Joy Buchanan

Weight Lifting is for You

December 3, 2024November 30, 2024Joy Buchanan1 Comment

This is a guest post by Mary Buchanan, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Here she explores the intersection of behavioral economics with her own health and fitness behavior change.

My childhood dentist often said, “Take care of your teeth, or they’ll go away.” As I approach my 40^th birthday, I’m learning the same is true of my muscle mass. I can use it or lose it. And I can lose it faster or slower based on my lifestyle choices.

As a behavior analyst, I have spent many years practicing the science of behavior, specifically teaching others how to master new, meaningful skills. I see myself as my own client now as I work to replace my old aimless approach to fitness with evidence-based eating and exercise interventions.

I wish I could say I embraced strength training as soon as I heard about its benefits. Instead, as I noticed more and more recommendations for women to “lift heavy”, I kept filing that information away for someday in the future. When I joined a gym last January, I returned to what I used to do in years past: Pilates classes or cardio machines. After 9 months of that approach with no benefits to show for my efforts, it was time to change my behavior.

Behavioral economics has a term for what causes people to resist changing their behaviors without a significant incentive for doing so: status quo bias.

Another behavioral economics term, loss aversion, helps to explain what moved me into action. Loss aversion refers to how people are often more motivated not to lose something they have than they are motivated to gain something similar. All humans start to lose muscle mass around age 30, but that fact was not on my radar until recently. I wasn’t interested in building muscles when I thought mine were adequate to my daily tasks. Now that I realize my muscle loss has been underway for years and the liabilities of that loss are clear to me, I’m motivated to rebuild and mitigate future muscle loss. How? By doing heavy lifting 2-3x per week and eating enough protein for my body to keep the muscle it makes.

There are many great resources that provide advice in this area, but I’ve decided to begin
with learning from Dr. Stacy Sims since she specializes in what works for women. Based on what I’ve learned, here are my target behaviors for increase:

Practice strength training for at least 30 minutes, 2x per week.
Dr. Sims says 3x per week is better, but 2x is an acceptable minimum that I can commit to either through classes at a gym or YouTube videos. As a behavior analyst, I know that I’m more likely to maintain a new behavior pattern when it is easy to feel successful early and often.
Continue to challenge myself throughout strength training by adding weight as I get stronger.
To stimulate muscle growth you must challenge your muscles so they break down and repair stronger. How heavy is enough? If you lift a weight 10x and it’s difficult to lift on the last two reps, but still possible for you to maintain good form, that is an appropriate weight for you to train with. When that weight gets easy to lift, it’s no longer heavy enough for your training purposes.
Increase my healthy protein intake.
In Roar, Dr. Sims suggests that women aim for .75-0.8 grams of protein per lb. on a light or non-training day, and increase to 1-1.2 grams of protein per lb. on strength training days.

Working on these goals together creates synergy. I am more motivated to make healthier eating choices because my eating is connected to my strength training goal. Strength training has also become more exciting for me the more I’ve learned about its benefits, including:

Increased metabolic rate
Improved posture and stability
Stronger bones
Better blood pressure control
Improved immunity
Maintenance of healthy body composition (lifting heavy helps maintain lean muscle and reduce fat gain)

As if that weren’t enough, I have another reason to keep going. As soon as I started resistance training, my sleep improved! I’ve had difficulty sleeping for many years already, both with falling asleep and staying asleep, and honestly, if sleeping through the night was the only benefit available to me from resistance-based workouts, I would still be all in.

While none of this constitutes professional medical advice, it is worth looking into, especially if you, like me, never saw role models strength training as a young person. Once you understand how it works in your favor now and as you age, the benefits are too good to pass up.

RESOURCES

Stacy Sims, MSC, PHD is an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist. She specializes in teaching women what works for their bodies based on their body type, stage of life, and fitness goals.

