Moments of inspiration can and do lead to innovation, almost by definition. Sometimes we forget that innovation is itself inspirational. I first read about “inverse vaccines” two days ago and it hasn’t left my mind since.

“Inverse vaccine” shows potential to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases

These are lab results, not clinical trials. This is not a new treatment coming any time soon. The logic though, the idea, is absolutely brilliant. Traditional vaccines teach the immune something the blueprint for attacking a new enemy. These researchers realized that the liver has a method for marking molecules with N-acetylgalactosamine so that the immune system knows not to attack them. Autoimmune disorders, from common allergies to multiple schlerosis, are a product of the immune system attacking what it shouldn’t.

Why can’t we mark the cells of the body being tormented by an overzealous immune system with N-acetylgalactosamine?

It’s such a simple idea. Simple and completely brilliant. I am convinced we are living in a new golden age of vaccines. But this? This is inspired and inspiring, promising to take what is already a time of miracles and push it in an entirely new direction. There are new ideas sitting out there, waiting to be conceived. But sometimes what we need is for an act of innovation to inspire us to think in a new way. Or an old way. Or a reciprocal way.

I just learned that the de-aging process used to produce scenes with a “younger” Harrison Ford in the most recent Indiana Jones movie was produced using an AI process that matched the Ford’s face in each newly filmed moment with a perfectly matching facial expression from archival stock of the actor.

The movie was fine, even if the third act was a little undercooked. I just want to point out two things. First, this is a natural extension of the LLM model of artificial intelligence: pulling from library of information provided (i.e. the internet or footage of Indiana Jones punching Nazis) and then reassembling that information to produce a new product. When we debate whether or not these pieces of software constitute actual “intelligence” what we are really arguing about is whether or not the substrate is sufficiently simple, sufficiently inert for the act of assembly to constitute an act of intelligence.

Case in point, nobody is arguing that de-aging Harrison Ford betrays true intelligence on the part of the software. The material being acted upon is already coherent, it’s just being reordered to convey a new message ( i.e. scenes in a different movie). Similar things could be said about ChatGPT. It’s just searching through pre-existing text and ideas, sifting for relevance, and reordering to optimally assemble into an updated product.

Operating within this metaphor, what would constitute intelligence is the that can sift through a primordial substrate of inorganic, individually incoherent components, and assemble them into original pieces of coherent information; sparks of cognition. An example of this would be to take the ambient, ineffable sentiments implied by the collective set of questions being asked by ChatGPT users (hopes, fears, feelings, etc) and produce not just answers to questions not yet answered by humans, but to answer questions not yet asked. To sift through information, break it into into its smallest possible molecules of cognition, and contribute to the broader collective body of knowledge by assembling new thoughts.

This sort of process has been occasionally posited in the form of a “matter compiler” in science-fiction, which is essentially just a 3-D printer at the molecular level. That remains pretty far off, as best I know. I suspect the same will be true of true artificial generalized intelligence. We know an awful lot about how molecules are assembled, the problem with producing a matter compiler is largely one of cost. We know comparably less about how neurons firing are assembled into acts of generative intelligence, of creativity. We will know no doubt get there, but getting there usually happens well before we cross the chasm of cost, of material feasibility.

But yeah, the new Indiana Jones movie was okay.

On this, the Day of our Labor in the year 2023, I leave you with a simple observation/plea into the void: don’t confusion condescending overconfidence with competence. I give to you Hans-Heman Hoppe stating, in public and on camera, his exasperated and deeply aggrieved belief that Paul Krugman doesn’t know what money is or how it works:

It is hilarious to use the hypothetical of "ask Paul Krugman to explain how adding more pieces of paper could make the economy richer."

