Redshift does influence my sleep.

One belief - that Redshift helped avoid bright light retarding the sleep cycle and enabling going to bed early - was borne: on Redshift days, I went to bed an average of 19 minutes earlier. (I had noticed this in my earliest Redshift usage in 2008 and noticed during the experiment that I seemed to be staying up pretty late some nights.) Since I value having a sleep schedule more like that of the rest of humanity and not sleeping past noon, this justifies keeping Redshift installed.

But I am also surprised at the lack of effect on the other aspects of sleep; I was sure Redshift would lead to improvements in waking and how I felt in the morning, if nothing else. Yet, while the exact effect tends to be better for the most important variables, the effect estimates are relatively trivial (less than a tenth increase in average morning feel? falling asleep 2 minutes faster?) and several are worse - I’m a bit baffled why deep sleep decreased, but it might be due to the lower total sleep.

So it seems Redshift is excellent for shifting my bedtime forward, but I can’t say it does much else.

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.

I use longitudinal data on top inventors based on the universe of US patents 1971 - 2007 to quantify the productivity advantages of Silicon-Valley style clusters and their implications for the overall production of patents in the US. I relate the number of patents produced by an inventor in a year to the size of the local cluster, defined as a city × research field × year. I first study the experience of Rochester NY, whose high-tech cluster declined due to the demise of its main employer, Kodak. Due to the growth of digital photography, Kodak employment collapsed after 1996, resulting in a 49.2% decline in the size of the Rochester high-tech cluster. I test whether the change in cluster size affected the productivity of inventors outside Kodak and the photography sector. I find that between 1996 and 2007 the productivity of non-Kodak inventors in Rochester declined by 20.6% relative to inventors in other cities, conditional on inventor fixed effects. In the second part of the paper, I turn to estimates based on all the data in the sample. I find that when an inventor moves to a larger cluster she experiences significant increases in the number of patents produced and the number of citations received.

...

In a counterfactual scenario where the quality of U.S. inventors is held constant but their geographical location is changed so that all cities have the same number of inventors in each field, inventor productivity would increase in small clusters and decline in large clusters. On net, the overall number of patents produced in the US in a year would be 11.07% smaller.

[ed.: I wonder whether the benefits of less concentration (eg, lower cost of living propping up demographics) are actually smaller than the downsides overall.]

actually covers a lot more than just education or the signaling hypothesis

The main problem of many studies was the autoselection – participants were informed about the aims of the study during recruitment and later likely described their health and wellbeing according to their personal beliefs and wishes, not according to their real status. To avoid this source of bias, we did not mention pets during participant recruitment and hid the pet-related questions among many hundreds of questions in an 80-minute Internet questionnaire. Results of our study performed on a sample of on 10,858 subjects showed that liking cats and dogs has a weak positive association with quality of life. However, keeping pets, especially cats, and even more being injured by pets, were strongly negatively associated with many facets of quality of life. Our data also confirmed that infection by the cat parasite Toxoplasma had a very strong negative effect on quality of life, especially on mental health. However, the infection was not responsible for the observed negative effects of keeping pets, as these effects were much stronger in 1,527 Toxoplasma-free subjects than in the whole population. Any cross-sectional study cannot discriminate between a cause and an effect. However, because of the large and still growing popularity of keeping pets, the existence and nature of the reverse pet phenomenon deserve the outmost attention.

Notes relating to my use of a treadmill desk and 2 self-experiments showing walking treadmill use interferes with typing and memory performance.

...

While the result seems highly likely to be true for me, I don’t know how well it might generalize to other people. For example, perhaps more fit people can use a treadmill without harm and the negative effect is due to the treadmill usage tiring & distracting me; I try to walk 2 miles a day, but that’s not much compared to some people.

Given this harmful impact, I will avoid doing spaced repetition on my treadmill in the future, and given this & the typing result, will relegate any computer+treadmill usage to non-intellectually-demanding work like watching movies. This turned out to not be a niche use I cared about and I hardly ever used my treadmill afterwards, so in October 2016 I sold my treadmill for $70. I might investigate standing desks next for providing some exercise beyond sitting but without the distracting movement of walking on a treadmill.

low-cost air purifier made by the guy who published paper on rice vs. wheat culture in China

In Models 1 (k = 99) and 2 (k = 119), we investigated the impact of working-memory training on near-transfer (i.e., memory) and far-transfer (e.g., reasoning, speed, and language) measures, respectively, and whether it is mediated by the type of population. Model 3 (k = 233) extended Model 2 by adding six meta-analyses assessing the far-transfer effects of other cognitive-training programs (video-games, music, chess, and exergames). Model 1 showed that working-memory training does induce near transfer, and that the size of this effect is moderated by the type of population. By contrast, Models 2 and 3 highlighted that far-transfer effects are small or null.

A vital attribute of a value system of any kind is that it works. I consider this a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for goodness. A value system, when followed, should contribute to human flourishing and not produce results that violate its core ideals. This is a pragmatic, I-know-it-when-I-see-it definition. I may refine it further if the need arises.

I think that the prevailing Western values fail by this standard. I will not spend much time arguing this; many others have already. If you reject this premise, this blog may not be for you.

I consider old traditions an important source of wisdom: they have proven their worth over centuries of use. Where they agree, we should listen. Where they disagree, we should figure out why. Where modernity departs from tradition, we should be wary of the new.

Tradition has one nagging problem: it was abandoned by the West. How and why did that happen? I consider this a central question. I expect the reasons to be varied and complex. Understanding them seems necessary if we are to fix what may have been broken.

In short, I want to answer these questions:

1. How do values spread and persist? An ideology does no good if no one holds it.
2. Which values do good? Sounding good is worse than useless if it leads to ruin.

The ultimate hope would be to find a way to combine the two. Many have tried and failed. I don’t expect to succeed either, but I hope I’ll manage to clarify the questions.

Christianity Is The Schelling Point: https://contingentnotarbitrary.com/2018/02/22/christianity-is-the-schelling-point/
Restoring true Christianity is both necessary and sufficient for restoring civilization. The task is neither easy nor simple but that’s what it takes. It is also our best chance of weathering the collapse if that’s too late to avoid.

Christianity is the ultimate coordination mechanism: it unites us with a higher purpose, aligns us with the laws of reality and works on all scales, from individuals to entire civilizations. Christendom took over the world and then lost it when its faith faltered. Historically and culturally, Christianity is the unique Schelling point for the West – or it would be if we could agree on which church (if any) was the true one.

Here are my arguments for true Christianity as the Schelling point. I hope to demonstrate these points in subsequent posts; for now I’ll just list them.

- A society of saints is the most powerful human arrangement possible. It is united in purpose, ideologically stable and operates in harmony with natural law. This is true independent of scale and organization: from military hierarchy to total decentralization, from persecuted minority to total hegemony. Even democracy works among saints – that’s why it took so long to fail.
- There is such a thing as true Christianity. I don’t know how to pinpoint it but it does exist; that holds from both secular and religious perspectives. Our task is to converge on it the best we can.
- Don’t worry too much about the existence of God. I’m proof that you don’t need that assumption in order to believe – it helps but isn’t mandatory.

Pascal’s Wager never sat right with me. Now I know why: it’s a sucker bet. Let’s update it.

If God exists, we must believe because our souls and civilization depend on it. If He doesn’t exist, we must believe because civilization depends on it.

Morality Should Be Adaptive: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/04/morals-should-be-adaptive.html
I agree with this

Sexual selection favours traits that confer advantages in the competition for mates. In many cases, such traits are costly to produce and maintain, because the costs help to enforce the honesty of these signals and cues1. Some evolutionary models predict that sexual selection also produces costs at the population level, which could limit the ability of populations to adapt to changing conditions and thus increase the risk of extinction2,3,4.

Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we show that women who report that religion is “very important” in their everyday life have both higher fertility and higher intended fertility than those saying religion is “somewhat important” or “not important.” Factors such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity differentials in fertility. This answer prompts more fundamental questions: what is the nature of this greater “religiosity”? And why do the more religious want more children? We show that those saying religion is more important have more traditional gender and family attitudes and that these attitudinal differences account for a substantial part of the fertility differential. We speculate regarding other contributing causes.

Religion, Religiousness and Fertility in the U.S. and in Europe: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2006-013.pdf
2006

RELIGIONS, FERTILITY, AND GROWTH IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/iere.12291
Using Southeast Asian censuses, we show empirically that being Catholic, Buddhist, or Muslim significantly raises fertility, especially for couples with intermediate to high education levels. With these estimates, we identify the parameters of a structural model. Catholicism is strongly pro‐child (increasing total spending on children), followed by Buddhism, whereas Islam is more pro‐birth (redirecting spending from quality to quantity). Pro‐child religions depress growth in its early stages by lowering savings and labor supply. In the later stages of growth, pro‐birth religions impede human capital accumulation.

