The NFT Market Is Mushrooming – Why??

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

Saturday Night Live fans were introduced to Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) a year ago with this skit. Most people know that an NFT is a digital ownership certificate of some asset. That could be a physical asset, or a purely digital asset, like a crude graphic of an ape wearing a sailor’s hat which people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for.

The NFT market volume exploded in the second half of 2021:

On-line chain transactions as tracked by DappRadar. Source: Schwab.

The global NFT market is projected to grow from $1.9 billion in 2021 to $5.1 billion by 2028, an annual growth rate of some 18%.

But, why??? Why would people plunk down millions of dollars for just a certificate of ownership of something which may not be particularly beautiful or functional? It is just not something that would ever occur to me.

Part of the answer must be that there are a lot of people who have a lot of money that they don’t really need. This may be a function of the ever-increasing income inequality, but we will not go down that rabbit hole. But still, assuming some 30-something has 50 grand that he doesn’t need  — why spend it on an NFT?

I did a real quick search on this topic. The most common reason appears to be the same reason many people buy rare coins or rare wines or other “collectibles” – they hope that someone else will pay them a higher price in the future. There also seems to be a sense of participating in some “community”, e.g., of Bored Ape Yacht Club aficionados. Much of it comes down to the psychology of what others will pay for something, which can be often explained in hindsight, but can be hard to predict if some asset class has not yet become “hot”.

It turns out that there are some other nuances to NFTs beside just hoping some “greater fool” will pay you more for the ownership of your ape drawing five years from now. I will conclude by pasting in some excerpts from an article on the Hyperglade blog, which frames the discussion partly in terms of the familiar economic concept of scarcity:

The key value proposition that NFTs often claim is scarcity. NFTs, as their name suggests, are each inherently unique on the blockchain, i.e. they can be attributed to a specific ‘hash’ or ID. But scarcity alone doesn’t drive value – it has to be a ‘scarcity’ that people want. 

One of the first types of scarcity that people want is exclusivity. Exclusivity in this context means something that is very rare and has attributes of originality. Long before NFTs existed, collectibles took center stage in this arena. For example, trading cards, comic books, and antique toys were very valuable due to their scarcity and history associated with them. For example, the Captain America Comics No. 1, from 1941 sold for over $3 million! The NFT equivalent of this would be Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, which went for $2.9 million. Jack’s tweet illustrates the quintessential NFT qualities; distinct historical moment, a special creator, and only one of them. 

Collectible NFTs come in many forms (in image, audio, or video formats), but the primary category is art (e.g. the Beeple NFT), followed by music, and sports moments (e.g. NBA top shot). Subsequently, given the depth of the cultural penetration of the content involved, collectibles are the most popular reason for investing in NFTs. According to Crypto.com’s NFT survey of ~30,000 polled users, 47% of those who own NFTs bought them for collectible value. Their primary motive – to be able to ‘flip’ (sell) at a higher price.

Access to a Network

More recently however, is the emergence of NFT collections that empower communities. These collections give holders access to special privileges, primarily access to special cryptocurrency related services and benefits (e.g. higher investment rates). For example, The famous Bored Ape Yacht club holders get to attend special events, E.g. in October 2021, members celebrated annual Ape Fest in New York City, Bright Moments Gallery.

Assets in virtual worlds and gaming

If you haven’t heard of them already, Virtual digital worlds are computer-simulated environments in which users roam around using their personal avatars. So NFTs neatly solve the problem of immutable land ownership. And depending on the demand, access and foot-traffic to certain places in these simulated world prices for virtual lands have skyrocketed. For example, even the cheapest land in decentraland exceeds $10,000. In a very similar way, web 3.0 games are expanding the use case by digitizing in-game assets so that they can be physically owned by players on the blockchain. In-game assets can include characters, cards, skins, etc. a list of which you can find here.

The story of social media isn’t over

mdmakowsky1 Comment

Saturday I opened twitter and was immediately confronted with bad news that threatened to turn tragic.

This was horrible. “That’s horrible” I said. I spent a moment’s thought reflecting on what might have happened and then continued down my feed.

Within seconds of continued scrolling, I was confronted with this:

https://twitter.com/owasow/status/1538053114774728704?s=20&t=_i29BDJydZSPVk82nkp_gA

My mentality changed immediately. This was no longer a tragic event happening to an anonymous person in a context I had no capacity, nor obligation, to offer assistance. This was a problem and time was a factor. I started thinking about who I knew in Florida. Did I have any friends holding a position through which they could offer assistance? Was there a social cluster I was connected to I could reach out to through social media? Hospitals, law enforcement, travel. Who did I know? I became despondent when it became clear I had nothing to offer but a retweet.

