One of the many self-inflicted wounds on humanity right now is a fear of new vaccines that is somehow associated with fear of new 5G cell phone technology. This BBC story documents some really nutty stuff including a cell phone tower being attacked in Bolivia where there is not yet any 5G service.
I have my opinion of these people, but what’s the point of printing that? Let’s try to shed some light on what 5G actually is.
Continue readingWho knows what state capacity was 150 years ago? After all, DMV jokes are only a little out of date. There is a lot of richness and specificity to state capacity. That’s why we can’t look at an identical law in two different places or times and assume that their enforcement and evasion are the same.
Interested readers can see my previous post for a figure that illustrates the timing of compulsory education legislation across US states. The effects on literacy were a bit ambiguous. The explanation might be that effective enforcement by the various states might have differed (substantially). The figure below illustrates the average rates of attendance by age and census year.
Just as an increasing number of states began to enact compulsory school attendance, we can see that school attendance rates rose over time. But we can’t tell from the figure whether attendance laws caused or were merely coincident with increasing attendance.
One hint is to group the people by whether their state had compulsory attendance laws on the books. See the figure below.
Continue readingThe emerging market in digital art as nonfungible tokens is the strongest signal of expected inflation I’ve seen to date.
Let’s back up.
Digital art is being sold as nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Is this a bubble? Don’t know. Is this art? Don’t care. Is a piece of digital art as an NFT harder easier or harder to duplicate? I imagine it is easier for the artist, but they have an incentive not to issue duplicates, because doing so erodes the market value of all future digital art NFTs the producer might issue. Is a piece of digital art as NFT harder to duplicate for a forger? I imagine so. The NFT as both art and artists signature is certainly harder to duplicate than traditional media and penmanship. Which is to say we have little reason to worry about the value of a piece of art being inflated away by the artist or criminal forgers.
Now that’s interesting.
The general rule of thumb is that the more consumption value a good offers, the worse it will perform, on average, as an investment. Art, baseball cards, comic books, vinyl records, memorabilia, homes – these are all generally inferior to equities as investments. It stands to reason, though I certainly haven’t checked, that the same logic applies to hedging against inflation as well. Precious metals, while less fun, should offer a superior hedge against inflation than art, particular in relation to art by living artists, where the supply is anything but fixed.
In this regard, however, NFTs are a bit of a game changer. The supply of any given Beeple NFT is fixed forever at one, and there is as yet no reason to believe otherwise. Storage and security costs approach zero, which is something that can’t be said about a 20-foot tall metallic balloon dog. The consumption value is subjective and I’ll leave it to market auctions to suss that out. The inflationary hedge value, however – in this manner NFTs may be an game-changing innovation for prominent living artists, allowing them to capture rents from the value they create that has previously eluded them prior to shedding their mortal coil.
The bond market isn’t giving unambiguous signals of inflationary pressures yet, but signs are creeping in, and among those signs I include seemingly rabid excitement for mixing cultural-status consumption with cryptocurrency-enabled hedges against the prospect of what would be the first real wave of inflation we’ve seen in 40 years.
Which is a long winded way of saying I’m not rooting for inflation, but I’d also be happy to sell my mint-condition complete set of 1987 Fleer baseball cards if you’re looking to hedge your portfolio.
The story that I’ve heard is this:
In the US, we care about education. We believe that all people should receive one, regardless of their family status. Therefore, states provide education directly.
There you have it. We provide education in the US so that everyone gets a more fair shake at education. We might disagree about the purpose of an education. Maybe it’s for improved job prospects, for a more informed citizenry, or for more unified values and experiences. One socially awkward answer is that state schools are, in part, a childcare service that permit parents to work. Except for these couple of reasons, school provision and compulsory education should, at the very least, increase literacy. That’s a low bar.
Given the above reasoning states began to pass compulsory school legislation. Massachusetts was first in 1852. Followed by DC and Vermont in the 1860s. Thirteen more adopted compulsory education legislation by 1880. By the year 1900, most states had compulsory schooling legislation on the books that was applicable to at least some age groups. See the figure. Thus, did the US achieve more equality, so goes the story.
The reasoning behind the story is sound. Without education of some sort, people will surely have less human capital. The vulnerability of the reasoning is that formal schooling is not the only form of education. A person who doesn’t attend school may help a parent at work or have a private tutor – or simply grow in a milieu of thoughtful exposure. Therefore, requiring that a child attend school may not improve human capital by a degree greater than what the child would have been doing otherwise. That’s an empirical matter.
The figure below illustrate the data for ‘white’ people and illustrates literacy between the ages of 20 and 30. Why that interval? At the lower end, we don’t have literacy data for people under the age of 20 in 1850 & 1860. On the higher end, any effects of compulsory schooling will only affect those who were children and subject to the law – older people are immune to compulsory schooling legislation.
The graph illustrates that state literacy rates were rising throughout the period. The main exception is 1870. Maybe the demands of the civil war caused children to work at home or otherwise and forego schooling. So the increase from 1870 to 1880 is more of a catch-up to a previous trend than anything else. While it’s true that several states passed compulsory schooling laws in the 1870s, that doesn’t explain the widespread literacy improvements across most states.
After 1860, we can examine the younger people who were subject to the schooling laws. The figure below for people ages 10-20 tells a similar story to the one above.
My biased reading of the data is that initial compulsory schooling laws had at least an ambiguous effect on the overall trend of improving literacy. I’ll delve deeper in future posts.
PS – The literacy data is from IPUMS.
PPS – The compulsory schooling law dates are allegedly from “Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 2004.” But I couldn’t find the original source. Kudos to anyone in the comments who can find it.
Most of our financial transactions are managed by centralized institutions like banks and credit card companies. We trust that these companies will properly manage transactions, so no one can spend the same dollar twice. In other words, if you have $300 in your checking account, you can’t use your debit card to buy a $300 message chair, and then quickly purchase a $300 patio furniture set before the first purchase clears.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic inventor of Bitcoin, wanted to set up a digital currency which would not be controlled by or dependent on any central institution. Rather, there would be a big network of thousands of independent computing nodes, which collectively would record and vet financial transactions. A big problem he faced was how to prevent the sort of double-spending described above. With a decentralized system, it was possible that one node, or a couple of nodes in cahoots, could quickly enter two transactions which would spend the same chunk of digital currency twice, before the rest of the nodes could catch the error. And without a central authority, who would have the authority to correct such errors?
Nakamoto’s solution was the blockchain. He defined and implemented it specifically for Bitcoin, but the concept is so elegant and powerful that hundreds of other digital coins were quickly set up also using blockchains. This in turn has spawned a whole multi-billion dollar “decentralized finance” industry around these blockchain based currencies.
Continue readingPolitical drama was about to happen and then it didn’t. Across the country, deep and insightful thinkpieces were left unfinished, relegated to the folder for things writers hope will become future brilliance but definitely never will.
The Big Covid Stimulus Bill was about to fall short by a single vote, with Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) threatening to break against party lines. It was a disaster… until it wasn’t. A political catastrophe, evidence that the Democrats were a failed coalition once again humbled by their ruthless coordinated opposition… until it wasn’t.
So what was the source of this unforeseeable political miracle? Joe Biden’s long-running political strategy of asking people what they wanted, keeping promises, and not being a d*ck.
As much as I want to roll with three paragraphs of clever wordplay referencing stratagems and gambits, the obvious point to be made is that Biden has decades of political capital that the entire Democratic party is currently able to leverage. In contrast, the Republican Party is currently fronted by a Senator who has broken every political norm for short/medium run political gain, while bearing the brand of a career grifter who spent decades opting not to pay his contractors, employees, or lenders.
I’m not much for making forecasts or predictions, so here’s my predictive forecast for the Republican party: they don’t matter and won’t for years.
Make no mistake: their politics still matter a great deal. White ethno-nationalism has a real foothold in chunks of the electorate all over the country, evangelical Christians remains one of the most influential voting blocks, and the US system remains weighted towards the preferences of rural voters. Rather, what I mean is that the institution of the Republican Party no longer brings much to the political bargaining table. The party has spent down decades of political capital and no recourse to trust in their reputation to solve collective action problems. The bill has finally come due for their spendthrift and short-sighted culture. As much as it may hurt our sympathetic sensibilities, we owe it to them to let them learn from this experience and, after a few decades of trustworthy behavior and political saving, they should be able to pull their party up by their bootstraps.
In four years, two with control of all three branches, the GOP was never ever able to pass legislation as impactful on the US landscape as what the Democrats pulled off this week. The Republican party remains an efficient fundraising organizing and cultural brand for running a campaign, no doubt. There’s not going to be a third-party usurping of their status as one of the two dominant parties, at least not any time particularly soon. But as far as the legislative marketplace is concerned, the Republican party is dead broke.
There are several conceptual pieces that are put together to make the working Bitcoin digital currency. The data which defines Bitcoin transactions is stored in a data structure called a blockchain. A key feature of blockchains involves cryptographic “hashing”. That is the focus of today’s post.
A hash function is any function that can be used to map initial data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values. The initial data may be called the key or the message. The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, digests, or simply “hashes”. A common use for hashing in the past has been to do large-scale data storage and retrieval more efficiently, as described in Wikipedia. That link also discusses how some actual hashing calculations are done.
Here we will focus on cryptographic applications of hashing. For this purpose, hash functions are chosen which are for all practical purposes one-way. It is straightforward to start with the “message” and compute the hash. But it is not feasible to start with the hash and back-calculate the initial message, even if you know the algorithm used for the hash function. Typically the only way to find the message is to run a brute-force search of all possible inputs until you find a match to the output hash.