Krugman answered this question in 1998:https://t.co/grd4tQhdmS https://t.co/iyIx2UQ4Ts

— Matt Darling 🌐🏗️ (@besttrousers) August 30, 2023

Never forget that “con man” is short for “confidence man“, and part of the trick when trying to get other people to believe in you is to first project unerring belief in yourself. Confidence communication is effective in the sharing of ideas, but the real trick to all con men is what they’re selling. Or, more specifically, what the customers are buying. Yes, he’s selling the idea what monetary policy and fiat currencies are all part of a giant scam, a fugazi, because lol money isn’t real. But that’s not what his customers are buying.

What they’re buying is the idea that “I, person who holds this belief, am smarter than Paul Krugman.” I imagine that is probably a pretty enjoyable belief to hold. I would certainly enjoy believing that I am smarter than Paul Krugman, but wanting something doesn’t make it true…which, now that I say it outloud, is a nearly sufficient encapsulation of the entire human condition.

To be clear, this isn’t about Krugman’s accomplishments or status in society inviting censure or criticism from all corners. That’s just the eminence tax. It’s actually, in a weird way, about everything he had to do to acquire that eminence, in the form of arduous education, training, and research production over decades. Because what I think the Hoppe’s of the world are often really selling to their audience is a shortcut. An opportunity to believe that you, the listener, don’t have to go through such trials of human capital acquisition. You just have to hang out with me, parrot a few trivializations of economic thought, cope with a little light reading, and boom, you’re smarter than a Nobel laureate with 275k citations. All available to you for the low low price of believing Paul Krugman doesn’t know how money works.

Don’t wait, supplies are limited.

I agree with Tyler’s assessment that the top performers in pretty much any field of endeavor tend to be incredibly intelligent, regardless of whether that field is broadly associated with intelligence per se. He closes with an open question: in what fields can success belie intelligence?

The older I get, the more complex and messier I find intelligence to be as a construct. If we broaden the concept from intelligence to “competence” or “capability”, however, I think it becomes an even more interesting question. In what fields can we expect to observe top performers who are, in actuality, objectively bad at their jobs?

This is not to say I that I believe there are any fields or jobs where success doesn’t positively correlate with capability. Rather, it is to ask in what fields, if any, is the variance on outcomes is so great as to be able to fully obscure average or expected outcomes within individuals? Framed this way, the fields we should be looking for are those that emphasize high leverage, high risk wagers made with low frequencies. If you’re trying to identify ostensibly high-performers who are, in reality, grossly incompetent in the fields that made them wealthy, look for a series of ex ante negative expected value wagers combined with large initial endowments and foolish leverage ratios. Probalistically most such individuals will be punished accordingly, but given enough players, a highly visible few will hit big with an initial sequence of winners. Their subsequent anointment as virtuosos combined with the sheer weight of their capital will permit them to coast for decades before, if ever, their underlying incompetence catches up with them.

As for specific fields, it’s pretty easy for me to see such dynamics at play in real estate and angel investing. Not to be confused with construction or venture capital, in which “wagers” are made with much higher frequency, lower risk, and, in turn, lower returns on investment. Success in such fields reveal competence for the same reason it reveals them in professional poker: the law of large numbers eventually comes for everyone. Real estate speculation, on the other hand, whether its developed or undeveloped properties is exactly the kind of field where otherwise incompetent boobs, if given a large enough initial endowment and the opportunity to leverage to the hilt, can become giants on the heels of a relatively small number of bets. If they were in the right zip codes for the last few decades, it’s entirely possible to turn a half million into a few billion, without any insight in the slightest. Angel investing, on the other hand, tends to be less about leverage than simply buying lottery tickets: negative ROI, but in a landscape of thousands of angel investors, most of whom will experience losses approaching 100% on their portfolio, someone will fall into a 5000x return on something originally coded in a dorm. To be clear, more capable and competent investors will on average perform better speculating in real estate and early stage start-ups, but the absolutely biggest winners will be chosen more by chance than talent.