After a few seconds I returned to reading what I realized was a thread of tweets only to be given the relief of wonderful news, a happy ending that was directly a product of sharing on twitter:

The arc of drama (from the privilege of my physical and personal distance from actual events) was over in less than 30 seconds. What I was left with was a simple truth: I was sympathetic, but comfortably detached from a tragic event actively unfolding. It wasn’t my problem nor was it something I could do anything about until I found out I knew someone involved.

Barely knew. I had exchanged a couple messages with Omar about a year ago. A handful of polite thoughts about something Omar tweeted that was of mutual interest. That’s it. That’s the totality of our interactions. But with it came a completely different framing, a level of connection that elevated an evocation of standard sympathy to a potential call to action.

Twitter, that engine of animosity and toothless rage, had made me care more about a stranger through the simplest of social connections.

Comedians and other entertainment professions often tell the same simple story about online trolls that goes something like this:

  1. Someone writes something mean about the entertainer on twitter
  2. The entertainer responds to the troll in a polite and controlled manner that invites them to more civil engagement or simply reveals that the trolls comments are hurtful.
  3. The troll evaporates, replaced by a person excited to re-acknowledge the basic humanity and worth of their previous target.

A moment of direct interaction transforms, in the eyes of the troll, a previously two-dimensional narrative prop into a flesh and bone person worthy of dignity. We’re awash in the denigration of targeted individuals by detached opportunists seeking status and approbation through targeted cruelty. What is underappreciated is the opportunity in this moment for the target to reach back and give the troll what they actual want: to be seen.

This next part is probably not the leap you are expecting, but there is a long history of media radically changing how we acknowledge and internalize the humanity of others. In this vein, there is arguably no more famous and impactful image than the seal of the The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787), asking “Am I not a man and a brother?”

Not to be glib about such an important and horrifying part of our history, but this image blew people’s minds. In David Levy’s amazing history of how economics came to be referred to as “The Dismal Science”, he relates the efforts of Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, and other figures in English literature to deny the basic humanity of non-White men and women, particularly those from Africa and Ireland. Key to their efforts were stories, particularly those coupled with drawings, that explicitly portrayed the targets of their denigration as something far removed from humanity as a species. It was to their chagrin that the “Man and Brother?” image went the 18th century equivalent of viral.

It not only shocked households all over England to learn that the victims of the slave trade were clearly human in every sense of the word, it sparked an undeniable chain of logic. If these are men and women, then they can learn to read. If they can read, then they can come to know the Bible and their souls can be saved. If they can be saved then we have an obligation to teach them to read, offer them a Bible, and welcome them as brothers and sisters.

This image forced the reconsidered worth of others and with that reconsideration a calling for their liberation and salvation. This image, and others like it, changed who was human.

Social media is currently how many of us stay on the bleeding edge of news. It’s a way for us to promote ourselves and our work. It’s also a hellscape of acrimony, bad faith arguments, bullying mobs, and malicious propaganda. That’s what it is today. But that doesn’t mean that’s all it can ever be. Film and television changed the world as entirely passive, one-directional media. Most of the downsides of social media are born of interactions that, by little more than the inertia of the mob, often behave as if it were a one-directional media, carrying the masses along in the tidal wave of an irresistible narrative. There remains the possibility, the hope, that the capacity to interact meaningfully will eventually reclaim it as a multi-directional discourse, where the people we interact with become more real. More human. Where calls to serve can overwhelm and displace calls to destroy.

The story of social media isn’t over. There is still time for it to become something more. Where the people on the other side of claims and jokes and accusations become more human, not less. Where we broaden the ranks of who we offer our best to and shrink those whom we condemn with our worst.

Nudging Students to Choose a Major

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

In one sense, it seems like advice does not work. Advice is often ignored and sometimes even resented. People are going to just do what they want.

And yet, many people were in fact influenced by advice at some point in some situation. Many people can tell you about a mentor they spoke with or a book they read. Somehow, we do indeed need to learn about our environments and make choices about career and health and relationships. So, advice does work, sometimes.

A trivial example is why I stopped putting sugar in my coffee. A random anonymous message board post said that you should stop putting sugar in your coffee and your taste will adjust. “You won’t even miss it,” the anonymous poster told me. From that day forward, I stopped putting sugar in my coffee. I’m healthier and I don’t miss it. I was “nudged”. I was also predisposed to make this healthy decision, and I had sought out advice.

