Raghu Parthasarathy has put together a few graphs looking at labor salaries at the University of Oregon. This isn’t the first potential observation of what others have termed “administrative bloat” at research universities, but the flatness of professors at budget category makes for a useful comparison of slopes.
I don’t know whether this is good or bad, but it does leave me with a couple questions
What do Directors do?
What is getting bundled into “Other”?
For directors, this could be a lot of things. They could be directing centers launched with private money, which means they are perfectly likely to be research professionals without teaching obligations and at-will contracts outside the tenure track ecosystem. They could, however, also be service professions working on the sports, entertainment, and student services side of things. The pool, the gym, the student outreach center – perhaps the scale of each now requires their own bespoke middle management position.
“Other” is, of course, far harder to parse without doing some actual digging, which of course I am in no way willing to do.
Is this bloat? Is it an academic institution drifting away from research and other forms of traditional public service? Not sure. What I am confident in is this is further evidence of the attractiveness of employee slots unattached to tenure. I’ve written before on what tenure is and how it is intended to be leveraged as a mechanism within the production of scholarship. Maybe the University of Oregon is simply trying to deleverage from tenure. Or maybe the bundle of goods being offered is more complex than previously, requiring a new layer of middle management. I’m curious if any of our readers have additional insight for the comments. Because, at the very least, this is more evidence that what is being produced at major universities is changing.
So a professor at a major institution wrote 200 papers last year. Unlike other commenters I’ve observed so far, I think this is neither true research nor pure AI fraud. It is likely AI “slop” to varying degrees, but unlike a lot of slop there is probably real value within it. What I have not yet seen ascertained is whether any of it has been vetted, investigated, or curated by the author in a meaningful way. The real question is: what is the actual ambition here? I think the tell is the lack of submission to peer review.
I think this is a form of intellectual squatting. The nice version is it’s putting out a series of half-baked papers in the hopes of establishing a property right to the underlying ideas at an earlier stage of the research process than previously possible. The less generous interpretation is it’s dumping a series of haystacks on the plains and laying claim to the needles probabilistically within each. Imagine you are a person who has highly esoteric, potentially important ideas every day. Many of those ideas you suspect, based on some combination of experience and ego, are new in at least one dimension. You would like to get credit for that newness. For being first. What’s the problem?
The problem is that scholarship remains more perspiration than inspiration. Having a new idea is great, but it takes years to work through the nuance in sufficient detail that you can convince your peers of the coherence and originality of the contribution. During the minutes each day you are not working on this singular project you have the inspiration for other ideas, sometimes multiple within a single day. How frustrating is the proposition that someone else gets credit for the originality of contribution just because they had time to reveal it to the world while you were embroiled in your investigation of what is only one of your many score ideas!?
Ah, but meta-level inspiration has struck you! What if you took each one of those ideas, spent an hour curating a series of prompts around it, and then let Chat GPT (or another LLM) fabricate an entire research paper around it? It might not be good, correct, or even coherent, but it does somethine far more important. It establishes an intellectual property right to the claim of being first. Now, to be clear, you are fully aware of the deficiciency of your paper as an actual scholarly contribution, but if somone else writes a full paper you at least have something to point to and say “I was here first. Cite me. Hell, if I’m close enough you might even have to name it after me. Well, sure, us. But definitely include me. Glory shared via hypenhnation is better than no glory at all.”
Is it a contribution? That’s something that will vary on a case-by-case basis, but I expect far more misses than hits. The work isn’t there. It’s like plopping down a block of marble with a dramatic-ish sketch of a man on an adhered post-it note and claiming that Michaelangelo needs to share credit with you on any subsequent sculptures. It’s like asking people to cite that one cool tweet you did about how DNA is cool but maybe RNA could be useful in vaccines one day. Intellectual property rights trolling via AI blunderbuss.
BTW, I’m not 100% sure this isn’t an AI take on a modern Sokal hoax. An attempt to show how much AI slop is introducing a whole new version of Gresham’s Law to scholarship. But if we treat it as earnest, it’s proof that a very smart person can potentially disrupt the market for scholarship, patents, or any other intellectual property by laying claim to ideas in much the same way that the printing press undermined the market for plenary indulges. Flood the market, leave it to someone else to sort through the ecumenical consequences.