A similar question we might ask is what are the fields where the quality of outcomes is orthogonal to the capability being ostensibly being selected for? Allow me to explain through a standard scam story. A stock broker cold calls 100 people, tells each his pick for the week, half he says Stock A will go up, half he tells Stock A will go down. He then calls back the 50 people he correctly prognosticated to. He repeat this several times, until there are 3 people who believe that this previously unknown stranger has correctly predicted future stock prices 5 times in a row, a feat that seems unlikely by chance. Customers think the quality they are observing is forecasting expertise, when in actuality it is the ability to spend 60 hours a week being energetic and charismatic on the phone with strangers. This is, unto itself, a rare ability, just not the one that the customers in question think they are observing evidence of. Related to our earlier story, a strong argument can be made the most important skill in real estate speculation isn’t forecasting, but gaining access to leverage i.e. convincing people to loan you enough money that you can particpate in a casino with a such a high minimum stake.

The moral of the story is we should take care when attributing success to narrow capability or competence. Sometimes it’s because of selection on observability, obscuring the role that luck has played in success. Sometimes its because success demands obscuring the criteria on which it is selected, whether because of legality or simple social disapprobation. We should be doubly careful when considering fields/sectors where success remains somewhat mysterious or even magical. When observers are consistently attributing success to intangible factors, whether its charisma in politicians, inspiration in coaches, instinct in investors, or genius in futurists, your antennae should raise. If we don’t really know why and how someone succeeds, then there is a decent chance they don’t know either.

The Writer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild of America are currently on strike. They are on strike because the highest paid actors are and, as best I can tell, all of the writers were getting entirely screwed by previous deal. A deal, I would note, they negotiated after realizing that they were getting screwed by the previous deal. Screenwriters do not appear to be a position to negotiate particularly good deals.

There’s no shame in that, by the way. This isn’t necessarily about shrewdness. The NFL players union has never been able to negotiate the deals on the level of major league baseball. Sometimes the structure of an industry and a labor market simply favor one side of the bargain. In the case of Hollywood, actors have always struggled with the reservation wages of non-guild members i.e. people will to act in movies for free in the hopes of hitting the jackpot and becoming a big star. I think the writers have a different problem.

The problem for writers is that the studios don’t know anything. They don’t know what they want, who’s good, who’s not. More importantly they don’t know what anybody or anything is worth. As best I can tell, the only thing they know is that paying less is better than paying more.

“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” ― William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade

This is a problem for writers because you can’t collectively bargain on behalf of thousands of writers against an idiot. The writers guild will tell you that they have no choice to bargain with said idiot because that idiot controls the studios and without the studios there is no business.

Ok, I get that. I’m not going to play the “Just make all your movies on an iPhone and distribute them on YouTube card…<whispers> even though a lot of you would be better off making your movies on an iPhone and distributing them independently. What I am saying that you don’t have to negotiate with studios. Plural. You can negotiate with a studio. Singular. Get it?

I’m telling you to break the cartel. DC is getting killed by Marvel. Negotiate a deal with DC. A24 is making the best movies in the world. They are small and they need their output in theaters selling tickets. Negotiate a deal with just them. Will it pay more than Marvel? Of course not. But it will employ 0.3% of your members for 6 weeks and set a precedent for small individual studio deals. Pretty soon that turns into 4.1%. Set the precedent that your guild is here to play hardball and will play the studios off against each other on behalf of your members. Each new deal is a valve that lowers the pressure on your members while simultanesouly ratcheting it up for the hold out studios that aren’t producing anything. If the larger studios attempt to punish those who negotiate deals with the guild, sue them for antitrust. Sue them for $200 billion. When it comes to “cartel-like” behavior, unions have vastly more legal latitude than industry players. It’s your job to take advantage of it.

And while you’re at it, negotiating all these bespoke deals, maybe add in a little flexibility. Maybe be a little more humble about your ability to prognosticate the future and don’t tie your selves to outragenously bad arrangements that leave writers of hit shows walking away with $3000 and a negative account balance. And if and when you realize your deal is this bad, strike sooner. Years sooner. The whole point of a union is gain bargaining power through collective action. If you can’t take action until something has passed the point of complete disaster, that doesn’t speak well of the union.

