Tag: tim taylor

An Economist Talks About PowerPoint

Not me, I hasten to add, but Tim Taylor.

He published some days ago a wonderful little blogpost, commemorating the 20th anniversary of an essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within“. It’s not a short essay, at 25 pages, but it is remarkably well written, full of lovely little anecdotes.

For example, did you know that Richard Feynman has a rant about bullet points?

“Then we learned about “bullets”—little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things. There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on slides”

https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/tufte-powerpoint.pdf

Both the essay and the blogpost are full of lovely little anecdotes and points such as these. I especially loved Tim’s concluding paragraph:

I just think we would all be better off with slide presentations that have fewer bullet points, fewer pages jam-packed with words, and fewer detailed numerical tables that can’t be read by anyone more than 30 feet away. Presentations impose costs of time and attention on others. In successful presentations, your attention is attracted, rather than taxed, and the entire time feels well-spent.

https://conversableeconomist.com/2023/06/01/how-powerpoint-and-other-slide-presentations-can-inhibit-thinking/

Having sat through my fair share of presentations in both the corporate world and in the world of academia, I can attest to the fact that in “unsuccessful” presentations, one’s attention is taxed. Mine has been taxed far too often at far too onerous rates The applicability of the Laffer Curve to the real world might remain a matter of debate, but I have empirical evidence about its relevance to sitting through PowerPoint presentations.

Do read both, Tim’s blogpost and Tufte’s essay – and here are my additions to both of their suggestions:

  1. Consider doing away with presentations entirely as often as you can. You can replace it, as Tufte’s anecdote about Gerstner suggests, with a conversation, or you can go Amazon style and have people write brief notes instead. But avoid presentations when possible.
  2. Do. Not. Read. Out. The. Slide.
    I am a person capable of reading what is in front of me. Not everybody in your audience might be able to do so at all times, of course, but working on the assumption that they are, please don’t read out the damn slide.
  3. Answer the “So What?” question. The title of the slide should not just describe what is in the rest of the slide, but it should also answer the question “So What?”. Gokul Rajaram’s LinkedIn post, which Tim links to, speaks about titles in the second bullet point: “The title does most of the heavy lifting, which means it cannot be passive. It must be action oriented. Eg: not “Subscriber retention” but “Subscribers continue to be retained strongly”. even better “Net revenue retention continues to be > 100%”.”
    I’d go a step beyond and say it could be something like “Net Revenue Retention targets continue to be exceeded at >100% Levels”. Or “need to remain at”, or “get even better than” – or whatever needs to be done as a consequence of the data shown in the slide.
  4. A presentation is a complement, not a substitute. It is there to help you do your job better, it is not there to do the job instead of you. Use it as a reference to help you deliver your talk later. Use it as an inspiration for you to take off on whatever point you want to make. Use it to convey a feeling, a thought, or an emotion (and this is why images are better than words), but don’t use it as a way to for you to be lazy on stage. Quite the opposite, actually.
  5. Make sure that there is a double thank you moment at the end of your presentation. And I should be more specific – make sure that you thank the audience for having listened to you, and make sure that they end up thanking you for having delivered the presentation. Not for finally ending it.

The Crypto Trilemma, by The Conversable Economist

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, please subscribe to his blog.

This will be a very short post, for two reasons. One, the more I read about cryptocurrencies and related topics, the more confused I get. Two, given my very limited understanding, there isn’t much more to add to Timothy Taylor‘s post.

But the reason I wanted to write a post is because I found the idea of the crypto trilemma really useful (and hopefully you will too), and writing about it helps make the idea clearer in my head.

https://conversableeconomist.com/2022/06/22/the-crypto-trilemma/

My most important takeaway from his post was this diagram. The point is that the crypto trilemma means that any currency can be any two things at any given point of time, but all three at the same time are simply not going to be possible.

  1. Traditional currencies, such as the rupee notes in your pocket are secure and scalable, which means that the rupee system can’t be ‘hacked’ and the system can grow large in terms of transactions per second without any difficulty. But it is not, of course, decentralized.
  2. Bitcoin and Ethereum (and possibly others, but I think these two are by far and away the biggest cryptocurrencies) are secure, and by definition decentralized, but they simply can’t scale. Navin Kabra, who is my guru in these matters (and many others!), tells me that Bitcoin can support 7-10 transactions per second, while Ethereum can do about 30. Even if they implement ‘sharding‘, Navin says they’ll go up to 30 transactions per second. Both the link I’ve given here and Timothy Taylor’s blog explain more about sharding, if you’re interested.
    Visa, on the other hand, can do twenty-four thousand transactions per second.
    TL;DR? Not scalable.
    As with everything in life, it’s more complicated than that. Here are three additional links shared by Navin: Visa’s claims | Bitcoin’s Refutation | An academic paper on the topic (bonus: a helpful table)
  3. And as we’re all discovering over the past few days, the newer cryptocurrencies ain’t quite that secure.