Continue readingThis short spark plug of a book written in 2015 by author Jon Birger was hard to put down. The book is informative on the idea of “marriage markets” and makes the case that, “college and post-college hookup culture, the decline in marriage rates among college-educated women, and the dearth of marriage-material men willing to commit are all by-products of lopsided gender ratios and a massive undersupply of college educated men.” (p. 5)
Recall from an earlier blog post, when there are more women relative to men, women compete with each other and effectively lower their “asking price” (their share of the marital benefits). This also applies to dating markets too. If you’re having trouble seeing how sex ratios matter, consider this example from the book,
“Among undergrads at UNC there are 50 percent more women than men …” That is for every 40 men there are 60 women which means 3 women for every 2 men, “If you want to visualize what 3:2 looks like, imagine you’re back in college. Imagine it’s late at night, and you’re hanging out with friends in someone’s dorm room. Imagine everyone has had a few beers, the mood is flirty, and people are thinking about pairing off. Now imagine there are three women and two men.”
Continue readingEverybody knows that Bitcoin is a “digital currency”. But what does that really mean, and what is Bitcoin really good for? Who developed it? Turns out, oddly, that we don’t actually know. Can you buy a pizza with it? Turns out that perhaps the most famous pizza purchase of all time was made with Bitcoin.
Continue readingA very brief story:
My advisor was Laurence Iannaccone, student of Gary Becker, seminal and in many ways founding contributor to the economic study of religion, now of Chapman University. His observation is a common one in academia, a point of pride for some even, though that varies greatly by discipline, as does their market options outside of the academy. And, yes, flexible work schedules, post-tenure job security, and sometimes picturesque campuses all should be counted towards the total compensation of those fortunate enough to secure a faculty appointment. But the power of the observation goes far beyond proper labor market accounting.
As I find so often to be the case, there is good sociology to be done, but the best first step in doing so is a little bit of economics. To wit:
The academy is, on average, considerably to the left of the population at large. Now this difference, mind you, is grossly exaggerated by your typical right-wing windbag who seems to think that universities begin and end in the English department, but the difference remains. So why would your typical economics, chemistry, or architecture professor tend to be left of the popular center? Well, if the median self-identified lefty got to choose the federal and state tax rates, what would they be? Ok, and how much of that will I have to pay out of my non-pecuniary income? Until they figure out how to tax the thrill of pursuing my own self-determined research agenda, not very much. Taxes are cheap when half of your compensation is non-pecuniary.
The academy is a club.
Scratch that.
The academy is a hierarchy of nested clubs. Which means that we often suffer from exclusionary FOMO akin to fourth tier English gentry trying to marry off five daughter in the early 19th century. Membership in those clubs– those famed research groups, donor-named centers, or even (god forbid) schools of thought — they become more than just sources of funding, workshop critique, and coauthor match-making sock hops. These clubs become the well springs from which ever increasing portions of our non-pecuniary income come from. They become our social networks, our friends, and even ,with a handful of co-authors you’ve gone into scientific battle alongside, a second family. The next time you see someone dig in their heels, seemingly denying the mounting evidence that they were on the wrong side of a scientific argument, don’t just blindly assume they are too stubborn and arrogant to acknowledge they might have been wrong. Consider how unfunded or, more importantly, how lonely they stand to be if they’re the first to give up the fight.
It’s why we covet tenure so much. Don’t get me wrong, everyone wants job security. But for most of us, the prospect of being laid off doesn’t necessarily include the possibility of being jettisoned from what you’ve slowly constructed as a separate parallel universe within which you have carefully curated the technical, educational, and social capital necessary to produce your career and life. If you get laid off from programming for Netflix, the next few weeks or months will be unpleasant, scary even. You may begin to doubt your ability or life choices. But that next job will come, and you will as often as not find yourself with a nearly identical life on the other side.
There are those in the academy though for whom this is all they’ve ever known. Bachelors, doctorate, tenure-track academic placement. Throw in a post-doc and that’s 20 years, and you’re entire adult life, in and around universities. Even if they’re from a field fortunate enough to have robust private sector options, how much will doubling your salary really soften the blow for such a person?
I say all of this now not as a critique of academia, or even to lead to prescriptions or advice. You want my advice? Fine, here: don’t go straight to grad school. Dip your toe in the real world, see how you like it. Come back in a few years with a little experience and distaste for office life. It’ll serve you well when your dissertation hits one of its many inevitable nadirs.
Rather, I invite you to consider this: what does the world start to look like when our utility comes less from the goods that we buy and the experiences we have, and more from the clubs we are members of? What does it look like when those clubs find newer and better ways to monitor our behavior and our expressed beliefs? What does it look like when the purging of membership rolls becomes a part of the culture of those clubs?
Economist Writing Every Day 