I am in the somewhat unusual position of generally liking private unions* that can survive on their own merits specifically because they represent another power player that balances the playing field, which leads to more competition, and more competition is better for everyone. But just because a union is a collective entity does not mean that they have to treat the opposition as a de facto collective entity. Play them off against each other. Break them down. Play dirty.

This isn’t show friends. Or even show cartels. This is show business. Bloody start acting like it.

---

*Public unions are a vastly different story and, full disclosure, I tend to be far more skeptical of them.

West Virginia University is proposing a radical restructuring of their university. Did I say restructuring? I meant slashing and buring whole departments:

Is this fiscally driven? Politically motivated? An attack on education? Some sorta boondoggle? Hard to say with any degree of confidence from all the way down here in Clemson, but that won’t stop me from speculating to my heart’s content. With these sorts of proposals on the table, there has arrived no shortage of proposed explanations and blame. All that said, I am quite confident that the final outcome will result in a different university that more than a few other universities will eventually resemble as well (NB: not mine, to be clear. For all of it’s standard pecadilloes, Clemson appears to be pretty good shape. That said, if the fates hand us a couple losing football seasons alongside a QAnon woke-truther voting block winning a set of seats in the state legislature, well, anything becomes possible).

So why is this happening?

A handful of reasonable explanations, in semi-random order

1. The University president is a corrupt and incompetent boob

Feasibility: 4/5 Explanatory power: 2/5

Whoo-buddy. This guy appears to be the kind of known commodity that only a completely checked-out board of trustees would ever put in charge of a university. To wit, while plowing through millions he got caught spending $64k (not a typo) on his “signature” bow ties at his job prior to WVU. He has since burned millions at WVU on all the stuff that corrupt managers spend money on when they can’t put the money directly in their own pockets. Click on the whole thread below, it’s pretty jarring. That said, while this is likely all true, I’m not sure he’s burned enough money to wholly explain cuts this deep and a $45m budget shortfall.

Gordon Gee has a verifiable history of wasteful spending and exorbitantly high compensation compared to his peers.

Not only has Gee's antics wasted tens of millions of dollars in spending … he's also responsible for the deaths of 29 West Virginian coal miners.

🧵A THREAD w/🧾

— Austin 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@AustinDizzy) August 11, 2023

2. West Virginia has turned its back on higher education broadly, the humanities specifically.

Feasibility: 2/5 Explanatory power: 1/5

West Virginia University is no longer interested in educating young people to meaningfully participate in a global community. As usual, students will pay for the parochialism and greed of a bloated administration that feeds itself while starving them. https://t.co/MokyosmuY0

— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) August 11, 2023

Now, before you get ahead of me, I am not saying that the current political climate, obsessions with “woke” professors, and the broad anti-science/scholarship platform of a chunk of the US conservative movement isn’t making this an easier sell to the state legislature. What I am saying is that the $45m budget shortfall is real and graduate programs are often sneaky expensive. Masters programs are generally expected to be revenue positive for a department, and for many schools were often quite lucrative (at least, they were before the demand from foreign students was cut off). If a MA/MS/MFA program is getting cut during a budget crisis, you can be extra sure that program is losing money. Put another way, the university can’t afford to cut any profitable program right now, no matter how much its political gestalt might annoy certain power players. Placed in this context, I am surprised to see the Public Administration department on the chopping block. Those are often fairly popular and profitable masters programs. To be fair, I was originially the most surprised to see the MFA in Creative Writing program was being eliminated. It has a good reputation, such programs are usually relatively low cost to operate, and often can bring in a lot tuition money from students looking for a “consumption” degree. Then I saw that 100% of their MFA students received a full tuition waiver and $16,500 stipend. For that to work when your university is underwater you need those MFA students to teach a lot of undergraduate composition courses, and even then that leaves you with an English Department faculty hardpressed to justify their own numbers.

