Measuring the dependency of different variables

The New York Times reports that less than 15% of Wikipedia contributors are women.

The discussion is really very poor, though. I’ve made a few edits on Wikipedia, but am not a big contributor so I don’t know what happens when you start editing a lot. I did write a few paragraphs on a controversial topic, the rise to power of Portuguese dictator Salazar and didn’t get negative comments, nor was my text immediately edited to reverse my description (for months, it stood almost unchanged and I can still recognise some of my sentences as well as the gist of my text).

I cannot believe that if anyone was to add a few more details on a fashion designer or a Mexican feminist writer (the examples in the NYT), they’d get much feedback, let alone the scary negative feedback that the authors seem to think keeps women away.

Maybe, women (in our current society) are just not that into writing for Wikipedia. Maybe that’s OK. Whose rights are being violated? I also bet that there are more men than women in most other online communities such as multi-player games. Is that an issue?

Oh, and when can we stop referring to women as a minority?

The New York Times reports that less than 15% of Wikipedia contributors are women. The discussion is really very poor, though. I've made a few edits on Wikipedia, but am not a big contributor so I don't know what happens when you start editing a lot. I did write a few paragraphs on a controversial ...

Many states are cutting Medicaid costs. This will not end well for patients on Medicaid (or for those marginal workers who now have insurance, but will be dumped on Medicaid by Obamacare).

Many states are cutting Medicaid costs. This will not end well for patients on Medicaid (or for those marginal workers who now have insurance, but will be dumped on Medicaid by Obamacare).

The great Scott Sumner:

Here’s how I think about jobs. First, what do we want? If those things can be provided with very few workers, don’t despair, ask what we want after we have gotten our first wish granted. And so on, until all the workers are employed.

The great Scott Sumner: Here’s how I think about jobs. First, what do we want? If those things can be provided with very few workers, don’t despair, ask what we want after we have gotten our first wish granted. And so on, until all the workers are employed.

Writes Todd Zywicki:

Who could have possibly predicted that the Credit CARD Act’s rules that limit non-interest fees and the ability to raise interest rates when a borrower’s risk changes would result in “record high” interest rates (other than me, of course, when I testified to the Senate Banking Committee in 2009 that the act would result in higher interest rates and other than the sponsor of the law, who has acknowledged that it has resulted in higher interest rates but has decided for the rest of us that higher rates is a good thing)? Even more amazing, it appears that these restrictions on risk-based pricing has hit poor credit risks even harder than less-risky consumers.

Amazing. It’s as if supply and demand continued to work even after Congress passed a law.

On the other hand, the lower-upper-middle-class (most of the policy and public opinion in the US is made by the sort of people that a NYT reporter might encounter at a dinner party) will be happy to know that (1) their rates have not gone up and (2) that pesky $30 fee that they got charged 5 years ago for over-using their card on a trip will not happen again.

Writes Todd Zywicki: Who could have possibly predicted that the Credit CARD Act’s rules that limit non-interest fees and the ability to raise interest rates when a borrower’s risk changes would result in “record high” interest rates (other than me, of course, when I testified to the Senate Banking Committee in 2009 that the act ...

The comments below made me verbalise my understanding of Cowen’s thesis in another way.

His argument is about traditional growth theory growth (capital and labour yields growth, i.e., you should invest in infra-structure), versus Romer-style growth (ideas and capital and labour yields growth, i.e., you should create knowledge and institutions).

Until the Great Stagnation, the US was undergoing Romer-style growth: new institutions, new ideas, and a lot of capital. Recently, it switched to something that is better explained by traditional growth theory: you apply more capital (having run out of extra labour to apply) and you get a bit of growth, but there are no radical new ideas. We have not been creating new intelectual infra-structure (is the thesis).

Therefore, the comments that the internet has never stopped growing strike me as not reaching the heart of the matter. Of course, email is much more valuable now that everybody is using it. However, this is traditional-growth-theory-growth (more computers, faster computers, faster connections, everything gets cheaper). There are no conceptual leaps to switching from a command line cryptic command editor to a gmail text box. Once you have email and the idea of a graphical interface (which was a true conceptual leap and was presented at mother of all demos in 1968), getting to gmail is just application of capital.

The comments below made me verbalise my understanding of Cowen's thesis in another way. His argument is about traditional growth theory growth (capital and labour yields growth, i.e., you should invest in infra-structure), versus Romer-style growth (ideas and capital and labour yields growth, i.e., you should create knowledge and institutions). Until the Great Stagnation, the US ...

Tyler Cowen’s ebook single, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better just came out. I read it and here I some thoughts

1. I love the format. Much better than the traditional way of handling these books, which is to add filler text to make them 150 pages long, then print them in large type with a few illustrations and finally sell them for $15.99. I also see this text as an essay, which is geared at pushing one idea and starting a discussion rather than trying to be the final word on the matter.

2. I applaud Tyler for just confronting the GDP/wage stagnation data face on. Too many free-market economists just deny the data (you can point out its many flaws, but still accept that there is signal there). The signs of stagnation in GDP growth wages are there and need to be addressed (the other free-market economist who has done the same is Scott Sumner who points out that, yes, after the 1970s, everybody had slower growth, but relatively speaking the free-market countries still did much better).