Lebron James is obsessed with golf. His new YouTube channel is what is getting the most attention, but this has been a publicly known fact for a while. There’s even a (largely unevidenced) theory that he chose to play his potentially final season in Philadelphia for it’s proximity to elite golf courses.
I just want to take this time to deconstruct why Lebron’s golf obsession is interesting. It’s a reminder that first derivatives often matter more than both absolute values and higher order derivatives. Let me explain.
Lebron at 41 years of age, in the face of history, experience, and logic, is still one of the 20 very best human beings at basketball in the world. So, in terms of absolutes, playing basketball should still give him immense satistfaction. The problem, of course, is his personal reference point (how good he used to be) and the rate of decay he is experiencing from that reference point. This is a person who spent more than two decades getting better and better at something, who arrived at a point where they were literally the very best in the world at it, only to then at some point in time arrive at the awareness that they were in fact getting worse at it. To be clear, that rate of decay is far slower than anyone could have predicted, but it remains decay nonetheless. And it’s not just “getting worse”. It’s getting worse at something that you are orienting your every day around. Your meals, your sleep, your family life, everything, all in dedication to something you are getting worse at.
I’m now going to generalize from my own lived experience, but I think the emotional returns to dedication are always stronger when the first derivative is positive, but no amount of work can guarantee it. You can work harder and increase the positive gains or, failing that, slow down the decay, but at some point the decay is inevitable (i.e. the work shows up in the second derivative). And no matter how much you slow it down, decay just isn’t as satisfying as the day-to-day lived experience as improvement or even plateauing.
And this is where golf comes in. Golf is a sport that has much lower athletic barriers to entry and, for Lebron or anyone who is starting out, a vastly lower reference point for quality. It is entirely likely that every time Lebron has ever picked up a golf club he is better at golf than he was the previous month. It is the 100% inverse to what Lebron has experienced playing basketball for at least 7 or 8 years now, likely longer. The relief he must feel, directly experiencing and observing the returns to his efforts.
Coming to terms with being past your prime is a standard trope in narrative fiction of all formats, but from an actual mental health point of view, I don’t think it is given enough attention, particularly for those at the tops of their field. There are vanishingly few purely natural elites in any profession, vocation, or craft. Most have had to sacrfice whole avenues of life experiences to achieve such levels, and when they do begin to decay they either have to endure public scrutiny bordering on censure, or the quiet tragedy of being alone in their ability to discern just how much they have lost. The latter is almost worse. Almost.
As a final tidbit, let me make a loose connection to technological innovation and AI specifically. Obsolescence hurts. A negative first derivative hurts. But what hurts even more is an unexpected shock that accelerates that decay. Injuries are mentally hard for athletes, in part, because of their often discontinuous nature. They were still improving, the rate at which they were improving was accelerating, until they weren’t. There are professions that are wrestling with this right now. There are professionals who reasonably expected to have another half decade before the decay began. That timeline is now in question. And most of us don’t have the luxury of being a generationally great athlete who can immediately become great at something completely new.
Because I’m not a financial planner. I’m not even an active investor. I’m an economist who follows the standard economist dictum regarding passive investing and low-fee index funds. But at some point the, if we take parallels to the past seriously, there arises the question of whether a 40 year old with a 100% index fund portfolio should consider hedging/reallocating their porfolio a decade sooner than they planned on becase, well, just look at that chart.
Maybe AI is great. The internet certainly was an is pretty great. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be a massive dotcom bubble-esque correction, and a 20% hedge can be the difference between 4 years getting back to even versus 7 years getting back to even. Even at the risk of misisng out on some growth in the longer term, the calculus with basic risk aversion checks out.
So, seriously. Are we hedging? And what are we hedging into? Asking for a friend. Who is an economist. And also me.