3. A $45 million shortfall meant WVU couldn’t put off the future another year

Feasibility: 5/5 Explanatory power: 3/5

This is the converstion we’re all actually having, regardless of the various competing framings. There are departments struggling on every campus. Humanities majors in decline, STEM majors in ascendance. For every Arts & Sciences faculty meeting that turned into a “why are their salaries higher than ours/because there is greater demand for our services outside of academia” food fight, there is now an actual existential question on the table, which means this just got real.

Real-er than you might think. Covid exposed the Return-On-Investment fragility of a lot of high priced private colleges, but <raised-eyebrows sotto voce> made your in-state public university look pret-ty good by comparison. Inflation? Inflation is often a boon to universities looking to cut costs because it offers the prospect of a meaningful haircut to the salaries of every member of your tenured faculty, but only if the state legislature plays along and lets you raise tuition in accordance with inflation. The fact that the flagship public university of a state is staring this down at exactly the moment when things are set up for state schools to succeed is perhaps the darkest harbinger of them all.

4. Maybe this is just a West Virginia problem

Feasibility: 5/5 Explanatory power: 4/5

West Virginia’s population shrank 3.2% from 2010 to 2020. The university’s enrollment has shrunk 10% since 2005. It’s hard enough to shrink any public institution’s workforce, let alone one with a tenure system for a sizable portion of it’s employees. Maybe none of this is that complicated. Shrinking populations are hard for government institutions to manage. Politically costly decisions get put off until the lights might actually go out. Choices do eventually get made, however, and when they do, they tend to be drastic.

5. All of the above

Feasibility: 5/5 Explanatory power: 5/5

That’s the best part of this gimmick. It implies I’ve explained the entire West Virginia University dilemma without ever actually committing my reputation to a single excerptable sentence. Come to think of it, I should use this format more often.

There are things that you can, on some level, know are true but not fully internalize until you re-experience that truth multiple times. We all know that there is a seemingly unending supply of free and paid educational instruction available on the internet, from the broadest mathematical pedagogy to instructions for replacing a single grommet on a specific appliance make and model. We are awash in content, much of it explicitly designed to aid in our self-guided educational journeys. You and I already know this, but every few years I feel like I re-live a moment of awe at what is costlessly or near-costlessly made available to anyone with an internet connection.

As you probably know, I am an economist and a sports junkie. In both my professional and sports endeavors, I tend to dabble in scattered interests until I get narrowly obsessed with something. Sometimes this takes the form of a 5 year research project, other times it means I become a hockey goalie for 15 years. For both hockey and most of the technical aspects of my economic research, I am almost exclusively “self-taught”, though I’m not sure that is all that unusual anymore. Woe be unto the applied economist who thinks an afternoon’s cap-and-gown affair means they are done struggling to learn new econometrics.

The corridor of athletic activity available to me has narrowed with injury and age, so like many before me I have turned to golf. At first reluctantly, I’ll admit, but now I am fully on board. I’ve constrained my financial investment, using (until very recently) entirely used equipment, found balls, and opting for less expensive courses. As I’ve progressed, what has once again shocked me is not just how easy it is to acquire instruction, but the incredible nuance and narrowness of that instruction. If something isn’t working for me, I can simply describe the problem I am experiencing into google and a dozen videos diagnosing and remedying the problem will instantly appear. If I want to understand the biomechanics or even physics behind my swing to build intuition, I can watch 100s of hours of videos. If I want advice geared towards players with similar personal characteristics, habits, or preferences, it all appears before me. It is not without exaggeration to suggest that I am receiving better instruction as a 46-year old amateur with one good knee than all but the absolutely most privleged in the world would have received 30 years ago.

This is all the more important when placed in the context of the rising cost of personal instruction. The price of passive instruction may be rapidly approaching zero, but that doesn’t insulate active instruction from Baumol’s cost disease. The cost of having someone’s time all to your self has never been higher, which means if you want your instruction curated, the regulatory device of interpersonal obligation and sunk costs, or simply an upscale babysitter that lets you feel like a good parent while you scroll your phone for an hour, you’re going to pay more than ever.