My first introduction to her work and recommendations was this 26-minute interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APwKKUtjINo

Her book, Roar, is helpful for those who want to learn about general women’s health, though it is especially geared towards female athletes. https://www.amazon.com/ROAR-Revised-Fitness-Physiology-Performance/dp/059358192X/

Next Level focuses on the physical changes women experience with the natural aging process. It clearly presents how we can use the latest research to work with what is happening in the body instead of against it. https://www.amazon.com/Next-Level-Kicking-Crushing-Menopause-ebook/dp/B091JVW6QR/

Pistol Squats Complete the Home Workout from James

Joy on AI in Higher Education

November 30, 2024November 25, 2024Joy Buchanan1 Comment

I was interviewed for an article “Navigating AI in Christian Higher Education“. Here’s an excerpt:

Rosenberg: What impact do you foresee in your field due to the increasing sophistication of AI, and what kind of skills do you think your students will need to be successful?

Buchanan: AI will reshape economic analysis and modeling, making complex data processing and predictive analytics more accessible. This will lead to more sophisticated economic forecasting and policy design. Economists will become more productive, and expectations will rise accordingly. While some fields might resist change, economics will be at the forefront of AI integration.

For students aiming to succeed, it’s crucial to embrace AI tools without relying on them excessively during college. Strong fundamentals in economic theory and critical thinking remain essential, coupled with data science and programming skills.

Interdisciplinary knowledge, especially in tech and social sciences, will be valuable. Adaptability and lifelong learning are key in this evolving field. Human skills like creativity, communication, and ethical reasoning will remain crucial.

While AI will alter economics, it will also present opportunities for those who can adapt and effectively combine economic thinking with technological proficiency.

Cato Globalization book out in paperback

November 23, 2024November 23, 2024Joy Buchanan1 Comment

A new book is out with chapters by me, Deirdre McCloskey, and others.

Book Title: Defending Globalization: Facts and Myths about the Global Economy and Its Fundamental Humanity

The COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, simmering US-China tensions, and rising global populism have led to globalization facing renewed attention-and criticism-from politicians and pundits across the political spectrum. Like any market phenomenon, the free movement of people, things, money, and ideas across natural or political borders is imperfect and often disruptive. But it has also produced undeniable benefits-for the United States and the world-that no other system can match. And it’s been going on since the dawn of recorded history.

The original essays compiled in this volume offer a diverse range of perspectives on globalization-what it is, what it has produced, what its alternatives are, and what people think about it-and offer a strong, proactive case for more global integration in the years ahead. Covering the basic economic and political ideas and historical facts underlying globalization, rebutting the most common arguments against globalization today, and educating readers on the intersection of globalization and our societies and cultures-from where we live to what clothes we wear and what foods we eat-Defending Globalization demonstrates the essential humanity of international trade and migration, and why the United States and the rest of the world need more of it.

You can read a summary, in a previous EWED blog post, of my chapter on fashion, previously posted on the Cato website as Fast Fashion, Global Trade, and Sustainable Abundance.

It takes all of us to be rich. We need “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language,” so to speak.

Two years ago, on Twitter, I summarized my contribution as follows, in the form of a dialogue:

Person from the Past: “So, how is it with 8 billion people?”

Me Today: “It’s bad. We have too many clothes.”

Person from the Past: “Right. With 8 billion you wouldn’t have enough clothes for everyone.”

Me Today: “Too many.”

I made it to the book launch event in D.C. near the Capitol.

Some people still have not heard of “fast fashion.” Maybe you heard it here first: New legislation is likely coming to regulate the clothing industry. It might start at the state level, in progressive places like California or Seattle. Demands include making information about supply chains more transparent and taxing the clothing companies in order to pay for trash disposal. For example, you can read about the New York Fashion Act. Similar to the way the food companies have to provide clear information about calories, clothing retailers might have to provide more information about chemicals, labor, and disposal issues.

Plastic fibers making new clothing cheap. I sometimes hate the flood of cheap products that American families are drowning in. Plastic products are so cheap to stamp out and give to kids. Some days you’ll find me grumpy about the latest bag of plastic swag and candy my kids came home with. There are some negative externalities to consuming tons of plastic items and tossing them out.

It’s a privilege to have this problem. Perhaps we are overindulging in clothing abundance and need some modern solutions to modern problems. We also need to figure out how to stop getting obese off of food abundance. (Hello, Ozempic.) But let’s still be grateful for the abundance, on this Thanksgiving week. My controversial take is that it’s good for the cost of clothing to be low. We don’t want to regress. We don’t want to make clothing scarce again.