Within my social network the exodus from the service industry is now almost complete. Ten years ago I had no fewer than 7 good friends in the restaurant busines, now only one remains (and he is, by his own classification, 40% retired). The reasons were both myriad and similar. The physiscal toll is substantial, the hours long, and lack of weekends, the separation from non-industry people working diametrically opposed schedules. What really keeps pushing people out, however, that seems to tip the scales over and over, is the lack of health insurance consistent across most restaurants. With the expiration of the ACA subsidies driving up premiums for those without an employer pool to participate in, the calculus has shifted. Who’s leaving? Is it just the friends of economists?
No, it’s everyone over 35. It’s not really more complicated than that. They are entering the age where health insurance has a lot more marginal value, so they are leaving. Sometimes for substantial paycuts.
Between the ACA subsidies expiring and ICE enforcement targeting the keep service industry labor pools, the business that make our meals are going to look very, very different. Will they be worse? I guess I can’t say for sure…no, scratch that, I absolutely can. It’s worse. Everything is going to be worse. Younger, less experience, fewer immigrants? Yeah, that’s the formula to make everything worse.
It is very good. See it in IMAX if you can, though I strongly recommend wearing concert ear plugs (i.e. the kind that let you still hear dialogue clearly). Minor spoilers ahead, if such a thing is even possible with a 2,800 year old epic poem.
The themes of the adaptation/translation are wonderful and poignant. The layers of shame and trauma never, to me, felt forced. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the fragility of civiliation as solution to the grand collective action problem, the idea that a single betrayal can unravel an entire society and that the “heroic” cenceiver of that betrayal might feel shame, well, that is not without current relevance.
So yes, the film as story is great. But, sitting here now 4 days after viewing it, what I find myself constantly returning to is the sheer, overwhelming competence of the film. The acting, costuming, set and prop design, lighting, sound design, editing, musical scoring. It all just worked. As a champion of practical effects, the texture of the film was transporting. Yes, there is CGI, but it blends in seemlessly, always complementing the practical elements in a way to never let the imagery fall into the uncanny valley. The final product coordinates a vast array of individual and team efforts that, together, create an experience that always felt purposeful, decisive, and real.
Given the small city that must be erected, populated, struck, and moved to create each element of a film like The Odyssey, it’s a great reminder of what can be accomplished when all of the people involved actually and truly know what they are doing. In an age of carnival barkers and con men, there is nothing more epic than grand demonstrations of competence.
Tyler Cowen once said over lunch “I don’t know why I don’t agree with everything Greg Mankiw says. He’s much smarter than me.” He was being entirely earnest and it doesn’t seem on it’s face a crazy question. Yes, with a little reflection it is easy to observe that smart people are wrong sometimes, but there’s nonetheless a probabilistic logic to it. If someone is smarter than me, I should just adopt all of their ideas which are, on average, more likely to be correct than those I form on my own, therefore increasing my average “correctness” through pure imitation, adoption, and replication. Almost none of us do this, thank the gods of ecological rationality and group selection, thus preserving the wisdom of crowds and the robustness of our collective wisdom, but I think it’s still worth revisiting how intelligence correlates with “correctness.” Specifically, I’m taking this as my opportunity to run a little thought experiment I like to call “The Genius Trap.” I apologize if there is a pre-existing thought experiment associated with someone famous. I haven’t read nearly enough philosophy.
To start, let’s make some gratuitous, outright rude reductions of people. People will be characterized by two attributes: how often they make correct assessments of the information being considered, which we will call “wisdom”, and how complex of an abstract system they can hold in their head while maintaining the consistency and coherence of each individual element, which we will refer to as “intelligence.” Now, it’s easy to observe that some people are wise but not intelligent, or vice versa, but that’s trite. To make things interesting, let’s assume that wisdom and intelligence are positively correlated. Some people will be low in both (“slow”), others will be medium (“average”), and a few blessed folks will be both highly wise and highly intelligent (“geniuses”).