To test the causal impact of religiosity, we conducted a randomized evaluation of an evangelical Protestant Christian values and theology education program that consisted of 15 weekly half-hour sessions. We analyze outcomes for 6,276 ultra-poor Filipino households six months after the program ended. We find _significant increases in religiosity and income_, no significant changes in total labor supply, assets, consumption, food security, or _life satisfaction, and a significant decrease in perceived relative economic status_. Exploratory analysis suggests the program may have improved hygienic practices and increased household discord, and that _the income treatment effect may operate through increasing grit_.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/randomizing-religion-impact-protestant-evangelism-economic-outcomes.html

Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00708
In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique micro-regional dataset of 452 Prussian counties in 1816-21 and 1869-71, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental-variable model finds that Protestantism had a substantial positive effect on suicide. Results are corroborated in first-difference models. Tests relating to the two mechanisms based on historical church-attendance data and modern suicide data suggest that the sociological channel plays the more important role.

this is also mentioned in the survey of reformation effects (under "dark" effects)

Education and Political Party: The Effects of College or Social Class?: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778029
The impact of education on political ideology: Evidence from European compulsory education reforms: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775716301704
correlation is with leftism, causal effect is shift to right

Greg thinks there are some effects: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:5adca8f16265

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/964209775419457536
https://archive.is/oFELz
https://archive.is/f1DBF
https://archive.is/5iiqn

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/12/education_ideol.html

https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/963451867912130561
https://archive.is/sHI7g
https://archive.is/B5Gdv
https://archive.is/hFERC
https://archive.is/8IUDm
Bryan Caplan has written a very persuasive book suggesting that retention/transfer of learning is very low. how do we know it’s not the same with the “PoMo ethos”

TL;DR: There are lots of systems in society which seem to fit the pattern of “the incentives for this system are a pretty good approximation of what we actually want, so the system produces good results until it gets powerful, at which point it gets terrible results.”

...

Here are some more places where this idea could come into play:

- Marketing—humans try to buy things that will make our lives better, but our process for determining this is imperfect. A more powerful optimization process produces extremely good advertising to sell us things that aren’t actually going to make our lives better.
- Politics—we get extremely effective demagogues who pit us against our essential good values.
- Lobbying—as industries get bigger, the optimization process to choose great lobbyists for industries gets larger, but the process to make regulators robust doesn’t get correspondingly stronger. So regulatory capture gets worse and worse. Rent-seeking gets more and more significant.
- Online content—in a weaker internet, sites can’t be addictive except via being good content. In the modern internet, people can feel addicted to things that they wish they weren’t addicted to. We didn’t use to have the social expertise to make clickbait nearly as well as we do it today.
- News—Hyperpartisan news sources are much more worth it if distribution is cheaper and the market is bigger. News sources get an advantage from being truthful, but as society gets bigger, this advantage gets proportionally smaller.

...

For these reasons, I think it’s quite plausible that humans are fundamentally unable to have a “good” society with a population greater than some threshold, particularly if all these people have access to modern technology. Humans don’t have the rigidity to maintain social institutions in the face of that kind of optimization process. I think it is unlikely but possible (10%?) that this threshold population is smaller than the current population of the US, and that the US will crumble due to the decay of these institutions in the next fifty years if nothing totally crazy happens.

basically suggests switching to German-style apprenticeship program

I provide new evidence on the relative “powers” of contraception and abortion policy in effecting the dramatic social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. Trends in sexual behavior suggest that young women’s increased access to the birth control pill fueled the sexual revolution, but neither these trends nor difference-in-difference estimates support the view that this also led to substantial changes in family formation. Rather, the estimates robustly suggest that it was liberalized access to abortion that allowed large numbers of women to delay marriage and motherhood.

This paper studies the political economy of fertility. Specifically, I argue that fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict. I first present a simple conflict model where high fertility is optimal for each ethnic group if and only if the economy’s ethnic diversity is high, institutions are weak, or both. I then test the model in a cross-national dataset. Consistent with the theory, I find that economies where the product of ethnic diversity and a measure of institutional weakness is high have increased fertility rates. I conclude that fertility may depend on political factors.

1. There has to be a place for people to go.
2. It has to be safe.
3. There preferably needs to be bathrooms and water available there.
Schools fulfill this list, which is one reason they are still among our few remaining sources of shared meaning and in-person community. As Christ Arnade has often remarked, McDonalds fast-food restaurants fulfill this list, and are therefore undervalued sources of community in low-income communities. (The young black guys in my Philadelphia Americorps program would not-entirely-jokingly allude to McDonalds as the central hub of the weekend social/dating scene, where only one’s most immaculate clothing- a brand-new shirt, purchased just for the occasion- would suffice.) Howard Schultz, for all his occasional bouts of madness, understood from the beginning that Starbucks would succeed by becoming a “third space” between work and home, which the coffee chain for all its faults has indubitably become for many people. Ivan Illich argued that the streets themselves in poor countries once, but no longer, acted as the same kind of collective commons.

grip strength was causally related to fitness, physical activity and other indicators of frailty, including cognitive performance scores

Secular, native-born Jews in Israel enjoy the socio-economic status of many affluent populations living in other democratic countries, but have above-replacement period and cohort fertility. This study revealed a constellation of interrelated factors which together characterize the socio-economic, cultural, and political environment of this fertility behaviour and set it apart from that of other advanced societies. The factors are: a combination of state and family support for childbearing; a dual emphasis on the social importance of women's employment and fertility; policies that support working mothers within a conservative welfare regime; a family system in which parents provide significant financial and caregiving aid to their adult children; relatively egalitarian gender-role attitudes and household behaviour; the continuing importance of familist ideology and of marriage as a social institution; the role of Jewish nationalism and collective behaviour in a religious society characterized by ethno-national conflict; and a discourse which defines women as the biological reproducers of the nation.

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/904137844834398209
https://archive.is/2RVjo
Fertility trends in Israel and Palestinian territories

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/923612344009351168
https://archive.is/FJ7Fn
https://archive.is/8vq6O
https://archive.is/qxpmX
my impression is the evidence actually favors propaganda effects over tax credits and shit. but I need to gather it all together at some pt

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.

I have said before that no currently popular ideology acknowledges well-established results of behavioral genetics, quantitative genetics, or psychometrics. Or evolutionary psychology.

What if some ideology or political tradition did? what could they do? What problems could they solve, what capabilities would they have?

Various past societies knew a few things along these lines. They knew that there were significant physical and behavioral differences between the sexes, which is forbidden knowledge in modern academia. Some knew that close inbreeding had negative consequences, which knowledge is on its way to the forbidden zone as I speak. Some cultures with wide enough geographical experience had realistic notions of average cognitive differences between populations. Some people had a rough idea about regression to the mean [ in dynasties], and the Ottomans came up with a highly unpleasant solution – the law of fratricide. The Romans, during the Principate, dealt with the same problem through imperial adoption. The Chinese exam system is in part aimed at the same problem.

...

At least some past societies avoided the social patterns leading to the nasty dysgenic trends we are experiencing today, but for the most part that is due to the anthropic principle: if they’d done something else you wouldn’t be reading this. Also to between-group competition: if you fuck your self up when others don’t, you may be well be replaced. Which is still the case.

If you were designing an ideology from scratch you could make use of all of these facts – not that thinking about genetics and selection hands you the solution to every problem, but you’d have more strings to your bow. And, off the top of your head, you’d understand certain trends that are behind the mountains of Estcarp, for our current ruling classes : invisible and unthinkable, That Which Must Not Be Named. .

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/biopolitics/#comment-96613
“The closest…s the sort of libertarianism promulgated by Charles Murray”
Not very close..
A government that was fully aware of the implications and possibilities of human genetics, one that had the usual kind of state goals [ like persistence and increased power] , would not necessarily be particularly libertarian.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/biopolitics/#comment-96797
And giving tax breaks to college-educated liberals to have babies wouldn’t appeal much to Trump voters, methinks.

It might be worth making a reasonably comprehensive of the facts and preferences that a good liberal is supposed to embrace and seem to believe. You would have to be fairly quick about it, before it changes. Then you could evaluate about the social impact of having more of them.

Rise and Fall: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/rise-and-fall/
Every society selects for something: generally it looks as if the direction of selection pressue is more or less an accident. Although nations and empires in the past could have decided to select men for bravery or intelligence, there’s not much sign that anyone actually did this. I mean, they would have known how, if they’d wanted to, just as they knew how to select for destriers, coursers, and palfreys. It was still possible to know such things in the Middle Ages, because Harvard did not yet exist.

A rising empire needs quality human capital, which implies that at minimum that budding imperial society must not have been strongly dysgenic. At least not in the beginning. But winning changes many things, possibly including selective pressures. Imagine an empire with substantial urbanization, one in which talented guys routinely end up living in cities – cities that were demographic sinks. That might change things. Or try to imagine an empire in which survival challenges are greatly reduced, at least for elites, so that people have nothing to keep their minds off their minds and up worshiping Magna Mater. Imagine that an empire that conquers a rival with interesting local pathogens and brings some of them home. Or one that uses up a lot of its manpower conquering less-talented subjects and importing masses of those losers into the imperial heartland.

If any of those scenarios happened valid, they might eventually result in imperial decline – decline due to decreased biological capital.

Right now this is speculation. If we knew enough about the GWAS hits for intelligence, and had enough ancient DNA, we might be able to observe that rise and fall, just as we see dysgenic trends in contemporary populations. But that won’t happen for a long time. Say, a year.

hmm: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/rise-and-fall/#comment-100350
“Although nations and empires in the past could have decided to select men for bravery or intelligence, there’s not much sign that anyone actually did this.”

Maybe the Chinese imperial examination could effectively have been a selection for intelligence.
--
Nope. I’ve modelled it: the fraction of winners is far too small to have much effect, while there were likely fitness costs from the arduous preparation. Moreover, there’s a recent
paper [Detecting polygenic adaptation in admixture graphs] that looks for indications of when selection for IQ hit northeast Asia: quite a while ago. Obvious though, since Japan has similar scores without ever having had that kind of examination system.

decline of British Empire and utility of different components: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/rise-and-fall/#comment-100390
Once upon a time, India was a money maker for the British, mainly because they appropriate Bengali tax revenue, rather than trade. The rest of the Empire was not worth much: it didn’t materially boost British per-capita income or military potential. Silesia was worth more to Germany, conferred more war-making power, than Africa was to Britain.
--
If you get even a little local opposition, a colony won’t pay for itself. I seem to remember that there was some, in Palestine.
--
Angels from on high paid for the Boer War.