As I said, a useful framework to keep in mind when thinking about crypticurrencies.

Read the JEP, and Follow The Conversable Economist

And if you are an undergrad student of economics but haven’t gotten around to doing both of these things just yet, well then, drop everything else and get on to this right away.

The Journal of Economic Perspectives is a journal that has been around since 1987, and I can attest to it being an excellent read, especially if you are an undergraduate student. The papers are accessible, almost always interesting, and the coverage is broad-based by definition. If you’re looking for a good place to start, here’s a personal favorite.

The Conversable Economist is a blog run by Timothy Taylor, who also happens to be the managing editor of the JEP (and has been so from its inception!). All of his posts are well worth your time (here are some I’ve blogged about on EFE before).

The reason I’m writing this post today is two-fold. One, the latest issue of the JEP is out, and Timothy Taylor blogged about it recently. Two, I’d like to expand a little bit on one of the pieces in this issue. There’s at least one other paper that sounds fascinating, but I won’t be able to get to it right away.

The piece that I would like to expand upon is this one: Recommendations for Further Reading

This section will list readings that may be especially useful to teachers of undergraduate economics, as well as other articles that are of broader cultural interest. In general, with occasional exceptions, the articles chosen will be expository or integrative and not focus on original research. If you write or read an appropriate article, please send a copy of the article (and possibly a few sentences describing it) to Timothy Taylor, preferably by e-mail at taylort@macalester.edu, or c/o Journal of Economic Perspectives, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Ave., Saint Paul, MN 55105.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.36.1.191
  1. It’s a great collection of articles for you to read if you are, as Timothy Taylor says, involved in undergraduate education.
  2. From the Smorgasbord section, the Nobel Prize in Economics write-up for this year’s awardees is great reading, and I’d strongly encourage you to read it in full. Or hey, watch the video!
  3. The BIS paper on bottlenecks and their macroeconomic implications is also a great read, please do read the whole report. (And here’s some writing on supply chains from EFE as a useful pairing)
  4. This is not to imply that the others aren’t great reading, of course. It is just that these two happen to be favorites of mine.
  5. Although I should point out that this piece continues to puzzle me! NFT’s in general continue to puzzle me, but that’s a story for another day.
  6. Here’s one thing I wish more undergraduate students would do: get into the habit of not just reading these pieces, but also run a Google Scholar search for other works by the same authors – especially by those whose works you have enjoyed reading thus far. Build up a sense of familiarity with their body of work, and this can serve as a great way to learn more about both a particular field of study and also about an author’s body of work.
  7. Discuss these works threadbare! Do it on campus, on a Discord server, host a discussion on Zoom, ask your profs to arrange for a discussion in class, but get in the habit of reading something, and then speak about it. This happens nowhere near the frequency with which it should, and this should change.
  8. And finally, Luigi Zingales is always worth a listen!

What is a market?

Oddly enough, this is a question that most (not all, but most) economic textbooks don’t answer. Even more oddly, neither do most (again, some, not all) online dictionaries of economics.

I’ll restrict myself to just a couple of sources here, but if you are an economics student, have fun looking up your favorite textbook and let me know if it contains a definition of a market.

The Economist has a website called “Economics A-Z terms”, and the page for all things economics beginning with the letter M doesn’t have a definition of the market. A search on springer.com for “market” yields a lot of results about features and aspects of markets, it doesn’t actually define the term itself. I know Pindyck and Rubinfield have a definition, on the other hand – and this is an excellent textbook, by the way, and there are some others besides. But long story short, it is a topic that seems to have remained curiously undefined. Especially curious considering the fact that we spend such a long time talking about aspects of markets!

The field of law, on the other hand, does define markets, and does so very thoroughly indeed.

But the reason I bring this up today is because of an excellent post by Tim Taylor over on his blog recently, the title of which is “Thomas Sowell: Why “The Market” is a “Misleading Figure of Speech”. The post is a rumination on Thomas Sowell’s take on, well, the market.

“The market” is another such misleading figure of speech. Both the friends and foes of economic decision-making processes refer to “the market” as if it were an institution parallel with, and alternative to, the government as an institution. The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to choose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and tastes.

https://conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com/2021/09/03/thomas-sowell-why-the-market-is-a-misleading-figure-of-speech/

So as per Sowell’s take here, the market is what each individual fashions to suit her own needs at a particular point of time. If I’m hungry, for example, I’m in the market for a meal. Now, that could mean that I choose to use Zomato or Swiggy to order food online and have it delivered home. It could also mean I spending some time in my kitchen rustling up a meal for myself. Or it could be I going to a restaurant and having a meal. Or something else altogether, including something that literally doesn’t exist until I invent it!

