Author: Joy Buchanan

How to get rid of toy clutter

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

I asked my friend Carrie what she does about the first-world problem of too many children’s toys in the house (especially right after Christmas). Her reply was genius and even includes some tips from psychology at the end. This method is economist-approved:

For [older elementary kids], they are really good about going through toys in their room with me.  I sell at consignment sales twice a year, so I will pay them a small amount for each toy I take from their room to sell (they do not get money for the family toys in the playroom).  I pay them whether or not the toy actually sells. I do not pay them what the full profit would be from each toy, but they get something for their unplayed-with toys.  This is very motivating for them and helps them truly evaluate whether they want a toy or not.  With [older girl]’s unwanted toys, I might pay her but keep them for [younger girl] if I think that she would enjoy it one day.  

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Talking about redistribution in the lab

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I am grateful to Yang Zhou for inviting me to talk about a working paper (with Gavin Roberts) on Friday. Yang told me that this audience is not familiar with lab experiments, so I’m going to take a few minutes out of my time to set the stage for my research.

There is a new book out, Causal Inference by Scott Cunningham, that is the talk of #EconTwitter (Cunningham, 2021). The book is 500 pages of dense prose and code. Here is a review saying that Cunningham left out many key things that a practitioner would need to know. Causal inference from naturally occurring data is hard!

Lab experiments bring something important to the research community. Lab experiments give the researcher a lot of control, which is why they are particularly useful for causal inference  (Samek, 2019).

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Andrew Weaver is Searching for the Skills Gap

Joy Buchanan5 Comments

Andrew Weaver is doing interesting work on “the skills gap.” One of his key methods is to create new data by interviewing firms. As someone who has looked hard for good data on the skills gap, I can say that we need more work like his.

Weaver’s 2017 paper with Paul Osterman is about data for U.S. manufacturing firms. These findings may or may not generalize perfectly outside of manufacturing, but I think this was a great place to start. There is plenty of talk about the decline of U.S. manufacturing and at least some of the talk was about a lack of skilled Americans to meet the great demand for high-tech doings. For this survey, they only ask about “core workers” who are doing the specialized roles of making widgets.  

Here are two important empirical questions:  a.) do American manufacturing firms want high-skill workers? b.) do they have trouble finding them? The authors answer, “not as much as you might think from policy discussions.”

There are lots of details in the paper that I don’t have time to cover. In table 2, they go over the determinants of a firm facing long-term vacancies. What is common among the (minority of) firms that report having long-term vacancies? Advanced computer proficiency is not associated with difficulty of filling jobs. The implication is that most manufacturing companies around 2017 were able to find workers who had the computer-related skills needed to do the core production tasks. What seemed to be a limiting factor was not computer skills but advanced reading skills. Half of the establishments surveyed said that they require workers with extended reading skills. That could mean, for example, reading a 10-page technical article in a trade journal.

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Will GameStop be as profitable as “Roaring Kitty” predicted in 2019?

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He’s been found and he’s talking to the press. He’s known as “Roaring Kitty” on Youtube, and his Reddit username is… something else. The WSJ even talked to his mom which tells you just how much public attention was directed at the event this week that he might be the prime mover of.

The man who convinced a Reddit “army” to drive up the price of Gamestop ($GME) says that he originally simply saw it as a value investment. He believed people would keep shopping there, even though some short sellers on Wall Street bet money on the store going the way of Borders (the way of all flesh).

One of the strange turns of this story is that now people are buying the stock as a means of self-expression. Some of them claim they don’t care if they lose the money they put in. A friend of mine described the scene thusly on his social media account:

#SaveAMC #gamestop Amid the global turmoil, some big banks made billions ‘shorting’ floundering businesses, profiting off of the struggles of failing businesses. Recently those targets were brick and mortar retailers like GameStop and AMC. But the banks got too greedy and shorted too far, so individual investors rallied to invest in these businesses to simultaneously save their favorites and stick it to the banks. Power to the people.

He describes GameStop as a “failing business” and simultaneously declares it a favorite of consumers.

The $GME episode might have been as fun as playing a video game. Will anyone think it’s exciting to shop at GameStop 2 years from now?

If the short sellers were right, then who is helped by prolonging the agony? If the short sellers were wrong, then they will pay anyway.

