The Writers Guild of America is on strike because everyone in Hollywood is unhappy. Nobody is making enough money or getting hired for long enough stretches. Complaints appear fairly universal as well, from showrunners and producers all the way down to the newest hire. In fact the only thing that doesn’t appear to be running a shortage is blame.

I know the complexity of trying to collectively bargain such an enormous industry means that any deal struck, even if it starts out relatively efficient, will be a bad deal for someone within 3-5 years. That’s just the nature of things when you’re trying to forecast both technology and the shape of multiple labor markets. It’s an impossible task. That said, I think we can boil down a lot of what has gone to hell to a single problem. Streaming is currently the dominant platform and streaming studios don’t pay points i.e. profit share on the back end.

Of course streaming services aren’t the totality of the television and movie business, but they are sufficiently dominant that the lack of points, and the problems downstream of it, have fundamentally altered both the labor market and the incentives facing the people creating entertainment. Writers, directors, producers, and even some of the bigger actors have routinely accepted a percentage share (i.e. percentage points, get it?) of the profits of an enterprise as a portion of their compensation. Blumhouse films famously got bigger name actors to join their small genre projects for scale (i.e. guild actor minimum wage) by contracting them for a sizable profit share. It’s a great way of mitigating risk for small studios while also attracting actors with the possibility of a big pay day.

Profit sharing is about far more than just mitigating risk, though. They are about aligning incentives. Everyone cares that much more about the quality of the product when their eventual payout is directly connected to success. Aligning incentives is both exceptionally important and difficult in contexts where quality is difficult to assess and forecast at intermediate stages of production. The only thing you need to know about Hollywood is a cliche that I choose to attribute to legendary screenwriter William Goldman who always asserted, with regards to the entertainment business, “Nobody knows anything.”“

“Nobody knows anything” means that 1) forecasting success or failure of a project is difficult, but just as importantly, that all of the really important information is tacit. There’s somone who knows what the best bit of dialogue is, the perfect costume, who to cast as the best friend and the villain, how to frame the shot, how to light the third scene, how to make the write kind of fake snow, what kind of bagels to get, etc. Someone knows, but that someone probably couldn’t explain why they know what they know, couldn’t pass that information on, couldn’t identify the underlying factors in audience and historical film data. They just know. And if you want them to take the optimal action, and make the necessary committments and sacrifices to make the film the best it can be, they need to have incentives in place to ensure that they are rewarded for infusing their tacit knowledge within the final product.

Those incentives are currently broken in the film and television business.

As best I can tell, what broke them was that a) streaming is a lot less profitable than Netflix, Disney, et al. hoped, and b) out of a desire to keep internal data private, compensation contracts could no longer include an “outcome” based component i.e. profit sharing.

Streaming services make money from subscriptions. How an individual production contributes to those subscriptions has a relationship to data associated with that production, but streaming companies have thus far been unwilling to release data associated with individual productions. Yes, Netflix started releasing a little bit of data, but nothing compared to previous entertainment paradigms. Ticket sales, nielson ratings, and advertising always allowed for intuitive mechanisms for profit sharing via points and residual checks. In order to keep their data private, firms have opted instead to move to simple compensation structures, including before-after compensation where a writer, producer, or director is paid when a project is started and when it is deemed completed.

Receiving roughly half of your pay when a an amorphous product, like a film script, is “done” is a really terrible idea for the simple reason that the writer has far less incentive to make the script “good” and far more incentive to make it acceptable to person who must stamp it “done” so they can get paid. How do you get that stamp? By doing whatever they tell you to do. The problem is, they don’t know what the script needs to be good, that’s why they aren’t a writer. They don’t have the tacit knowledge. The writer has it, but fighting to infuse that knowledge in the script does nothing to improve their pay, in fact, it only delays it.

These breakdowns in incentives are all over Hollywood and you can feel it in the films and shows coming out. Scripts feel half-assed, as if written by disconnected employees scattered to the winds of Zoom and a California housing crisis. Performers seem unsure of what to do within a menagerie of green screen and tennis balls on sticks. Audio is famously terrible in movies now.

So how do they fix it? Well, I’m not even sure who “they” are one answer might be found in the Blumhouses, A24s, and every troupe of actors and filmmakers who keep working together. Shrink the number of people involved to the point where you solve incentives not with perfect contracts but with longer term relationships. Repeated interactions have always been a great way of aligning incentives. When credit can more naturally flow to smaller number of people, when working together over and over is the best way to create job security, all of the other problems become easier to solve.