The market is simply the freedom to choose among many existing or still-to-be-created possibilities. The need for housing can be met through “the market” in a thousand different ways chosen by each person–anything from living in a commune to buying a house, renting rooms, moving in with relatives, living in quarters provided by an employers, etc., etc. The need for food can be met by buying groceries, eating at a restaurant, growing a garden, or letting someone else provide meals in exchange for work, property, or sex. “The market” is no particular set of institutions.

https://conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com/2021/09/03/thomas-sowell-why-the-market-is-a-misleading-figure-of-speech/

It’s an interesting take, and as Tim Taylor himself says later on in the post, if the definition of a market is “nothing more than an option for each individual to choose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and tastes”, that applies equally to government institutions too.

This is a bit of a nuanced take, but I’d actually go a bit beyond and ask if Sowell’s definition can be taken to mean that government itself is nothing but one of those numerous existing institutions. And whichever society in a particular place came up with some form of government first – well, that society was simply fashioning a new arrangement suited to that society’s own situation and tastes. This gives me the mischievous ability to drive both capitalists and socialists up the wall, for can I not then say that the government is nothing but another form of a market?

But that gentle leg-pulling aside, there is an important distinction between government and markets, as Tim himself points out:

Perhaps instead of thinking about government vs. the market, it’s more useful to think about government as embodying the set of ground-rules under which markets then operate.

https://conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com/2021/09/03/thomas-sowell-why-the-market-is-a-misleading-figure-of-speech/

So even if both were to be institutions that serve our needs (and can indeed therefore be thought of as “markets”), some markets are more equal than others. Governments get to embody (and indeed enforce) the set of ground rules under which markets operate.

And not to get all meta on you, but as public choice economists would rush to tell you, there also happens to be a very real market whose sole reason for existence is to influence the market we call government into making rules that suit, well, some forms of markets more than the others.

Yes, that is a long sentence, but an important one!

JEP, p-values and tests of statistical significance

The Summer 2021 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives came out recently:

I have been the Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives since the first issue in Summer 1987. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which decided about a decade ago–to my delight–that the journal would be freely available on-line, from the current issue all the way back to the first issue. You can download individual articles or the entire issue, and it is available in various e-reader formats, too. Here, I’ll start with the Table of Contents for the just-released Summer 2021 issue, which in the Taylor household is known as issue #137.

https://conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com/2021/07/29/summer-2021-journal-of-economic-perspectives-available-online/

(JEP is a great journal to read as a student. If you’re looking for a good place to start, may I recommend the Anomalies column?)

Of particular interest this time around is the section on statistical significance. This paper, in particular, was an enjoyable read.

And reading that paper reminded of a really old blogpost written by an ex-colleague of mine:

The author starts off by emphasizing the importance of developing a statistical toolbox. Indeed statistics is a rich subject that can be enjoyed by thinking through a given problem and applying the right kind of tools to get a deeper understanding of the problem. One should approach statistics with a bike mechanic mindset. A bike mechanic is not addicted to one tool. He constantly keeps shuffling his tool box by adding new tools or cleaning up old tools or throwing away useless tools etc. Far from this mindset, the statistics education system imparts a formula oriented thinking amongst many students. Instead of developing a statistical or probabilistic thinking in a student, most of the courses focus on a few formulae and teach them null hypothesis testing.

https://radhakrishna.typepad.com/rks_musings/2015/09/mindless-statistics.html

If you are a student of statistics, and think that you “get” statistics, please read the post in its entirety. Don’t worry if you get confused – that is, in a way, the point of that post. It challenges you by asking a very simple question: do you really “get” statistics? And the answer is almost always in the negative (and that goes for me too!)

And my final recommendations du jour is this (extremely passionately) written tirade:

We want to persuade you of one claim: that William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937)—aka “Student” of “Student’s” t-test—was right, and that his difficult friend, Ronald A. Fisher (1890-1962), though a genius, was wrong. Fit is not the same thing as importance. Statistical significance is not the same thing as scientific importance or economic sense. But the mistaken equation is made, we find, in 8 or 9 of every 10 articles appearing in the leading journals of science, economics to medicine. The history of this “standard error” of science involves varied characters and plot twists, but especially R. A. Fisher’s canonical translation of “Student’s” t. William S. Gosset aka “Student,” who was for most of his life Head Experimental Brewer at Guinness, took an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. Against Gosset’s wishes his friend Fisher erased the consciously economic element, Gosset’s “real error.” We want to bring it back.

https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf

Although it might help by reading this review first:

However, thanks to an arbitrary threshold set by statistics pioneer R.A. Fisher, the term ‘significance’ is typically reserved for P values smaller than 0.05. Ziliak and McCloskey, both economists, promote a cost-benefit approach instead, arguing that decision thresholds should be set by considering the consequences of wrong decisions. A finding with a large P value might be worth acting upon if the effect would be genuinely clinically important and if the consequences of failing to act could be serious.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nm0209-135

Statistics is a surprisingly, delightfully conceptual subject, and I’m still peeling away at the layers. Every year I think I understand it a little bit more, and every year I discover that there is much more to learn. The symposium on statistical significance in this summer’s issue of the JEP, RK’s blogpost and Deirdre McCloskey’s paper are good places to get started on unlearning what you’ve been taught in stats.