You know, someone in the 50’s asked for the numbers – how much various colonies cost and how much they paid.

Turned out that no one had ever asked. The Colonial Office had no idea.

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.

Stuart Richie, Bates, Plomin

SEM: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4354297/figure/fig03/

The variance explained by each path in the diagrams included here can be calculated by squaring its path weight. To take one example, reading differences at age 12 in the model shown in Figure​Figure33 explain 7% of intelligence differences at age 16 (.262). However, since our measures are of differences, they are likely to include substantial amounts of noise: Measurement error may produce spurious differences. To remove this error variance, we can take an estimate of the reliability of the measures (generally high, since our measures are normed, standardized tests), which indicates the variance expected purely by the reliability of the measure, and subtract it from the observed variance between twins in our sample. Correcting for reliability in this way, the effect size estimates are somewhat larger; to take the above example, the reliability-corrected effect size of age 12 reading differences on age 16 intelligence differences is around 13% of the “signal” variance. It should be noted that the age 12 reading differences themselves are influenced by many previous paths from both reading and intelligence, as illustrated in Figure​Figure33.

...

The present study provided compelling evidence that improvements in reading ability, themselves caused purely by the nonshared environment, may result in improvements in both verbal and nonverbal cognitive ability, and may thus be a factor increasing cognitive diversity within families (Plomin, 2011). These associations are present at least as early as age 7, and are not—to the extent we were able to test this possibility—driven by differences in reading exposure. Since reading is a potentially remediable ability, these findings have implications for reading instruction: Early remediation of reading problems might not only aid in the growth of literacy, but may also improve more general cognitive abilities that are of critical importance across the life span.

Does Reading Cause Later Intelligence? Accounting for Stability in Models of Change: http://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/cdev.12669
Results from a state–trait model suggest that reported effects of reading ability on later intelligence may be artifacts of previously uncontrolled factors, both environmental in origin and stable during this developmental period, influencing both constructs throughout development.

This paper studies how autocratic rule affects social capital. Between 1660-1788, individuals in imperial China were persecuted if they were suspected of holding subversive attitudes towards the state. A difference-in-differences approach suggests that these persecutions led to a decline of 38% in social capital, as measured by the number of charitable organizations, in each subsequent decade. Investigating the long-run effect of autocratic rule, we show that persecutions are associated with lower levels of trust, political engagement, and the under provision of local public goods. These results indicate a possible vicious cycle in which autocratic rule becomes self-reinforcing through a permanent decline in social capital.

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.

In 18 B.C., the Emperor Augustus turned his attention to social problems at Rome. Extravagance and adultery were widespread. Among the upper classes, marriage was increasingly infrequent and, many couples who did marry failed to produce offspring. Augustus, who hoped thereby to elevate both the morals and the numbers of the upper classes in Rome, and to increase the population of native Italians in Italy, enacted laws to encourage marriage and having children (lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus), including provisions establishing adultery as a crime.

Jus trium liberorum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum
The ius trium liberorum, meaning “the right of three children” in Latin,[1] was a privilege rewarded to Roman citizens who had borne at least three children or freedmen who had borne at least four children.[2] It was a direct result of the Lex Iulia and the Lex Papia Poppaea, bodies of legislation introduced by Augustus in 18 BC and 9 AD, respectively.[3] These bodies of legislation were conceived to grow the dwindling population of the Roman upper classes. The intent of the jus trium liberorum has caused scholars to interpret it as eugenic legislation.[4] Men who had received the jus trium liberorum were excused from munera. Women with jus trium liberorum were no longer submitted to tutela mulierum and could receive inheritances otherwise bequest to their children.[5] The public reaction to the jus trium liberorum was largely to find loopholes, however. The prospect of having a large family was still not appealing.[6] A person who caught a citizen in violation in this law was entitled to a portion of the inheritance involved, creating a lucrative business for professional spies.[7] The spies became so pervasive that the reward was reduced to a quarter of its previous size.[8] As time went on the ius trium liberorum was granted to those by consuls as rewards for general good deeds, holding important professions or as personal favors, not just prolific propagation.[9] Eventually the ius trium liberorum was repealed in 534 AD by Justinian.[10]

The Purpose of the Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/3292043

Roman Monogamy: http://laurabetzig.org/pdf/RomanMonogamy.pdf
- Laura Betzig

Mating in Rome was polygynous; marriage was monogamous. In the years 18BC and AD 9 the first Roman emperor, Augustus, backed the lex Julia and the lex Papia Poppaea, his “moral” legislation. It rewarded members of the senatorial aristocracy who married and had children; and it punished celibacy and childlessness, which were common. To many historians, that suggests Romans were reluctant to reproduce. To me, it suggests they kept the number of their legitimate children small to keep the number of their illegitimate children large. Marriage in Rome shares these features with marriage in other empires with highly polygynous mating: inheritances were raised by inbreeding; relatedness to heirs was raised by marrying virgins, praising and enforcing chastity in married women, and discouraging widow remarriage; heirs were limited— and inheritances concentrated—by monogamous marriage, patriliny, and primogeniture; and back-up heirs were got by divorce and remarriage, concubinage, and adoption. The “moral” legislation interfered with each of these. Among other things, it diverted inheritances by making widows remarry; it lowered relatedness to heirs by making adultery subject to public, rather than private, sanctions; and it dispersed estates by making younger sons and daughters take legitimate spouses and make legitimate heirs. Augustus' “moral” legislation, like canon law in Europe later on, was not, as it first appears, an act of reproductive altruism. It was, in fact, a form of reproductive competition.

Did moral decay destroy the ancient world?: http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2014/01/17/did-moral-decay-destroy-the-ancient-world/

hmmm...:
https://www.thenation.com/article/im-a-marxist-feminist-slut-how-do-i-find-an-open-relationship/
https://www.indy100.com/article/worst-decision-you-can-ever-make-have-a-child-science-research-parent-sleep-sex-money-video-7960906

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/913087174224044033
https://archive.is/LRpzH
Cato the Elder speaks on proposed repeal of the Oppian Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Oppia) - from Livy's History of Rome, Book 34

"What pretext in the least degree respectable is put forward for this female insurrection? 'That we may shine,' they say."

The Crisis of the Third Century as Seen by Contemporaries: https://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/9021/4625
"COMPLAINTS OF EVIL TIMES are to be found in all centuries which
have left a literature behind them. But in the Roman Empire
the decline is acknowledged in a manner which leaves no
room for doubt."

Morals, Politics, and the Fall of the Roman Republic: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/642930

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_historiography#Livy
The purpose of writing Ab Urbe Condita was twofold: the first was to memorialize history and the second was to challenge his generation to rise to that same level. He was preoccupied with morality, using history as a moral essay. He connects a nation’s success with its high level of morality, and conversely a nation’s failure with its moral decline. Livy believed that there had been a moral decline in Rome, and he lacked the confidence that Augustus could reverse it. Though he shared Augustus’ ideals, he was not a “spokesman for the regime”. He believed that Augustus was necessary, but only as a short term measure.

Livy and Roman Historiography: http://www.wheelockslatin.com/answerkeys/handouts/ch7_Livy_and_Roman_Historiography.pdf

Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4435293

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.

Compared with forward planning, backward planning not only led to greater motivation, higher goal expectancy, and less time pressure but also resulted in better goal-relevant performance. We further demonstrated that this motivational effect occurred because backward planning allowed people to think of tasks required to reach their goals more clearly, especially when goals were complex to plan. These findings suggest that the way people plan matters just as much as whether or not they plan.

To better understand the forces underlying fertility decisions, we look at the forerunners of fertility decline. In Rouen, France, completed fertility dropped between 1640 and 1792 from 7.4 to 4.2 children. We review possible explanations and keep only three: increases in materialism, in women’s empowerment, and in returns to education. The methodology is one of analytic narrative, bringing together descriptive evidence with a theoretical model. We accordingly propose a theory showing that we can discriminate between these explanations by looking at childlessness and its social gradient. An increase in materialism or, under certain conditions, in women’s empowerment, leads to an increase in childlessness, while an increase in the return to education leads to a decrease in childlessness. Looking at the Rouen data, childlessness was clearly on the rise, from 4% in 1640 to 10% at the end of the eighteenth century, which appears to discredit the explanation based on increasing returns to education, at least for this period.

Fertility Fall Myths: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/fertility-fall-causes.html
In the latest JEL, Tim Guinnane does a nice job debunking misconceptions about the great fertility fall associated with the industrial revolution. For example, “The decline in French fertility began in the late eighteenth century,” and fertility declines were not uniform across Europe:

Mortality decline doesn’t work as an explanation for fertility declines:

Nor do child labor laws:

Nor do new social insurance programs:

Still in the running, he thinks, are increases in urbanization, female employment, and gains to schooling:

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

Results indicate that traditional lecture style teaching is associated with significantly higher student achievement.

The idea that venesection was a good thing, or at least not so bad, on the grounds that one in a few hundred people have hemochromatosis (in Northern Europe) reminds me of the people who don’t wear a seatbelt, since it would keep them from being thrown out of their convertible into a waiting haystack, complete with nubile farmer’s daughter. Daughters. It could happen. But it’s not the way to bet.

Back in the good old days, Charles II, age 53, had a fit one Sunday evening, while fondling two of his mistresses.

Monday they bled him (cupping and scarifying) of eight ounces of blood. Followed by an antimony emetic, vitriol in peony water, purgative pills, and a clyster. Followed by another clyster after two hours. Then syrup of blackthorn, more antimony, and rock salt. Next, more laxatives, white hellebore root up the nostrils. Powdered cowslip flowers. More purgatives. Then Spanish Fly. They shaved his head and stuck blistering plasters all over it, plastered the soles of his feet with tar and pigeon-dung, then said good-night.

