It’s the 3-year anniversary of EWED. Thanks for reading and sharing. Our blog has been cited by The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Reason Magazine, Marginal Revolution, and many others.
The following posts are in order, starting with the entry that got the most page views so far in 2023.
“Why Tenure” Mike Makowsky on academic tenure and the unintended consequences of taking it away.
“Steal My Paper Ideas!” James offered the internet research ideas that he does not have time to pursue.
“ChatGPT Cites Economics Papers That Do Not Exist” I wrote about a problem with ChatGPT hallucinations. This idea has now been more formally explored in my working paper available on SSRN (which has been trending in top-10 download lists on SSRN throughout the summer). The point is not just that GPT will create fake citations. The important take-away is that GPT can fabricate falsehoods of all kinds that sound serious. Citations are easy to count and verify. Once we have a quantitative measure, we can also demonstrate that accuracy declines when a topic is less general.
If you ever want to know what people were saying about my generation when we were fresh out of college, watch an SNL sketch called “The Millennials”. Now we are just the parents at the parent-teacher conferences. Our jams play at the grocery store at 8am (Wonderwall, anyone?). And Jeremy is documenting the state of our finances.
For maybe three purchases of celery, bought in 2023 from different stores, the fibers or strings in them were so tough that we could not chew them to point of chopping them into small enough pieces to comfortably swallow. We would chew away for several minutes, masticating and swallowing most of what we bit off from the stalk, but this left a tangle of intact strings in our mouths, to be spit out. Prior to 2023, we never recall having a batch of celery that was simply inedible like this. For at least one batch we were so disgusted that we just threw it out.
I tried steaming a couple of stalks for a minute or so in microwave. This turned most of the celery into unappealing mush, whilst doing the stalks no apparent harm.
For the most recent bunch of unchewable celery, I finally got wise and harnessed the vast power of the internet to solve this problem. I did not have to invoke ChatGPT, so I was perhaps spared an AI hallucination regarding string theory. A simple DuckDuckGo search (this search engine respects your privacy, unlike You Know Who) found there are at least three reasonable ways to strip the offending strings out of a celery stalk. This article from Kitchen Ambitions does a great job describing these three ways:
( 1 ) Carefully snap the stalks in half the correct way (it is obvious when you think about it; or see the article), leaving the two halves connected by the strings. Then you can peel the strings down the lengths of the stalks. This is the easiest and cleanest way. I found I usually had to do a second round of snapping and peeling to get the rest of the strings.
Or
( 2 ) At one end of the stalk, use sharp knife to tease up the ends of several strings at a time, and peel them down the length of the stalk.
Or
( 3 ) A brute force approach is to use a vegetable/carrot peeler. This does work, but removes more of good celery along with the strings.
Hurray for economical life hacks – – the internet knows everything.
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.
“Major cuts in faculty, academic programs could hit West Virginia University as financial concerns loom” by Maddie Aiken, Pittsburgh Gazette
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
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.
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
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 universitycan’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.
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 paperpresentation 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 thek-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 communityand 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 secretcurriculum. 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?
At a Chinese restaurant, I got a fortune that said, “Success is in starting a new project at work.” It struck me as very funny, and it resonates with other people on Twitter.
Starting a new project at work does not translate to success in academia. The danger is usually in starting too many projects and finishing too few.
Starting a new research project, whether alone or with coauthors, is exciting. You fall in love with a new idea.
The hard part is sticking with that idea until the very end of the publication process. This is more comparable to staying married. The project will see you at your worst, and you will discover that the project is not as wonderful as it seemed initially. You might end up re-writing the manuscript several times, years after the initial infatuation has worn off.
Academics do need to start projects. It is important to start the right projects. A reason to not start too many projects is to preserve time for the best work. A downside to being overloaded is that you might have to say no to a new project when an actual good opportunity comes along.
In my post on the Beatles documentary Get Back, I observed the way that the bandmates start new songs together. It reminded me of coauthors convincing each other to start a new project.
Their creative process resembles co-authoring a research paper. When Paul is working out a song and humming through places he hasn’t worked the lyrics out yet, that reminds me of the early drafts of a paper. You don’t have to have the whole Introduction written. The hook of a song is a bit like the main result of a research paper. Persuading yourself and your coauthor that you have a project worth finishing is the first step. Coauthors have unspoken agreements on how the project is going to proceed. The tacit knowledge of the collaborative process is one of the most important things you can learn in graduate school.