The only downside to being able to costlessly access our near-infinite Library of Alexandria, if there must be one, is the guilt I feel as I steadily improve. Every increment of improvement is evidence that I chose to get better at golf instead every other dimension of my professional and private self. The double-edged sword of opportunity cost haunts me, reminding me that everything I learn comes at the expense of what I chose not to learn. I could have learned about the China Trade Shock, the latest reason why every identification strategy ever employed in an economics paper is wrong, Mandarin, or how to cook rissotto for my wife.

But I chose golf. There’s probably insight into myself to be be had there, but some lessons are best left unlearned.

A new paper, “Beyond Teachers: Estimating Individual Guidance Counselors’ Effects
on Educational Attainment” by Christine Mulhern observes significant contributions from guidance counselors to student outcomes:

It’s the last bit that rings truest to me: that counselors are most salient to low-achieving and low-income students because they lack other resources, specifically information. As I’ve noted before, information deserts are real, particularly for potential first generation college students. As modern applied economists, we are obsessed with identification and causality, but don’t sleep on distribution of impacts observed. Her finding that “counselors vary substantially in their effectiveness” is worth consideration and further exploration. Where does that variation come from? The excellence of the best counselors or the negative impact of the very worst? I’ve only a handful of experiences interacting with counselors, but my expectation is that it is both. Given that counselors tend to be woefully paid, I expect that they frequently sort across schools on non-pecuniaries i.e. how pleasant it is to work somewhere, which seems like yet another channel through public school students in affluent neighborhoods will find themselve advantaged.

But that’s enough speculative extrapolating for one day. Read the paper.

The EJMR paper presentation dropped at the NBER summer meetings. If you were a 90s kid who loved hacker movies, you were not disappointed. Some are worried it’s an exercise in doxxing (it isn’t). What I think is worth a bit more reflection is the “big reveal” that EJMR toxic posters were not limited to the periphery of the profession. Quite to the contrary, large swaths were matched to the IP addresses of elite universities. Besides disabusing people of the notion that toxic behavior and ideas might decrease with prestige, accomplishment, or intelligence, I think it serves as a healthy reminder that 1) Any anonymous message board will devolve into a cesspool if left unmoderated (see Law, Gresham’s) and, 2) Any status game can devolve into a negative sum game if left unmoderated.

Academia is a status tournament

From a purely careerist standpoint, academia is a long run status tournament built around rankings and tiers. It starts from the moment you apply to graduate schools, hoping to get into the highest ranked school. Some are admitted, some are not. Those admitted are sorted across tiers of schools. Once in a school there is the (sometimes true) perception that students are internally ranked, sorting to faculty advisors, projects, and data access. Some graduate, some leave early with a masters degree, some leave with nothing. Those who graduate are sorted into academic and non-academic jobs. Those that are pushed by the faculty on to the academic market sort into better and worse schools. The best prospects are swapped across the best schools (it’s generally uncouth to hire your own students, at least immediately). Once they are established in tenure track positions, the tournament continues in its least compressed, but also most heightened form, as scholars conduct research, write papers, tour seminars, apply to workshops and conferences, submit to journals, apply for grants and fellowships, and generally fight their way towards tenure. Tenure, to be noted, is a stage of this tournament, but it’s not the end (the end happens at funerals and Nobel Prize ceremonies.)

“You aren’t tenured by your department. You’re tenured by the profession.” – academic proverb

The tournament is subtle and unrelenting. For those who seek to climb the ladder or remain on top, the strategies are more varied than you might expect. It is, point of fact, not all about research productivity, scholarly contributions, and intellectual advancements. It’s also about public goods, including data curation, lab management, feedback on other people’s research, journal editing, idea sharing, even referee reports. From the most cyncical careerist point of view, however, it remains a status game, which means what matters at the end of the day is not how good you are, but how good other people think you are. Or how good people think other people think you are. Or how good…you get the k-level reasoning idea.