...

Friday. The king was worse. He tells them not to let poor Nelly starve. They try the Oriental Bezoar Stone, and more bleeding. Dies at noon.

Most people didn’t suffer this kind of problem with doctors, since they never saw one. Charles had six. Now Bach and Handel saw the same eye surgeon, John Taylor – who blinded both of them. Not everyone can put that on his resume!

You may wonder how medicine continued to exist, if it had a negative effect, on the whole. There’s always the placebo effect – at least there would be, if it existed. Any real placebo effect is very small: I’d guess exactly zero. But there is regression to the mean. You see the doctor when you’re feeling worse than average – and afterwards, if he doesn’t kill you outright, you’re likely to feel better. Which would have happened whether you’d seen him or not, but they didn’t often do RCTs back in the day – I think James Lind was the first (1747).

Back in the late 19th century, Christian Scientists did better than others when sick, because they didn’t believe in medicine. For reasons I think mistaken, because Mary Baker Eddy rejected the reality of the entire material world, but hey, it worked. Parenthetically, what triggered all that New Age nonsense in 19th century New England? Hash?

This did not change until fairly recently. Sometime in the early 20th medicine, clinical medicine, what doctors do, hit break-even. Now we can’t do without it. I wonder if there are, or will be, other examples of such a pile of crap turning (mostly) into a real science.

good tweet: https://twitter.com/bowmanthebard/status/897146294191390720
The brilliant GP I've had for 35+ years has retired. How can I find another one who meets my requirements?

1 is overweight
2 drinks more than officially recommended amounts
3 has an amused, tolerant atitude to human failings
4 is well aware that we're all going to die anyway, & there are better or worse ways to die
5 has a healthy skeptical attitude to mainstream medical science
6 is wholly dismissive of "a|ternative” medicine
7 believes in evolution
8 thinks most diseases get better without intervention, & knows the dangers of false positives
9 understands the base rate fallacy

EconPapers: Was Civil War Surgery Effective?: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/htrhcecon/444.htm
contra Greg Cochran:
To shed light on the subject, I analyze a data set created by Dr. Edmund Andrews, a Civil war surgeon with the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. Dr. Andrews’s data can be rendered into an observational data set on surgical intervention and recovery, with controls for wound location and severity. The data also admits instruments for the surgical decision. My analysis suggests that Civil War surgery was effective, and increased the probability of survival of the typical wounded soldier, with average treatment effect of 0.25-0.28.

Medical Prehistory: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/
What ancient medical treatments worked?

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/#comment-76878
In some very, very limited conditions, bleeding?
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Bad for you 99% of the time.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/#comment-76947
Colchicine – used to treat gout – discovered by the Ancient Greeks.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/#comment-76973
Dracunculiasis (Guinea worm)
Wrap the emerging end of the worm around a stick and slowly pull it out.
(3,500 years later, this remains the standard treatment.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebers_Papyrus

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/#comment-76971
Some of the progress is from formal medicine, most is from civil engineering, better nutrition ( ag science and physical chemistry), less crowded housing.

Nurses vs doctors: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/nurses-vs-doctors/
Medicine, the things that doctors do, was an ineffective pseudoscience until fairly recently. Until 1800 or so, they were wrong about almost everything. Bleeding, cupping, purging, the four humors – useless. In the 1800s, some began to realize that they were wrong, and became medical nihilists that improved outcomes by doing less. Some patients themselves came to this realization, as when Civil War casualties hid from the surgeons and had better outcomes. Sometime in the early 20th century, MDs reached break-even, and became an increasingly positive influence on human health. As Lewis Thomas said, medicine is the youngest science.

Nursing, on the other hand, has always been useful. Just making sure that a patient is warm and nourished when too sick to take care of himself has helped many survive. In fact, some of the truly crushing epidemics have been greatly exacerbated when there were too few healthy people to take care of the sick.

Nursing must be old, but it can’t have existed forever. Whenever it came into existence, it must have changed the selective forces acting on the human immune system. Before nursing, being sufficiently incapacitated would have been uniformly fatal – afterwards, immune responses that involved a period of incapacitation (with eventual recovery) could have been selectively favored.

when MDs broke even: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/nurses-vs-doctors/#comment-58981
I’d guess the 1930s. Lewis Thomas thought that he was living through big changes. They had a working serum therapy for lobar pneumonia ( antibody-based). They had many new vaccines ( diphtheria in 1923, whopping cough in 1926, BCG and tetanus in 1927, yellow fever in 1935, typhus in 1937.) Vitamins had been mostly worked out. Insulin was discovered in 1929. Blood transfusions. The sulfa drugs, first broad-spectrum antibiotics, showed up in 1935.

DALYs per doctor: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/
The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden – the number of years lost. I’m wondering just much harm premodern medicine did, per doctor. How many healthy years of life did a typical doctor destroy (net) in past times?

...

It looks as if the average doctor (in Western medicine) killed a bunch of people over his career ( when contrasted with doing nothing). In the Charles Manson class.

Eventually the market saw through this illusion. Only took a couple of thousand years.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/#comment-100741
That a very large part of healthcare spending is done for non-health reasons. He has a chapter on this in his new book, also check out his paper “Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism” http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/showcare.pdf
--
I ran into too much stupidity to finish the article. Hanson’s a loon. For example when he talks about the paradox of blacks being more sentenced on drug offenses than whites although they use drugs at similar rate. No paradox: guys go to the big house for dealing, not for using. Where does he live – Mars?

I had the same reaction when Hanson parroted some dipshit anthropologist arguing that the stupid things people do while drunk are due to social expectations, not really the alcohol.
Horseshit.

I don’t think that being totally unable to understand everybody around you necessarily leads to deep insights.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/#comment-100744
What I’ve wondered is if there was anything that doctors did that actually was helpful and if perhaps that little bit of success helped them fool people into thinking the rest of it helped.
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Setting bones. extracting arrows: spoon of Diocles. Colchicine for gout. Extracting the Guinea worm. Sometimes they got away with removing the stone. There must be others.
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Quinine is relatively recent: post-1500. Obstetrical forceps also. Caesarean deliveries were almost always fatal to the mother until fairly recently.

Opium has been around for a long while : it works.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/#comment-100839
If pre-modern medicine was indeed worse than useless – how do you explain no one noticing that patients who get expensive treatments are worse off than those who didn’t?
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were worse off. People are kinda dumb – you’ve noticed?
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My impression is that while people may be “kinda dumb”, ancient customs typically aren’t.
Even if we assume that all people who lived prior to the 19th century were too dumb to make the rational observation, wouldn’t you expect this ancient practice to be subject to selective pressure?
--
Your impression is wrong. Do you think that there some slick reason for Carthaginians incinerating their first-born?

Theodoric of York, bloodletting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvff3TViXmY

details on blood-letting and hemochromatosis: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/#comment-100746

Starting Over: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/starting-over/
Looking back on it, human health would have … [more]

Someone was quoted as saying that if you adopted an Australian Aborigine kid and raised him in England, he’d do just fine. This is a standard prediction, or maybe really an assumption, of most social scientists: people are the same everywhere. Let me put it more precisely: If you adopted a random draw of such kids just after birth, and then treated them in the same way that local native kids were treated, they’d end up with the same adult IQ, on average. And the same rate of alcoholism, and so forth. Same with any other racial group, the prediction says.

But is this actually true? The same people would say that one-day-old babies from different groups ought to act the same, and that’s certainly not true.

I would think that there was a lot of adoption of Australian Aborigines going on in Australia, back in the day. What were the results?

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/stolen-generations/#comment-23715
I don’t see how you could spend a lot of time on this (aboriginal education) and not see the pattern in front of you. But people do, certainly in the US as well. Here’s a fun quote: “There is no logical reason to expect that the number of minority students in gifted programs would not be proportional to their representation in the general population. ” (p. 498) Frasier 1997
Of course this never happens, never has happened, but still it’s gotta happen.

This is secondhand, but an interesting story. There was once a graduate student in anthropology at UNM who was very interested in Australian Aboriginal education. I believe that’s what he wanted to do when he got out. He did a lot of digging into the subject, including mimeographed stuff that never got published, and much against his will came to the conclusion that Aboriginals really were different from Europeans, really did have significantly lower intelligence. It drove him nuts – he actually had to be hospitalized. Dropped out of the program.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/stolen-generations/#comment-23811
It’s easier than you think. Just threaten the members of the IRB – they generally have no honor.

The long-term effects of American Indian boarding schools: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/09/long-term-effects-american-indian-boarding-schools.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387817300664
Combining recent reservation-level census data and school enrollment data from 1911 to 1932, I find that reservations that sent a larger share of students to off-reservation boarding schools have higher high school graduation rates, higher per capita income, lower poverty rates, a greater proportion of exclusively English speakers, and smaller family sizes. These results are supported when distance to the nearest off-reservation boarding school that subsequently closed is used as an instrument for the proportion of past boarding school students. I conclude with a discussion of the possible reasons for this link.

...

Last, the link drawn here between higher boarding school share and assimilation should not be misinterpreted as an endorsement of coercive assimilation.

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.

Both individual experiences and community characteristics influence how much people trust each other. Using data drawn from US localities we find that the strongest factors that reduce trust are: i) a recent history of traumatic experiences, even though the passage of time reduces this effect fairly rapidly; ii) belonging to a group that historically felt discriminated against, such as minorities (black in particular) and, to a lesser extent, women; iii) being economically unsuccessful in terms of income and education; iv) living in a racially mixed community and/or in one with a high degree of income disparity. Religious beliefs and ethnic origins do not significantly affect trust. The latter result may be an indication that the American melting pot at least up to a point works, in terms of homogenizing attitudes of different cultures, even though racial cleavages leading to low trust are still quite high.