This quote from Rules of Thumb was surprising: “None of this is part of a grand plan. At any moment, I work on whatever then interests me most. Coming up with ideas is the hardest and least controllable part of the research process. It is somewhat easier if you have broad interests.” He goes on to say: “I sometimes fear that because I work in so many different areas, each line of work is more superficial than it otherwise would be. Careful choice of co-authors can solve this problem to some extent, but not completely.”
He really refutes my fortune cookie with this line, “Deciding which research projects to pursue is the most difficult problem I face in allocating my time.” Success is about starting the right projects and no others.
Many of us desire at times to overcome insomnia, anxiety, brain fog, depression, or some other mental/emotional hindrance. Some common interventions include healthy lifestyle changes like better diet, drink more fluids, and exercise (all of which we should just do anyway), and more expensive therapies such as counseling or doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals. These all have their places, but (in keeping with an economics blog) I’d like to call attention to another treatment modality which seems quite cost-effective and harmless*.
It has been known for decades that the electrochemical activity in our brains occurs in measurable waves. “Alpha waves” are pretty well known as a state associated with calm attention, and can be attained by meditation. These waves operate at a frequency of about 10 cycles per second, or 10 Hertz (Hz). Deeper meditation and sleep are associated with slower frequencies, while intense attention and problem-solving thought operate at faster speeds.
Ideally, your brain would automatically generate the right waves for the situation you are in, and for the most part it does. However, for some folks, their brains don’t make the most effective waves much of the time, and even for more normal folks, it can be helpful to tweak it now and then.
Ways To Shape Your Brainwaves
There are three main avenues for you to manipulate your brainwaves. These are indirect methods, neurofeedback/biofeedback, and direct stimulation. Some indirect ways are to practice various types of mindfulness or meditation, which usually move you towards alpha waves, or intense exercise can lead to alpha in the subsequent rest session.
A direct route, which involves training yourself, is to don some sort of device on your head that measures brainwaves or a correlate such as cerebral blood-flow or heartbeat, and feeds back to let you know what your brain state is. It turns out that humans (without being to explain how) are able to learn to shift their brain states if they are given feedback on whether they are getting closer or further from some desired target. Consumer devices are available in the $400-$1400 price range that can do this with varying degrees of sophistication and requiring various degrees of training and effort. More extensive and targeted training of specific frequencies in particular spots in the brain is done in the offices of neurofeedback clinicians, often as an adjunct to talk therapy. The neurofeedback can calm the animal-level fear/panic/emotional noise, such that the client can relate therapeutically with the counselor. This can be very helpful to address specific pathologies including depression (and here), anxiety, PTSD , reactive attachment disorder, and maybe even autism, but naturally it is expensive to go through a course of say ten sessions with a highly trained professional. Unfortunately, you cannot count on routine coverage by insurance.
Direct Audio-Visual Stimulation
A less-expensive way to achieve a desired brainwave state is to present yourself with (say) 10 Hz stimulation of light and sound. The theory is that your brain waves become “entrained” along with these external stimuli. Hence the name audio-visual stimulation or audio-visual entrainment (AVE).
There are many YouTube videos claiming to have embedded alpha or other frequencies. These videos often have many comments from appreciative users claiming calming or other effects, so they are certainly worth a try. The price is right. However, research studies cast doubt on whether sound alone is very effective at creating specific brainwaves. Light stimulation has been shown to evoke e.g., alpha waves.
What has been shown to work well are systems where you don headphones for the sound and lightweight “goggles” (thin opaque glasses with LEDs on the inside). Studies have shown this to help with ADD, anxiety, depression, and migraines. Perhaps the most widely produced AVE devices are the “DAVID” models from MindAlive. MindAlive is headed by David Siever, who has spearheaded numerous studies of AVE.
The AVE devices can quickly move you into desired brain states, in the comfort of your home, for just a modest (~ $400) up front cost. You can use them with your eyes open or closed. They are perhaps more usable for children and seniors than the neurofeedback modalities, where the client has to engage with some feedback and learn to make their brainwaves go where they should. [1] With AVE, you just sit back and relax and let the sound and light carry you along. However, AVE is something of a blunt instrument, stimulating the auditory and visual and linked centers in the brain, whereas regular neurofeedback can train say two specific spots in the brain to two different specific frequencies, and has more enduring effects.