Can Undergraduates Be Taught To Think Like Economists?

The title of today’s blogpost has been copied, word for word, from a blogpost I had linked to earlier (the fifth link in this post).

It’s been about two and a half years since I read that post. I would still like to believe that Deirdre McCloskey was wrong, and that you can too teach undergraduates to think like economists. But well, perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

A common goal for principles of economics courses is to teach students to “think like economists.” I’ve always been a little skeptical of that high-sounding goal. It seems like a lot to accomplish in a semester or two.

https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/03/can-undergraduates-be-taught-to-think.html

Both Tim Taylor and Deirdre McCloskey (whose essay I excerpt from below) aren’t saying that you can’t teach economics to undergraduates. You most certainly can, and you don’t need to run a fancy-pants model to ascertain this. What they are saying, however, is that it is one thing to teach them the principles of economics. It is quite another to teach them to apply these principles in their lives, at all times.

Bower thinks that we can teach economics to undergraduates. I disagree. I have concluded reluctantly, after ruminating on it for a long me, that we can’t. We can teach about economics, which is a good thing. The undergraduate program in English literature teaches about literature, not how to do it. No one complains, or should. The undergraduate program in art history teaches about painting, not how to do it. I claim the case of economics is similar. Majoring in economics can teach about economics, but not how to do it…. (Emphasis added)

http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/graham/natural.pdf

It is one thing to teach opportunity costs. And most students we’ve taught will tell you the definition. The “good” students will tell you three different definitions, from three different textbooks, and maybe cite a couple of academic papers that ruminate about what the definition means. Well, great. Do these students apply the concept of opportunity costs in their daily lives? Do they ask themselves if this (whatever this may be) is the best use of their time, and what are they giving up in order to do this?

Does winning matter more than learning? Does winning matter more than doing? If you end up defeating somebody else – a person, a team, a tribe, a party or a nation – what do you gain? And to go back to the previous paragraph, was it but a Pyrrhic victory?

Consider this hypothetical:

Let’s say there’s two teams in some corporate environment somewhere. And for whatever reason, these teams don’t get along well together. Both sides believe that they’re in the right, and the other side is in the wrong, and we’ve reached Mark Twain territory.

Are they going to go to their manager(s) and ask them to resolve this issue? Sure, it may seem like a good idea initially. But said managers, I can assure you, have things to do. Deliverables to, well, deliver. Teams to manage. Projects to initiate. Other people to manage. And so the manager(s) might listen to both teams long list of complaints once, perhaps twice.

But eventually the price mechanism will come to the party. The more the two teams spend time on this, rather than on work, the more expensive the situation becomes for the enterprise. Because a commodity that is limited (time) is being spent on non-productive work (productive, in this case, can be thought of as remunerative).

Since the whole point of the firm’s existence is to maximize revenue, this will not be tolerated for too long. The manager(s) will eventually say one of the following:

  1. Figure it out yourselves, but get the work done, for that’s what matters. Or else.
  2. Let’s reallocate, forcibly, both teams on to other projects. This will usually be accompanied with a mental note to themselves that truly important projects in the future should not be given to these team members. For obvious reasons.
  3. Or let’s shut down the project, because the point of a firm is to do the work that earns one the money. Start something new, with a new set of people.
  4. Now, since the team members are old enough to know that eventually pts 1 to 3 will occur, they usually swallow their differences and get the work done. Sure, bitching about the other team will happen in bars and pubs in the evening, and sure the other team won’t be called home for dinner anytime soon. But in the workplace, professionalism will win out, due to the price mechanism. In more explicit terms, they will get the work done because they know that otherwise they will be fired.

The reason all of this will happen is because these team members will have families, responsibilities, loans to pay off. The money they will lose out on by losing their jobs is far too important, and the threat of losing out on their income forces them to behave professionally.

The opportunity cost argument comes into play. Playing politics may be good for your ego, but it ain’t good for your wallet. But that lesson comes with age, it doesn’t come from attending principles of economics classes.