Can you see where the trouble seeps into this tweedy swamp of ambition and ego? The inherent subjectivity of it. The biases some of us have, the biases all of us have. The dark arts of manipulating image, conversation, and public opinion. The herding around ideas. The bureaucratic and scholarly gamesmanship that can hold back one paper and elevate another. Every story your paranoid lizard brain can dream up explaining why a node in the tournament decision tree turned against you and in another’s favor.

Which brings me back to EJMR.

I’ll make a statement you don’t have to believe: I expected the worst behavior to be at the good schools. Why? Because they are embroiled in the most ruthless, unforgiving level of the tournament, and most of them are losing. That’s not a hypothesis, that’s just a mathematical reality. For every 25 students in a top PhD program, I’d guess 10-12 end up in academia. Of those, 6-10 are at an R1. Of those, 1-2 are in a top school. Of those, maybe 1 gets tenure at said top school.

From the perspective of the most competitive souls, that’s 96% who are losers. Not in the absolute sense, but in the “at some stage of the game someone else was chosen over them” sense. In the relative, zero-sum, status seeking sense. That doesn’t mean 96% of academics are angry, but it does make for a large pool of potentially angry people. People who, in a moment of weakness, might feed that dark tapeworm of the soul whose only sustenance is the denigration and suffering of people they envy. That desperate willingness to believe the only reason you didn’t “win” is because your competitors were vile and dishonorable? That’s a tapeworm buffet.

The dark tapeworm is an emotional parasite, isolated and lonely in it’s host. EJMR, in its toxic final form, allowed thousands of depressed, angry tapeworms to find community and feed each other. To affirm the belief festering within each of them that they were cheated. That they would have gotten the job, published, admitted, invited, tenure. That they would have won just one more round, and risen just one more level, if it wasn’t for them. The cheaters.

It’s not surprising that the targets of EJMR hate were disproportionately (but not exclusively) women and people of color. I’m not going to tour you through the misogny and racism on EJMR, but I will note that it’s a good reminder that intelligence isn’t the prophylactic against grotesque beliefs and behavior that you might hope it is. Quite the contrary, it’s almost (almost) heartwarming to see that status envy and anger turn everyone into the same monsters, looking to attack and blame the same people, whether you’re an unemployed trucker in Arkansas worried about making rent or a 5th year PhD student at Harvard nervously managing the shame of having to settle for an industry job that starts at $190k a year.

Returing to the thesis of this post, let’s not forget that tournaments are perfectly fine. They can even be positive sum games. A golf tournament only has one winner, but the more honorable the competitors are, the more they collectively raise the status and opportunities of others in their tournament, the higher the quality of their collective product, which means a bigger prize pool for everyone. There’s a reason the prize money isn’t winner-take-all: they know that a certain amount of cooperation amongst competitors is necessary for the tournament as a whole to thrive.

And that’s why this paper is important. Beyond shining a light on grotesque and dangerous behavior, it’s a wake-up call that the status tournament in academic economics is out of control and veering into negative sum territory. EJMR got a foothold because students and faculty had questions nobody felt they could ask or answer without anonymity. A secret curriculum. A gnawing, desperate fear that you don’t understand the rules. How do I get in the NBER? Can I use the same data as another student? Can I renege on a job if a better one is offered? Does journal X count for tenure? EJMR thrived and achieved critical mass. But that critical mass, combined with anonymity and the abandoning of content moderation, became a breeding ground for emotional tapeworms and here we are.

So how do we kill it off? Well, we can go after the most aggressive and disgusting posters on the website, but that feels a bit like attacking a forest fire with a fire extinguisher. In the long run, I suspect the solutions will be public goods. Not unlike undermining the labor supply of a terrorist group by supplying clean water and healthcare, I think the profession needs to start providing the public goods that were the original EJMR lifespring. Journal submission records. Hiring decision transparency (i.e. when a job is filled or still considering candidates). Invitation, acceptance, and rejection statuses in real time. Repositories of course notes and slides. A hidden curriculum made visible.