Now typically in a thought experiment we leave everything in the realm of adjectives (high, low, slow, genius, etc), but bear with me here because this experiment benefits from assigning hard numerical paramaters. Let’s say that slow people are correct 85% of the time but can only only a 2 element system in their head. Average people are correct 90% of the time and can consider and evaluate an 32 element system. No need for symmetry here, let’s really go all-in on geniuses, and say they are correct 95% of the time and can hold a 1024 element system in their head. Following so far? Geniuses are carrying around 2^10 element models in their head, each element of which is correct 95% of the time.
You ever play “Mousetrap”?
Rube Goldberg Machines (RGMs) make for useful allegorical references, but why are some funny and others just sweaty metaphors? An RGM is an overly complex device drawn or conceived for comedic effect. They are purposefully absurb in their individual design elements, but what is key is that, if the events proceed as planned the intended result will actually occur. The metaphorical intent is usually that the complexity is unnecessary, but what makes an RGM funny is precisely that it would work if events proceeded as expected. The audience, of course, knows with certainty born of experience that there is absolutely no way this machine will function because anything with high levels of complexity and narrow tolerances for deviation will always fail. Comedic irony comes for us all.
It is in this manner that the opinions, most notably the politics, of really smart people can go so entirely off the rails. Recall our slow individual. Sure, they’re only right 85% of the time, but in a two elemement model of the world that still gets you home intact 72.25%. And for most of daily life, a two element model is more than sufficient to get you through your day hale and hearty. But alas, our poor geniuses, they cannot help themselves. The world is a rich and complex place of which they want to unlock the deepest mysteries. And why not? Point by point their lived experience is confronting all of the exam questions they knew the correct answers to when others were obviously mistaken. The rub, of course, is that being right 95% of the time can’t survive in the face of a 10 element model, for which their understanding remains pure and intact only 59.87% of the time. By the standards of a daily life, they have been reduced to dullards, clumsily shouting their world view at those without the luxury of ignoring them.
It is precisely because they are capable of holding in their heads and considering the ramifications of fantastically complex mental models of the world, each element itself well considered and defended, brilliant people can find themselves with very specific opinions that stand no chance of being remotely correct. The solution, of course, is social. It’s friends and coworkers who challenge you, pointing out your foolishness in fun and good faith. It’s the academy, going through every line of your proof with a fine toothd comb, sometimes perhaps taking a little too much glee in pointing out your errors (often, in turn, making errors of their own), but the system persists and science proceeds in no small part because of the wisdom of crowds.
Some of the worst political ideas in history have come from geniuses, but as a light consumer of intellectual biography, it’s interesting how often the very worst ideas happen after the world decides someone is a genius, isolating them in a web of fame, worship, self-regard, and, in our modern era, extreme wealth. In many ways, it’s the opposite of herding, where the mechanics of herd safety disables the wisdom of crowds. Less common, do doubt, than herding simply because of the tautologically lesser prevalence of extreme intelligence, but nonetheless important.
Which is a long-winded waying of saying that the trap is not in being a genius,per se, but in being a genius alone. Of becoming surrounded by yes men or moving to an off the grid cabin in the woods. Of building a steel cocoon of your own narcissism, formulating ever more complex models within models, each mistake compounding and eroding your mind like intellectual termites. Avoiding the genius trap is not to limit yourself or the complexity of your thinking, but simply to open yourself to the criticism of others, particularly those invested in neither your brilliance or your censure. To wholly avail yourself of the possibility that the mouse trap might never fall because you are completely and utterly wrong.
I had an interesting dinner with two macroeconomists, Paulo Lins and Michael Navarrette. A follow-up conversation led to me skimming this paper, which dives into the regional heterogeneity of food inflation. Now inflation is not something we typically think of having particularly local or granular heterogeneity (“inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomena”, etc, etc), but it’s important to remember that the biggest difference between chalkboard inflation and real-life inflation is measurement.
Economic data is something we often take for granted, in no small part because it’s the substrate from which so much economic research is grown. To fight over it almost feels like nihlism. But just because we aren’t fighting about it doesn’t mean that measurement is easy. It is, in fact, brutally challenging for a host of reasons. Now, a lot of those reasons come down to the demand for immediacy in measurements, which can in turn be dealt with through updates over time. But there’s a deeper challenge that we shouldn’t lose sight of.