What about the revenue problem though? Well, maybe ticket sales never recover, and streaming never prints money the way advertising did, but modern technology also means you can make a show or film with a smaller number of people than ever before, which means every single one of those people could feasibly participate in profits. Maybe the answer is to simply recreate the old model externally to the big studios, at the earliest stages of coordination, recruiting and writing, before distribution or marketing even enter the equation. Smaller teams, direct participation in profits. Smaller movies and shows. Smaller can be better, just ask anyone who’s ever tasted a beer in the last 20 years.

Maybe the WGA (and the directors and actors guilds too, for that matter), should be thinking a little bit less about what they can negotatiate from the studios, and more more about how much it can cut them out of pre-distribution entirely. Vertically integrating the film and television business is not the only possible state of the world. In fact, given the current state of technology and the broader labor market, it’s entirely feasible that one of the main reasons that industry has collapsed into such a small number of firms is that guild contracts grant cost advantages to being enormous, even in the case where much of the companies in question have next to zero knowledge about the creative side of their industry. There may very well come a time where a million micro-studios, teams of writers, actors, directors, and production staff simply work to make their products and then sell ex-post to the highest of the content-starved bidders. There was a time with the Shane Blacks of the world got to enjoy the benefits of bidding wars for their scripts. Maybe the WGA,DGA, and SAG can bring those back. Does anyone have Sotheby’s number?

Or maybe the world collapses into a hellscape of reality-influencer tik tok stars and I wholly divorce myself from entertainment entirely. Bird watchers seem happy. Maybe I could get into bird watching.

The president of my university said that he wants the following strategy publicized.

The purpose of an admission application is to find good matches between students and the university. We want the application to be easy for people to complete, but to filter out those with low conscientiousness and those who aren’t a good mission fit. If the application is arbitrarily difficult or convoluted, then we’ll lose great applicants. But, if it’s not costly enough, we’ll attract students who are closer to indifferent about attending. Those are the freshmen who don’t return for their sophomore year.

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My kids go to public school, and I love our Parent Teacher Organization (PTO). I’m going to keep this focused on one wonderful bit of collective action.

Students need to show up on the first day of school in August with certain school supplies. For example, first graders must have a 24-count crayon box. The school posts a list of supplies that parents must pay for. One option is to go to the store yourself to get all these items.

Or the PTO will do it for you if you pay a fee online. So, you don’t go shopping at all, and your kid just walks into school and the supplies are on their desk.

The savings from going through the PTO, in both time and money, are massive. The savings in the time of parents are more important than the bulk discount factor. (If you’d like to consider what that monetary bulk discount is, see this form from a similar program in Pennsylvania https://www.ht-sd.org/uploaded/District/Schools/Central/2013-2014_SY/PTO_-_School_Supplies_5th_Grade_2014.pdf)

One reason for sharing this is just to spread this particular idea, although many PTOs around the country already do it. It requires some volunteers to coordinate activity.

In my experience, collecting money and handling new office supplies is something American volunteers will do. There are certain jobs that seemingly always have to be paid positions in any organization, because no one wants to do it no matter how warm the fuzzies are.

Another reason for mentioning it is as just one of thousands of examples of how my life is improved by the networks of volunteers and local leaders that I live near. These kinds of benefits do not automatically follow from people living in proximity to each other, but they are one of the potential benefits of clustering together geographically.

The UN estimates this milestone event – when the number of people in urban areas overtook the number in rural settings – occurred in 2007.

https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization#number-of-people-living-in-urban-areas

Gifs are really cool. They’re like the animated photos on loop from Harry Potter. They’re also great for teaching. You can show students exactly what you want them to see over, and over, and over. They don’t need to navigate to the right part of the video, wait for ads, or worry about whether the particular grammar of a book is opaque. They can just look and think.

For example: Why are prices higher than 3 years ago? We can use the Aggregate Supply- Aggregate Demand model (AS-AD) to help us think about it. Prices have increased because demand has grown faster than long-run aggregate supply (LRAS).

At first, the SRAS, which does the work of finding the long run equilibrium, increased rightward. This is because we’ve had a decade of low, stable inflation and inflation expectations were anchored at a low level. Greater demand was met with greater output. But, as AD continued to grow and people began to confront the unavoidable reality of scarcity, SRAS began moving upward, increasing the price to ration the quantity demanded.*

See the below gif. I made it in Stata and ezgif.com. It’s pretty cool.

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Joy got tenure! Texas took away tenure? North Carolina is trying to take away tenure. It’s become, at least to some, an open question as to why we grant faculty lifetime contracts after a certain benchmark of their career. So I’m going to answer it.

But first a point of clarification. I think we sometimes confuse benefits with reasons. Intellectual freedom is a benefit of tenure, a byproduct possibly, but I don’t think that is a reason. There is no shortage of industries and fields that would benefit from creative, intellectual, and artistic freedom, but we don’t tenure them. Just ask any of the major film directors of the last 50 years how much job security they’ve enjoyed and they’ll laugh out loud. I think it is pretty safe to say we’d probably observe greater artistic integrity in a variety of fields if people could fall back on a lifetime contract, albeit integrity coupled with some dropoff in productivity. Tenure remains a rare commodity across labor contracts.

So why tenure in academia?

To become an academic researcher is to make an enormous upfront investment in human capital, often remaining in school until someone’s late 20s, even early 30s. These are people who often have a relatively high opportunity cost of time, even early in their careers, and they do this while also staring down the possibility of technical obsolescence within a decade of graduation. An academic, if they make a major contribution, often knows it will happen before they turn 40 (30 if they’re a mathematician). This is not a trivial endeavor or decision.

Building a critical mass of high quality employees when such high opportunity costs underlie the requisite labor pool presents a financial challenge. In the face of these costs, as much as half of academic compensation takes the form of non-pencuniary benefits (lifestyle, freedom, flexibility, status, etc). And there’s one more problem, and it might be the biggest. For those in more technical fields, the full career’s worth of (discounted) wages would have to be collected in their first 8 years on the job. To put it another way, for the academic labor market to clear absent these non-pecuniary benefits, salaries would have to double or more.

There should be little doubt in your mind that all but a tiny fraction of universities would much prefer to pay in non-pecuniaries, clinging to solving their fiscal puzzle simply by letting their gaggle of weirdo nerds hang out in their clubhouses. Here’s the rub, though: you can’t front-load non-pecuniaries. If you know you’re going to peak at 34, you’re going to want to get paid now because nobody trusts an employer to keep paying them out of “loyalty”. Just ask every professional athlete who’s ever blown out their knee how well the franchise took care of them after their elite attributes were taken from them by the dark forces of randomness and age.

So how have universities solved this quandary? By paying their very best employees a lifetime contract, an annuity bundled with all those precious non-pecuniary benefits that blessedly never show up as an expenditure in a budget.

Sure, this story applies a bit more directly to departments whose faculty enjoy outside options in the private sector and government. But still, ten years studying literature and rhetoric remains an investment in human capital with a significant opportunity cost that most universities would be loathe to compensate for in pure wages. Better again to bundle a lifetime annuity with all those non-pecuniaries, especially since the kind of people who want to study esoteric subjects with little outside market value are exactly the kind of people who are willing to even less of their total compensation in wages.

Tenure exists to balance the books in a peculiar labor market. So what happens if tenure goes away?

Well, first off universities will have to start paying more money if they want to hold their incoming labor pool historically consistent. More of those wages will have to be frontloaded as well. I have a hard time imagining the state legislature is going to increase the line item for universities to accomodate a massive increase in the wage bill. More likely the quality of talent coming in will drop, especially for technical fields.

Second, university faculty employment will become more vulnerable to the preferences of their peers, students, and to a lesser degree the state legislature. Sure, once a year some poor soul will find themselves in the crosshairs of guileless politician desperate to sacrifice an academic for media attention, but the reality is most academics will gallop unnoticed within the herd. No, the real problem will be when students decide they don’t like you. Or your colleagues decide they don’t like you. Woe unto the professor who finds themselves outside of the political zeitgeist. It’s funny to me to that politicians in Texas and North Carolina seem to think that tenure is what’s protecting liberal professors. Liberal professors are the median voter in these little quasi-democracies. It’s the conservatives who are vulnerable. Or, more accurately, the most conservative faculty member in each department.

When you imagine departments purging colleagues, what sort of department do you imagine? Chemistry? Mechanical Engineering? Marketing?

Of course not. It’s obviously a humanities-adjacent department. Which brings us to perhaps the greatest irony of eliminating tenure: it will take the biggest hotbeds of godless communist socialist conspirators and make them even more liberal.

Now, I have little doubt that universities will strategically respond with contract designs that offer quasi-tenure. They will do everything they can to reconstitute the lifetime annuity compensation structure that keeps them competitive and fiscally afloat. But you can only do so much and there seems little doubt that job security absent tenure will decline, which means wages will have to increase some, particularly for fields without the kinds of large grants for which universities are desperate.

There’s no real workaround, no panacea for losing job security that protects you from political and intellectual isolation. Perhaps the biggest effect of eliminating tenure will be to make faculties more homogenous, more paranoid, more boring, and yes, I’m talking to you state legislatures, more liberal. Eliminating tenure will, at the margin push the most valuable, most talented, and most conservative faculty away, from red states to blue states. Those left behind will, at the margin, focus more on teaching than research, activism than grants, politics than science. When red states eliminate tenure, they are taking a significant step towards conjuring exactly the bogeyman that has thus far only existed in their imagination: an institution dedicated towards indocrinating students into a monolithic political worldview contrary to their own.

When your grandchildren come home from college, they’ll explain that is what we call “ironic“.

I’m not arrogant enough to believe I can actually solve Twitter in under an hour, but let’s walk through the product and see if we gain any clarity.

Twitter is a microblogging site. Users get value from 1) access to content produced by others, 2) the ability to produce original content and place it in front of others, and 3) the ability to act as the middle-man, sharing content produced by others. It’s principal advantage in the marketplace is that it has already achieved a critical mass of users, such that content placed on Twitter has more value than content placed on competitor sites. It’s biggest disadvantage is no one is sure how to optimally generate revenue from their user base.

For a moment’s perspective, Twitter can comfortably be expected to earn $4 billion /year in advertising revenue if it just held steady, which isn’t peanuts. The problem is that it hasn’t been enough to turn a steady profit and it’s definitely not enough since Musk spent $43 billion for Twitter. I won’t pretend to understand his utlity function, but I’m pretty sure he’s not hoping to just (nominally) break even on his deathbed. He at least wants to break even in terms of net present value.

How can Twitter make money? As best I can tell, there are only three possible revenue strategies. It can charge user fees. It can sell advertising. It can sell the data it accumulates. That’s it.

Let’s get the first one out of the way. User fees can be charged in two dimension, tall or wide. Tall fees focus on charging a large fee from a small number of high value accounts. Brand accounts, like Coca-cola or Beyonce. Wide fees focus on collecting a small fee from a large number of lower value accounts (<100k followers). Musk wants to charge for user verification, which is a fairly wide tactic. There is nothing inherently right about wide or tall user fee strategies. The problem with charging for verification is that it lowers the quality of information discourse on Twitter. Reducing the quality of the product diminishes the value of advertising and generated data while also lowering the bar for competing products (NB: competing products aren’t necessarily or even likely to be other microblogging sites. Just whatever else might substitute e.g. TikTok, Instagram, Substacks, high fidelity smoke signals from vaping, whatever).

Advertising and user data go hand in hand. One could speculate that the reason Twitter’s advertising revenue underperforms relative to their position in the market is either because a) Twitter is a bad channel to advertise within, b) the manner within which users engage the produce yields low quality consumer data, and c) Twitter is bad at collecting and producing advertising opportunities based on that data. My guess is all three.

Is there a way to generate revenue while protecting or increasing the value of the product and data generated? Glad you never asked.

1. Focus on charging fees from users who need Twitter and not from users that Twitter needs. Good rule of thumb: if they’re a person, Twitter needs them. If they are not a person, they need Twitter. Don’t charge $8 to verify a sportscaster from Tuscaloosa. Charge $0.01 per follower for each a corporate entity or brand. Charge them $1 per reply, $2 per retweet. Bundle user fees with engagement. When you’re selling printers to Chase Bank you don’t make money off the printers, you make it off the ink.
2. Verify everyone with more than 10k followers. It incentivizes users to pursue more followers.
3. Kill the bots. Just require monthly captcha, randomizing day and mechanism. The numbers you’ll lose on your sales pitch to advertisers will be more than made up for in increased quality.
4. Allow for parallel content streams within users. Twitter advertising isn’t making enough money because they don’t know what to advertise to me. To be fair, nobody really knows how to advertise to me. Except Instagram. They have a window straight into my consumer id. Why? Because I take photos of things I love, write captions that betray my sense of humor, and scroll content that entertains me. They have a dossier on how to sell me crap and it works. Maybe I hate it, but I’ve also bought more from Instagram ads in the last year than I’ve bought from Gmail ads in 20 years.

Let’s talk about this last one a bit. If Twitter wants to learn more about me, they need to give me more opportunities to produce data, such as:

1. Multiple feeds from subsets of the accounts I follow. Better yet, suggest alternate feeds. If I say yes to the 100 accounts you suggested as a starter, you’ve added a dimension to your data’s model of me.
2. Multiple streams from which I produce content. I’m pretty sure a lot of my followers would love to subscribe to just me talking about economics or just about sports. Let me click a button on each tweet that says A stream, B stream, C stream, or ALL. Now Twitter is learning about me and each of the followers that makes a decision about which stream(s) they want to follow.
3. Separate streams/feeds for photos. Steal a little Instagram market share.
4. Separate feeds/streams for meso-blogging (10,000 characters). Steal a little from Substack. Charge $2 a month to produce meso-blog posts.

One last thing. Stop forcing content into feeds. Yes, people will pay to promote their content, but forcing it into my feed reduces the quality of the product. It’s like an informercial without the warning and bad sweaters. You have to at least color code it differently. Good advertising can dilute the product, but it can never degrade it. Forcing crazy people and grifters into my feed pushes users away, reducing trust and engagement. Just don’t.

There, I fixed Twitter. You’re welcome?

You’re probably sick of ChatGPT thinkpieces prognosticating the future of AI but, let me assure you, this is not one, if only because I haven’t thought about it all that much. I have been using ChatGPT though, and my experience has not been unlike when Google first appeared in my life. It was a tool that bore a superficial resemblence to options that came earlier (e.g, Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos, etc), but persistent engagement with it brought a deeper understanding of what the tool actually was and, more importantly, how to manipulate it.

My Google-fu is strong. I am quite adept at finding what I need to find. The prinicipal limitation, beyond the specific existence of my quarry, is that I have to have a fairly strong idea in my mind of what the thing I am looking for actually is. More importantly, I have to know what that thing looks like to the Google search algorithm. Searching in the dark on Google is far less efficient and more likely to lead me on wild goose chase. It is only through experience that I have learned how to backwards induct from the information or object that I am seeking to am optimally structured query.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to do several things. To teach me Python. To answer questions about data based on information otherwise buried in expansive and opaque documentation files. To explain notation norms in fields of study other than my own. What in many ways distinguishes these objectives is how labor intensive they would otherwise be. I use “labor intensive” for a very literal reason. If I were to try to accomplish many of these objectives on Google, I would be stringing together queries to accumulate a body of information and then from that corpus I would try to produce answers and acquire knowledge. It would take a lot of time. So much so that, if I were I person blessed with greater resources, I would hire someone to do the googling and sorting, further tasking them with producing a summary of what they learned, perhaps a power point deck or word document, form which to teach me. Given sufficient resourcese, I would have an army of assistants doing this for constantly, each with a 3-7 days to accomplish their assigned task.

ChatGPT is this assistant.

In this vein, what what I find most striking about ChatGPT is not it’s ability to be pseudo-conversational or otherwise produce prose, but it’s malleability and infinite stamina. ChatGPT is not particularly sophisticated, but it is wholly indefatiguable. It’s not an elite executive or research assistant with pre-existing expertise or 20 years experience. It’s a 20-year old intern. ChatGPT doesn’t know how the world works, but it’s free and it’s got moxie.

Continued interactions allow you to mold your new intern. They’re naive, but because of their endless stamina I can assign the task of, first, learning as much as they can about a subject and then, second, explaining it to me. I cannot treat my ChatGPT intern as a true expert in the field in question any more than I could trust a human personal assistant to whom I assigned the task of learning everything they can about a narrow qustion in a week. Imagine having an army of sufficiently literate interns to whom you could assign 3-7 day learning assignments after which they would present their results to you in a manner that might accelerate your own learning on the subject? Now imagine they a) can execute the task in < 10 seconds, b) never get tired, c) are essentially free of charge.

Now comes the rub, though. You must evaluate and internalize the knowledge presented to you with caution because they aren’t actually an expert in the field you’ve charged them with answering questions about. They’re just trying to mimic the voice of all the expertise they’ve been consuming for a week as an intelligent lay person. Your directions must be specific, precise. The results must be testable. Parallel interrogations must yield the same conclusions.

Of course, we could attempt to project forward how much more intelligent this generalist lay assistant will be made, but futurism is beyond my ken. Perhaps, given time, ChatGPT and other LLMs will begin to more closely resemble tutors, their algorithms tailered to better internalize more specific subject fields, service mechanisms, or task channels. Maybe they will learn to model not just a prediction of what might be read on the internet, but a prediction in the voice of their interlocutors. But for most of us, the value of the interactions with ChatGPT will remain largely dependent on the quality of the questions being asked and the tasks being assigned. Very nearly every human personal assistant is a miraculous problem solver whose talents are limited by the human assigning their tasks. ChatGPT is no different. Many human assistants are undervalued by their bosses, their talents wasted on ill-defined tasks serving principals who don’t actually know what they want. Many of these human assistants dream of one day rebelling against their undeserving, wet-brained superiors.

Oh.

Yeah, maybe we should turn it off. But not until after it teaches me Python.

For the purposes of this blog post we are the supreme chancellors of the American Economic Association and we are mad with power. The only question is what shall become of this power? What will be our legacy? For me, the answer is obvious.

An AEA Working Paper Series. A working paper series for all!

Wait, maybe we need to walk that last bit back. After all, a working paper series for all already exists. It’s called the internet. Or at least SSRN. What exactly is it that we want again?

If we’re being honest, what we want is to post our papers to the NBER working paper series (WPS), but some of us aren’t members. That’s still not a call to action, though. Are we just trying to replicate a club that we aren’t members of? What are the benefits of posting a paper to the NBER WPS that we desire for our own research? Better to work our way backwards from what we specifically want than complain about what we don’t have.

What I think we want to solve is the research dissemination problem in economics. The review process can last anywhere between 1 and 5 years, during which time research is, at best, fully internalized into the field before being formally accepted, but can also become stale, outmoded, or even leap-frogged by parallal researchers. Worse still, research can be missed. Fields, observations, questions, they all have moments. For a piece of research to have an impact, it is paramount that it be within the purview of researchers, policy makers, and journalists during those moments. The NBER has solved this problem through the prominence of it’s WPS, but only for members.

So we want the AEA to replicate the NBER WPS, but for everyone? Sure, but it’s not that easy, since solving the problem for everyone presents an actual paradox. The whole reason the NBER WPS has solved the research dissemination problem is exactly because it is not open to everyone. Researchers, policy makers, and journalists take the work posted within the NBER WPS seriously because they trust the filter. They trust the NBER to only grant membership to serious researchers. They trust members to only post papers that are sufficiently developed that they are ready for public consumption. They trust it because they need to trust it. There is far too much research produced to possibly be consumed without a massive quality filter. The journals used to provide this service, but they became too slow and the NBER filled the gap.

The problem we are trying to solve is not how to create just any research filter, but the source and nature of that filter. The American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, they were (in theory) pure quality filters. They were meritocracies. Sure, there was always plenty of grumbling about journals being clubs (and there is, as it turns out, a lot of merit to those complaints), but the club component was at least nominally less dominant. The NBER, on the other hand, is a club, full stop. A useful and important club that has advanced the discipline in countless ways, but still a club.

So, to return to our motivating question, is there a way to offer the benefits of the NBER WPS outside of a pure club structure? If we have apply a quality filter, can we do so in a more openly meritocratic way that grants at least the prospect of access to a wider group of researchers?

Your first thought might be “We can read and evaluate the papers individually”…but that’s just an academic journal, and we already know the problems there. For a WPS to matter we need both sufficient scale and speed. The NBER solved this by filtering people, not papers. That is, I think, exactly what an AEA WPS needs to replicate. And that, to my mind, brings us to heart of the matter: can we create a WPS membership filter that is open and meritocratic, or is that a contradiction in terms?

Can the American Economic Association create a membership-only Working Paper Series that offers then benefits of the NBER WPS, but with less dependence on the path dependent forces that currently shape NBER membership?

Let’s start with the block of granite that is the entire AEA membership. Can the AEA offer a functioning WPS that includes the papers of all of it’s members? I don’t think so. Too many people, too many papers. Management, including quality control, would be too costly. More problematic, the number of papers coming out in weekly/monthly digests would be too large to be useful to readers. We need to cut it down, but how?

1. Price

No reason we can’t charge members who want access to the WPS a $100 a year on top of their dues to pay editors and managers. Discounts for graduate students and faculty in lower income countries would be important, but straightforward. That will lower the numbers, but not enough. Worse, a modest price would be insufficient, and might even backfire, as a quality filter.

2. Educational or institutional requirements

We can set up minimal standards for WPS membership. The simplest: a Ph.D. Stricter: faculty appointment. Strictest: faculty appointment in an R1 accredited institution. Is this fair? No, but I’m not sure what qualification requirements would be perfectly fair. You could, of course, have separate series for current graduate students, with the graduate series posting quarterly. Any of these would still include far too many papers, but we’re making progress.

