Author: Joy Buchanan

Pins to Patterns at AdamSmithWorks

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I’m at AdamSmithWorks this week with “FROM PINS TO PATTERNS: FOLLOWING THE THREADS OF PRODUCTIVITY”

In the tapestry of human progress studies, two authors, Adam Smith and Virginia Postrel, have left their mark on the story of productivity and innovation. Their books, written centuries apart, both explore the power of specialization and the division of labor.

Part of the reason this came out this week is that I’m reading The Fabric of Civilization. So good! It had come highly recommended before, but I finally have an excuse to read it because I’m working on an article about fashion.

The Value of Student Organizations and On-Campus Education: Anecdotal Evidence from Tim Keller

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Tim Keller, who was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, died last week. Starting and growing a church in Manhattan takes talent. I am reading Tim Keller’s biography by Collin Hansen through the lens of Tyler’s Talent book.

How did a successful leader and famous speaker get started? Keller is not described in the book as an outgoing child. Although academically gifted, “He grew up socially awkward, a wallflower…”

In 1968, Keller started at Bucknell University. Keller, who would go on to write multiple best-selling books, may have refined some of his writing skills through his coursework. From my reading, the most important aspect of his college experience was not the classes but the chance to be a leader of a campus (religious) club and having so many peers close by to practice “working” with. “Some 2,800 students lived within short walking distance of each other…[on campus].”

He planned retreats and invited famous guest speakers who appealed to his audience. He got feedback on the effectiveness of different messages and programs. Due to Keller’s efforts, the college club chapter meetings more than doubled in size. You can see the beginnings of the man who would go on to manage a large organization and attract over 5,000 people to hear him on the Sunday after 9/11.

In the debate over the value of a college education, the value of the experience students gain from holding officer positions in campus clubs is underrated. The information or credentials that can be obtained through online classes doesn’t build this kind of social capital. For leaders of organizations, college clubs are how some of them gained momentum and developed confidence.

Students can learn in a low stakes environment. For example, an ambitious club president can get 20 students to show up for pizza instead of 8. Club leaders get to make the key decisions and solve the problems that determine the success of their organization, because the faculty are too busy to micromanage club meetings. This gives students accurate feedback on the success of their own ideas.

In-person campus-based education is more than acquiring knowledge from textbooks. It is a dynamic environment in which students can develop social skills and form their network for future professional support. By participating in these organizations, students learn collaboration, decision-making, problem-solving, and mentoring — skills that are transferable across various domains of life.  

Is Your Head in the Arm Hole of Your Dress?

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There is something morally instructive about watching a preschooler melt down. It was the morning of my __th birthday yesterday. Kids still had to be dressed and fed and shipped to school on time.

My daughter, who is almost 5, was screaming on the stairs instead of coming to breakfast. Upon inspection, I realized that her head was through the arm hole of the sleeveless dress she had chosen to wear to school. I offered to help her. She screamed louder and lurched away from me. Her pride was more hurt than her neck at the thought of accepting help. She was not yet really wearing the Anna (the character from Frozen) dress because of the snafu of the sleeves. She stomped around screaming for minutes, refusing all offers of help or comfort from me.

Adults do this kind of thing all the time, although it looks different. People do the stupidest things and then dig in instead of accepting help and reversing course.

My daughter is exceptionally brilliant and kind. She is loved by everyone she meets. Even she has these moments, because we all do. That is some behavioral economics for you.

Video of Joy Buchanan on Tech Jobs and Who Will Program

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Here are some show notes for a keynote lecture to a general audience in Indiana. This was recorded in April 2023.

Minute Topic
2:00“SMET” vs STEM Education – Does Messaging Matter?  
(Previous blog post on SMET)
5:00Is Computer Programming a “Dirty Job”? Air conditioning, compensating differentials, and the nap pods of Silicon Valley  
(post on the 1958 BLS report)
7:50Wages and employment outlook for computer occupations
10:00Presenting my experimental research paper “Willingness to be Paid: Who Trains for Tech Jobs?” in 23 minutes  

Motivation and Background 10:00 – 15:30
Experimental Design         15:30 – 22:00
Results                    22:00 – 30:00
Discussion                 30:00 – 33:30
33:50Drawbacks to tech jobs  

See also my policy paper published by the CGO on tech jobs and employee satisfaction
35:30The 2022 wave of layoffs in Big Tech and vibing TikTok Product Managers  

I borrowed a graph on Tech-cession from Joey Politano and a blog point from Matt Yglesias, and of course reference the BLS.
39:00Should You Learn to Code? (and the new implications of ChatGPT)  

Ethan Mollick brought this Nature article to my attention. 
Tweet credits to @karpathy and @emollick
48:00Q&A with audience

Video: Joy Presents Two Experimental Papers to a Macro Class

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Here are some show notes to a talk I gave in April 2023. I had the opportunity to talk to an undergraduate macroeconomics class at Indiana University East.

