Author: Joy Buchanan

Joy on Books 2021

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The non-fiction book for adults I recommend this year is Liberty Power by historian Corey Brooks. If you have ever cared about social justice or affecting change, then wouldn’t you be curious to know how the abolitionists really did it around 1850? How, practically speaking, did a handful of people with moral convictions rid the United States of legal slavery? Abolitionists were striving and scheming to use the newly minted American democratic political system to their advantage even though they were in the minority. One of their big decisions was to start a third political party after they grew frustrated with slavery-complicit Northern Whig politicians. I blogged here about the connection with current politics.

I had a huge gap in my knowledge of American history before reading this book. Nothing that happened between George Washington and the Civil War seemed interesting, until this book created a narrative that I cared enough about to follow. History books might not be the perfect gift for everyone, but I bet no one in your family already has it!

Another book I reviewed earlier is Emily Oster’s The Family Firm, which any parent of young children would probably find helpful if they like research.

When I’m not reading for work, I read to my kids. I strongly recommend, for kids aged 6-12, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This ties into Liberty Power, because the main characters abolish the slave trade on one of the islands they sail to!

Before reading Dawn Treader, you should certainly start with the book that sets up the world, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe. I have a tip for younger kids: start reading this book right at the point where Lucy walks into the wardrobe for the first time. Younger kids won’t miss the first few pages that explain how the 4 children came to be in the old house.

For 4yo and 5yo kids, I recommend Aesop’s fables. These are short and self-contained. There are many versions of fable books for kids with good illustrations.

In addition of my specific plug for the Narnia series, I encourage parents to read fantasy with children. I see a lot of children’s books that promote science or STEM-readiness. My son enjoys learning about dinosaurs and nature, however I am certain that he’s learned the most from the conversations we have had about adventure stories.

Reading to your kids is costly in terms of time. We have limited time, so let me make an argument for dropping some of the other competing activities. I speak as someone who professionally teaches hundreds of college students to program. Those games that try to trick 5-year-olds into “programming” are less valuable than reading and discussing fantasy stories.

Inspire them with the story of a ship sailing to unknown islands. Talk about how a lovable band of flawed characters can escape from a clever magician. What your child will need to be able to do when they are 20 is read and comprehend a textbook that explains a totally new technology that no one alive today understands. Then they will need to think of creative ways to apply that technology to real world problems.

Joy Recommends Running Products

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Late October is a nice time to get outside in Alabama. I have answered the primal call to suburban moms and signed up for a 5K running race at the end of the month. To make running practice safe and fun, I dropped a few hundred dollars this month on products.

Now that I’m old, my first concern is not injuring myself. Having good new shoes that absorbs some of the impact from running is important. I went to a local running store and ended up getting Asics Gel Nimbus.

I really like them. Amazon link. It seems like the price ($150) in the boutique store and the Asics website and Amazon is all the same.

Assuming you are not considering getting these shoes for yourself, do not buy a woman running shoes for Christmas, obviously, unless you’ve discussed it with her. You could buy a family member the other big purchase I made for running: AirPods.

Many people already have AirPods but I’ll review them anyway. I bet there are at least 10 people out there just like me who view them as newfangled and unnecessary.

My primary reason for getting them was so that I can listen to music while I run and not have the annoying headphones cord in my face. They are great for running. By the way, I got the cheapest version since I only use them occasionally.

AirPods are more than wireless headphones.  They are smart. They allow you to take hands free phone calls when your phone is two rooms away (which can be a reason to keep them in even when you are not listening to music). They respond to voice commands and prompt you on what to say. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I was surprised by how easy it was to start using them.

I use a free application called RunKeeper. Without any fiddling from me, the AirPods give me useful feedback on my run from RunKeeper. I don’t have to stop the music or pull out my phone to get this feedback. It just knows, and the AI is correct about what I want to hear when.

While I was at the Apple store getting AirPods, I considered getting an Apple Watch. It turns out that the Apple Watch does not have a long range from the phone. So, I cannot run a mile away from my phone and still get all services on the Watch. Since I’m not a serious runner, I did not want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new watch plus pay for a separate cellular plan for the device. I run while holding my small-ish iPhone.