A nineteen-year old has intimations of immortality, comes directly from a socialized economy (called a family), and has no feel on his pulse for those tragedies of adult life that economists call scarcity and choice. You can teach a nineteen-year old all the math he can grasp, all the history he can read, all the Latin he can stand. But you cannot teach him a philosophical subject. For that he has to be, say twenty-five, or better, forty-five. …

http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/graham/natural.pdf

Adults don’t necessarily grasp the argument that the opportunity cost of politics is work. But they understand the rules of the game called life. They do understand that the opportunity cost of politics is an increase in the probability of losing their wages. And so they still practice politics, but more covertly. Not, in other words, an ideal situation if the system is trying to optimize work, but hey, better than overt politics.

How to get students to understand that the opportunity cost of politics is learning? That the opportunity cost of politics is not getting fun projects done? That the opportunity cost of resolving arguments, or adjudicating who said what to whom and when is not being able to start other fun learning based projects? There’s no price mechanism at play, there’s illusions of immortality (they don’t get that time is limited), they don’t have the responsibility of putting food on the table (they come from a socialized economy called a family), and they haven’t experienced the tragedies of adult life.

To them, winning a political argument against the other side is the best use of their time.

Principles of economics, if taught well, and if learnt well, should in theory help you understand that the opportunity cost of politics is work. Philosophy should in theory teach you that good work is better than bad politics.

I’ll say this much: I was convinced that Deirdre McCloskey was wrong when she said that you couldn’t have undergraduates do economics, even if we taught them economics.

Now?

I hope.

All About Taxation

I write this blog for folks who are looking to learn more about economics. And if you are in this group, you can’t help but have noticed that there’s been a bit of a brouhaha over taxes, both in the United States of America and in India.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.
Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

What exactly is income tax? And what is its history?

Well, the first question is simple to answer (to begin with): it is a tax on your income. Ah, but that then begs the (pardon the puny pun) million dollar question: what is income?

But a question remained: What would count as income and what wouldn’t? In 1916, a woman named Myrtle Macomber received a dividend for her Standard Oil of California shares. She owed taxes, thanks to the new law. The dividend had not come in cash, however. It came in the form of an additional share for every two shares she already held. She paid the taxes and then brought a court challenge: Yes, she’d gotten a bit richer, but she hadn’t received any money. Therefore, she argued, she’d received no “income.”
Four years later, the Supreme Court agreed. In Eisner v. Macomber, the high court ruled that income derived only from proceeds. A person needed to sell an asset — stock, bond or building — and reap some money before it could be taxed.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

As the article I have excerpted this from goes on to say, folks were warning us even back then that this was not going to end well (it is nowhere close to ending, and it is not going well). But this talks to us about the difficulty of defining income, about which more in a bit. Here’s a brief snippet about how the idea of income taxes originated:

The universal taxes of ancient times, like the one that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem just before the birth of Jesus, were invariably head taxes, with one fixed sum to be paid by everybody, rather than income taxes. Before about 1800, only two important attempts were made to establish income taxes—one in Florence during the fifteenth century, and the other in France during the eighteenth. Generally speaking, both represented efforts by grasping rulers to mulct their subjects. According to the foremost historian of the income tax, the late Edwin R. A. Seligman, the Florentine effort withered away as a result of corrupt and inefficient administration. The eighteenth-century French tax, in the words of the same authority, “soon became honeycombed with abuses” and degenerated into “a completely unequal and thoroughly arbitrary imposition upon the less well-to-do classes,” and, as such, it undoubtedly played its part in whipping up the murderous fervor that went into the French Revolution.

Brooks, John. Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street (p. 93). Hodder & Stoughton. Kindle Edition.

That… is not reassuring.

The chapter on income tax from this excellent, excellent book makes for great reading. As it turns out, it was the (surprise, surprise) Civil War that finally provided the impetus for the imposition of an income tax across the length and breadth of the nation((do read the entire chapter, though. The snippet about the experiment in Rhode Island is fascinating.)) And the imposition was celebrated! Well, at least by some:

“I am taxed on my income! This is perfectly gorgeous! I never felt so important in my life before,” Mark Twain wrote in the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise after he had paid his first income-tax bill, for the year 1864—$36.82, including a penalty of $3.12 for being late. Although few other taxpayers were so enthusiastic, the law remained in force until 1872. It was, however, subjected to a succession of rate reductions and amendments, one of them being the elimination, in 1865, of its progressive rates, on the arresting ground that collecting 10 per cent on high incomes and lower rates on lower incomes constituted undue discrimination against wealth.

Brooks, John. Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street (p. 96). Hodder & Stoughton. Kindle Edition.