We might overestimate the effectiveness of advice because when people bother to talk about it, they mention the one time it affected them. First, they fail to mention the thousands of messages that had no effect (personally I still eat all kinds of junk food that contain sugar despite getting warnings to stop). And secondly, some decisions (perhaps including my coffee-sugar example) would have been made eventually without the advice event. Even recognizing those limitations, I still believe that messaging works sometimes.

It is tempting to think that, at almost zero cost, you could nudge people into making different decisions, just by sending them messages. There is a growing literature on this topic. Economists like myself are collecting data on whether it works.

One of these papers was just published:

Halim, Daniel, Elizabeth T. Powers, and Rebecca Thornton. 2022. “Gender Differences in Economics Course-Taking and Majoring: Findings from an RCT.” AEA Papers and Proceedings, 112: 597-602.

We implemented an RCT among undergraduate students enrolled in large introductory economics courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Two treatment arms provided encouragement to major in economics. A “prosocial” treatment provided information emphasizing the wide variety of career options and personal benefits associated with the major, while an “earnings” treatment provided information on financial returns. We evaluate the effects of the two treatments on subsequent choices to take another economics course and declaration of the economics major by the end of the student’s junior year using student-level matched administrative data. … Our primary aim is to evaluate whether women can be “nudged” into a major with low-cost, theoretically grounded, encouragement/information interventions.

Our primary sample consists of 1,976 students who were freshmen or sophomores during the focal course.

We find that the average male student receiving either treatment is more likely to take at least one more economics course after the focal course, but there is little evidence of increased majoring. The average woman appears unresponsive to either treatment.

Treated women with better than-expected focal-course performance are nudged to take an additional economics course. The likelihood that a woman takes another course in response to treatment increases by 5.6-5.9%-points with a favorable one-third- grade “surprise”. The hypothesis of treatment effects on women’s majoring, mediated or not, is rejected. Men’s susceptibility to treatment is invariant with respect to focal course performance.

Women did not demonstrate a bias towards a pro-social framing, and men did not demonstrate a bias towards a pro-earnings framing.

The pile of null results for messaging, when it is randomly assigned, is growing. It’s good to see null results get published though.

One of my current projects is related, but with a focus on computer programming instead of majoring in economics.

Inflation for Thee, But Temporarily Not for FL

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

On May 6, 2022, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, signed House Bill 7071. The bill was touted as a tax-relief package for Floridians in order to ease the pains caused by inflation. In total, the bill includes $1.2 billion in forgone tax revenues by temporarily suspending sales taxes that are levied on a variety of items that pull at one’s heartstrings. Below is the list of affected products.

A minor political point that I want to make first is that the children’s items are getting a lot of press, but they are only about 18.4% of the tax expenditures. The tax break on hurricane windows and doors received 37% of the funds and gasoline is receiving another 16.7%. There are ~$150 million in additional sales, corporate, and ad valorem tax exemptions. Looking at the table, it seems that producers of hurricane windows and doors might be the biggest beneficiary and that that the children’s items are there to make the bill politically palatable. Regardless, this is probably not the best use of $1.2 billion.


There are at least three economic points worth making.

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Is this the peak of inflation?

James Bailey1 Comment

I think so, though the path back to 2% is a long one. Two months ago I wrote that “the Fed is still under-reacting to inflation“. We’ve had an eventful two months since; last Friday the BLS announced CPI prices rose 1% just in May, and that:

The all items index increased 8.6 percent for the 12 months ending May, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending December 1981

Then this Wednesday the Fed announced they were raising interest rates by 0.75%, the biggest increase since 1994, despite having said after their last meeting that they weren’t considering increases above 0.5%. I don’t like their communications strategy, but I do like their actions this month. This change in the Fed’s stance is one reason I think we’re at or near the peak.

Its not just what the Fed did this week, its the change in their plans going forward. As of April, the Fed said the Fed Funds rate would be 1.75% in December, and markets thought it would be 2.5%. But now the Fed and markets both project 3.5% rates in December.

The other reason I’m optimistic is that the days of rapid money supply growth continue to get further behind us. From March to May 2020, the M2 and M3 supply exploded, growing at the fastest pace in at least 40 years:

Rapid inflation began about 12 months later. But the rate of money supply growth peaked in February 2021, then began a rapid decline. Based on the latest data from April 2022, money supply growth is down to 8%, a bit high but finally back to a normal range. Money supply changes famously influence prices with “long and variable lags”, so its hard to call the top precisely. But the fact that we’re now 15 months past the peak of money supply growth (and have stable monetary velocity) is encouraging. Old-fashioned money supply is the same indicator that led Lars Christiansen to predict this high inflation in April 2021 after successfully predicting low inflation post-2009 (many people got one of those calls right, but very few got both).

Stocks also entered an official bear market this week (down 20% from highs), which is both a sign of excess money no longer pumping up markets, and a cause of lower demand going forward.

Markets seem to agree with my update: 5-year breakevens have fallen from a high of 3.6% back in March down to 2.9% today, implying 2.9% average inflation over the next 5 years. Much improved, though as I said at the top the path to 2% will be a long one- think years, not months. Even the Fed expects inflation to be over 5% at the end of this year, and for it to fall only to 2.6% next year.

What am I still worried about? The Producer Price Index is still growing at 20%. The Fed is raising rates quickly now but their balance sheet is still over twice its pre-Covid level and is shrinking very slowly. The Russia-Ukraine war drags on, keeping oil and gas prices high, and we likely still have yet to see its full impact on food prices. Making good predictions is hard.

While I’m sticking my neck out, I’ll make one more prediction, though this one is easier- Dems are in for a bad time in November. A new president’s party generally does badly at his first midterm, as in 2018 and 2010. But this time the economy will be a huge drag on top of that. November is late enough that the real economy will be notably slowed by the Fed’s inflation-fighting effects, but not so late that inflation will be under control (I expect it to be lower than today but still above 5%). Markets currently predict a 75% chance that Republicans take the House and Senate in November, and if anything that seems low to me.

How Zoning Affects Your Home, Your City, and Your Life (a book review)

Jeremy Horpedahl4 Comments

As you drive, walk, or bike around your city, what do you think about as you see the various buildings and other structures? Perhaps you think about the lives of the people in them, or the architecture of the buildings themselves, or the products and services that the businesses offer for sale. For me, lately I’ve been thinking about one thing as I make my way around town: zoning. It’s not something I had thought about before very much, but after reading Nolan Gray’s new book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, I’ve been thinking about zoning a lot more.

(Disclosure: I know the author of the book, but I paid for my own copy and got it in advance through the luck of the Amazon-pre-order draw.)

The book does a wonderful job of explaining what zoning is (and importantly, also what it is not), where zoning comes from historically (it’s a development of the early 20th century), and how zoning affects our cities. I really like the way that the book encourages the reader to be a part of the story of zoning. In Chapter 2, Gray encourages you to put down the book and locate your city’s zoning map to learn more about how zoning impacts your life.

I immediately did so and had no trouble finding zoning maps for the city I live in, Conway, Arkansas. Conveniently, my city provides both a simple PDF map and an interactive map, which provides a lot more detail. The interactive map even has embedded links with historical information on different pieces of property. For example, I found the ordinance for when my college, the University of Central Arkansas (previously Arkansas State Teachers College), was annexed by the City in 1958. Pretty cool!

Looking over the map, it’s pretty clear that most of the city that I live in is covered by R-1 and R-2 zoning. But what exactly do these designations mean? You can probably guess that “R” designates residential, but what does it proscribe about land use?

For that, you must dig into the zoning ordinances. And as Gray cautions in the book (somewhat tongue-in-cheek), you might not want to get in too deep with your zoning ordinances, since they can run hundreds or thousands of pages. But I was brave enough to do so, and located my zoning code online (the PDF runs a modest 253 pages).

What did I learn about the zoning that covers my city?

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Raging Inflation, Spiking Rates, Plunging Stocks, Oh, My!

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

It has been such a volatile couple of days in the markets that you hardly know where to focus.  Friday’s inflation print was 8.6% (year/year), higher than expected and the highest in forty years, showing (yet again) that the Fed’s “transitory inflation” line was always just fantasy. Despite its glacial, foot-dragging pace of response to date, the Fed will need to raise short-rates (which they directly control) faster and farther than earlier planned. The Fed does not directly control long-term rates, but they influence them by buying and selling bonds on the open markets. For years, they have been buying bonds (driving interest rates lower), but they will have to stop that and maybe go the other way, being net sellers of bonds.  This will make financing government deficits much more difficult.

Anyway, both short and long term rates have gone vertical in the past few days as markets price in all this, reaching levels not seen since the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis:

Rates of U. S. 1-Year Bills. From Wolf Richter.

Rates of U. S. 10-Year Notes. From Wolf Richter.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4518160-treasury-bonds-plunge-yields-spike-stock-crypto-mess

Mortgage rates will likely march even further upward, increasing the monthly payments for most homeowners. At some point, this will deflate the housing market. Some of today’s eager new homebuyers who paid over asking price, assuming that housing only goes up, may be in for a rude awakening.

It seems like the only way to tamp down inflation is old-fashioned demand destruction. Stock market participants are starting to price in the dreaded R-word (recession). The plunging stock market has been in the news the last few days. Yes, it has dropped a lot, but shown on a five-year chart below it may not be so apocalyptic. It is dropping from ridiculously over-optimistic market highs at the end of 2021.  We are still slightly above the pre-COVID peak:

S&P 500 Index. From Seeking Alpha.

If you are young and working, you should see lower prices as a buying opportunity. If you are making regular contributions to a savings plan in stocks (dollar cost averaging), your dollars are buying you more stocks. If you feel you must DO something, you could always rebalance your portfolio, shifting some funds into stocks from something else, to maintain a say 70/30 stock/bond portfolio. Peace…

It’s nice going to the movies again

mdmakowskyLeave a comment

Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those truly great movies that manages to be high and low art at the same time. It is beautiful, absurd, timeless, and inspiring. It is without question my favorite expression of positive nihilism in popular art I’ve ever come across. There is no intrinsic meaning to life, but in that absence there is the opportunity to fill that empty vessel with meaning of your own design. As the characters ponder their own designs on how to impose meaning on the shifting and chaotic ocean of the multiverse, they present theories of strength, weakness, destiny, and fashion. I loved this film.

I also saw the new Top Gun film. I consumed a heroic amount of popcorn and diet pepsi. I learned absolutely nothing. I’m not sure I ever had a serious thought during it’s entire run time. I thoroughly enjoyed every second of it. I’m just so terribly happy to be going to the movies again.

Thoughts for the week on podcasts and the Constitution

Joy BuchananLeave a comment
  1. Jamal Greene was the most recent guest on Conversations with Tyler. This is how Greene describes his work habits as an academic with children:

GREENE: … my most effective work habit is to use the entire day to work. I get a lot of work done late at night. Most of my time during the day is spent teaching classes or meeting with students, and all writing and reading and preparation and everything is much later. That means I don’t watch television shows. It’s a really extended workday.

I work during soccer practices. I work sitting in the car while my kids are doing something or other. I don’t segregate times of the day where I can’t work.

One thing I find personally is that if I’m doing empirical work then I really need to be inside with at least one external monitor. As much as I like the idea of working from the pool (referencing the viral video of the week) being at my office is the best set up.

2. Currently I am teaching an online asynchronous class. Considering that my students are on the move in different places right now, I decided to create a podcast assignment. This seems to have gone over well. One student had a criticism for the episode that she chose: it was not entertaining. Another student complained that his episode had too much fluff about the personal lives of the speakers. This raises the interesting question of how the experts manage to make podcasts informative without being boring. It’s an art. Talking about your personal life to break up the subject matter can work but it can also feel like a waste of time.

3. For a discussion group, I read The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers.

Something that stood out to me was the sheer intensity of these guys. Liberty is a serious topic, but I’ll just share something that is funny from the book.

In the middle of a long fiery speech of Patrick Henry, the book inserts a line in brackets:

What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue? {Here Mr. Henry strongly and pathetically expatiated on the probability of the President’s enslaving Americans, and the horrible consequences that must result.}

A footnote explains that stenographer had difficulty keeping up with Mr. Henry and was occasionally reduced to recording a mere summary of his words. It’s impressive that a stenographer could have gotten as much as they did.

I came away from the book thinking that people should talk more about this moment in history, and then I started noticing when people do talk about it. In fact, Tyler was interviewing a constitutional scholar this week and explicitly addressed the idea of “federalism.”

4. The debate does rage on 200+ years later.

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Not so Great Expectations

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

People have expectations about the world. When those expectations are violated, they usually change their behavior in order to account for the new information (on the margin at least). Does unexpected inflation affect people’s behavior? Of course. William Phillips thought so (the famous version of the Phillips Curve assumes constant inflation expectations).

Macroeconomists often separate the world into reals and nominals. Sometimes we produce more and other times we produce less. Those are the reals. The prices that we pay and the money that we spend are the nominals. There is what’s sometimes called a ‘loose joint’ between reals and nominals. That is, they do not move in tandem, nor are they entirely independent. If the Fed suddenly slows the growth of the money supply, then economic activity growth might also slow – but not by the same amount. In the long run, reals and nominals are largely independent. Whether we have 2% vs 3% annual inflation over the course of some decade is probably not important for our real output at the end of that decade.

It Takes Two to Tango.

It is often said that the Fed can achieve any amount of total spending in the economy that it prefers. It can achieve any NGDP. But, the Fed doesn’t control NGDP as a matter of fiat. The Fed changes interest rates and the money supply in order to change the total spending in our economy. Importantly, the effect of Fed policy changes is contingent on how the public reacts. After all, the Fed can increase the money supply. But it is us who decides how much to spend.

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