Every good is a bundle.
A tomato is a vegetable that is secretly a fruit. Sometimes the price is higher, sometimes it’s lower. But here’s the rub: sometimes when the price is higher it’s secretly lower, and vice versa. Sometimes it’s the same, only it’s not. Sometimes that modestly increased price is secretly a catastrophic increase threatening marinara all across the nation.
Yesterday the tomatoes I bought were 3 for $2. Today they were 2 for $1.50. A modest 11% increase in price. Ah, but see, it isn’t.
The tomatoes today are a little smaller. They came from farther away, representing a seed line that is more tolerate of travel and refrigeration. They are less uniform in color, more acidic, less sweet. Diving deeper, we find that the cost for a 100 lbs of tomatoes purchased in bulk were unchanged. There was, however, less variety to be chosen from because those crates of bulk tomatoes were increasingly curated to fit the needs of Sysco, the chief purveyer for mid to lower tier restaurants, which needs them more for median-customer approved red sauces than spinach salads and bruschetta.
So, dear reader, I ask you – did the price of tomatoes go up? For me, they certainly did. For the median American they barely budged. For Pizza Hut they may have actually gone down!
It’s easy to see how complex goods are bundles of attributes, but it’s amazing how products as commodified as sand or amino acids for livestock feed can quickly become bundles once you put yourself in the shoes of the customers for those goods. When quality, timing, and uniformity enter the mix, damn near every good becomes a rich bundle of attributes for which profit-maximizing suppliers are working diligently to not just meet the needs of their customers, but serve the terms of the explicit and implicit contracts from which any deviation brings the spector of margin-spoiling transaction costs. There’s a lot of gravity at the status quo. Which, in a way, is simple rediscovering menu costs, but with the important distinction that just because the number on the menu hasn’t changed doesn’t mean the price hasn’t. The menu is a lie.
Mexico plays England tonight in the World Cup and I will be rooting for Mexico. Which is interesting considering that Harry Kane is one of my favorite global players to watch and Mexico, for most of my life, as been the primary rival for the US Men’s National Team (who play Monday night against Belgium, another household dilemma since my wife used to run a Belgian restaurant).
I could go on about this, but Ryan Rosenblatt covers it ably. The rivalry was fun so long as it stayed on the pitch. After 12 years of racist political rhetoric about Mexico and Mexicans, it’s no fun to root against them. Combined with the fact that the team plays genuinely enjoyable soccer (relative to the broad standard of international soccer, which I am contractually obligated to note is aesthetically inferior to 95% of club soccer), I would love to see Mexican soccer fans collectively lose their minds advancing deep in the tournament.
There is a broadertheme this WorldCup of wonder and awe at the sense of camaderie amongt fans from 48 different countries and the communities hosting them. Which is wonderful and the World Cup as an institution deserves a lot of credit (the Cup itself, mind you, not FIFA- they’re as corrupt as they come), but honestly I think this is the result of just a lot of people coordinating to travel at the same time.
The reality is and always has been that most people don’t carry any (or, at least, much) nationalistic hate in their hearts, and certaintly not the ones willing to the incur the discomfort of flying to a different part of the world. The hate isn’t real. It’s mostly a fugazi, a masquerade carried out because it’s materially and politically profitable for a few hundred and the only source of identity and pride for a few thousand. The World Cup, by comparison, is a collective endeavor of a few million, and once you get to those numbers, it’s mostly folk who like having a good time with other folk.
This is a near-perfect policy experiment showing us, once again, that immigration is not only a net gain for all, but an absolute gain in the rural communities that have become the most politically resistant to immigration.
🗣️ Published today in @aeajournals.bsky.social. Ethan Lewis and I use a visa lottery, as a nationwide randomized experiment, to test the effects of foreign labor on US firms and workers. doi.org/10.1257/app….A concise summary from @nber.org —> http://www.nber.org/digest/20221…
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Economist Writing Every Day 