Understanding Trust: http://www.nber.org/papers/w13387
In this paper we resolve this puzzle by recognizing that trust has two components: a belief-based one and a preference based one. While the sender's behavior reflects both, we show that WVS-like measures capture mostly the belief-based component, while questions on past trusting behavior are better at capturing the preference component of trust.

MEASURING TRUST: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/laibson/files/measuring_trust.pdf
We combine two experiments and a survey to measure trust and trustworthiness— two key components of social capital. Standard attitudinal survey questions about trust predict trustworthy behavior in our experiments much better than they predict trusting behavior. Trusting behavior in the experiments is predicted by past trusting behavior outside of the experiments. When individuals are closer socially, both trust and trustworthiness rise. Trustworthiness declines when partners are of different races or nationalities. High status individuals are able to elicit more trustworthiness in others.

What is Social Capital? The Determinants of Trust and Trustworthiness: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7216
Using a sample of Harvard undergraduates, we analyze trust and social capital in two experiments. Trusting behavior and trustworthiness rise with social connection; differences in race and nationality reduce the level of trustworthiness. Certain individuals appear to be persistently more trusting, but these people do not say they are more trusting in surveys. Survey questions about trust predict trustworthiness not trust. Only children are less trustworthy. People behave in a more trustworthy manner towards higher status individuals, and therefore status increases earnings in the experiment. As such, high status persons can be said to have more social capital.

Trust and Cheating: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18509
We find that: i) both parties to a trust exchange have implicit notions of what constitutes cheating even in a context without promises or messages; ii) these notions are not unique - the vast majority of senders would feel cheated by a negative return on their trust/investment, whereas a sizable minority defines cheating according to an equal split rule; iii) these implicit notions affect the behavior of both sides to the exchange in terms of whether to trust or cheat and to what extent. Finally, we show that individual's notions of what constitutes cheating can be traced back to two classes of values instilled by parents: cooperative and competitive. The first class of values tends to soften the notion while the other tightens it.

Nationalism and Ethnic-Based Trust: Evidence from an African Border Region: https://u.osu.edu/robinson.1012/files/2015/12/Robinson_NationalismTrust-1q3q9u1.pdf
These results offer microlevel evidence that a strong and salient national identity can diminish ethnic barriers to trust in diverse societies.

One Team, One Nation: Football, Ethnic Identity, and Conflict in Africa: http://conference.nber.org/confer//2017/SI2017/DEV/Durante_Depetris-Chauvin.pdf
Do collective experiences that prime sentiments of national unity reduce interethnic tensions and conflict? We examine this question by looking at the impact of national football teams’ victories in sub-Saharan Africa. Combining individual survey data with information on over 70 official matches played between 2000 and 2015, we find that individuals interviewed in the days after a victory of their country’s national team are less likely to report a strong sense of ethnic identity and more likely to trust people of other ethnicities than those interviewed just before. The effect is sizable and robust and is not explained by generic euphoria or optimism. Crucially, national victories do not only affect attitudes but also reduce violence. Indeed, using plausibly exogenous variation from close qualifications to the Africa Cup of Nations, we find that countries that (barely) qualified experience significantly less conflict in the following six months than countries that (barely) did not. Our findings indicate that, even where ethnic tensions have deep historical roots, patriotic shocks can reduce inter-ethnic tensions and have a tangible impact on conflict.

Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?: http://www.columbia.edu/~mh2245/papers1/HHPW.pdf
We identify three families of mechanisms that link diversity to public goods provision—–what we term “preferences,” “technology,” and “strategy selection” mechanisms—–and run a series of experimental games that permit us to compare the explanatory power of distinct mechanisms within each of these three families. Results from games conducted with a random sample of 300 subjects from a slum neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, suggest that successful public goods provision in homogenous ethnic communities can be attributed to a strategy selection mechanism: in similar settings, co-ethnics play cooperative equilibria, whereas non-co-ethnics do not. In addition, we find evidence for a technology mechanism: co-ethnics are more closely linked on social networks and thus plausibly better able to support cooperation through the threat of social sanction. We find no evidence for prominent preference mechanisms that emphasize the commonality of tastes within ethnic groups or a greater degree of altruism toward co-ethnics, and only weak evidence for technology mechanisms that focus on the impact of shared ethnicity on the productivity of teams.

does it generalize to first world?

Higher Intelligence Groups Have Higher Cooperation Rates in the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma: https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp8499.html
The initial cooperation rates are similar, it increases in the groups with higher intelligence to reach almost full cooperation, while declining in the groups with lower intelligence. The difference is produced by the cumulation of small but persistent differences in the response to past cooperation of the partner. In higher intelligence subjects, cooperation after the initial stages is immediate and becomes the default mode, defection instead requires more time. For lower intelligence groups this difference is absent. Cooperation of higher intelligence subjects is payoff sensitive, thus not automatic: in a treatment with lower continuation probability there is no difference between different intelligence groups

Why societies cooperate: https://voxeu.org/article/why-societies-cooperate
Three attributes are often suggested to generate cooperative behaviour – a good heart, good norms, and intelligence. This column reports the results of a laboratory experiment in which groups of players benefited from learning to cooperate. It finds overwhelming support for the idea that intelligence is the primary condition for a socially cohesive, cooperative society. Warm feelings towards others and good norms have only a small and transitory effect.

individual payoff, etc.:

Trust, Values and False Consensus: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18460
Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming trust beliefs about the same pool of potential partners - i.e., more (less) trustworthy individuals form more optimistic (pessimistic) trust beliefs - and that this tendency continues to color trust beliefs after several rounds of game-play. Moreover, we show that one's own type/trustworthiness can be traced back to the values parents transmit to their children during their upbringing. In a second closely-related experiment, we show the economic impact of mis-calibrated trust beliefs stemming from false consensus. Miscalibrated beliefs lower participants' experimental trust game earnings by about 20 percent on average.

The Right Amount of Trust: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15344
We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs. Our interpretation is that highly trusting individuals tend to assume too much social risk and to be cheated more often, ultimately performing less well than those with a belief close to the mean trustworthiness of the population. On the other hand, individuals with overly pessimistic beliefs avoid being cheated, but give up profitable opportunities, therefore underperforming. The cost of either too much or too little trust is comparable to the income lost by forgoing college.

...

This framework allows us to show that income-maximizing trust typically exceeds the trust level of the average person as well as to estimate the distribution of income lost to trust mistakes. We find that although a majority of individuals has well calibrated beliefs, a non-trivial proportion of the population (10%) has trust beliefs sufficiently poorly calibrated to lower income by more than 13%.

Do Trust and … [more]

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1058905.shtml

Population planning in Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_planning_in_Singapore
Fewer babies born in Singapore last year despite incentives: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-population/fewer-babies-born-in-singapore-last-year-despite-incentives-idUSKCN1C2138
Late marriage and low fertility in Singapore: the limits of policy: http://www.ipss.go.jp/webj-ad/webjournal.files/population/2012_Vol.10/Web%20Journal_Vol.10_05.pdf

A: no, contraception is not a major driver of fertility declines

Explaining Current Fertility Dynamics in Tropical Africa From an Anthropological Perspective: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1069397116644158

https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/926291419366600704
https://archive.is/A1ity
There seem to be several factors behind tropical Africa's continuing high fertility rates.

Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not.

Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534707002704
Double-blind peer review, in which neither author nor reviewer identity are revealed, is rarely practised in ecology or evolution journals. However, in 2001, double-blind review was introduced by the journal Behavioral Ecology. Following this policy change, there was a significant increase in female first-authored papers, a pattern not observed in a very similar journal that provides reviewers with author information. No negative effects could be identified, suggesting that double-blind review should be considered by other journals.

Teaching accreditation exams reveal grading biases favor women in male-dominated disciplines in France: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6298/474
This bias turns from 3 to 5 percentile ranks for men in literature and foreign languages to about 10 percentile ranks for women in math, physics, or philosophy.

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

http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~fowles/STANFIN.pdf
After the Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona, critics charged that it would “handcuff the cops.” In this article, Professors Cassell and Fowles find this claim to be supported by FBI data on crime clearance rates. National crime clearance rates fell precipitously in the two years immediately after Miranda and have remained at lower levels in the decades since. Multiple regression analysis reveals that other possibly confounding factors— such as the rising crime rate and baby boom children reaching crime prone-years in the 1960s— do not account for much of the post-Miranda decline in clearance rates. Rather, the cause of the decline was most likely the Supreme Court’s broad new restrictions on police questioning. The authors conclude that Miranda has in fact “handcuffed” the police and that society should begin to explore ways of loosening these shackles.

https://twitter.com/ChipMitchell1/status/954516255381258240
https://archive.is/2FHGV
BREAKING: #Chicago Police Department solved just 17.2% of murders in 2017, according to #police figures obtained by @WBEZ. That's the department's lowest murder-clearance rate in at least a half century.

Calibrating the model to match key moments for the 1940 cohort and conditioning solely on gender, our ex ante welfare analysis finds that women fare better under mutual consent whereas men prefer a unilateral system. Conditioning as well on initial productivity (expected income), we find that the top three quintiles of men and the top two quintiles of women prefer unilateral divorce.