And, yes, an anonymous message board (or a identified board with a special anonymous section), but with strict content moderation. We know it can be done. You don’t see any of the same filth on statalist or the economics subreddit. We have professional associations, including the AEA, whose sole purpose is to provide public goods. I’m not going to dissuade anyone, particularly those attacked, from going after EJMR operators or posters through legal channels. But it we want to rip it out of the earth, root and vine, I see no better way than to beat it in the marketplace. And in doing so, we might even smooth over the rough edges of the status tournament we’re trying to build lives and careers in.

Because maybe the collective production of new knowledge at the bleeding edge of economics could even be a positive sum game?

I don’t know if Team Transitory (in which I count myself, though I included Fed intervention in my expectations) gets to take home the final prize regarding inflation. Certainly the timeline was imperfect. It’s good that we’re debating who and what gets credit for a soft landing, though, since it means that Covid recovery policies haven’t likely mired us in a decade of heavy inflation (let alone hyperinflation). No, that doesn’t mean that the last round of payments wasn’t a net welfare loss, but let’s do our best to be sympathetic to the possibility that one-too-many is preferable to one-too-few when trying to bubblewrap your economy through the worst global pandemic in a century.

I bring this up because we will no doubt continue to suffer through “If inflation is under control, why is _____ so expensive” takes for a few year. I look forward to entirely ignoring these takes, with the occasional link back to this post when the commenter is sufficiently thoughtful (or annoying) to engage. And I just want to remind everyone that a lot of goods and services continue to steadily rise in price, not just because of the opportunity cost of labor (i.e. Baumol’s disease), but because of the opportunity cost of death.

We value human life more than at any previous point in human history (I haven’t consulted actuarial tables, or even googled it, but remain confident this is true). There are a lot of things we used to produce cheaply by throwing labor at the problem until it was built or everyone was dead (see Giza, the Pyramids of). You don’t have to go back nearly so far to appreciate the phenomenon.

Have you ever seen The French Connection? It has the single greatest car chase in history. It’s amazing. How did they do it? By not giving a damn about anyone or anything, including the actors in the cars and the unknowing civilians on the street. The film with arguably the greatest long-form stunt set-piece was produced for a total of $1.8 million (12.8 in 2023 dollars). Not that scene, mind you, the whole movie. It was cheap in dollars, but they had to put hundreds of people at risk to do it. Just because a miracle occurred and no one died doesn’t mean it was enormously expensive in turns of human risk (including unconsented risk).

Did you see John Wick 4? It has the best chase scene I’ve seen since the French Connection (at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, no less). Priscillia Page, without question my single favorite film writer going these days, interviewed the director, and brilliant action movie obsessive that she is, got him to discuss in extensive detail the months of planning, the small city of professionals, and the enormous investment that went into mitigating risk at every possible turn for just that scene. All in service of John Wick driving the wrong way on the world’s most famous roundabout and then running through traffic. John Wick 4 cost $100 million to film precisely because it places so much value on every human being directly and indirectly involved.

just dropped the first part of my interview with Chad Stahelski, one of my absolute favorite filmmakers https://t.co/BPpjTRbjGk

— priscilla page (@BBW_BFF) June 17, 2023

Does anyone seriously believe movies are more expensive because of decades of inflation? Of course not. We know, at some level that the products have become more costly to produce and that that is reflected in the price facing consumers. I remain an unrepentant YIMBY who thinks that the key to the future of the US economy is lowering the costs of rebuilding our infrastructure, but we would do well to remember that the dollar costs of the past are no longer attainable because we are (gratefully) no longer comfortable throwing human suffering at a problem instead of money. This doesn’t let us off the hook from permitting, NIMBY, and public union gridlock, but we would do well endure rising costs with a bit more alacrity.

Technological innovation means the total cost of most things has gone down. That total cost includes dollars and physical risk. Our willingness to tolerate physical risk has gone down so much that, even in our world of technological miracles, there are some products that the dollar cost we are left with has gone up. But that’s not inflation. Or even a problem. It’s literally the best thing about living in the modern world.