Author: Joy

Human Capital and Filepaths

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Someone wrote a story about my life. It’s a report from The Verge called “File Not Found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans”.

When I started teaching an advanced data analytics class to undergraduates in 2017, I noticed that some of them did not know how to locate files on a PC. Something that is unavoidable in data analytics is getting software to access data from a storage device. It’s not “programming” nor is it “predictive analytics”, but you can’t get far without it. You need to know what directory to point the software to, meaning that you need to know what directory contains the data file.

As the article says

the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students. It’s the idea that a modern computer doesn’t just save a file in an infinite expanse; it saves it in the “Downloads” folder, the “Desktop” folder, or the “Documents” folder, all of which live within “This PC,” and each of which might have folders nested within them, too. It’s an idea that’s likely intuitive to any computer user who remembers the floppy disk.

I am a long-time PC user. Navigating File Explorer is about as instinctive as drinking a glass of water for me. The so-called digital natives of Gen Z have been glued to mobile device screens that shield them from learning anything about computers.

Not everyone needs to know how computers work. I myself only know the layer that I was forced to learn.

My Dad, to whom I owe so much, kept a Commodore 64 in a closet in our house. About once a year, he would try to entice me into learning how to use it. I remember screwing up my 9-year-old eyes and trying to care. Care, I could not. It’s hard to force yourself to do extra work without a clear goal. The Verge article explains

But it may also be that in an age where every conceivable user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories for the tasks they do. The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search and Spotlight on macOS are both products of the early 2000s. Most of 2017’s college freshmen were born in the very late ‘90s. They were in elementary school when the iPhone debuted; they’re around the same age as Google. While many of today’s professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today’s students increasingly don’t remember a world without them.

One area in which I do minimum archiving is my email. I rely heavily on the search function. I could spend time creating email folders, but I’m not going to put in the time unless I’m forced to.

Here’s where the “problem” lies:

The primary issue is that the code researchers write, run at the command line, needs to be told exactly how to access the files it’s working with — it can’t search for those files on its own. Some programming languages have search functions, but they’re difficult to implement and not commonly used. It’s in the programming lessons where STEM professors, across fields, are encountering problems.

Regardless of source, the consequence is clear. STEM educators are increasingly taking on dual roles: those of instructors not only in their field of expertise but in computer fundamentals as well.

Personally, I don’t mind taking on that dual role. I didn’t learn to program until I really wanted to. The only reason I wanted to was that I had discovered economics. I wanted to be able to participate in social science research. Let these STEM or business courses be the motivation for students to learn to use computers as tools instead of just for entertainment.

Allen Downey wrote a great blog on this topic back in 2018 that is more practical for teachers than the Verge report. He argues that learning to program will be harder for the 20-year-olds of today than it was for “us” (old people as defined by entering college before 2016). He recommends a few practical strategies, while acknowledging that there is “pain” somewhere along the process. He thinks it is sometimes appropriate to delay that pain by using browser-based programming interfaces, in the beginning.

I gave my students a break from pain this week with a little in-browser game that you can play at https://www.brainpop.com/games/blocklymaze/ They got 10 minutes to forget about file paths, and then it was back to the hard work.

I have found that a lot of students need individual attention for this step – the finding a file in their hard drive. I only have to do that once per student. Students pick the system up quickly. File Explorer is a pretty user-friendly mechanism. Everyone just has to have a first time. Sometimes, Zoomers just need a real person who cares about them to come along and say, “The file you downloaded exists on this machine.”

One way around this problem is to reference data that lives on the internet instead of in a local machine. If you are working through the examples in Scott Cunningham’s new book Causal Inference, here’s a piece of the code he provides to import data from his public repository into R.

full_path <- paste(https://raw.github.com/scunning1975/mixtape/master/, df, sep=“”)

df <- read_dta(full_path)

The nice thing about referencing data that is freely available online is that the same line of code will work on every machine as long as the student is connected to the internet.

As more and more of life moves into the cloud, technologists might increasingly be pointing programs to a web address instead of the /Downloads folder on their local machine. Nevertheless, the kids need to have a better sense of where files are stored. He or she who can understand file architecture is going to get paid a lot more than their peers who only know who to poke and scroll on a smartphone.

There is a future scenario in which AI does most of the programming for us. When AI can fetch files for us, then File Explorer may seem obsolete. But I worry about a world in which fewer and fewer humans know where their information is stored.