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Going back to the gym?

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Who doesn’t want to be stronger? You can get on the floor and do 5 pushups right now. Did you do it? Probably not. (If you did, great work.) For most people, nothing is stopping you from getting strong, except yourself.

I just keep sitting around. Going to a gym and meeting with an instructor in person used to be a way around this problem. This takes our human foibles and makes them work to our advantage. The sunk cost fallacy can work for us.

If you bought a stock and it’s a loser, you should sell! Too many people keep holding and go down with the ship.

However, knowing themselves, many people also go to the gym and sign up for a class. Not wanting to walk away from their investment, they actually do the classes.

The WSJ reports that many gyms are closing after Covid-19 forced the customers out. The article describes the machines people have brought into their homes to replace gyms. The Peloton is a signature of the year 2020. The new trend brings a live human trainer into the process of exercising alone at home.

The new machines can collect data on the user. This data is transmitted to instructors and maybe even friends. Now, from the comfort of your own home, you can “sign up for a class” again.

Had Covid struck in 1980, people might have bought fitness machines for their basements and they might even have bought a VHS to pop in and exercise with. But they would have been missing the link to a human who knows where they are supposed to be, which apparently provides more motivation.

The market has loved Peloton and smart money seems to think it will continue to do well, even with a vaccine already rolling out.

https://twitter.com/TheMarkCooke/status/1352485110604566529
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The Sound of Silence

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I became aware of SlateStarCodex during the online kerfuffle over the popular blogger, Scott, getting his real name and professional identity exposed by the NYT. He’s written a new post about the whole event. He is a victim of sorts, but he doesn’t ask for more sympathy than he deserves. His story is an interesting case study concerning free speech and the internet.

See here the consequences of becoming a known figure in 2020. Quotes from Scott:

The New York Times thought so. Some people kept me abreast of their private discussions (in Soviet America, newspaper’s discussions get leaked to you!) and their reporters had spirited internal debates about whether I really needed anonymity. Sure, I’d gotten some death threats, but everyone gets death threats on the Internet, and I’d provided no proof mine were credible. Sure, I might get SWATted, but realistically that’s a really scary fifteen seconds before the cops apologize and go away. Sure, my job was at risk, but I was a well-off person and could probably get another.

So, you know, death or abuse and unemployment is all. Scott recognizes that some people have it worse. He used his situation to discuss the whole issue of anonymity. Why do people want anonymity to discuss their ideas? Scott brings us some data:

And: a recent poll found that 62% of people feel afraid to express their political beliefs. This isn’t just conservatives – it’s also moderates (64%), liberals (52%) and even many strong liberals (42%). … And the kicker is that these numbers are up almost ten percentage points from the last poll three years ago. 

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Leopold on supply chain independence

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Leopold said when he started his new blog that he would be thinking long-term. He has managed to stop staring at footage of the capital raid last week and produced a forward-looking blog. He is not the first person to speculate that the US has a vulnerability in its reliance on the country we buy the most stuff from.  

Free trade is awesome. Something that is going to link together all EWED writers is a common respect for the power of trade to make lives better. Consumers who have access to world market can have much more great stuff. Enjoying your chair, or your phone, or you lightbulbs right now? It’s great to have access to more stuff and be able tot get it cheaper.

However, there are those who worry that if country A abandons domestic production of widget B, then in the unfortunate/unexpected event of a war, country A will be in trouble. For example, it would be concerning for a military power if they are not able to make any steel themselves.

Should country A use tariffs to stimulate domestic production? Tariffs really bother economists. Tariffs bite into the wonderful benefits of free trade. Since I talk to economists, I have heard a lot of arguments against tariffs. Leopold makes a novel argument against using tariffs to advance national security interests.

The problem with tariffs, however, is that they are royally ineffective at reducing the security vulnerability we are concerned about. A general tariff incentivizes onshoring the production that is cheapest and easiest to onshore—but it is likely the imports for which onshoring would be the most expensive and difficult that present the greatest security vulnerability, as I will explain.  In the language of economics, I argue that the imports that present the greatest security vulnerability are those with the most inelastic import demand—while a general tariff most reduces those imports with the most elastic import demand.

I propose an alternative approach: general per-product quotas. These would better target vulnerability than a general tariff.

Instead of having tariffs, require that a certain number of several products be made domestically. That would be expensive, but we already put up with huge losses from tariffs. We already spend hundreds of billions of dollars on defense. The question is not whether we are going to spend money on defense. How can we spend money in the smartest way that recognizes how markets generate information? Think about the government buying 1,000 digital watches made on a friendly supply chain, and also dispensing with some costly tariffs.

Note that Leopold, if I understand him correctly, uses the word quota to mean that the government will buy a block of domestically produced goods at above-world-market prices. This is different from the way “quota” is sometimes used in international trade. See this MRU video narrated by Alex Tabarrok for a discussion of import quotas versus tariffs, a separate topic.

Fitbit got 2 billion and all I got was an email

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I made a Fitbit account years ago, even though I don’t wear one. As a user, I got an email on Jan 14, 2021 alerting me that they just sold Fitbit to Google. The email assured me that Google will not try to muscle Fitbit users away from iPhones or iOS. Google has said that it will keep Fitbit data “separate from other Google ad data.” TechCrunch had some more details for me, including how many billions of dollars Fitbit was getting out of this deal.

Is it so bad to see adsbased on your sleep habits? What if you had a bad night and then saw more coffee ads the next day? Seems fine. Is it more “creepy” than seeing an ad for something you just bought?

I don’t actually know much about Google’s data structure. But I can imagine ways that a large tech company could use Fitbit data in a way that users would not like. What if Google knows that you didn’t sleep well this week. Say someone else is using Google search to find a person to recruit for a desirable job in Public Relations. What if predictive models indicate that people who don’t get at least 6.5 hours of sleep per night are low performers? What if you ended up not getting linked up with your dream job, because you weren’t sleeping well one week? This is all speculative. What if Google starts measure how your heart rate responds to viewing various website that you access through Chrome? Have they agreed to not do that as part of the acquisition deal?

In 2018, Tyler sat down with Eric Schmidt, a senior executive of Google. Tyler asked him why Google doesn’t use their massive stores of data to inform investments for a hedge fund. Here was the reply:

SCHMIDT: Well, I’ll give you a more generic answer, which is, from the moment I joined the company, there were many people who said, “Why don’t you take this information and do something that will use it for marketing purposes?”

And the answer is always the same, which is that you need people’s permission to do that, and you can be sure you won’t get that permission, if you follow that reasoning. So we decided that was a pretty bright line. For example, if a tech company that were a consumer company were bundled with a hedge fund, you would have to disclose that it was being used in that context. The people would go crazy.

But the other thing that’s true — and Google was good about this — is we took the position that it was important for us to disclose everything we were doing as well as we could.

I’ll give you a governance argument. In a large company, the employees are independent citizens of humanity, and if they see corruption in your leadership — in other words, if they see you doing things which are inconsistent with the values, you will be criticized.

Schmidt doesn’t deny that Google could take advantage of data in order to become a successful hedge fun. He says that it would look bad, and Google doesn’t want to look bad even to its own employees. Hmmm, right? I don’t bring this up to accuse Google of wrongdoing. It just makes you wonder how things will unfold in the future. One can, at least, see why the acquisition of Fitbit was scrutinized.

I use Google products heavily on my laptop. I don’t have many “smart” devices aside from my smartphone. I wore the Fitbit step tracker for a few days, but I didn’t find the information to be helpful. It’s not like the Fitbit does the dishes for me or drives me to the gym. Get me that smart device and I’ll look at any ads you want.

Female orphan with superpowers stories

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It’s been a heavy week. Here’s something for the weekend to take your mind off of Covid deaths and democracy in peril.

Disney made almost $1.5 billion from the theatrical release of Frozen II in 2019. Netflix reported The Queen’s Gambit (TQG) was one of its most popular shows of 2020. TQG attracted tens of millions of viewers around the world. These two stories are strikingly similar to each other.

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Chesterton on Patriotism

Joy Buchanan5 Comments

America is in the news, and not for reasons I’d like. Here is G.K. Chesterton on “patriotism.” I will always remember this quote from reading his book Orthodoxy (emphasis mine):

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

G.K. Chesterton

The Pimlico reference is to some unsavory district of London at the time.

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