If you were to want to cite my work on fashion and globalization, then you could use something like this:

Buchanan, Joy. “Fast Fashion, Global Trade, and Sustainable Abundance” (2024) In S. Lincicome, & C. Packard (Eds.), Defending Globalization: Facts and Myths about the Global Economy and Its Fundamental Humanity, Cato Institute, (pp. 367 – 380).

Human Pettiness Knows No Bounds

November 16, 2024November 14, 2024Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Just when you think there might be one arena of human life free of status competition, you will turn out to be wrong.

Consider the 4th graders who get to do “safety patrol” as volunteer work. This is a badge of honor and the kids like power. A casual observer might think that any kid who volunteers to do safety patrol would simply be having a great experience. Surely this is as simple as adding a unit of utility from consumption, in comparison to the times when the child is not allowed to do safety patrol.

But all is not well. Jackson Carter, says Rachel Pratt, has been hogging the prime safety patrol spot for weeks. He walks to school earlier than anyone and sits on the good spot, excluding the other 4th graders from having the chance to catch the highest volume of younger kids to boss around.

Rachel Pratt and several other girls are conspiring to, collectively, prevent Jackson from getting so disproportionately many days on the prime spot. They have agreed that if any one of them can beat him to the spot, they will share it with anyone except Jackson. The crew has also planned to loudly comment on the situation in earshot of the school principal in hopes that Jackson will have to share the spoils more evenly.

Do humans even want to be happy?

Why Podcasts Succeeded in Gaining Influence Where MOOCs Failed

November 9, 2024September 24, 2025Joy Buchanan4 Comments

When MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) burst onto the education scene in the early 2010s, they were hailed as the future of learning. With the promise of democratizing education by providing free access to world-class courses from top universities.

Leading universities rushed to put their courses online, venture capital poured in, and platforms like Coursera and edX grew rapidly. Yet today, while MOOCs still exist, they’ve largely retreated to the margins of education. Meanwhile, long-form podcasts have emerged as a surprisingly powerful force in American intellectual life.

Is this ironic? I wanted to learn a bit about MOOCs while I took a walk before writing this blog post. I typed “MOOCs” into the Apple Podcasts search bar.

One of the first results was: John Cochrane on Education and MOOCs

I learned about MOOCs from Russ Roberts at a reasonable pace (when I listen to podcasts, I do it at 1x speed but I’m almost always doing something like driving or folding laundry).

I consider myself a lifelong learner. I buy and read books. Like hundreds of millions of people around the world, I like podcasts. I will attend lectures sometimes, especially if I personally know someone in the room. I did sit in classrooms for course credit throughout college and graduate school. I took extra classes that I did not need to graduate purely out of interest, and yet I have never once been tempted to sign up for a MOOC.

Enough introspection from me. My viral “tweet” this week was: “MOOCs never took off, as far as I can tell, and yet long-form podcasts are shaping the nation.”

https://twitter.com/aboutJoy/status/1854188563757158517

Did MOOCs fail? Many millions of people signed up for MOOCs. A much smaller percentage of people completed MOOCs. Some users find MOOCs worth paying for.

However, if you listen to the podcast with John Cochrane in 2014, you can see the promise that MOOCs failed to live up to. The idea was that many people who did not have access to a “top quality” education would get one through MOOCs. Turns out that access is not the bottleneck.

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Effort Transparency and Fairness Published at Public Choice

November 2, 2024November 2, 2024Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Please see my latest paper, out at Public Choice: Effort transparency and fairness

The published version is better, but you can find our old working paper at SSRN “Effort Transparency and Fairness”

Abstract: We study how transparent information about effort impacts the allocation of earnings in a dictator game experiment. We manipulate information about the respective contributions to a joint endowment that a dictator can keep or share with a counterpart…

Employees within an organization are sensitive to whether they are being treated fairly. Greater organizational fairness is shown to improve job satisfaction, reduce employee turnover, and boost the organization’s reputation. To study how transparent information impacts fairness perceptions, we conduct a dictator game with a jointly earned endowment.