Behavioral Economist at Work

Joy1 Comment

A blog post titled “The Death of Behavioral Economics” went viral this summer. The clickbait headline was widely shared. After Scott Alexander debunked it point-by-point on Astral Codex Ten, no one corrected their previous tweets. I recommend Scott’s blog for the technical stuff. For example, there is an important distinction between saying that loss aversion does not exist versus saying that its underlying cause is the Endowment Effect.

The author of the original death post, Hreha, is angry. Here’s how he describes his experience with behavioral economics.

I’ve run studies looking at its impact in the real world—especially in marketing campaigns.

If you read anything about this body of research, you’ll get the idea that losses are such powerful motivators that they’ll turn otherwise uninterested customers into enthusiastic purchasers.

The truth of the matter is that losses and benefits are equally effective in driving conversion. In fact, in many circumstances, losses are actually *worse* at driving results.

Why?

Because loss-focused messaging often comes across as gimmicky and spammy. It makes you, the advertiser, look desperate. It makes you seem untrustworthy, and trust is the foundation of sales, conversion, and retention.

He’s trying to sell things. I wade through ads every day and, to mix metaphors, beat them off like mosquitoes. Knowing how I feel about sales pitches, I don’t envy Hreha’s position.

I don’t know Hreha. From reading his blog post, I get the impression that he believes he was promised certain big returns by economists. He tried some interventions in a business setting and did not get his desired results or did not make as much money as he was expecting.

According to him, he seeks to turn people into “enthusiastic purchasers” by exploiting loss aversion. What would consumers be losing, if you are trying to sell them something new? I’m not in marketing research so I should probably just not try to comment on those specifics. Now, Hreha claims that all behavioral studies are misleading or useless.

The failure to replicate some results is a big deal, for economics and for psychology. I have seen changes within the experimental community and standards have gotten tougher as a result. If scientists knowingly lied about their results or exaggerated their effect sizes, then they have seriously hurt people like Hreha and me. I am angry at a particular pair of researchers who I will not name. I read their paper and designed an extension of it as a graduate student. I put months of my life into this project and risked a good amount of my meager research budget. It didn’t work for me. I thought I knew what was going to happen in the lab, but I was wrong. Those authors should have written a disclaimer into their paper, as follows:

Disclaimer: Remember, most things don’t work.

I didn’t conclude that all of behavioral research is misleading and that all future studies are pointless. I refined my design by getting rid of what those folks had used and eventually I did get a meaningful paper written and published. This process of iteration is a big part of the practice of science.

The fact that you can’t predict what will happen in a controlled setting seems like a bad reason to abandon behavioral economics. It all got started because theories were put to the test and they failed. We can’t just retreat and say that theories shouldn’t get tested anymore.

I remember meeting a professor at a conference who told me that he doesn’t believe in experimental economics. He had tried an experiment once and it hadn’t turned out the way he wanted. He tried once. His failure to predict what happened should have piqued his curiosity!

There is a difference between behavioral economics and experimental economics. I recommend Vernon Smith’s whole book on that topic, which I quoted from yesterday, for those interested.

The reason we run experiments is that you don’t know what will happen until you try. The good justification for shutting down behavioral studies is if we get so good at predicting what interventions will work that the new data ceases to be informative.

Or, what if you think nudges are not working because people are highly sensible and rational? That would also imply that we can predict what they are going to do, at least in simple situations. So, again, the fact that we are not good at predicting what people are going to do is not a reason to stop the studies.

I posted last week about how economists use the word “behavioral” in conversation. Yesterday, I shared a stinging critique of the behavioral scientist community written by the world’s leading experimental researcher long before the clickbait blog.

Today, I will share a behavioral economics success story. There are lots of papers I could point to. I’m going to use one of my own, so that readers could truly ask me anything it. My paper is called “My reference point, not yours”.

I started with a prediction based on previous behavioral literature. My design depended on the fact that in the first stage of the experiment, people would not maximize expected value. You never know until you run the experiment, but I was pretty confident that the behavioral economics literature was a reliable guide.

Some subjects started the experiment with an endowment of $6. Then they could invest to have an equal chance of either doubling their money (earn $12) or getting $1. To maximize expected value, they should take that gamble. Most people would rather hold on to their endowment of $6 than risk experiencing a loss. It’s just $5. Why should the prospect of losing $5 blind them to the expected value calculation? Because most humans exhibit loss aversion.

I was relying on this pattern of behavior in stage 1 of the experiment for the test to be possible in stage 2. The main topic of the paper is whether people can predict what others will do. High endowment people fail to invest in stage 1, so then they predict that most other participants failed to invest. The high endowment people failed to incorporate easily available information about the other participants, which is that starting endowments {1,2,3,4,5,6} were randomly assigned and uniformly distributed. The effect size was large, even when I added in a quiz to test their knowledge that starting endowments are uniformly distributed.

Here’s a chart of my main results.

Investing always maximizes expected value, for everyone. The $1 endowment people think that only a quarter of the other participants fail to invest. The $6 endowment people predict that more than half of other participants fail to invest.

Does this help Mr. Hreha get Americans to buy more stuff at Walmart, for whom he consults? I’m not sure. Sorry.

My results do not directly imply that we need more government interventions or nudge units. One could argue instead that we need is market competition to help people navigate a complex world. The information contained in prices helps us figure out what strangers want, so we don’t have to try to predict their behavior at all.

Here’s the end of my Conclusion

One way to interpret the results of this experiment is that putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is costly. We often speak of it as a moral obligation, especially to consider the plight of those who are worse off than ourselves. Not only do people usually decline to do this for moral reasons, they fail to do it for money. Additionally, this experiment shows that, if people are prompted to think about a specific past experience that someone else had, then mutual understanding is easier to establish.

I’m attempting to establish general purpose laws of behavior. I’ll end with a quote from Scott Alexander’s reply post.

A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon.

Vernon Smith on Behavioral in 2008

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Like last week, this post is adjacent to the internet chattering over whether behavioral economics is “dead”.

Vernon Smith wrote a book Rationality in Economics that came out in 2008. I’m going to pull some quotes from that book that I think are relevant. This is not an attempt to summarize the main point of the book.

I began developing and applying experimental economics methods to the study of behavior and market performance in the 1950s and 1960s…

Preface, pg xiii

Repetitive or real-time action in incomplete information environments is an operating skill different from modeling based on the “given” information postulated to drive the economic environment that one seeks to understand in the sense of equilibrium, optimality, and welfare. This decision skill is based on a deep human capacity to acquire tacit knowledge that defies all but fragmentary articulation in natural or written language.

Preface, pg xv

I think that improved understanding of various forms of ecological rationality will be born of a far better appreciation that most of human knowledge of “how,” as opposed to knowledge of “that,” depends heavily on autonomic functions of the brain. Human sociality leads to much unconscious learning in which the rules and norms of our socioeconomic skills are learned with little specific instructions… Humans are not “thinking machines” in the sense that we always rely on self-aware cognitive processes…

Introduction, pg 5, emphasis his

Research in economic psychology[footnote 6] has prominently reported examples where “fairness” and other considerations are said to contradict the rationality assumptions… Footnote 6: I will use the term “economic psychology” generally to refer to cognitive psychology as it has been applied to economics questions, and to a third subfield of experimental methods in economics and recently product-differentiated as “behavioral economics”… Behavioral economists have made a cottage industry of showing that SSSM assumptions seem to apply almost nowhere… their research program has been a candidly deliberate search “Identifying the ways in which behavior differs from the standard model…”

Introduction, pg 22, italics mine

Vernon Smith doesn’t always like the direction of the behavioral economics literature as a whole, however he agrees in the book that humans don’t always behave rationally. Chapter 6 has the very un-fuzzy title FCC Spectrum Auctions and Combinatorial Designs. Here’s an example of the way Vernon uses the word behavioral, which I offer like I did last week as an example of how “behavioral” is never going away.

I will provide a brief review of the theoretical issues and some… experimental findings that bear most directly on the conceptual and behavioral foundation of the FCC design problem.

Chapter 6, pg 116

Unfortunately, the popular press… has often interpreted the contributions of Kahneman as proving that people are “irrational,” in the popular sense of stupid… In the Nobel interview, Kahneman seems clearly to be uncomfortable with this popular interpretation and is trying to correct it.

Chapter 7, pg 150

Chapter 7 is about loss aversion and fairness and any other “behavioral” phenomenon of interest. I recommend anyone who is following the current conversation to read all of Chapter 7 for yourself. Vernon sees the best in all whenever possible, despite being annoyed that certain academics have used a tool he developed to make points that he believes are wrong. He forges a way forward for everyone in this book.

Experiments help us understand how human beings who are prone to error can arrive at good outcomes when they are working within good/effective institutions.

Behavioral Economics Conversation: Cutler and Glaeser

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I haven’t written a formal response, yet, to the “behavioral economics is dead” claim going around Twitter. I’m too busy doing my referee reports on behavioral papers to write in depth about why behavioral is not dead. Incidentally, I’m not loving the most recent paper I was sent, so maybe that’s a point in the column of Team Death. I’ll write a few posts intersecting with the arguments being had.

First, I’ll point out two places in a CWT discussion of health and cities where the phrase “behavioral” was used. This is obviously a current conversation. David Cutler probably wouldn’t say that behavioral economics is his field, but here’s how he describes puzzles in decision making over health issues. (bold emphasis mine)

Everything that we know in healthcare is that people have difficulty choosing on the basis of price and quality. It goes back a little bit to some of the behavioral issues that we were talking about, but I think it’s slightly different. If you go to the doctor, and the doctor says you should take medication X, and you go to the pharmacy, and the pharmacy says that’ll be $30, a fair number of people will walk away and say, “I don’t have $30.”

What we would hope they would do is go to their doctor and say, “Doctor, is there any way that there could be a cheaper medicine that might work because $30 is hard for me this month?” In practice, people are extremely uncomfortable doing that. They really don’t like to go to their doctor and say, “Doctor, how do I trade off the money here versus the medicine?”

David Cutler

The previous issues Cutler mentioned had to do with time preference and delayed gratification. The turmoil over dieting alone is evidence that people don’t always make the best decisions.

Here’s the second of two appearances of the word “behavioral”, in response to Tyler’s question about how to make cities healthier.

I certainly join the crowd of economists who have argued that congestion pricing is the best way to deal with urban traffic jams. There’s no reason not to charge people for the social cost of their actions on that. And giving away street space for free is just crazy, especially since we now have technologies that can handle this.

And if we introduce autonomous vehicles without congestion pricing, you have just lowered the cost of sitting in traffic, which means the first-order behavioral response is that more people will sit in traffic, and our congestion will get even worse unless we introduce this from the beginning. So I think pricing is really good.

Ed Glaeser

In the second use of the word, it sounds like an individually-rational decision to sit in your autonomous vehicle and read blogs until your arrive at your destination. Maybe we can use mechanism design to reduce traffic congestion and improve life for all.

Whether or not you think behavioral economics is dead, economists are going to keep using the word “behavioral” for a long time.

I did a quick Ngram to get a sense of how common the word is, although this does not restrict the search to books about economics. Ngrams are easier to interpret if there is a comparison word. I choose the word “clustering” because it’s also a relatively new technical term. Both words were quite rare before 1930.

If you missed the small discussion about behavioral econ, Mike Munger did a link round-up here. Tomorrow’s post will be Vernon Smith’s view of behavioral economics.

20 Years To The Day

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It’s a blog. I’ll write about 9/11, since it’s 20 years today. 9/11 was an attack on my family and I will always be sad on this day remembering the horror. 9/11 was more than the number of murders we can count.

The Twin Towers episode was more than an attack on American citizens. New York City is the place people from all over the country and all over the world dream of reaching. It is the great melting pot. It is the symbol of American ideals, even as it is paradoxically at odds sometimes with the conservative heartland. Anything is possible for anyone, in New York.

I was not a New Yorker as a kid. I grew up nearby, but my parents avoided the city. I think the fact that you had to pay for parking and fight traffic was their primary reason. We were transcendentalists, preferring to park for free by some hiking trail on weekends. Anyway, I want to be a New Yorker now, if they’ll have me. I will always share that dream of moving to New York and experiencing the version of freedom that was uniquely created there.

I follow a lot of smart people who want to fix all problems. By all means, fix problems. This day just hurts. No one is expected, for example, to cure cancer on the day their deceased husband’s birthday comes around. This day can be for remembering what was lost and listening to a favorite song and talking to a favorite person. I try to convert the survivor’s guilt into gratitude.

9/11 will haunt me all my life.  I know this is becoming a topic for history textbooks. People will interpret this event as coldly as I do when I read about massacres in history books. My professor peers are getting the first wave of kids born after 9/11. “I can’t believe these kids were born after 9/11. Is that… Do I have a gray hair?” It is in fact true that everyone born after 9/11 was born after 9/11. Maybe we should be happy that it’s been so long. I don’t wish this memory on my children.