Minute Topic
2:00Research on Behavioral economics and Macroeconomics
4:25Labor Market Equilibrium Concepts and Incomplete Labor Contracts
6:50The Gift Exchange Game and the Fair Wage-Effort Theory
13:00Recessions and Downward Wage Rigidity
19:00Presenting my Experimental Study “If Wages Fell During a Recession” in 13 minutes
32:00-33:00How question raised in “If Wages Fell During a Recession” pointed the way to the Reference Point paper
33:00 – 41:00Presenting my Experimental Study “My Reference Point, Not Yours” in 8 minutes
41:00-44:00Conclusion of “My Reference Point, Not Yours” and tying it back to macroeconomics

The “If Wages Fell…” paper directly inspired the “My Reference…” experiment. But I don’t cite “If Wages Fell…” in “My Reference…,” so you would never know how closely they are connected unless you listen to this talk.

PTO can buy school supplies in bulk

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My kids go to public school, and I love our Parent Teacher Organization (PTO). I’m going to keep this focused on one wonderful bit of collective action.

Students need to show up on the first day of school in August with certain school supplies. For example, first graders must have a 24-count crayon box. The school posts a list of supplies that parents must pay for. One option is to go to the store yourself to get all these items.

Or the PTO will do it for you if you pay a fee online. So, you don’t go shopping at all, and your kid just walks into school and the supplies are on their desk.

The savings from going through the PTO, in both time and money, are massive. The savings in the time of parents are more important than the bulk discount factor. (If you’d like to consider what that monetary bulk discount is, see this form from a similar program in Pennsylvania https://www.ht-sd.org/uploaded/District/Schools/Central/2013-2014_SY/PTO_-_School_Supplies_5th_Grade_2014.pdf)

One reason for sharing this is just to spread this particular idea, although many PTOs around the country already do it. It requires some volunteers to coordinate activity.

In my experience, collecting money and handling new office supplies is something American volunteers will do. There are certain jobs that seemingly always have to be paid positions in any organization, because no one wants to do it no matter how warm the fuzzies are.

Another reason for mentioning it is as just one of thousands of examples of how my life is improved by the networks of volunteers and local leaders that I live near. These kinds of benefits do not automatically follow from people living in proximity to each other, but they are one of the potential benefits of clustering together geographically.

The UN estimates this milestone event – when the number of people in urban areas overtook the number in rural settings – occurred in 2007.

https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization#number-of-people-living-in-urban-areas

Tenure Reflections from Joy

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Samford has voted to keep me around with promotion to Associate Professor. I am also pleased to have won a faculty Research award this year. You can see a list of my papers here. Tenure gives one an ability to plan for the future and be less focused on short-term publication success. I’m excited to keep at it with empirical research.

Five thoughts:

  1. It is a privilege to live when and where I do. Since we started this blog in August of 2020, several major events have changed the world. Through it all, I sometimes try to stay informed and offer thoughts here, and sometimes I block it out to focus on my research papers. I think about the young women in Kabul or Mariupol who started projects of their own in August of 2020. They don’t get to block it out.

https://www.wired.com/story/mariupol-ukraine-war/

2. James wrote a great inspiring tenure reflection post last year and pointed me to this quote: “I consider the “wasting of tenure” to be one of the aesthetic crimes one can commit with a wealthy life, and yet I see it all the time” –Tyler Cowen No aesthetic criminals here at EWED.

Continue reading →

Fashion is not just for teen girls

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It’s teen girls who care about what they wear, and rough military men do not even think about it. Right? Wrong.

Up Front is a book depicting WWII soldiers by cartoonist Bill Mauldin. Around page 135, Mauldin describes how men dressed who were close to the front lines but not actually in combat. Mauldin coined the term garritrooper (a portmanteau of garrison and paratrooper). I thank Prof. Mike Munger for the pointer.

The garritroopers are able to look like combat men or like the rear soldiers, depending on the current fashion trend. When the infantry was unpublicized and the Air Forces were receiving much attention, the emphasis was on beauty… [The garritroopers] would not wear ordinary GI trousers and shoes, but went in for sun glasses, civilian oxfords, and officers’ forest-green clothing. This burned up many decidedly unglamorous airplane mechanics who worked for a living and didn’t look at all like the Air Force men the garritrooper saw in the magazines.