My Experience with AVE
I have owned a DAVID for many years. I and my family members have used it off and on, when we happened to feel a need for it. We all find that straight down the middle 10 Hz alpha sessions make us feel just plain good, positive, calm, etc. This can help cure anxiety (mind too fast, hard to focus) or sluggishness (mind too slow). It only takes about ten minutes exposure to the 10 Hz to get us in “the zone.” [2] On most mornings, when I wake up feeling OK anyway, I don’t bother with it. But it is good to have it around as needed. We find the feeling from an AVE session sticks with us for a number of hours.
AVE has been shown to help with seasonal asset disorder (SAD). That makes sense because SAD is about light deprivation. I had a bit of SAD when we lived in a house with few windows, and tried my DAVID for that. It did help, but it turned out to be more satisfactory and less bother to just use a big bright sunlamp at the breakfast table.
We find the slower AVE sessions useful to combat occasional insomnia (where mind is anxious or racing) and even to help with pain. A month ago I had some serious pain from an injury, that was so bad I could not sleep. These slow programs (3.5-7 Hz) did help to divert and relax my brain and help me get to sleep. Again, the effects can be enduring. If we have used a really slow, say 3.5 Hz, program to knock us out at night, we often are sluggish the next morning, so we reset our brains with some 10 Hz alpha. For sleep, I usually prefer a 7-7.8 Hz protocol that does nicely slow and relax my brain, but does not leave me groggy in the morning.
The literature and the operator’s manual recommend slightly faster waves, e.g. 14 Hz “beta” waves as a normal morning waker-upper, like a cup of coffee. These faster “Brain Brightening” protocols have shown benefits for seniors. My family does not necessarily find 14 Hz enjoyable. It sometimes feels feels tiring.
One the other hand, the 14 Hz protocol can sometimes be quite helpful as a pick-me-up. Early one winter, I was feeling sluggish and low, not wanting to get out and exercise, and was nearly ten pounds over my normal weight. It probably had something to do with an extended road trip (stress, food) plus Thanksgiving (food) and the reduced sunlight hours, including daylight savings time ending, plus a stretch of cloudy/rainy weather. I did use a sun lamp to get more photons into my head, but that didn’t cut it. I decided to push myself and use the 14 Hz flashing lights, instead of the comfy 10 Hz, to get more of an activation. It actually worked out well. Three mornings in a row with the 14 Hz, and I felt “reset” to a more energetic, optimistic me. So score one for beta waves.
A couple of us have experimented even faster programs, around 18-20 Hz. That gave an unpleasant buzz, which persisted. I think if I had to drive a truck all night, it might be useful for keeping me awake and alert. After these high frequency sessions I soon used the 10 Hz program to reset to my nice smooth alpha. It is nice to know that if I go too high or low on an entrainment session, I can always recover by using the 10 Hz alpha session [3].
At any rate, I am a satisfied customer and I think this is a cost-effective treatment modality for amateurs to use, or for therapists to prescribe.
* If someone is susceptible to seizures, they should avoid any device like this with repetitive flashing lights.
ENDNOTES
[ 1 ] There is a newer, less-studied technique called LENS that kind of bridges between classical neurofeedback and AVE and trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). “Transcranial” means the stimulation is from coils outside your skull. Straight TMS is approved by the FDA for treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), migraines, and smoking cessation. With LENS, the brain waves are monitored with electrodes, and this information is used to shape special synchronized electromagnetic stimulation of the brain (from outside the scalp). This stimulation is keyed to the existing brainwaves, which may make it particularly effective, e.g. for reducing anxiety and helping with PTSD and traumatic brain injury (e.g., from military explosion exposure). This LENS technique is also called direct neurofeedback, in contrast to the standard neurofeedback, where the client must actively muster the altered brainwaves via training.
[ 2 ] Many of the canned protocols in the DAVID devices begin with about ten minutes of transitional sound and light pulses. These “dissociation” segments are intended to help users transition from their starting brain states and move to the final target frequencies. But we find these segments to be an unnecessary waste of time. We fire up a program, do something else for 8-9 minutes, and then don the headphone and glasses and dive right into the desired frequency, with only 1-2 minutes of dissociation.
One other user tip is that there is some virtue in starting with the lights a little dim (which I do by either playing with the Intensity setting, or by holding the goggles an inch away from my face), and by tapering down the brightness at the end of a session as you reenter the real world. With the David, you can push a pair of buttons to have it automatically ramp down light and sound intensity over the course of a minute or so.
[ 3 ] There is some evidence that super-fast AVE, at 40 Hz, stimulates cerebral bloodflow which can do marvelous things with the brain, such as mitigate Alzheimer’s degeneration.
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
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.
Economist Writing Every Day 