The endowment is earned by completing a real effort task in the experiment, an analog to the labor employees contribute to employers. First, two players work independently to create a pool of money. Then, the subject assigned the role of the “dictator” allocates the final earnings between them.

In the transparent treatment, both dictators and recipients have access to complete information about their own effort levels and contributions, as well as those of their counterparts. In the non-transparent treatment, dictators have full information about the relative contributions of both players, but recipients do not know how much each person contributed to the endowment. The two treatments allow us to compare the behaviors of dictators who know they could be judged and held to reciprocity norms with dictators who do not face the same level of scrutiny.

*drumroll* results:

This graph shows the amount of money the dictators take from the recipient contribution, in cents. There are two ways to look at this. Notice the spike next to zero. Most dictators do not take much from what their counterpart earned. They are *dictators*, meaning they could take everything. Most take almost nothing, regardless of the treatment. We interpret this to mean that they are acting out of a sense of fairness, and we apply a humanomics framework to explain this in the paper.

Also, there is significantly more taken in non-transparency. When the worker does not have good information on the meritocratic outcome, then some dictators feel like they can get away with taking more. Some of this happens through what we call “shading down” of the amount sent by the dictator under the cover of non-transparency.

There is more in the paper, but the last thing I’ll point out here is that the “worker” subjects (recipients) anticipate that this will happen. The recipients forecast that the dictator would take more under non-transparency. In our conclusion, we mention that, even though the dictator seems to be at an advantage in a non-transparent environment, the dictator still might choose a transparency policy if it affects which workers select into the team.

View and download your article* This hyperlink is good for a limited number of free downloads of my paper with Demiral and Saglam, says Springer the publisher. Please don’t waste it, but if you want the article I might as well put it out there. I posted this on 11/2/2024, so there is no guarantee that the link will work for you.

Cite our article: Buchanan, J., Demiral, E.E. & Sağlam, Ü. Effort transparency and fairness. Public Choice (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-024-01230-9

Can researchers recruit human subjects online to take surveys anymore?

October 26, 2024October 25, 2024Joy BuchananLeave a comment

The experimental economics world is currently still doing data collection in traditional physical labs with human subjects who show up in person. This is still the gold standard, but it is expensive per observation. Many researchers, including myself, also do projects with subjects that are recruited online because the cost per observation is much lower.

As I remember it, the first platform that got widely used was Mechanical Turk. Prior to 2022, the attitude toward MTurk changed. It became known in the behavioral research community that MTurk had too many bots and bad actors. MTurk had not been designed for researchers, so maybe it’s not surprising that it did not serve our purposes.

The Prolific platform has had a good reputation for a few years. You have to pay to use Prolific but the cost per observation is still much lower than what it costs to use a traditional physical laboratory or to pay Americans to show up for an appointment. Prolific is especially attractive if the experiment is short and does not require a long span of attention from human subjects.

Here is a new paper on whether supposedly human subjects are going to be reliably human in the future: Detecting the corruption of online questionnaires by artificial intelligence

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Physics Highlights from What is Real

October 19, 2024October 18, 2024Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Some highlights from reading the book What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics*

Page 9 “The godfather of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, talked about a division between the world of big objects, where classical Newtonian physics rules, and small objects, where quantum physics reigned.”

The book has some drama, much centered around Einstein’s rejection of the Copenhagen interpretation.

The title of Chapter 2 is so excellent: “Chap 2: Something Rotten in the Eigenstate of Denmark”

Pg 37 “But Max Born had discovered a piece of the puzzle that summer. He found that a particle’s wave function in a location yields the probability of measuring the particle in that location – and that the wave function collapses once measurement happens… The measurement problem had arrived.”

Pg 56 “Einstein rejected any violation of locality, calling it “spooky action at a distance” in a letter to Max Born.”

Pg 79 “By the end of the war, the Manhattan Project had cost the nation nearly $25 billion, employing 125,000 people at thirty-one different locations across the United States and Canada. Hundreds of physicists were called away from their everyday laboratory work … After the war ended, physics research in the United States never returned to what it was… Damned by their success … military research dollars poured into physics.”