3. The main thesis is that this is a real phenomenon: the US has grown more slowly since around 1970. This is because previous growth was support by low hanging fruit such as free land, small government, and scientific progress that ran out without being replaced. Over the last few decades, the only real new thing has been the internet.

4. Let me comment on the internet. It is the exception that Tyler gives to his general thesis. I respectfully disagree. There are very few things on the internet that are new. Most of them are simpler, more colourful, versions of functionality that existed in the 1980s or even before. Blogs were part of the original idea for the web (which was inspired in pre-existing systems). Instant messaging, email, discussion groups, all of those have always been with us. The one exception might be wikipedia (the precedents are the 1945 description of it by V. Bush and open-source software [early 1980s], but I still think that no one was predicting it would work so well if anyone could edit). What feature does today’s internet have that was not present in 1980s internal university Unix systems (which were used by many internet “innovators”)?

5. A few weeks ago, I read another book, Coders at Work, which has a long interview with Bernie Cosell. He describes a system at a hospital in Boston where doctors and nurses use electronic prescriptions and medical records so that every time a patient walks into another part of the hospital the data is already there (your doctor prescribes an exam, you just go to the exam room and they already know what you’re coming for). Compared to the top university hospital I have the most interaction with (UPMC, here in Pittsburgh), where everything is still on paper and you need to check in everytime you cross a hallway and talk to several different people, this sounds like a marvel of efficiency. The amazing part is that this was the job that B. Cosell had before he went on to develop the first internet routers. This was a live, running, system in the early 1960s! There are other examples of regression (rail service in the US is another good example: it doesn’t run nearly as fast as it did 100 years ago—the US does not need 2011 trains as much as 1911 ones).

6. Interestingly, much of the thesis of Great Stagnation is contradicted by another of T. Cowen’s books, Create Your Own Economy. In it, Tyler had glorified the non-measured wealth of variety and small intelectual pleasures.

7. The discussion of the current crisis I felt as the weakest part of the book. I think it commits from the Junker Fallacy when it argues that too many resources were diverted to finance (maybe a few people would have been better employed doing something else, but you cannot measure it by dollars). It is fine to disregard this whole discussion as it is ancillary to the main argument of the book. The crisis is still too recent for anyone to be able to say where it fits with more secular trends.

8. As a scientist, I support the call to give more status to scientists.

Tyler Cowen's ebook single, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better just came out. I read it and here I some thoughts 1. I love the format. Much better than the traditional way of handling these books, which is to add filler ...

One of the most widely reproduced results in psychology is that replacing an internal motivation by an external one may lead to perverse results. For example, if you pay young kids (probably in candy rather than money) to do their homework, they end up less interested in school.

I feel something analogous happened in the Euro zone with the 3% rule. That was the rule that said that euro states needed to keep their budget deficit below 3% (another rule said that overall debt should be below 60% of GDP).

A weak rule with weak incentives (if you don’t do your homework, we won’t let you watch your favourite TV show) can mask a strong incentive: if you don’t do your homework, you’ll fail in school and that will destroy a lot of your life prospects.

Or, for Euro states, if you let debt get out of control, you will get a nasty letter from the European Commission. This is the weak incentive: a bit of public humiliation which you can even turn to your advantage by tugging at populist nationalism (“how dare some Brussels bureaucrat tell the great nation of Brokeistan that they are spending too much?”). However, there is a real incentive too: if your debt gets out of hand, you won’t be able to get a loan from private markets any more.

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During the last 10 or 15 years, even the fiscal conservatives in Portugal argued that the debt should be kept under control because otherwise the European Commission might be upset and Portugal was under treaty obligations to comply with this rule. Wishing to fulfil treaty obligations is a noble sentiment, but I used to stare in disbelief at the television that this was the best that fiscal conservatives came up with. Never mentioning that a real debt crisis could eventually happen, their arguments were much weaker than they needed to be and were consistently undercut by

(1) appeals to national pride, even outright jingoism,
(2) the fact that the penalties, when they came, were really very weak (the minutes of a meeting in Brussels, mention your country negatively in page 47), and
(3) the fact that other countries also broke treaty rules.

Finally, it legitimised all of the budget games that masked the problem. Portugal never engaged in the illegal manipulation that Greece performed, but successive governments used legal loop-holes to rename debt to something else. Of course, these accounting schemes do not change the underlying situation; but if the game is to keep the European Commission happy, it all seemed fair as long as it was legal.

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Even after the Greek crisis, some people were still writing as if it was all about getting the European Commission’s approval! Some people are still operating under a faulty mental model where this is a fight between EU factions. It is still an unlikely path, but not an absurd one, that this might lead to a real confrontation if there is an enterprising politician, particularly in a larger country like Spain, who picks up the anti-free-trade, anti-foreigner, anti-market, anti-German, (anti-Jewish,) platform.

The more likely path, is still a muddling through, with a lot of anger that comes from cognitive dissonance as people think (and vote) under a mental model where the problem is not that nobody is willing to lend Portugal any money at modest interest rates, but that somehow big countries are using their political power to get away with something (breaking the 3% rule) that small countries cannot do.