Back, as it were, to the future. Anand Giridharadas wrote an article in the New York Times about the ProPublica report:

Mr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.
And this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.
It can’t. And who keeps us from seeing that simple, stark truth more effectively, more perniciously, than the Good Billionaire?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opinion/warren-buffett-billionaire-taxes.html

The second card in my three card trick is a response to this essay, from V Ananta Nageswaran((note that I am excerpting the outline of the argument, please visit the blog to read it in full)):

So, notwithstanding Anand Giridhardas, we can still think about the manner in which incomes and capital gains & dividends are taxed. I see three issues, at my level.
There needs to be a discussion on unrealised capital gains and dividends. Dividends are avoided and companies buy stocks back to avoid dividend tax. What if the tax policies take away that choice?
Second, even if we accept that only realised capital gains are to be taxed, why are they taxed at much lower rates than tax on wages?
Third, even if we accept this logic (which, in addition to the above arguments, is also a reflection of who made those laws, their incomes and wealth status, etc., over time and across the world) of the primacy of capital, for the sake of argument and hence accept the conclusion that capital gains will be treated differently from regular labour income, then the question is one of defining short-term and long-term. Why should short-term be just one year? In economics, anyone’s definition of short-term is not one year but a business cycle, i.e., minimum three years. Extending the definition of ‘short-term’ to 36 months from 12 months will earn more revenues.

https://thegoldstandardsite.wordpress.com/2021/06/19/the-inequity-of-the-tax-system/

That is, the author is saying that that are indeed problems with capital being taxed the way it is, but (as he points out elsewhere in the blog) the way forward is evolution, not revolution.

Which brings me to the third card: TALISMAN.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle – and that, of course, is the point of the excerpt above too. On the spectrum of Current System Bad:::Current System Good, reasonable people can and should argue about the “sweet spot”.

And if you are a student of economics (and especially public finances), where do you go to learn more before trying to figure out where you should be on this spectrum?

  1. Please read the chapter on income taxes from the book Business Adventures
  2. Read this essay by Tim Taylor (and note that it was written before the ProPublica report came out!)
  3. Farhad Manjoo, a while ago, on abolishing billionaires (and the response to that essay)
  4. Gulzar Natarajan on this issue
  5. And for a theoretical understanding – always a good idea for an issue as complex and important as this one – Chapters 20 and 21 from Stiglitz’ Economics of the Public Sector.

Variants of Concern

I didn’t do so well last year in terms of posting regularly around this time onwards, and it was because thinking about Covid overwhelmed me. I’ve studiously tried to avoid writing about it since then as much as possible, but this post is an exception to that self-imposed rule.

First, about the “second” wave in India. We’ve been here before, about a century ago. I’d written down notes from Laura Spinney’s excellent book, The Pale Rider in March of last year, and there was this bullet point:

The flu struck in three waves, and the second wave was by far the deadliest.

https://econforeverybodyblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/18/notes-from-pale-rider-by-laura-spinney/

There are many possible reasons for why the second wave is likely to be much worse than the first, and I do not know enough to be able to even speculate which one is the most likely. But both a century ago and now, the second wave was by far and away the worst:

Please, read the whole thread.

And here we are, a century down the road. Via the excellent, indefatigable Timothy Taylor, this little book. And from that little book, this not-so-little excerpt:

Manaus, a city on the Amazon River of more than 2 million, illustrates the dangers of complacency. During the first wave of the pandemic, Manaus was one of the worst-hit locations in the world. Tests in spring 2020 showed that
over 60 percent of the population carried antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. Some policymakers speculated that “herd immunity”—the theory that infection rates fall after large population shares have been infected— had been attained.

That belief was a mirage. A resurgence flared less than eight months later, flooding hospitals suffering from shortages of oxygen and other medical supplies. The pandemic’s second wave left more dead than the first.

Scientists discovered a novel variant in this second wave that went beyond the mutations identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa. This new variant, denominated P.1, has since turned up in the United States, Japan, and
Germany. Scientists speculate that a high prevalence of antibodies in the first wave may have helped a more aggressive variant to propagate. The hopes for widespread herd immunity may be dashed by the emergence of more infectious
virus variants.

Since the outbreak in Manaus in January 2021, P.1 has now spread throughout Brazil. The variant is much more transmissible than those that had been circulating previously in the country. High transmissibility and the absence of
measures and behaviors to stem the dissemination of the virus have led to the worst health system collapse in Brazilian history. The country has been on the front pages of major news outlets around the world not only due to the dramatic
situation that is currently unfolding but also because of the global threat posed by a major country with an uncontrolled epidemic.

https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/piieb21-2.pdf

The point is not to read more about the P1 variant. That is a worthy exercise, and you can see this, this and this for starters. But the point that I want to make is this – well, the points I want to make are these:

  1. The one other instance we have of a global pandemic tells us that the second wave was deadlier.
  2. That seems to be the case this time around as well, because the same virus has mutated into a variety of different forms over the past year in different parts of the world.
    1. Each of these so-called “variants-of-concern” will have different impacts, both in their countries of “origin” and (inevitably) elsewhere.
    2. How variant x affects individual y in region z is down to a long list of potential factors.
  3. And therefore 2021 already is, and will continue to be, worse in many ways compared to 2020.