The kids-these-days lost their innocence to Covid (and watching adults fight about it). I can only imagine how the 9th graders felt who were sent home from school to watch from the windows while a parent-killing plague swept through their community. They will want to share their lockdown stories in the way that I want to share my “where were you on…” story.

I lived close enough to New York to feel the outer ripple of grieving families. A schoolmate’s uncle died. I had a flamboyant Sunday School teacher who told us that God told him to stay home that morning and make muffins, else he would have been in lower Manhattan at his job in the fashion industry.

Tomorrow, I will begin a series of post about “behavioral economics” and the rumor that it died.

Here’s a song I have been listening to this week. https://youtu.be/zyVZ4uVHYRw

Government Elimination of Perceived Vices

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My post yesterday was about video games, prompted by the CCP legal restriction on video games for children. To enforce this rule, the government is making a list. Any adult playing these online video games will have to register with their real name. Is this a regulation of an addictive substance for minors, like we have for cigarettes, or is it progress toward managing the leisure time of males?

Before the Communists came to power (and before video games existed), previous Chinese government administrations had tried to ban another addictive form of recreation: smoking opium. The British famously did not help with this endeavor, but the British imports of opium ended years before the CCP crackdown. Where others had failed, the CCP practically eliminated opium from China in about 3 years. For my information, I’m drawing partly from a honors thesis on this topic.

The CCP started the relentless march toward eliminating opium in a clever way. They gathered information before announcing how ambitious the program would be. It started with making a list.

There had been previous attempts to send soldiers to destroy poppy fields (hello, 21st century?) but never in a coordinated enough way to stamp out supply. Police had raided opium dens in the cities, but nothing ever worked. Addicts were going to buy the stuff as long as it was being produced, and producers were going to grow the stuff as long as it was profitable. The CCP pulled off a coordinated attack on both producers and consumers in the entire country at the same time.

After a period of record-keeping, the CCP started forcefully addressing opium both in the rural areas where it was both produced and in the cities. There were different strategies for all the unique regions of China.

Those who did not cooperate knew that prison or immediate execution could result. The CCP, along with civilian volunteers, provided rehabilitation for some addicts who were willing to register themselves as offenders. It was acknowledged that kicking an opium addiction is hard. When possible, the government manipulated taxes and subsidies in such as way that farmers would choose to switch away from cultivating opium. The use of force was a reason for the success of the campaign, but people who were willing to cooperate often could find a way to transition away from their old habits.

The Communists did not just write laws and send soldiers. They held rallies that sound to me a lot like religious revival meetings. They galvanized millions of people to not just distain addictive drugs but to become volunteers for the cause. I would assume that many Chinese parents didn’t like opium in 1949 but were not yet so fervent as to become police informants. That changed in 1950. Everyone wants to have a moral cause. For some people today, it’s global warming. For millions in 1950’s China, it was eliminating opium distribution and addiction.

In one of my posts on Afghanistan I speculated that it is self-defeating for Americans to purchase illicit opium as consumers and also task our military with stamping out its production by force. This week when I read about the opium campaign, I found that a related message was used in 1950. The CCP presented opium abstinence as a way to defeat America in the Korean War.

I will be curious to watch developments concerning screen time and China. There is much to be determined. As Vice reported this week, ‘It’s unclear how the government will define “sissy pants”…’

Video Games: Emily Oster, Are the kids alright?

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On Monday, China announced that kids under 18 will be limited to only 3 hours per week of online gaming. Those hours are scheduled for the evenings of Fri-Sun with a 9pm cut off. Go to bed, young man!

Last month I reviewed Emily Oster’s new book The Family Firm. In light of China’s ruling over how kids spend their free time, I’ll explain her view of video games.

Interestingly, she does not have a chapter called ‘Video Games: Do we need the CCP to intervene?’ She has one chapter near the end called Entertainment that includes video games and screen time. She writes at the beginning of the chapter that, “Screen time strikes fear in the heart of many a parent.” Most parents, at least among her audience, have their own smart phone and at least one TV in the house. It is such a relief, honestly, to get the kids to sit down and stop making trouble in the 3-D world. In What Women Want I wrote about a wealthy celebrity mom who has a nanny and a cook. She spends quality time with her kids, when she wants to. Most of us can’t afford a weekend nanny, but we might leave our kids with technology when we need a break. (I believe, with no data to back this up, that childhood mortality is down partly due to screens keeping kids off of cliff ledges and out of abandoned mines.)  Then, at the end of the day, we worry that they have spent too much time on screens.