The impact of divorce laws on the equilibrium in the marriage market: http://www.anamreynoso.com/assets/AR_JMP_latest.pdf
Adoption of no-fault divorce -> more assortative mating + more permanent singlehood, especially among educated women

Losers and Winners: The Financial Consequences of Separation and Divorce for Men: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2657417
Contrary to conventional thinking, the majority of partnered men in the United States lose economic status when their unions dissolve. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this analysis shows that for most men the primary source of economic decline after union dissolution is their inability to fully compensate for the loss of their partner's income. A secondary source of economic decline is an increase in compulsory and voluntary support payments. Welfare state tax and transfer mechanisms have a much smaller overall impact on changes in men's living standards following separation. Although most men experience a decline in living standards following union dissolution, men's outcomes are heterogeneous, and the minority of men who relied on their partners for less than one-fifth of pre-dissolution income typically gain from separation and divorce. The data show a clear trend toward greater economic interdependence in American partnerships, and this trend appears to increase the proportion of men who suffer a reduced standard of living following separation.

https://twitter.com/pnin1957/status/876835822842130433
https://archive.is/1Noyi
this is ominous
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/the_upper_middle_class_is_ruining_all_that_is_great_about_america.html
Has the Democratic Party Gotten Too Rich for Its Own Good: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/democratic-party-rich-thomas-edsall.html
Saving the American Dream: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/saving-american-dream/
It’s not just about the people at the top
- Amy Wax

ow can we arrange things so that more people with different levels of affluence can prosper and live meaningful lives? How can we make the advantages that the rich now “hoard” more widely available, thus reducing their incentive to separate themselves? Although these goals are elusive and difficult for any society to attain, ours can probably do better. But the changes required would be far bolder than the tepid ones Reeves proposes, which do little to disrupt current “structures of privilege.” And more dramatic reforms might also advance the causes he holds dear, including enhancing mobility and reducing inequality.
So here goes my laundry list.

Let’s start with Reeves’s proposal to ban legacy admissions. Not only would this increase fairness, but it would discourage private contributions. This would, in turn, promote the worthy goal of defunding the Ivies and other selective universities, which have become counterproductive sites of snobbery, dogma, and progressive indoctrination. Save for the kind of scientific research that benefits everyone, they don’t need any more money and could do with much less.

But we shouldn’t stop there. As suggested by the late Justice Antonin Scalia during oral argument in the Grutter affirmative-action case, selective admissions should simply be abolished and students admitted by lottery, except for math and hard sciences, for which a simple test can determine entrance. The steep pyramid of colleges, in which the affluent crowd monopolizes prestigious institutions, will be immediately flattened, and the need for affirmative action would disappear. In this respect, our system would simply mimic those in northern European countries like Holland and Germany, where enrolling in the university nearest to home is the usual practice and there is no clear elite pecking order. And since fewer than a fifth of colleges take less than half their applicants, with only a tiny group much more competitive, this change would have no effect on most institutions of higher learning.

While we’re at it, we should give up on the fetish of college for all by significantly reducing the number of students attending four-year academic programs to no more than 10 to 15 percent of high-school graduates. The government should dial back on student loans and grants to universities, except for scientific research.

That step, which would reduce the burden of educational debt, is not as drastic as it appears, since many students who start college end up dropping out and only 25 percent of high-school graduates manage to obtain a four-year degree. At the same time, we should step up the effort to recruit highly qualified low-income students to the most selective colleges across the country—something that Caroline Hoxby’s research tells us is not currently taking place. Finally, we should copy some of Western Europe’s most successful economies by tracking more students into job-related nonacademic programs, and by redirecting the private and public money that now goes to universities to creating and maintaining such programs.

More broadly, the amounts freed up by defunding elite colleges and private schools should be used to help average Americans. The Gates Foundation and other rich private philanthropies should stop chasing after educational schemes of dubious value and devote their billions to improving community colleges, supporting the people who attend them, and dramatically expanding vocational programs.

Although Reeves does mention vocational education, he does so only in passing. That option should receive renewed emphasis. And private donors should provide grants to thousands of students of modest means, including stipends for rent and living expenses, to enable them to do the summer internships that Reeves claims are now so important to getting ahead.

also by Lyman Stone:
Can Uncle Sam Boost American Fertility?: https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fertility

The US needs more babies, more immigrants, and more integration: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/11/10/16631980/fertility-immigration-economics-growth-family-friendly

Throwing Natalist Benefits At Women Won’t Fix Low Fertility Rates: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/03/01/throwing-natalist-benefits-at-women-wont-fix-low-fertility-rates/

How to Fix the Baby Bust: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/25/how-to-fix-the-baby-bust/
- Lyman Stone, W. Bradford Wilcox, et al

https://twitter.com/WilcoxNMP/status/1154763316482510849
https://archive.is/NLi0G

This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/why-amazon-bought-whole-foods/530652/
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/06/17/the-distribution-channel-comes-to-you/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/06/18/amazon-whole-foods-deal-is-bad-news-for-store-cashiers-and-the-fight-for-15-minimum-wage/
Amazon Must Be Stopped: https://newrepublic.com/article/119769/amazons-monopoly-must-be-broken-radical-plan-tech-giant

Amazon Will Go To Denver: https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/09/10/amazon-will-go-to-denver/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/09/upshot/where-should-amazon-new-headquarters-be.html
http://www.paddypower.com/bet?action=go_event&category=SPECIALS&ev_class_id=45&ev_type_id=22711&ev_id=13023353&force_racing_css=&ev_desc=Where%20will%20Amazon%20build%20their%20Second%20Headquarters?
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/this-city-hall-brought-to-you-by-amazon/
Real things cities are offering to get Amazon HQ2
*Chicago: Let Amazon keep employees' income tax
*SoCal: Give away $100M in land
*Boston: City employees working just for Amazon
*Fresno: Let Amazon decide how to spend tax dollars

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rules-of-engagement-how-cities-are-courting-amazons-new-headquarters-1522661401
Washington, D.C., might have a leg up, having already hosted Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos for visits when he considered acquiring the Washington Post, which he now owns. Mr. Bezos also purchased the former Textile Museum in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood for $23 million in 2016 and is currently turning it into a private residence.

28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/28-year-old-makes-millions-buying-from-walmart-selling-on-amazon/ar-AAupB8i

https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/954028684788273153
https://twitter.com/hyperplanes/status/954020562262781952
https://archive.is/uNk1p
https://archive.is/phiTA
Thread: Why Amazon’s HQ2 is going to Fairfax County

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-19/amazon-is-sure-acting-like-it-s-going-to-pick-the-d-c-area

https://twitter.com/NeonPeonage/status/955436146183561216
https://archive.is/lJeaz
walmart is the only entity that has even a slim chance at preventing jeff bezos from intermediating every commodity exchange in the world, u must respect

https://twitter.com/holerepairer/status/955469951833436160
https://archive.is/ig58T
"I tried to save you, but you didn't listen. Now you'll have to face Him alone..."

What Amazon does to wages: https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21735020-worlds-largest-retailer-underpaying-its-employees-what-amazon-does-wages
Is the world’s largest retailer underpaying its employees?

Flat or falling industry wages are common in the cities and towns where Amazon opens distribution centres, according to an analysis by The Economist. Government figures show that after Amazon opens a storage depot, local wages for warehouse workers fall by an average of 3%. In places where Amazon operates, such workers earn about 10% less than similar workers employed elsewhere.

What Amazon Does to Poor Cities: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/amazon-warehouses-poor-cities/552020/
The debate over Amazon’s HQ2 obscures the company’s rapid expansion of warehouses in low-income areas.

The Facts Behind Trump’s Tweets on Amazon, Taxes and the Postal Service: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/us/politics/trump-amazon-post-office-fact-check.html

If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (And Amazon Has a Patent for It.): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/technology/amazon-wristband-tracking-privacy.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/01/582370715/wrist-watching-amazon-patents-system-to-track-guide-employees-hands
https://boingboing.net/2018/02/02/amazon-patent-could-lead-to-do.html
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/02/amazon-patents-wristbands-shock-collars-designed-to-steer-employees-movements/

auto-management -> automation dystopia: http://marshallbrain.com/manna.htm

Amazon’s vision for the future: delivery drone beehives in every city: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15860668/amazon-drone-delivery-patent-city-centers

Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83
https://openborders.info/innovation-case/
https://www.economist.com/news/world-if/21724907-yes-it-would-be-disruptive-potential-gains-are-so-vast-objectors-could-be-bribed
The Openness-Equality Trade-Off in Global Redistribution: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2509305
https://www.wsj.com/articles/opening-our-borders-would-overwhelm-america-1492366053
Immigration, Justice, and Prosperity: http://quillette.com/2017/07/29/immigration-justice-prosperity/

Some Countries Are Much Richer Than Others. Is That Unjust?: http://quillette.com/2017/07/23/countries-much-richer-others-unjust/
But we shouldn’t automatically assume that wealth disparities across the world are unjust and that the developed world owes aid as a matter of justice. This is because the best way to make sense of the Great Divergence is that certain economic and political institutions, namely those that facilitated economic growth, arose in some countries and not others. Thus perhaps the benevolent among us should also try to encourage – by example rather than force – the development of such institutions in places where they do not exist.

An Argument Against Open Borders and Liberal Hubris: http://quillette.com/2017/08/27/argument-open-borders-liberal-hubris/
We do not have open borders but we are experiencing unprecedented demographic change. What progressives should remember is that civilisation is not a science laboratory. The consequences of failed experiments endure. That is the main virtue of gradual change; we can test new waters and not leap into their depths.