And again, not just because of the P1 variant. That is simply one (worrisome, to be sure) variant – there are many more, and there will be more still to come.

Bottomline: we’re just getting started with the second wave. It isn’t the beginning of the end – it is the end of the beginning.

Reproducibility and Replicability

I and a colleague conducted a small behavioral economics and experimental economics workshop for our students at the Gokhale Institute. It was a very small, very basic workshop, but one of the things that came up was the reproducibility problem, or as Wikipedia puts it, the replication crisis.

The replication crisis (also called the replicability crisis and the reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis most severely affects the social sciences and medicine. The phrase was coined in the early 2010s as part of a growing awareness of the problem. The replication crisis represents an important body of research in the field of metascience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

And further on in that same article:

A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist’s experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments).[9] In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did. Misconducts were reported more frequently by medical researchers than others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

The basic idea behind replicability is very simple: you should be able to take the data and the code from the paper you are reading/reviewing, and replicate the results obtained. You don’t have to agree with the choice of method, or with the results or with anything – you should be able to replicate the results, that’s all.

One basic standard of economic research is surely that someone else should be able to reproduce what you have done. They don’t have to agree with what you’ve done. They may think your data is terrible and your methodology is worse. But as a minimal standard, they should be able to reproduce your result, so that the follow-up research can then be in a position to think about what might have been done differently or better. This standard may seem obvious, but during the last 30 years or so, the methods for reproducibility have been transformed.

https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-reproducibility-challenge-with.html

Now (to me, at any rate) this is interesting enough in and of itself, but at the risk of becoming a little meta, reading the rest of Tim Taylor’s post is worth it because it raises so many interesting issues.

The first is a link to a lovely overview of the problem by Lars Vilhuber, published in the Harvard Data Science Review. It is relatively simple to read, and is recommended reading. For example, Vilhuber draws a careful distinction between replicability and reproducibility, and is full of interesting nuggets of information. I’ll list out the major ones (major to me) here. Note that I have simply copy-pasted from the link:

  1. Publication of research articles specifically in economics can be traced back at least to the 1844 publication of the Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft (Stigler et al., 1995).
  2. As the first editor of Econometrica, Ragnar Frisch noted, “the original data will, as a rule, be published, unless their volume is excessive […] to stimulate criticism, control, and further studies” (Frisch, 1933)
  3. …only 17.4% of articles in Econometrica in 1989–1990 had empirical content (Stigler et al., 1995)
  4. As Dewald et al. (1986) note: “Many authors cited only general sources such as Survey of Current Business, Federal Reserve Bulletin, or International Financial Statistics, but did not identify the specific issues, tables, and pages from which the data had been extracted.”
  5. Among reproducibility supplements posted alongside articles in the AEA’s journals between 2010 and 2019, Stata is the most popular (72.96% of all supplements), followed by Matlab (22.45%; Vilhuber et al., 2020) (Note: Do check figure 2 at the link. Fascinating stuff.)
  6. It was concluded that “there is no tradition of replication in economics” (McCullough et al., 2006).
  7. The extent of the use of replication exercises in economics classes is anecdotally high, but I am not aware of any study or survey demonstrating this.
  8. The most famous example in economics is, of course, the exchange between Reinhart and Rogoff, and graduate student Thomas Herndon, together with professors Pollin and Ash (Herndon et al., 2014; Reinhart & Rogoff, 2010). (Note to students: this is a fascinating tale. Read up about it!)

There is much more at the link of course, but Tim Taylor’s post does a good job of extracting the key points. I’m noting them here in bullet point fashion, but you really should read the entire thing.

  1. Economic data – our understanding of the phrase needs to change, because a lot of it is in fact not publicly available today.
  2. “Vilhuber writes: “In 1960, 76% of empirical AER [American Economic Review- articles used public-use data. By 2010, 60% used administrative data, presumably none of which is public use …””
  3. Restricted Access Data Environments is a new thing that I discovered while writing this blogpost. “…where accredited researchers can get access to detailed data, but in ways that protect individual privacy. For example, there are now 30 Federal Statistical Data Research Centers around the country, mostly located close to big universities.” We could do with something like this in India. Actually, we would be a lot happier with just dbie working the way it was supposed to, but that’s for another day.
  4. Data that is given by creating a sub-sample, data that is ephemeral (try researching Instagram stories, for example) and data that you need to pay for are all challenging, and relatively recent, developments.
  5. I worked for four years in the analytics industry, so believe me when I say this. Data cleaning is a huge issue.
  6. Tim Taylor writes five paragraphs after this one, but this is a glorious para, worth quoting in full:
    “As a final thought, I’ll point out that academic researchers have mixed incentives when it comes to data. They always want access to new data, because new data is often a reliable pathway to published papers that can build a reputation and a paycheck. They often want access to the data used by rival researchers, to understand and to critique their results. But making access available to details of their own data doesn’t necessarily help them much.”