Oster writes, “Screens change your brain, say the headlines. (Spoiler alert: Everything changes your brain.)” Parents like me have come to love Emily Oster’s ability to cut through the noise. Everything changes your brain. Video games are not a completely separate new form of human experience.

Helping a child’s brain develop is a big responsibility. We know that you can mess this up, most obviously in the cases of serious abuse. So, can you put on Sesame Street while you make dinner? Should you allow your son to play video games?  I’ll put the rest under Read More.

Continue reading →

One Year of EWED Blogging

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We would like to thank the readers and subscribers who have joined us since we started blogging in August of 2020. This has been a great experience. Special thanks to people who have linked to us. Most of our web traffic comes from the United States, but I am pleased to report that we receive visitors from almost every nation in the world.

We believe that the world is better when people keep learning. Reading and writing blogs is a good way to learn. All of the EWED writers have benefitted from reading other blogs. We want to put new facts and analysis into the pool.

Our three most-viewed posts so far for the year 2021 are

  1. Academic Publishing: How I think we got here by Mike Makowsky
  2. Coase and COVID by Jeremy Horpedahl
  3. GDP Growth in 2020 by Jeremy Horpedahl

Looking back to 2020, the most-viewed post was my Complacency and American Girl Dolls.

In winter of 2021 we got some new graphics, like the one below. The importance of the shipping container cannot be understated, for economic growth and trade. Every blog post individually is like one box, not very important on its own, a piece of the essential human discourse.

I see blogging as a complement to both research articles and Twitter. Blogs get published much faster than journal articles and they allow more depth than tweets. By writing a new post every day we stay accountable both to ourselves and to our readers.

The various EWED writers represent a range of opinions, but we all agree that blogging is a way to make “small steps toward a much better world”.

Go urban, young man

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The U.S. Census Bureau is gradually releasing data gathered in the 2020 decennial. Their release of a map showing which US counties have lost population caused a small Twitter furor.

Visually speaking, it’s a lot of brown. People are leaving rural counties in favor of urban areas with jobs and amenities.

The main facts from Home for a Millennial were: 1) although millennials were slower to buy homes, they are trying to buy them now and bidding up housing prices in desirable metros 2) millennials were more likely to live with parents than previous generations, so that’s part of the answer to where they were prior to the home buying scramble 3) the previously-not-house-buying phenomenon is not associated with chronic unemployment

Buying a home in the desirable areas is going to be expensive, unless there has been a lot of building. Texas, the leader in building, added more than 1.5 million housing units in the last decade. The map above illuminates what “moving to Texas” means. At the county level, some people are leaving Texas. However, the booming cities of Texas are really booming.

Being the largest generation, millennials are going to be a factor in the general move from rural to urban areas. I have about two peer friends who, after graduate school, moved to a rural place. They are garden influencers, using hashtags like #AllTheNature. The novelty of growing their own vegetables has earned them a minor celebrity status among my internet circles. How trad of them. The exception proves the rule. Most millennials don’t want to farm or even dabble in raising goats. If I grew up in farm country, my social media experience would be very different, so I don’t want to conclude too much from my bubble. The Census data confirms it. Many young Americans are gathering into the cities and leaving the rural areas.

I have a (white) Boomer relative who has 4 siblings. He was born in Iowa. I remember him telling me that his large family would drive 2 hours to visit another large family, for fun. He said the only thing to do for entertainment was visit each other’s kids. Those 5 siblings “escaped” cold Iowa in favor of the more desirable metro areas, and they did not go on to have large families of their own.

The move to cities and the shortage of housing therein connects with the delay on forming families (relative to past generations). Expensive housing could be delaying desired children, or millennials who don’t want children could be moving to places that are more fun than the farm.

Aside from rural America losing population, the other big result from the Census was the increase in racial diversity, which is also driven by young people.

The Two or More Races population (also referred to as the Multiracial population) has changed considerably since 2010. The Multiracial population was measured at 9 million people in 2010 and is now 33.8 million people in 2020, a 276% increase.

Has anyone offered a simple narrative that relates the increasing racial diversity with the urban land grab?