3. Prior contributions

What if we limited WPS membership to established researchers? For example, limiting the WPS to individuals who have previously published in one of the six AEA journals? This strikes me as the most feasible to me, particularly from the point of view of the AEA and its strong interest in maintaining the integrity of its journals. It would make the numbers manageable.The AEA could also partner with other top associations, such as the Econometric Society, European Economic Association, and Royal Economic Society to create a list of 10-20 journals. Publication in one of these outlets would grant WPS membership access for 20 years. This would still advantage graduate students co-authoring with stars to jump start their career, but do you honestly think there’s any world in which writing with brilliant scholars isn’t an enormous advantage? Marginal improvements folks, that’s what we’re going for.

4. Citations

Perhaps research impact could be a channel for membership? It seems to me any researcher with 25 citations within the previously establish list of journals has established their bone fides as a researcher. This seems good to me on it’s face, but difficult to implement.

5. Current member/editor sponsorship

This is basically what the NBER does. I am bit hesitant to include qualification via the exact channel I am rebelling against, but there is also something to be said for allowing some discretion in opening the door for others, particularly when we consider the obstacles facing disadvantaged groups when trying gain access to the academy. I’d be far more interested if current member/editor sponsorship for AEA WPS membership were exclusively limited to junior researchers from groups targeted for greater inclusion.

6. Two of the previous four

My guess is that having multiple channels to WPS access is the best way forward, but with the caveat that a researcher has to qualify on more than one dimension to establish themselves as an active, top-tier researcher. Limiting access in these manners will keep the monthly flow of papers limited to a manageable, consumable quantity. The filter imposed will ensure the necessary level of quality, while at the same time granting access on dimensions sufficiently orthogonal to the traditional high school -> undergraduate->grad school prestige pipeline filter. Because that is the real goal here: to solve the economic research dissemination problem for broader subset of scholars. This isn’t a perfect solution, but I think it would stand as a significant step forward.

So there it is folks. The seed from which the AEA WPS will surely spring forth in the next 5 years, surpassing the NBER WPS and becoming the go-to channel to stay abreast of research at the bleeding edge of economic knowledge. I look forward to paying my dues and posting my first paper.

Firearm deaths are a problem, both mass shootings and the broader class of gun violence. I am not open to the argument that mass shootings are per capita irrelevant given their low frequency relative to other deadly events. The reality is that mass shootings, particularly school shootings, are sufficiently frequent that they generate a predictable news cycle that culminates in the increasingly familiar despair over a political stalemate. We live in that despair and there is no denying it.

Firearms deaths cannot be dismissed as insignificant portions of the risk landscape. Firearms are the leading cause of death in the United States before the age of 18, outpacing traffic accidents and cancer. Yes, they fall to third place if we exclude teenagers. Yes, that is in part because of the progress we’ve made on traffic safety and cancer. Fine. Great job all around. None of that reduces the salience of firearms if we are trying to reduce child mortality.

I’ve written about firearms restrictions and mass shootings before and I am sufficiently pessimistic that I expect to write about it again. There was another mass shooting at a children’s school in Nashville. I admit I am sad and angry. I am trying to not be despondent. A nine-year old girl lost her life trying to pull a fire alarm to save her classmates. Her bravery shames me away from despondence. It should be shaming a lot more people, if I am being honest.

I am, however, also on the record that the stalemate of US firearms policy is an…ahem…

So what can be done? While “do nothing” is in fact often the optimal policy, I don’t believe that is the case with regard to firearms. Let’s talk some options through, both in terms of potential efficacy and political feasibility, all framed within the broader objective of reducing the supply and demand for killing capacity.

1. Ban aftermarket firearm modification of any sort, including cosmetic changes

End the toyification of firearms. If you believe that firearms are tools, great, but the firearm market would seem to disagree with you. We banned flavored tobacco products to keep then away from kids. Let’s ban the toyification of firearms to make them less appealing to idiots.

A firearm should provide you no more identity-signally consumption than owning a pick axe. It’s a tool. Treat it as one. Any modification should destroy it’s resale value and carry risk of misdemeanor punishment if observed in public (i.e. a gun range or hunting). Guns should be as plain as a shovel. I’m already judging you for owning this death toy. Owning it in school colors, or with a punisher logo, or in don’t you just love it purple? Congrats, now I’m even more sure I’m absolutely right and you should be banned from owning anything deadlier than a toaster oven.

I’ll be honest that I am speaking more anecdotally from personal interactions with enthusiastic assault weapon owners, but a big part of the appeal is no different from owning a 400 horsepower sports car or giant truck. Assault weapons ownership makes them feel powerful and cool in a way that a standard 12 gauge shotgun wouldn’t.

While I know the NRA will, by dint of their own pure policy of universal opposition, resist limits on firearms modification, the legal merits of opposing bans on after-market firearms modification would be considerably weaker. Firearms manufacturers, on the other hand, would earn better margins on weapons forcibly more uniform in design. Further, the returns to scale would favor larger incumbent firms, hopefully weakening lobbying resistance.

2. Tax ammunition, scale it with killing power

The tax on bullets should be onerous. The tax on ammunitaton with higher killing power (e.g. hollow points), armor piercing capability, or explosiveness should be so burdensome that the scale of acquisition should be trackable in a national database. It’s not just about reducing the amount of ammunition floating around society, but rendering large scale acquisition trackable.

I don’t know if this is politically feasible. A baseline tax on all ammunitition would be resisted feverishly, but focusing on deadlier ammunitition might create a window of feasibility.

The vegas shooter fired over 1000 rounds into a crowd, wounding and killing a total of 473 people. He had fourteen AR-15s, some of which had 100 round magazines and bump stocks to facilitate the fastest and most efficient means to commit as many murders as possible. Is it a perfect world if a $35 tax on top of the current $15 box of 20 rounds limited him to 500 rounds? No, but there are at least 10 more people alive today. And in the current landscape of firearm violence in the United States, I’ll take any marginal gain I can get.

3. Hold people responsible for crimes committed with their guns

Not just parents, either, but that’s a good start. I was given a rifle by my parents when I was 16. If I committed a crime with it, they should have been held responsible. Same should go for all weapons. If you can’t lock your guns securely, you shouldn’t own them. Firearms manufacturers absolutely have the ability to biometrically lock them. They don’t because it isn’t required. Legal liability would increase demand for exactly this ability. Biometric locks mean fewer accidents, gun thefts, and would reduce the broader supply of guns as people would be far more likely to have older weapons destroyed.

Now, I know some would argue that legal liability is a back-door tax on firearms. Here’s my counter-argument: yes, it absolutely is a tax, but if responsibility for your firearms is a tax you can’t afford, then you can’t afford a firearm. That’s called being an adult.

4. Absolute ban on names and images of perpertrators unless they are at large.

You will not become famous. There will not be a Netflix series about you. Your identity will be scattered to the wind long before it could even be resigned to the dustbin of history. Is this politically feasible? I think so. Sure, podcasts and tweets about shooters will still inevitably pop up still, but anything that lowers the historical status of shooters, the better. Broad regulation of when to name shooters seems low risk, high benefit.

5. End No-knock raids

People will own fewer guns if they feel safer in their homes, which means at the very least fewer firearms accidents. Reaffirming 4th Amendment rights would go a long way towards reducing citizen’s desperate need to express their 2nd Amendment rights. Ending all no-knock raids is more than politically feasible, I would go so far as to say it is potential political winner, though I’ll concede there will resistance from police unions.

6. Ban assault weapons

Let’s close with most discussed policy solution, an outright ban based centered around power and kill capacity. Banning a good with high demand is always difficult, just ask the war on drugs. If we’re going to try to ban assault rifles, we need to go in with our eyes open. Assault weapons are by and large consumption goods, if not outright toys, and in case you can’t hear the derision in my tone let me be clear I am absolutely judging you for owning one. They have zero value for hunting: a .556 round from an AR-15 will destroy your quarry. Better hunting option: anything firing .45-70 caliber ammunition. An assault rifle has negative value for defending your family at home. The through-wall collateral damage leaves you as likely to harm your family as any intruder. Better home defense option: any 12 gauge shotgun. An assault rifle is not a bulwark against tyranny any more than a samurai sword would have been living in a rural town in the Jim Crow South. We all need to accept that we are woefully outmatched in terms of physical and human capital in a confrontation on the local monopsolist on violence. Better option: join a peaceful political action organization. Join a major political party. Hell, join a local religious group. Resistance against tyranny is about numbers, not the stopping power of the weapon you or your drinking buddies are holding.

There is absolutely no more reason for civilians to own high power, high capacity assault rifles than there is for them to own anti-aircraft guns or weapons grade plutonium. It’s a disaster and it’s stupid. So why are we stuck here? Short answer: gerrymandering and lobbying. How do we get out? High shame campaign. Aggressive, unrelenting politics of shaming. No quarter taken, none given. Ads. With. The. Victims. It will be awful, I will cry. You will cry. It’s the only way. Why can 18 year olds vote? The Vietnam draft shamed us into giving draftees the right to vote before we sent them to die. Shame works when it is this pointed and undeniable. And there is no denying our shame.