We are all trying to look like the celebrities in magazines, even if we don’t all agree on who is a celebrity and which magazine to read.

Look at that smirk, found on the Wikipedia page. Bill Mauldin is temporarily my new favorite writer.

Comparing ChatGPT and Bing for a research literature review in April 2023

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We wrote “ChatGPT Cites Economics Papers That Do Not Exist”

I expect that problem to go away any day, so I gave it another try this week. For the record, they are currently calling it “ChatGPT Mar 23 Version” on the OpenAI website.

First, I asked ChatGPT for help with the following prompt:

ChatGPT is at it again. There is no such paper, as I will verify by showing John Duffy’s publications from that year: 

ChatGPT makes up lies (“hallucinations”). It is also great for some tasks, and smart people are already using it to become more productive. My post last week was on how impressive ChatGPT seemed in the Jonathan Swift impersonation. I didn’t take any time to do fact checking and I would bet money that at least something was made-up-facts in there.

I posed the same question to the Bing plug-in for the Edge browser (Microsoft). Yup, I have opened Edge for the first time in forever to use Bing.

Bing handles the prompt by linking to a useful relevant paper – so if you click the link you will get to a helpful and not misleading answer. Just being a smart search engine instead of hallucinating randomly is better, for my purposes.

The actual paper I wanted returned was this one, by the way:

Duffy, John. “Experimental macroeconomics.” Behavioural and Experimental Economics (2010): 113-119.

There is no reason that ChatGPT should be better than an expert in a subfield of a field of economics. But that’s the genius of a good search engine. You ask it “Can I repair a broken fiddlewhat?” The search engine does not claim to know but rather directs you to the blog of the world expert in fiddlewhats.

I can’t find the link to it, but I’m going to toss in one more thing here. Tyler Cowen did an interview this Spring on AI. There was a newspaper reporter who had a “creepy” interaction with an AI that made for the topic of a viral internet article. Tyler made a very contrarian point by saying that he interprets this as a case of AI alignment. The reporter wanted something sensational and he got what he wanted.

So, it will probably be true for a long time that if you want to find a failure of AI, you can get what you want. Still, I’m putting this on the record here because I wonder if this particular problem will get solved quickly.

GPT showing off on Conversations with Tyler

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Since posting it in January of 2023, our post on a failure of ChatGPT has been one of the most popular articles of the year in terms of web traffic. Read ChatGPT Cites Economics Papers That Do Not Exist

LLMs will make up nonsense lies, but it might sound sophisticated and serious. As human editors, we are not used to detecting that kind of problem, because usually if something sounds serious that means it has been written by a serious thoughtful person (usually).

That’s a problem, but ChatGPT is really good at some tasks.

Instead of pointing out the fact that ChatGPT is not perfect, Tyler Cowen wants people to see the potential. He has done an entire podcast interview with ChatGPT, asking it to take on the voice and role of deceased writer Jonathan Swift.

I’ll share part of the transcript:

COWEN: In 1709, you, Jonathan Swift, still were calling yourself a Whig. What exactly induced you to switch to the Tory side of the ledger?

SWIFT: My shift from the Whigs to the Tories was a gradual and complex process, influenced by several factors, including personal connections, political developments, and ideological disagreements.

During my early years in politics, I was indeed more aligned with the Whigs, who championed principles such as constitutional government, religious toleration, and the supremacy of Parliament over the monarchy. However, over time, I became increasingly disillusioned with the Whigs, particularly as their internal factions and power struggles intensified.

The Whigs’ support for the war with France, which began in 1702, was a point of contention for me. I believed that the war was costly…

The replies seem nuanced and insightful. Nothing made me suspect that they were factually inaccurate, although I do not know enough about Irish history to judge.

Is there any human who could have produced this script? I think so, although it would have required a lot of work. If one of these replies is better than anything a human Swift scholar would produce, how would we know?

GPT4 can write good summaries for the work of a prolific author like Swift, because the model can train on lots of examples.

GPT4 could probably write a good biography of a modern figure by pulling together all of the writing by them and about them. Maybe GPT4 could efficiently scrape up all mentions of this figure online and synthesize them faster than a human scholar. However, we observed GPT3 completely making up citations when we tried to get it to do economics summaries.

I’m concerned that humans will use GPT4 to write but not do the requisite fact-checking. That could introduce a new corpus of work that the next LLMs will train on, which might be full of lies. Humans might not admit to using GPT, and therefore we wouldn’t have a mechanism for using extra scrutiny on AI-generated writing from 2023. Humans can make mistakes too… so the ultimate solution could be an all-powerful AI that somehow does begin with a fairly accurate map of the world and goes around fact-checking everything faster than human editors ever could.