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(There is a more serious, informed, argument about how the interest rates favoured by the Northern countries and the Southern countries differ and how the ECB is more responsive to the Northern views. This is not what I am writing about.)

One of the most widely reproduced results in psychology is that replacing an internal motivation by an external one may lead to perverse results. For example, if you pay young kids (probably in candy rather than money) to do their homework, they end up less interested in school. I feel something analogous happened in the ...

On of Hernando de Soto’s repeated stories about the shakiness of properties rights in the slums is how it is often imperative that people sit on their claimed plots or they will lose it. They do it in the favelas of Rio and they do it in Massachusetts.

On of Hernando de Soto's repeated stories about the shakiness of properties rights in the slums is how it is often imperative that people sit on their claimed plots or they will lose it. They do it in the favelas of Rio and they do it in Massachusetts.

Megan McArdle is asked whether there is a ‘libertarian’ solution to the foreclosure mess and answers no, not really.

Let me, respectfully, disagree.

There is much in this mess that reminds me of Hernando de Soto’s work in defending the formalisation of oral, informal, but widely respected, contract. If you read, nodding along, to how he described the slums of the third world with its plots of land parcelled according to tradition, but without legal protection; you mustn’t think that it only applied there.

Hayek, too, talked of the difference between Law (the practice that is generally accepted and respected by the people) and legislation. Here, we have a disconnect between the two.

It seems that, in most of the actual cases I have read described, there is no question on whether the bank has a moral right to the house, just whether the bank has the legal right to foreclose. There is no one else who even claims to own the property. Just whether five years ago, the signature on some document was or not properly notarised. This is the bureaucratic hell that de Soto described in the slums, but it happens in Massachusetts as well.

Let the banks (or other intermediaries) be served with penalties and fees for shoddy paperwork, but keep the property assignments based on more substantive arguments than some of what I’ve heard.

(This will probably require a legislative solution by either Congress or, most likely, the Supreme Court.)

Megan McArdle is asked whether there is a 'libertarian' solution to the foreclosure mess and answers no, not really. Let me, respectfully, disagree. There is much in this mess that reminds me of Hernando de Soto's work in defending the formalisation of oral, informal, but widely respected, contract. If you read, nodding along, to how he ...

Tyler Cowen tries to explain France. The question (from a reader) is the following:

By which I mean this: relying solely on prejudice and snippets of information, it would seem to me that France should be an economic backwater. The rate of taxation, cost of labor, early pension age, large public sector, high welfare payments, etc., none of this suggests a highly dynamic and performative economy fit for the 21st century.

While I normally appreciate Tyler Cowen’s ability to see beyond the confines of the US, I do not think his answers are very on point this time. So let me try:

1. The assumption seems to be that France is sort of the anti-US. But France is more similar to the US than either is to Congo, or Bolivia, or, for that matter, Greece. I could talk about their similar cultural vices (the insularity, the political correctness, &c), but even on the matter of economics, the differences are not that large. The French never had a single payer health care system, for example.

2. More importantly, the differences were historically even smaller. You could probably argue that for 30 years after the war, American policies were often to the left of French policies. In France, the discourse is dominated by the Left and the extreme-Left is fashionable. However, they have only have had one president after the second world war which identified himself as a (in American terms) liberal: F. Mitterrand. Yes, the French Rightwing is economically more statist than Obama, but definitely less so than Nixon was. It is note-worthy that Mitterrand was elected at the same time as Reagan and Thatcher.

4. The French are very patriotic. Sometimes, it renders them laughable, but often serves them well, in particular in the civil service. I don’t know if the civil servant ethos is stable to the modern pressures (where the pay is lower than the private sector and the prestige is not so great anymore), but it sill survives to a large extent. The same is true in most of the US too—American public services are not that as bad as people imagine them.

3. The most egregious anti-market actions in France are the labour laws. Not surprisingly, their labour market is where things are the worst: unemployment, especially of the young and unqualified, is a major social issue. After all, a good, hip designer or marketer will certainly not be affected by the ridiculously high minimum wage and other such obstacles. So businesses that depend on cool, hip designers or savy marketing do well.

5. A note on the educational system. It is a bizarre mix of extreme competition at the top and a mediocre egalitarianism for everyone else. It is very good at giving the elites an excellent education in a competitive environment. The grands écoles (Ivy League equivalent) are the most well known example. But even before that pupils are ranked by academic merit from a young age. At least, until very recently (the 90s), it was still the case that pupils would be often seated in order of GPA. No egalitarianism here (just imagine what the American left would cry if you suggested something like this).

6. In fact, France is not a very egalitarian society at all. Germany and the Nordic countries are much more egalitarian. So are some regions of the US.

The answer to the readers question is that most of the confusion was in his head: if he can explain how high-tax, high regulation New York City is so rich, then France will be easy.

Tyler Cowen tries to explain France. The question (from a reader) is the following: By which I mean this: relying solely on prejudice and snippets of information, it would seem to me that France should be an economic backwater. The rate of taxation, cost of labor, early pension age, large public sector, high welfare payments, ...