Pg 82 “Research into the meaning of quantum physics was one of the casualties of the war. With all these new students crowding classrooms around the country, professors found it impossible to teach the philosophical questions at the foundation of quantum physics.”

Joy: The politics of physics in academia was interesting to me. I recommend this book to university economists on that merit alone.

Page 100 “the photons are deliberately messing with you”

Experimentalists take note, page 104 “The story that comes along with a scientific theory influences the experiments that scientists choose to perform”

Joy: Having no internet greatly slowed down the spread of the correct ideas. However, eventually, over the course of a few decades and with a few career casualties, the more correct information did seem to influence the consensus.

Joy: I’m used to economists having very basic and sometimes heated disagreements. One might say that issues in economics are a bit more subjective than a topic in the physical sciences. However, with quantum physics turning out to be so weird, there are also heated disagreements among the physicists.

An equivalent book for economics might be Grand Pursuit by Sylvia Nasar.

Pg 108: “Bohm’s theory had also appeared during the height of Zhdanovism, an ideological campaign by Stalin’s USSR to stamp out any work that had even the faintest whiff of a conflict with the ideals of Soviet communism.”

Pg 124: “This universal wave function, according to Everett, obeyed the Schrödinger equation at all times, never collapsing, but splitting instead. Each experiment, each quantum event… creating a multitude of universes…”

*Thanks to Josh Reeves and Samford University for buying me the book.

Related previous posts: Is the Universe Legible to Intelligence?

Oppenheimer Film Thoughts

Literature Review is a Difficult Intellectual Task

Literature Review is a Difficult Intellectual Task

October 12, 2024October 12, 2024Joy Buchanan4 Comments

As I was reading through What is Real?, it occurred to me that I’d like a review on an issue. I thought, “Experimental physics is like experimental economics. You can sometimes predict what groups or “markets” will do. However, it’s hard to predict exactly what an individual human will do.” I would like to know who has written a little article on this topic.

I decided to feed the following prompt into several LLMs: “What economist has written about the following issue: Economics is like physics in the sense that predictions about large groups are easier to make than predictions about the smallest, atomic if you will, components of the whole.”

First, ChatGPT (free version) (I think I’m at “GPT-4o mini (July 18, 2024)”):

I get the sense from my experience that ChatGPT often references Keynes. Based on my research, I think that’s because there are a lot of mentions of Keynes books in the model training data. (See “”ChatGPT Hallucinates Nonexistent Citations: Evidence from Economics“)

Next, I asked ChatGPT, “What is the best article for me to read to learn more?” It gave me 5 items. Item 2 was “Foundations of Economic Analysis” by Paul Samuelson, which likely would be helpful but it’s from 1947. I’d like something more recent to address the rise of empirical and experimental economics.

Item 5 was: “”Physics Envy in Economics” (various authors): You can search for articles or papers on this topic, which often discuss the parallels between economic modeling and physics.” Interestingly, ChatGPT is telling me to Google my question. That’s not bad advice, but I find it funny given the new competition between LLMs and “classic” search engines.

When I pressed it further for a current article, ChatGPT gave me a link to an NBER paper that was not very relevant. I could have tried harder to refine my prompts, but I was not immediately impressed. It seems like ChatGPT had a heavy bias toward starting with famous books and papers as opposed to finding something for me to read that would answer my specific question.

I gave Claude (paid) a try. Claude recommended, “If you’re interested in exploring this idea further, you might want to look into Hayek’s works, particularly “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) and “The Pretense of Knowledge” (1974), his Nobel Prize lecture.” Again, I might have been able to get a better response if I kept refining my prompt, but Claude also seemed to initially respond by tossing out famous old books.

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Writing with ChatGPT Buchanan Seminar on YouTube

October 5, 2024October 4, 2024Joy Buchanan3 Comments

I was pleased to be a (virtual) guest speaker for Plateau State University in Nigeria. My host was (Emergent Ventures winner) Nnaemeka Emmanuel Nnadi. The talk is up on Youtube with the following timestamp breakdown: