Tag: bryan caplan

On Bryan Caplan’s Question

Bryan Caplan asked an interesting question on Twitter the other day:

I’m not sure if you can see what I voted for, but I am fairly sure you could have guessed!

But if you think about it a little bit, it’s actually not all that easy to answer this question. As with all good questions, there are nuances and layers. First, I asked my excellent research assistant to tell me more about what the phrase “epistemic value” might mean:

The phrase “epistemic value” refers to the degree to which a belief or piece of information contributes to our knowledge or understanding of the world. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the nature and scope of knowledge, and epistemic value is a term that is often used in discussions within this field.
Beliefs or pieces of information that have high epistemic value are those that are reliable, accurate, and well-supported by evidence. Conversely, beliefs or pieces of information that have low epistemic value are those that are unreliable, inaccurate, or poorly supported by evidence.
In general, beliefs or pieces of information that have high epistemic value are more valuable to us than those that have low epistemic value, because they are more likely to help us understand the world and make well-informed decisions.

https://chat.openai.com/chat

I’ve always thought of the word epistemic as ‘ about knowledge’, or ‘about knowing’. And the phrase ‘epistemic value’ seems to be – as expected – very similar. But that phrase in the first sentence of my RA’s answer is worth thinking about a little bit: ‘the degree to which a belief or piece of information contributes to our knowledge or understanding of the world’.

Now that makes the answer to Bryan’s question more difficult! To the extent that the top empirical papers of the last 5-10 years have been written using economic principles (and I see no reason to assume that this is not the case), they end up telling us more about the world than the principles that they have used. This has literally got to be true by definition.

They might tell us conditions under which, for a given geography and a given time period, these principles are upheld (or not). They might quantify the relationship between two variables, again for a given geography and a given time period. They might explain apparent violations of these principles, and explain why such phenomena occur.

To give you a simple, but completely hypothetical example – imagine a paper that examines how people change their consumption patters in the face of high inflation in America in the year 2021. That wouldn’t make it a ‘top empirical econ paper’ of course – but leave that be for the moment. Standard econ theory will predict that consumers will respond to changing prices by changing their patterns of consumption (more fillers in your burger patties rather than only meat, for example). And this hypothetical paper of ours not only confirms this, but also quantifies it for a geography (USA) for a particular time period (2021).

But that would mean that the epistemic value of this paper is actually more than the wisdom of standard intro econ textbooks. Because your standard econ text will tell you that this will happen, but the textbook will be unable to tell you the extent to which this will be true for a given country for a given time period. That ‘piece of information’ re: the extent is an addition to the knowledge that we get from a standard econ text, and so by definition the paper has more epistemic value.

Whoops. I chose the first option in Bryan’s tweet, and it would seem that I am wrong.

Or am I?

For the year 2021, for the nation of the United States of America, the epistemic value of that paper is higher than the wisdom of a standard intro econ textbook. But the wisdom of the standard econ intro text will apply to all other geographies in the world in the year 2021, and will apply for all geographies for all years to come.

The paper wins in the specific, but becomes by definition inapplicable in the case of the general.

Time to roll out one of my favorite guns from my arsenal:

What are you optimizing for?

If you want more epistemic value for a given space and a given time, option 3 from Bryan’s tweet. If you want more epistemic value in general, option 1 from Bryan’s tweet.

And for having written this post, my own answer still remains option 1, but this post helps me understand that I should ask one of my favorite questions more often.

What say you?

The meta-epistemology of the rate hike

Soon after I started blogging, Tyler Cowen joked, “You’re not really a blogger.” His point: Unlike most of the competition, I wasn’t reacting to the latest news or whatever’s hot. My goal as a blogger has always been to write think-pieces that stand the test of time.

https://www.econlib.org/a-fond-farewell-to-econlog/

I don’t know about standing the test of time where posts on EFE are concerned, but my approach to blogging is very similar: I prefer to not write about events immediately after they’ve occurred. This for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that I’m lazy, and reading a lot of stuff at very short notice is something I would rather not do.

Another reason is that the very best pieces on any event usually take time to bubble up in my feed, and waiting therefore makes sense.

By the way, if you aren’t yet subscribed to Bryan Caplan’s new blog, please do!

But that being said, let’s talk about yesterday’s rate hike.

One of the pieces that I enjoyed writing last year was on the concept of meta-epistemology, after reading a post about it by Zeynep Tufekci.

I’m going to post a screenshot rather than an extract, because the formatting of the post helps:

https://econforeverybodyblog.wordpress.com/2021/02/05/zeynep-tufekci-on-metaepistomology/

Honest question: does this apply to the Reserve Bank of India as well?

Is it the case that the cost of downplaying inflation as a major problem now exceed the benefits of doing so? Have the incentives flipped for the RBI? If so, on what basis? Is there a sense, based on preliminary data, that inflation is a problem that can no longer be ignored?

And if so, how should we be interpreting not just the fact that rates have been raised, but the manner and the timing of the raise? In other words, are there two messages being sent out by the RBI: the message itself, and the implicit message encoded in the timing of the message?

And have (or will) the markets internalize this message, and if yes, what is to follow?

Learning about inflation, monetary policy, and the efficient market hypothesis via textbooks is less than half of the story. Take your view/model of how the world works to the world itself, and update your model as the years roll by.

Fun, exhilarating and occasionally nerve-wracking.

But it is the best way to learn.

Education and Signaling

I’d linked to this video this past Friday too, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet:

And a bonus today, Bryan Caplan on the same topic:

Agriculture in England and India, Immigration, Water and Healthcare

Five articles I enjoyed reading this week – and hopefully you will as well

The change that is coming over farming can be summarised in simple economic terms. Intensive agriculture prioritises a bumper harvest – the annual dividend – while the new approach emphasises the preservation of the initial capital – the land itself. For a glimpse of how this new investment priority will affect British farming, it suffices to visit those progressives who have already, to varying degrees, made it their own.

The Guardian Long Read on agriculture (in England). Horizons (one out of choices, horizons, incentives and costs) remain underrated in economics classes, as this article points out. But there is much more to read here: recommended!

It developed an app-based platform that registers orders directly from buyers, analyses category-wise demand, fixes dynamic prices depending on daily demand, and transfers the orders to its network of 1,000+ farmers. Farmpal’s price comparison feature ensures that farmers can sell their produce at rates higher by 20 to 30 percent than what they would normally get in the mandis.
“This is one of our main promises to the farming community. We are able to offer them premium prices because technology eliminates at least four to seven middlemen from farm to fork,” the founder explains.

While on the topic of agriculture, this from Maharashtra, India: Farmpal.

Caplan’s case isn’t entirely about economics: he also makes a moral appeal. Consider the case of “Starving Marvin,” who needs food and is prepared to purchase it legally. On his way to the market, he is turned away by an armed guard. If Marvin subsequently dies of starvation, Caplan asks, is the guard guilty of murder? The philosopher Michael Huemer, who first introduced this hypothetical, in 2012, concluded that the answer was yes. He writes, “If a person is starving, and you refuse to give him food, then you allow him to starve, but if you take the extra step of coercively interfering with his obtaining food from someone else, then you do not merely allow him to starve; you starve him.” Caplan doesn’t go that far, but he does argue that the guard is wrong to prevent Marvin from feeding himself.

Read the paper, read the book, read this profile of Bryan Caplan, and his quixotic quest to get all of us to accept a world without borders.

Geologists and hydrologists, who worked on implementing the project, shared similar views and hailed Jalyukta Shivar. This was mainly due to the interventions undertaken in the existing water reserves, planned de-silting activities, among many others. However, experts agreed that the scheme was not appropriately implemented. Now with Jalyukta Shivar no longer in existence, focused efforts of the past five years, in most likelihood, will go down the drain unless a similar scheme is introduced. With rainfall variations getting more pronounced, in addition to depleting groundwater reserves, the state will need concrete interventions to tackle future water requirements, experts recommended.

As Tyler Cowen is fond of saying, solve for the equilibrium. On the politics of water conservation in Maharashtra.

America’s mediocre health outcomes can be explained by rapidly diminishing returns to spending and behavioral (lifestyle) risk factors, especially obesity, car accidents, homicide, and (most recently) drug overdose deaths. [Please read this post for the full explanation]

The diminishing returns are evident in cross-sectional analysis. Higher-income countries like Norway and Luxembourg spend twice as much as the likes of Spain and Italy and probably experience worse average outcomes.

Via the excellent Navin Kabra, a very, very long article on healthcare in America. Excellent if you are a student of America, healthcare or microeconomics. At the intersection of the three, it becomes mandatory reading. Pair up with Baumol’s Cost Disease (although the name is misleading, it is the most popular way to this phenomenon is referenced)

 

RoW: The movement of people into and out of Poland

One target for this year, 2020, is to write about one country a month. As this Wednesday article makes clear, this month’s country is Poland. Given its history and its current politics, I was curious about immigration and Poland – as the title of this post suggests, the movement of people into and out of Poland.

This is a topic that is of interest to me for a variety of reasons. I got the chance to teach a course on migration and its impact on development some years ago, and reading up for that course was quite instructive. Specifically, I got to know the works of Douglas Massey, and also chanced upon this lovely paper – lovely to me, that is – by Bryan Caplan. I also want to read this book, written by him.

Our government’s approach to migration – completely wrongheaded, in my view – is of course another reason to want to read about experiences in other parts of the world.

Onwards, then: five articles about Poland and its approach to immigration.

  1. “A draft of the interior ministry’s new migration policy, leaked to Polish media last month, revealed the government’s priority is to lure Poles back from western Europe, and to attract people from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, who can prove they have Polish origins.The document said Poland’s safety was guaranteed by its cultural, national and religious homogeneity, and said the new policy would focus on selecting immigrants who would follow Poland’s law and customs, as well as “values emerging from . . . Poland’s dominating religion”.

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    An article form the FT, miraculously ungated, about the issue.
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  2. “Poland’s massive migration numbers, and the warm welcome Ukrainians have received, stands in marked opposition to the anti-migrant electoral campaign that helped bring PiS to power four years ago. The party crushed a coalition of opposition parties with 46 percent of the vote in last month’s European Parliament election, its strongest ever result. Stumping in 2015, PiS head and Poland’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, said that “refugees” would “bring in all kinds of parasites, which are not dangerous in their own countries, but which could prove dangerous for the local populations.”
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    The title of the article says it all, really.
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  3. “So it may come as a surprise that the Polish government has, very quietly, presided over the largest influx of migrant workers in the country’s modern history — though they are mostly Christians from neighboring Ukraine.Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has not been shy about promoting the government’s agenda. “We want to reshape Europe and re-Christianize it,” he said in 2017 in an interview with a Catholic television station. The government recently ordered all new passports include the phrase, “God, Honor, Motherland.”

    But immigration is Poland’s paradox. It has benefited greatly from the European Union’s open borders, earning billions of dollars in remittances from the hundreds of thousands of Polish workers who have migrated to other countries in the bloc, especially to Britain. Yet with Poland now facing labor shortages, the government is failing to lure back the diaspora — and is restricted by its political stance against migrants.”
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    The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes.
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  4. “Since the opening of the labour market following Poland joining the European Union in 2004, Poland experienced a mass migration of over 2 million abroad. As of 2011, 52 out of 1,000 Polish citizens have lived outside the country;[10] estimated at 2.2 million by the Polish Central Statistics Office (GUS), and 2.6–2.7 million by the journalists. GUS statistics estimate that the number of long term Polish immigrants abroad have risen from 0.7 million in 2002 to a peak number of almost 2.3 million in 2007, and has since declined to 2 million by 2010–11.It has remained relatively stable at that level for a short period, following the uncertainty of Global Recession of 2007–08, By December 2015, 12% of Polish labor population left for UK to work there.According to a 2013 survey, approximately 14% percent of adult Poles have worked abroad since 2004 (approximately a quarter for over a year); 69% have a family member of a close friend who lives abroad, and approximately 24% are open to immigration. Majority of Polish migrants or those considering leaving are young; according to a 2014 survey approximately 90% of Poles under 34 have considered some form of migration. ”
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    That is from a Wikipedia article about the topic.
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  5. “BELGIANS must believe Siemiatycze is the capital of Poland, residents of this eastern Polish town like to quip. Those that are left, that is. Since before the fall of Communism Brussels has been the destination of choice for thousands of Siemiatyczans who seek work abroad. Accurate figures as to just how many have left are hard to come by, as people often retain Siematycze as their official place of residence. But it is clear that the real population of the town, at any given moment, is considerably less than the official figure of 15,000.”
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    From within that Wikipedia article, an article from the Economist about the number of people who have left Poland over the years.

 

EC101: Links for 12th December, 2019

What do economists have to say about (ahem) immigration?

  1. The Wikipedia article on Harris-Todaro.
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  2. Feeling ambitious? Use this CV as a jumping board for stuff to read about immigration. Douglas Massey.
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  3. One of my favorite papers to read about immigration (and you can see where my sympathies lie, I suppose, where immigration is concerned).
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  4. George Borjas – his Wikipedia page.
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  5. I’ll link to this again: Chinmay Tumbe’s excellent book on migration into and within India.

RoW: Links for 30th October, 2019

  1. Who, exactly, are the Rohingyas? A short explainer from Wikipedia.
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  2. “With repatriation stalled, Bangladesh is now exploring relocation. The country has thus far been patient and welcoming, but its willingness to host such a large refugee population is wearing thin. Dhaka now plans to relocate about 100,000 Rohingya to a remote island at the mouth of the Meghna river in the Bay of Bengal. Known as Bhasan Char, or “Floating Island” in Bengali, the islet is made up of accumulated silt and is hard to reach—aid workers worry that anyone moved there would be vulnerable to floods, cyclones, and traffickers.”
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    A problem that the world would rather not acknowledge.
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  3. “Myanmar, which United Nations officials say should be tried on genocide charges over the orchestrated killings that began on Aug. 25, 2017, is keen to prove it is not a human rights pariah.Bangladesh, struggling with overpopulation and poverty, wants to reassure its citizens that scarce funds are not being diverted to refugees.

    But the charade at Nga Khu Ya, with its corroded buildings devoid of any Rohingya presence, proves the lie in the repatriation commitment. The place is so quiet that a dog snoozes at the main entrance, undisturbed.

    Even the repatriation center’s watchtowers are empty of soldiers. There is no one to watch.”
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    They, the Rohingyas, are to be sent back to Myanmar. Except not.
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  4. “One day in the 1980s, my maternal grandfather was sitting in a park in suburban London. An elderly British man came up to him and wagged a finger in his face. “Why are you here?” the man demanded. “Why are you in my country??”“Because we are the creditors,” responded my grandfather, who was born in India, worked all his life in colonial Kenya, and was now retired in London. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” We are here, my grandfather was saying, because you were there.”
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    Suketu Mehta in fine form on this topic.
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  5. “I want you to think of free movement across borders as not just a matter of humanitarianism, not just a matter of good policy, but as an issue of civil rights, in the same tradition as those of Milk, and King, and Stanton, and indeed others yet to come.”
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    A short blog post on a longer essay, which argues about instituting immigration as a civil right.