If there are those amongst you who are considering getting into academia, and are wondering what field to specialize in, reproducibility and replicability are fields worth investigating, precisely because they are relatively underrated today, and are only going to get more important tomorrow.

That’s a good investment to make, no?

The Long, Slow, But Inevitable Death of the Classroom

If you read enough about Robert Solow, this quote coming up is but a matter of time:

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics

http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/solow-computer-productivity.pdf

Much the same could be said about internet based learning technologies if you tried to measure it in colleges and universities before March 2020. We had lip service being paid to MOOC’s and all that, but if we’re being honest, that’s all it was: lip service.

Things have changed around a bit since then, I think.

We’ll get to that later on this post, but let’s go back to the seeing computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics bit for the moment. Paul David, an American economist, wrote a wonderful essay called “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox“, back in 1990.

I think of this essay as an attempt to respond to the question Robert Solow had posed – why isn’t the data reflecting the ubiquitousness of the computer in the modern workplace? Read the essay: it’s a very short, very easy read.

Paul David draws an analogy between the move away from steam as a source of power, back at the end of the 19th century.

In 1900, contemporary observers well might have remarked that the electric dynamos were to be seen “everywhere but in the productivity statistics!”

David, P. A. (1990). The dynamo and the computer: an historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. The American Economic Review, 80(2), 355-361.

Adjusting to a new technology, it turns out, takes time.

Steam-powered manufacturing had linked an entire production line to a single huge steam engine. As a result, factories were stacked on many floors around the central engine, with drive belts all running at the same speed. The flow of work around the factory was governed by the need to put certain machines close to the steam engine, rather than the logic of moving the product from one machine to the next. When electric dynamos were first introduced, the steam engine would be ripped out and the dynamo would replace it. Productivity barely improved.
Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be completely redesigned on a single floor. Production lines were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or stopping it at will. The improvements weren’t just architectural but social: Once the technology allowed workers to make more decisions, they needed more training and different contracts to encourage them to take responsibility.

https://slate.com/culture/2007/06/what-the-history-of-the-electric-dynamo-teaches-about-the-future-of-the-computer.html

Again, please read the whole thing, and also read this other article by Tim Harford from the BBC, “Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing?” The article, by the way, is an offshoot of a wonderful podcast called “50 Things That Made The Modern Economy“. Please listen to it!

But here’s the part that stood out for me from that piece I excerpted from above:

“Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be completely redesigned on a single floor. Production lines were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or stopping it at will.”

https://slate.com/culture/2007/06/what-the-history-of-the-electric-dynamo-teaches-about-the-future-of-the-computer.html

Colleges and universities are today designed around the basic organizational unit of a classroom, with each classroom being “powered” by a professor.

Of the many, many things that the pandemic has done to the world, what it has done to learning is this:

each worker learner could have his or her own little electric motor personal classroom, starting it or stopping it at will.

In fact, I had a student tell me recently that she prefers to listen to classroom recordings later, at 2x, because she prefers listening at a faster pace. So it’s not just starting or stopping at will, it is also slowing down or speeding up at will.

Today, because of the pandemic, we are at an extreme end of the spectrum which describes how learning is delivered. Everybody sits at home, and listens to a lecture being delivered (at least in Indian universities, mostly synchronously).

When the pandemic ends, whenever that may be, do we swing back to the other end of the spectrum? Does everybody sit in a classroom once again, and listens to a lecture being delivered in person (and therefore synchronously)?

Or does society begin to ask if we could retain some parts of virtual classrooms? Should the semester than be, say, 60% asynchronous, with the remainder being doubt solving sessions in classroom? Or some other ratio that may work itself out over time? Should the basic organizational unit of the educational institute still be a classroom? Does an educational institute still require the same number of in person professors, still delivering the same number of lectures?

In other words, in the post-pandemic world…

How long before online learning starts to show up in the learning statistics?

Additional, related reading, for those interested:

  1. Timothy Taylor on why “some of the shift to telecommuting will stick“
  2. An essay from the late, great Herbert Simon that I hadn’t read before called “The Steam Engine and the Computer“
  3. “The role of computer technology in restructuring schools” by Alan Collins, written in 1990(!)