A Radical Solution to Global Income Inequality: Make the U.S. More Like Qatar: https://newrepublic.com/article/120179/how-reduce-global-income-inequality-open-immigration-policies

Why nation-states are good: https://aeon.co/essays/capitalists-need-the-nation-state-more-than-it-needs-them
The nation-state remains the best foundation for capitalism, and hyper-globalisation risks destroying it
- Dani Rodrik
Given the non-uniqueness of practices and institutions enabling capitalism, it’s not surprising that nation-states also resolve key social trade-offs differently. The world does not agree on how to balance equality against opportunity, economic security against innovation, health and environmental risks against technological innovation, stability against dynamism, economic outcomes against social and cultural values, and many other consequences of institutional choice. Developing nations have different institutional requirements than rich nations. There are, in short, strong arguments against global institutional harmonisation.

http://people.oregonstate.edu/~flayb/MY%20COURSES/H676%20Meta-Analysis%20Fall2016/Examples%20of%20SRs%20&%20MAs%20of%20interventions/Piquero%20etal16%20Updated%20MA%20of%20self-control%20progams%20on%20SC%20and%20delinquency.pdf
http://sci-hub.tw/10.1348/135910709X461752
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0178814
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303767910_Does_Self-Control_Improve_With_Practice_Evidence_From_a_Six-Week_Training_Program

various evidence that ECT works

I will soon be offering e-books providing skeptical looks at mindfulness and positive psychology, as well as scientific writing courses on the web as I have been doing face-to-face for almost a decade.

https://www.coyneoftherealm.com/collections/frontpage

Coyne of the Realm Takes a Skeptical Look at Mindfulness — Table of Contents: https://www.coyneoftherealm.com/pages/coyne-of-the-realm-takes-a-skeptical-look-at-mindfulness-table-of-contents

Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691617709589
Where's the Proof That Mindfulness Meditation Works?: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wheres-the-proof-that-mindfulness-meditation-works1/

Brad Delong, in his course on economic history, lists the following among the reasons for the decline of the British empire and its loss of industrial superiority to Germany and the US.

British deficiencies:
* low infrastructure investment
* poor educational system
* lags behind in primary education
* teaches its elite not science and engineering, but how to write Latin verse

Sound familiar? What is the ratio of Harvard students who have studied Shakespeare, Milton or (shudder) Derrida to the number who have thought deeply about the scientific method, or know what a photon is? Which knowledge is going to pay off for America in the long haul?

Most photon experts are imported from abroad these days. We're running a search in our department for a condensed matter experimentalist (working on things ranging from nanoscale magnets to biomembranes). The last three candidates we've interviewed are originally from (1) the former Soviet Union (postdoc at Cornell), (2) India (postdoc at Berkeley) and (3) China (postdoc at Caltech).

Of course, these Harvard kids may be making a smart decision - why fight it out in an efficiently globalized meritocracy (i.e. science), when there are more lucrative career paths available? Nevertheless, I think we would be better off if our future leaders had at least some passing familiarity with the science and technology that will shape our future.

The future of US scientific leadership: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/07/future-of-us-scientific-leadership.html
Does Globalization of the Scientific/Engineering Workforce Threaten US Economic Leadership?: http://www.nber.org/papers/w11457
Note Freeman's Proposition 2: Despite perennial concerns over shortages of scientific and engineering specialists, the job market in most S&E specialties is too weak to attract increasing numbers of US students. Nevertheless, US S&E pay rates are still high enough to attract talented foreigners. This competition further reduces the attractiveness of S&E careers to US students.

Foreign Peer Effects and STEM Major Choice: http://ftp.iza.org/dp10743.pdf
Results indicate that a 1 standard deviation increase in foreign peers reduces the likelihood native-born students graduate with STEM majors by 3 percentage points – equivalent to 3.7 native students displaced for 9 additional foreign students in an average course. STEM displacement is offset by an increased likelihood of choosing Social Science majors. However, the earnings prospects of displaced students are minimally affected as they appear to be choosing Social Science majors with equally high earning power. We demonstrate that comparative advantage and linguistic dissonance may operate as underlying mechanisms.

fall of Rome: https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/886075755364360192
But if the gradualness of this process misled the Romans there were other and equally potent reasons for their blindness. Most potent of all was the fact that they mistook entirely the very nature of civilization itself. All of them were making the same mistake. People who thought that Rome could swallow barbarism and absorb it into her life without diluting her own civilization; the people who ran about busily saying that the barbarians were not such bad fellows after all, finding good points in their regime with which to castigate the Romans and crying that except ye become as little barbarians ye shall not attain salvation; the people who did not observe in 476 that one half of the Respublica Romanorum had ceased to exist and nourished themselves on the fiction that the barbarian kings were exercising a power delegated from the Emperor. _All these people were deluded by the same error, the belief that Rome (the civilization of their age) was not a mere historical fact with a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they breathed and the earth they tread Ave Roma immortalis, most magnificent most disastrous of creeds!_

The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? _Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell._

But still more responsible for their unawareness was the educational system in which they were reared. Ausonius and Sidonius and their friends were highly educated men and Gaul was famous for its schools and universities. The education which these gave consisted in the study of grammar and rhetoric, which was necessary alike for the civil service and for polite society; and it would be difficult to imagine an education more entirely out of touch with contemporary life, or less suited to inculcate the qualities which might have enabled men to deal with it. The fatal study of rhetoric, its links with reality long since severed, concentrated the whole attention of men of intellect on form rather than on matter. _The things they learned in their schools had no relation to the things that were going on in the world outside and bred in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday that everything was the same, whereas everything was different._

All the time I hear some public figure saying that if we ban or allow X, then logically we have to ban or allow Y, even though there are obvious practical reasons for X and obvious practical reasons against Y.

No, we don’t.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005864.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002053.html

compare: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:190b299cf04a

Small Change Good, Big Change Bad?: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/02/small-change-good-big-change-bad.html
And on reflection it occurs to me that this is actually THE standard debate about change: some see small changes and either like them or aren’t bothered enough to advocate what it would take to reverse them, while others imagine such trends continuing long enough to result in very large and disturbing changes, and then suggest stronger responses.

For example, on increased immigration some point to the many concrete benefits immigrants now provide. Others imagine that large cumulative immigration eventually results in big changes in culture and political equilibria. On fertility, some wonder if civilization can survive in the long run with declining population, while others point out that population should rise for many decades, and few endorse the policies needed to greatly increase fertility. On genetic modification of humans, some ask why not let doctors correct obvious defects, while others imagine parents eventually editing kid genes mainly to max kid career potential. On oil some say that we should start preparing for the fact that we will eventually run out, while others say that we keep finding new reserves to replace the ones we use.

...

If we consider any parameter, such as typical degree of mind wandering, we are unlikely to see the current value as exactly optimal. So if we give people the benefit of the doubt to make local changes in their interest, we may accept that this may result in a recent net total change we don’t like. We may figure this is the price we pay to get other things we value more, and we we know that it can be very expensive to limit choices severely.

But even though we don’t see the current value as optimal, we also usually see the optimal value as not terribly far from the current value. So if we can imagine current changes as part of a long term trend that eventually produces very large changes, we can become more alarmed and willing to restrict current changes. The key question is: when is that a reasonable response?

First, big concerns about big long term changes only make sense if one actually cares a lot about the long run. Given the usual high rates of return on investment, it is cheap to buy influence on the long term, compared to influence on the short term. Yet few actually devote much of their income to long term investments. This raises doubts about the sincerity of expressed long term concerns.

Second, in our simplest models of the world good local choices also produce good long term choices. So if we presume good local choices, bad long term outcomes require non-simple elements, such as coordination, commitment, or myopia problems. Of course many such problems do exist. Even so, someone who claims to see a long term problem should be expected to identify specifically which such complexities they see at play. It shouldn’t be sufficient to just point to the possibility of such problems.

...

Fourth, many more processes and factors limit big changes, compared to small changes. For example, in software small changes are often trivial, while larger changes are nearly impossible, at least without starting again from scratch. Similarly, modest changes in mind wandering can be accomplished with minor attitude and habit changes, while extreme changes may require big brain restructuring, which is much harder because brains are complex and opaque. Recent changes in market structure may reduce the number of firms in each industry, but that doesn’t make it remotely plausible that one firm will eventually take over the entire economy. Projections of small changes into large changes need to consider the possibility of many such factors limiting large changes.

Fifth, while it can be reasonably safe to identify short term changes empirically, the longer term a forecast the more one needs to rely on theory, and the more different areas of expertise one must consider when constructing a relevant model of the situation. Beware a mere empirical projection into the long run, or a theory-based projection that relies on theories in only one area.

We should very much be open to the possibility of big bad long term changes, even in areas where we are okay with short term changes, or at least reluctant to sufficiently resist them. But we should also try to hold those who argue for the existence of such problems to relatively high standards. Their analysis should be about future times that we actually care about, and can at least roughly foresee. It should be based on our best theories of relevant subjects, and it should consider the possibility of factors that limit larger changes.

And instead of suggesting big ways to counter short term changes that might lead to long term problems, it is often better to identify markers to warn of larger problems. Then instead of acting in big ways now, we can make sure to track these warning markers, and ready ourselves to act more strongly if they appear.

Growth Is Change. So Is Death.: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/03/growth-is-change-so-is-death.html
I see the same pattern when people consider long term futures. People can be quite philosophical about the extinction of humanity, as long as this is due to natural causes. Every species dies; why should humans be different? And few get bothered by humans making modest small-scale short-term modifications to their own lives or environment. We are mostly okay with people using umbrellas when it rains, moving to new towns to take new jobs, etc., digging a flood ditch after our yard floods, and so on. And the net social effect of many small changes is technological progress, economic growth, new fashions, and new social attitudes, all of which we tend to endorse in the short run.