Apple Watch records your heart beat. I can be a privacy grump, even though I use a lot of tech. Apple Corp. can C it’s way right out of my vital signs. I don’t even want data on my heart rate and sleep patterns, for myself. I’m already mentally overloaded, so I don’t want more data to think about.

Here’s a song I like to put at the beginning of my running song playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxmkYugYu7Q

Lastly, for your holiday shopping list, I will make one plug for the shirts in our Blog Store. These make a fun gift for math majors or Econ Ph.D. folk.

Gen Z on TikTok

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I did an informal survey among undergraduate students. This is not a representative sample of American youth. Before answering the question “How is TikTok affecting your peers?” they had just heard about the TikTok recommendation algorithm. Answers might have been slightly different if they had not been primed to think about the app from a business perspective.

Most of the answers were negative, both among students who use TikTok themselves and especially from students who are staying off of the app. Some answers presented both a positive and a negative reply.

Here is one of the more positive replies:

“TikTok is affecting my peers in a few different ways. On the positive side, people can learn very useful things on the app. On the negative side, it can be very time consuming. I have heard from many friends how they have wasted a lot of their time on TikTok when they could have been doing something more productive.”

Some students emphasized the social aspect:

“TikTok is one of the biggest social platforms amongst my friends and I. When we hangout, we are creating our own TikToks, but when we are apart we are able to share videos with each other. TikTok for me is a big rabbit hole that I find myself spending way too much time on.”

Also, they believe that this platform, more so than the original social networks, allow a new user to break out. “The idea that a normal, average person can post on TikTok and have a likelihood of it becoming viral is what has launched the platform.” I can see how a 20-year-old today would think Twitter is less fun because it is hard for a newcomer to get noticed.

Some students mentioned the addictive aspect of TikTok:

“I see a lot of my peers stay on the app for long periods of time. I can’t count the amount of times people say something about how they didn’t realize they were scrolling for an hour before they looked at the clock.”

“I have three friends back home who are being affected by Tik Tok in the worse way possible. All they do is watch Tik Toks all day and has even affected their sleep schedule cause they can’t put their phone down. It’s hard to see my friends sucked in the rabbit hole.”

“Personally, I have had to set screen time limits for TikTok through my phone’s settings because I can easily spend extended periods of time of the app without even realizing it; and even then, sometimes, I even override the limits I have set in place because I want to see even more content.”

The funniest line award goes to: “I personally hate TikTok and think it is rat poison.”

I wonder how the responses might have differed if I had asked a similar question to college students about TV and video games 20 years ago.

I use Twitter frequently. Maybe I spend more time on it than I should, and I don’t support as many paid media outlets as I might otherwise. Thus, the non-Twitter world is less rich for today’s college students.

For balance, here’s how Big Tech helped me in the past week. I needed to help my son build a model rocket from a kit. Some stranger kind young man had made an excellent YouTube video detailing how to make this rocket. This video really helped me, and the man should get the satisfaction of one more watch on his views count.

Reading Slavery and American Economic Development

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Slavery is a bad and we should rid ourselves of it. One of the arguments made by abolitionists before the Civil War in the United States is that slaves make poor workers and therefore it’s not that costly to get rid of slavery. Of course, it doesn’t matter if slaves worked hard or not. Slavery was a moral abomination, regardless. However, it does make it easier to argue that we should direct government resources to fight enslavers when we can make a case that slavery makes the entire country poorer.

On the one hand, there were many non-slave workers and farmers in North America, demonstrating that products including cotton could be produced by free labor. On the other hand, slavery as an institution expanded into the South and the West, presumably because of the economic advantage it gave to slave-owners.

In Slavery and American Economic Development, economist Gavin Wright states that whether or not slaves were as productive as free/wage labor is hard to measure and also is not hugely important. Slavery might have provided wealth to slave owners in the South, but that is only because of the institutional setting that was created explicitly to maintain the slave society.

The American South had some of the best land in the world for growing cotton and cotton became a lucrative export crop thanks to British demand before the Civil War. Before the Civil War, there were some extremely profitable plantations on which slaves worked. It is true that some enslavers became rich and that drives up what appears to be the GDP per capita in the South at the time.

Wright explains that a slave owner living closer to the East Coast was better able to go on an entrepreneurial venture into Alabama to clear a large plantation for cotton farming than a typical free family farmer. The slave owner could obtain large loans and had a future guarantee of workers (thanks to the local laws and police state). So, something like a modern corporation employing free labor could also have accomplished the venture. But, at the time, it was an opportunity that was easier for enslavers to take advantage of. Free farmers also expanded West into the United States, but they tended to move more slowly and focus on subsistence (e.g. wheat for consumption). That is, partly, what Wright means when he speaks of slavery as a “system of property” as opposed to just a “system of production”. That helps explain why slavery was on the rise in the American South.

Wright also examines slavery as a political regime. In a place with many slaves, resources had to be allocated to policing and preventing revolts. It might have been individually rational for a landowner to offer freedom to slaves as a form of compensation for work, but this was disallowed by that broader political environment. So, everyone was somewhat trapped. Most importantly, the slaves were abused and trapped. But the free residents of the South had to live in a stagnant society. Governments did not invest in schooling, even for white children.

Municipalities in the North were booming and attracting free migrants with public investments. These investments set the North on a path to overtake the South economically and demonstrate which system is superior for creating wealth. Wright blames property owners in the South for continuing to fail to vote for good institutions that foster economic growth after the Civil War.

Polarized Americans in 1840

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I’m reading a new book Liberty Power by historian Corey Brooks. It is about how abolition was accomplished through American politics. Something that stood out to me in the introduction is that abolitionists claimed that they had been “cancelled” by proslavery dominant powers in Congress. Americans did not like to see someone getting cancelled, and it created sympathy for abolitionists.

Calling Behavioral Economics a Fad

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Josh Hendrickson and Brian Albrecht have a Substack called Economic Forces that is a source of economics news and examples. We have linked to EF before at EWED.

Albrecht just published an op-ed titled “Behavioral Economics Is Fine. Just Keep It Away from Our Kids”. I’ll to respond to this, just as I responded to that other blog. I think the group of people who are pitting themselves against “behavioral economics” is small. They might even think of themselves as a minority embattled against the mainstream. So, why bother responding? That’s what blogs are good for.

I agree with Albrecht’s main point. The first thing an undergraduate should learn in economics classes is the classic theory of supply and demand. Even in its simplest form, the idea that demand curves slope down and supply curves slope up is powerful and important.*

Albrecht points out that there are some results that have been published in the behavioral economics literature that turned out not to replicate or, in the recent case of Dan Ariely, might be fraudulent. Then he makes a jump from there by calling the behavioral field of inquiry a “fad”. That’s not accurate. (See Scott Alexander on Ariely and related complaints.)

In his op-ed, Albrecht names the asset bubble as a faddish behavioral idea. Vernon Smith (with Suchanek and Williams) published “Bubbles, Crashes and Endogenous Expectations in Experimental Spot Asset Markets” in Econometrica in 1988. Bubbles have been replicated all around the world many times.  There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the “dot com” bubble had an element of speculation that became irrational at a certain point. This is not a niche topic or a very rare occurrence. Bubbles are observed in the lab and out in the naturally occurring economy.

Should we start undergrads on bubbles before explaining the normal function of capital markets? No. Lots of people think that stock markets generally work well, communicate reliable information, and should be allowed to function with minimal regulation.  Behavioral Finance is usually right where it should be in the college curriculum, which is to be offered as an upper-division elective class for finance and economics majors. I am not going to do research on this, but I looked up courses at Cornell, and there it is: Behavioral Economics is one of many advanced elective classes offered for economics students. I don’t know how they teach ECON101 at Cornell, but it would seem like they are binning most of the behavioral content into later optional courses.

In a social media exchange, Albrecht pointed me to one of the posts by Hendrickson on how they handle the situations where it seems like economic forces are not explaining everything. Currently, for example, it seems like the labor market is not clearing right now because firms want to hire but wages are not rising. The quantity supplied seems lower than the quantity demanded at the market wage. Hendrickson claims that this market condition is temporary. He says that firms are cleverly paying bonuses to attract workers so that they won’t have to lower wages in the future when conditions return to normal post-Covid. This would be a perfect time to discuss downward nominal wage rigidity, a pervasive behavioral phenomenon.** It has been studied extensively in lab settings. Nominal wage rigidity has implications for monetary policy. Wage rigidity might be a “temporary” thing, but it helps to explain unemployment. Some of the research done by behavioral economists in this area follow the Akerlof 1982 paper on the gift exchange model. It was published 40 years ago by a Nobel prize winner and cited extensively.*** The seminal lab study of that theory is Fehr et al. 1993. There have been hundreds of replications of the main result that people will trade out of equilibrium due to positive reciprocity.

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Forecasting that Job Growth Would Continue

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The number of new jobs is being heralded (example in picture) as disappointing relative to the expectation that we would march steadily back to pre-Covid employment levels. (Ben Casselman is a good Twitter source for the data.)

One of the reasons for a slow recovery is that the Delta variant of Covid hit hard at the end of the summer and people are not getting vaccinated, so the health threat of going out to work and consume did not decline as much as we had expected. Covid was hard on family caregivers, often women. The disruptions to childcare from Covid still are not over. We are seeing a reversal of the massive influx of women into the formal workforce that started in the previous century.

Some people are saying that workers no longer want “dead end jobs,” and there has been a permanent shift in the labor supply, although it is hard to disentangle that from the effect of temporary Covid subsidies.

I am reminded of two very different sources who claimed, before 2019, that what we had in the early 21st century was not sustainable.

First, there were agitators for a $15/hr minimum wage. They marched in the streets while leading Democrats voiced approval. They were pointing out that families in America who depend on $8/hr jobs do not feel like they have a part of the American Dream.

Someone who, I am certain, would be against a federally mandated $15/hr minimum wage was also pointing this out. Tyler Cowen published Average is Over in 2013, when unemployment was still high following the Great Recession. Chapter 1 of Average is Over is called “Work and Wages”. Tyler was concerned that market forces were creating a world where some people have the best jobs that humanity has ever conceived of, by virtue of their compatibility with intelligent machines, while the rest of the workforce is left with jobs that are not so great. At the time, I don’t think people realized how many jobs could be done from the comfort of home or from a hip coffee shop. Covid exposed that. The “not so great” jobs feel especially crappy when you know that people in your city get paid 6 figures to sit at a laptop.

Tyler might have been surprised when unemployment dropped so low in 2019, right after he had written The Complacent Class, which warns us that America isn’t working well for a large group of people.

We are not great at predicting the future.* Some of Tyler’s predictions have come true already, but even he did not try to put a date on things. The point is that maybe the latest job numbers are not as surprising for the reason that the forecasts were more wrong than we thought. Covid has moved us far out of equilibrium, so it is still hard to tell where we are going to land.

Personally, I thought prices at the grocery store, one of the few places you could go in early 2020, would shoot up faster. It seemed to me like we would need to start paying cashiers more as hazard pay.

*In one of my experiments, I asked subjects in the role of employers to predict what their employees would do. They failed to predict how strongly employees would respond to wage cuts. We are not great at predicting.

The high cost of day care and demographics

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When I moved half-way across the country to take a new job, I had no local support system for my 2-year-old. Putting him in a full-time day care was the plan. I wanted a day care center with a good reputation that is located near work and home. My story, like so many others, includes phone calls and long wait lists. At first, it was hard to understand how I could be willing to pay for a service and it could just not exist.

Opening a large daycare center is risky. Who wants to take that risk? I joked that I’d quit my professor gig and start a daycare in response to the huge demand. Of course, I did not. Fortunately, I don’t live in one of the American counties that lost population over the past ten years.

The WSJ on demographics describes this situation in a shrinking county:

In Lincoln County, Kan., pop. 2,986, about 40 miles west of Salina, Kan., economic development director Kelly Gourley set out to build the county’s first day-care center not run out of someone’s home. A child-care shortage was making it difficult to work and raise children, she saw. The town’s handful of in-home daycares were the only options, and they tended to come and go.

Ms. Gourley estimated it could cost as much as a half-million dollars to build the facility, and she didn’t think it could weather fluctuations in demand. “In a rural community, you lose one kid and you might be in the red all the sudden,” she said. She shelved the plan and instead is working to increase the supply of in-home caretakers.

Allison Johnson, a 32-year-old nursing home speech pathologist, grew up in Lincoln County and hoped one day to have three children. She no longer thinks that is feasible after she had to wait a year to get an in-home daycare spot when her first child was born. Now she and her husband, who owns a residential-construction business, are trying to figure out how they would juggle having a second child.

Her father, a farmer, watches her son, now 2, when her in-home daycare provider isn’t available. But he and her brother are in their busy season, and “they’re not going to be able to do anything but throw him in the tractor.”

There are attractive economies of scale for day-care centers. This economic fact is part of the reason that young people are leaving rural areas, which in turn makes it harder for rural areas to support services for young families.

There has always been a huge amount of value created at home within families that is not fully captured by GDP. As more childcare is moving to the formal market, we are starting to see just how valuable those services are that used to be provided in the family.

Whatever your views on the matter, it’s not surprising that politicians are talking about subsidized day care.

Allowing for flexibility through policy moves like vouchers and de-regulating in-home daycares is important. Some communities can’t support a day-care center facility, like the one in this article. I think the if you build it they will come philosophy, if applied too widely, would be hugely expensive and not efficient. On the other hand, there could be situations in which more day care would be provided if the local government would take on some of the risk currently faced by entrepreneurs.

Markets in Everything for Christmas Decorating

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Last year I blogged about a service to create your kid’s school Valentine’s cards.

Now, the temperature in Alabama has dropped to a chilly 71 degrees and the pumpkins are out. It’s time for parents to start worrying about who is going to create holiday magic at home.

You can pay someone to do this. An enterprising local has already posted this in a neighborhood group.

Creating holiday magic is a wonderful thing. There are huge positive externalities to even a simple string of lights around your front door. I love it. Creating the magic is also a lot of work. As someone who is forever swamped at work and has already booked three weekend work trips for Fall 2021, my willingness to pay for this service is positive. (I can’t afford this particular service, nor do I need my Christmas tree to look like the one in her picture.)

The rich have always had extra hands to manage their estates. I have a feeling that the percent of households for which this might be a paid service is expanding. There are women in the comments asking this crew to come over.

Clemens and Strain on Large and Small Minimum Wage Changes

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In my Labor Economics class, I do a lecture on empirical work and the minimum wage, starting with Card & Kreuger (1993). I’m going to quickly tack on the new working paper by Clemens & Strain “The Heterogeneous Effects of Large and Small Minimum Wage Changes: Evidence over the Short and Medium Run Using a Pre-Analysis Plan”.

The results, as summarized in the second half of their abstract are:

relatively large minimum wage increases reduced employment rates among low-skilled individuals by just over 2.5 percentage points. Our estimates of the effects of relatively small minimum wage increases vary across data sets and specifications but are, on average, both economically and statistically indistinguishable from zero. We estimate that medium-run effects exceed short-run effects and that the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage is substantially more negative for large minimum wage increases than for small increases.

The variation in the data comes from choices by states to raise the minimum wage.

A number of states legislated and began to enact minimum wage changes that varied substantially in their magnitude. … The past decade thus provided a suitable opportunity to study the medium-run effects of both moderate minimum wage changes and historically large minimum wage changes.

We divide states into four groups designed to track several plausibly relevant differences in their minimum wage regimes. The first group consists of states that enacted no minimum wage changes between January 2013 and the later years of our sample. The second group consists of states that enacted minimum wage changes due to prior legislation that calls for indexing the minimum wage for inflation. The third and fourth groups consist of states that have enacted minimum wage changes through relatively recent legislation. We divide the latter set of states into two groups based on the size of their minimum wage changes and based on how early in our sample they passed the underlying legislation.

The “large” increase group includes states that enacted considerable change. New York and California “have legislated pathways to a $15 minimum wage, the full increase to which firms are responding exceed 60 log points in total.” Data comes from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS).

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