Even regarding big human-caused changes, most don’t worry if changes happen far enough in the future. Few actually care much about the future past the lives of people they’ll meet in their own life. But for changes that happen within someone’s time horizon of caring, the bigger that changes get, and the longer they are expected to last, the more that people worry. And when we get to huge changes, such as taking apart the sun, a population of trillions, lifetimes of millennia, massive genetic modification of humans, robots replacing people, a complete loss of privacy, or revolutions in social attitudes, few are blasé, and most are quite wary.

This differing attitude regarding small local changes versus large global changes makes sense for parameters that tend to revert back to a mean. Extreme values then do justify extra caution, while changes within the usual range don’t merit much notice, and can be safely left to local choice. But many parameters of our world do not mostly revert back to a mean. They drift long distances over long times, in hard to predict ways that can be reasonably modeled as a basic trend plus a random walk.

This different attitude can also make sense for parameters that have two or more very different causes of change, one which creates frequent small changes, and another which creates rare huge changes. (Or perhaps a continuum between such extremes.) If larger sudden changes tend to cause more problems, it can make sense to be more wary of them. However, for most parameters most change results from many small changes, and even then many are quite wary of this accumulating into big change.

For people with a sharp time horizon of caring, they should be more wary of long-drifting parameters the larger the changes that would happen within their horizon time. This perspective predicts that the people who are most wary of big future changes are those with the longest time horizons, and who more expect lumpier change processes. This prediction doesn’t seem to fit well with my experience, however.

Those who most worry about big long term changes usually seem okay with small short term changes. Even when they accept that most change is small and that it accumulates into big change. This seems incoherent to me. It seems like many other near versus far incoherences, like expecting things to be simpler when you are far away from them, and more complex when you are closer. You should either become more wary of short term changes, knowing that this is how big longer term change happens, or you should be more okay with big long term change, seeing that as the legitimate result of the small short term changes you accept.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/03/growth-is-change-so-is-death.html#comment-3794966996
The point here is the gradual shifts of in-group beliefs are both natural and no big deal. Humans are built to readily do this, and forget they do this. But ultimately it is not a worry or concern.

But radical shifts that are big, whether near or far, portend strife and conflict. Either between groups or within them. If the shift is big enough, our intuition tells us our in-group will be in a fight. Alarms go off.

We find that members of the “lost generation” who missed out on college because they were born just a year or two too early believe that effort pays off to a much lesser degree, even 40 years into their adulthood. However, they invested more in their children’s education, and transmitted less of their changed beliefs to the next generation, suggesting attempts to safeguard their children from sharing their misfortunes.

A normal good is a good for which demand increases with income.

From Extreme to Mainstream: How Social Norms Unravel: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23415
Unleashed: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3025749
Liberals against Liberation: http://www.unz.com/isteve/liberals-against-liberation/
nurse ratched state
The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth About Political Illigitimacy: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/tkpn5/

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.

grip strength and physical fitness improve cardio health independent of genetic confounding

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/reversal-of-fortune-2/#comment-5940
“particularly in the fetus”. You’d think so, but people have looked at Dutch draftees who were in the womb during the famine of 1944. They found no effects of famine exposure on Ravens scores at age 19. Schizophrenia doubled, though. Schiz also doubled in the Chinese cohort exposed to the Great Leap Forward famine.

Cohort Profile: The Dutch Hunger Winter Families Study: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/36/6/1196/814573
Nutrition and Mental Performance: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.178.4062.708
Schizophrenia after prenatal exposure to the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-1945: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1001/archpsyc.1992.01820120071010
Prenatal famine exposure and cognition at age 59 years: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1093/ije/dyq261

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/reversal-of-fortune-2/#comment-5960
You might be right. There is reason to suspect that prenatal exposure to alcohol is far riskier in some populations than others – in particular populations that have limited historical exposure to alcohol. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is very rare in France, for example – yet they drink, I’m told.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/reversal-of-fortune-2/#comment-5961
The kind of conservatism that shows up politically doesn’t have any predictive value. In other words, liars and morons. They’re why God made baseball bats. Once upon a time, I said this: “The American right doesn’t have room for anyone who knows jack shit about anything, or whose predictions have ever come true.” I’ll stick with that.

full quote here: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/planescape-torment-problems.9208/
The American right doesn't have room for anyone who knows jack shit about anything, or whose predictions have ever come true. Of course they're all liars. In the words of one of their semi-prominent members, himself plenty despicable: "Science, logic, rational inquiry, thoughtful reflection, mean nothing to them. It's all posturing and moral status games and sucking up to halfwits like GWB and clinging to crackpot religion, and of course amoral careerism. " I think my correspondent forgot to mention their propensity for eating shit and rolling around in their own vomit, but nobody's perfect.

lol:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/reversal-of-fortune-2/#comment-6045
I’ve mused that it’s generally believed that iodine benefits females more than males, and the timing of iodization in the US matches up reasonably well with the rise of feminism…

preferences -> place, not place -> preferences (mostly)
Cosmopolitan immigration attitudes in Europe's large cities: Adaptation or selection: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lb3yrsdlhpxprfs/RahsaanMaxwellAPSACosmopolitanImmigrationCities.pdf?dl=0
The myth of London exceptionalism: https://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-5/ukip-in-london/
London is not as invulnerable to the appeal of UKIP as commonly reported, finds new research from Eric Kaufmann.

Are White British Londoners more accepting of immigration than White British elsewhere? The British Election Study (BES)’s 2015 panel survey asks whether immigration enriches or undermines cultural life. 34.7 per cent of White British outside London say immigration strongly undermines cultural life. But so do 34.4 per cent of White British Londoners. Not much difference there. 44 per cent of White Brits outside London want to leave the EU, but so do 42.3 per cent of White British Londoners. Again, not much in it.

...

Finally, when we control for a fuller range of demographic and attitudinal characteristics, as in figure 4, London and the South East emerge as significantly more likely than the rest of England and Wales to have voted UKIP in 2014, according to the BES.

Cosmopolitan cities and their country cousins – UK in a changing Europe: http://ukandeu.ac.uk/london-voted-leave-or-why-local-differences-in-populist-right-voting-are-overstated/

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/minimum-wage
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/new-study-casts-doubt-on-whether-a-15-minimum-wage-really-helps-workers/
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-object-lesson-in-weaponized-data/
anecdote: https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/879541837580517376
poll: https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/879458711579762688
commentary on poll: https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/879522254664499200
lovely subthread on modeling and methodology: https://twitter.com/HoustonEuler/status/879588491033804800
https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/866702316593754114
"I’d also set the federal minimum wage to zero. Yes, I would do that."
https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/859721048266338304
In the short run

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://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/933118496363311104
https://archive.is/Cs7Yu
i wonder to what extent pensions, social security, medicare, old age benefits etc depress fertility
joke: slashing broad-based entitlements because you yearn for the "desolate freedom of the wild ass"
woke: slashing broad-based entitlements because they're a t o m i z i n g you

A Population-Level Decline in Serum Testosterone Levels in American Men: http://sci-hub.tw/10.1210/jc.2006-1375
Secular trends in sex hormones and fractures in men and women: http://www.eje-online.org/content/166/5/887.full.pdf
https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/984543033285898246
https://archive.is/dcruu
Small n and older sample, but interesting that while testosterone decreases have been large for men they’ve been even larger (in % terms) for women; wonder if this contributes to declining pregnancy and sexual frequency, rising depression.

https://www.labcorp.com/assets/11476
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sperm-killers-and-rising-male-infertility/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/25/sperm-counts-among-western-men-have-halved-in-last-40-years-study
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/most-men-in-the-us-and-europe-could-be-infertile-by-2060
Strangelove: https://youtu.be/N1KvgtEnABY?t=67

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropping-in-western-world/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855796
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857588
People offering human-centric explanations like cell phones: Note also that the sperm quality of dogs has decreased 30% since 1988.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/august-3-2019-science-of-awe-blue-whales-and-sonar-chromosomes-and-sleep-and-more-1.5047142/man-and-man-s-best-friend-have-both-been-experiencing-declines-in-sperm-quality-1.5047150
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20636757

mendelian rand.:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28448539
1 SD genetically instrumented increase in BMI was associated with a 0.25 SD decrease in serum testosterone
https://twitter.com/SilverVVulpes/status/857902555489341441

Ibuprofen linked to male infertility: study: https://nypost.com/2018/01/08/ibuprofen-linked-to-male-infertility-study/
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/4/E715.full

Tucker Carlson: "Men Seem To Be Becoming Less Male": https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/03/08/tucker_carlson_men_seem_to_be_becoming_less_male.html
Carlson interviewed Dr. Jordan Peterson who blamed the "insidious" movement being driven by the "radical left" that teaches there a problem of "toxic masculinity." He said ideological policies focus on "de-emphasizing masculinity may be part of the problem."

...

Those are the numbers. They paint a very clear picture: American men are failing, in body, mind and spirit. This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women far outpace men in higher education, virtually every college campus supports a women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. Men are privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.

https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:bd7b0a50d741
But it also hints at an almost opposite take: average testosterone levels have been falling for decades, so at this point these businessmen would be the only “normal” (by 1950s standards) men out there, and everyone else would be unprecedently risk-averse and boring.

Tai Chi seems to do well, though the number of studies is smaller than other forms of exercise. The frequency of taking exercise shows a dose-response relationship, but less for intensity and duration and length, which is a little surprising. Moving about a bit every day seems the best policy. More socially active control groups seem almost as good as exercise, as does the sham exercise of stretching, so this is somewhat of a worry for the “exercise saves your wits” hypothesis.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/dnb/2010-zeidan.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/43/17152.short
https://puredhamma.net/wp-content/uploads/Psychological-effects-of-meditation-Sedlmeir-2012.pdf