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Degree-educated millennials in London are 41 per cent less likely to own a home than degree-educated boomers were at the same age. And if you think that’s bad, pity the non-graduate under-40s in London, just 20 per cent of whom own a home (among non-graduate boomers of the same age, 60 per cent were homeowners).
Here is more from John Burn-Murdoch at the FT.
The post UK fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
And perhaps it did not start in the United States? Here is more from David Rozado, including a full research paper:
Great Awokening is a global phenomenon. No evidence it started in US media. Analysis of 98 million news articles across 36 countries quantifies. Exception: state-controlled media from China/Russia/Iran using wokeness terminology to criticize/mock the Westhttps://t.co/yHwPMSR4D0 pic.twitter.com/RF30c2UmWQ
— David Rozado (@DavidRozado) April 6, 2023
The post Is the Great Awokening a global phenomenon? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This paper examines the authorship of post-publication criticisms in the scientific literature, with a focus on gender differences. Bibliometrics from journals in the natural and social sciences show that comments that criticize or correct a published study are 20-40% less likely than regular papers to have a female author. In preprints in the life sciences, prior to peer review, women are missing by 20-40% in failed replications compared to regular papers, but are not missing in successful replications. In an experiment, I then find large gender differences in willingness to point out and penalize a mistake in someone’s work.
That is from a new paper by David Klinowski. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post Do women disagree less in science? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Ufuk Akcigit and Nathan Goldschlag (my co-author and former student) have an important new paper on the employment and invention dynamics of US inventors. Amazingly they link data on inventors from patents to census data using anonymized, person-level identifiers, known as Protected Identification Keys (PIKs) so they also have individual data on earnings and employment and they link that data to data on firms.
Ultimately, we observe the employment histories of approximately 760 thousand inventors associated with 3.6 million patents granted between 2000 and 2016.
What they find is twofold. First, an increasing number of inventors are being hired by large incumbent firms (left below). Second, when inventors move to large incumbent firms they earn more but they invent less, compared to similar inventors who go to young firms (right below). Why would an incumbent firm pay more for less productive workers? One possible answer is the Arrow replacement effect, namely a monopolist has less incentive to innovate than a competitive firm becasue the monopolist has a bigger opportunity cost, namely it’s own profits. As Arrow put it: “The preinvention monopoly power acts as a strong disincentive to further innovation.” A logical extension is that a monopolist will be willing to pay not to innovate and one way of doing that is to hire inventors who, if they worked at an entrant, would threaten their monopoly profits.
This is an important paper on declining dynamism in the US economy.
Addendum: In a second paper they use their extensive data to discuss the demographic characteristics of inventors.
The post The Arrow Replacement Effect and the Dynamics of US Inventors appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Analyzing every tweet of all US senators holding office from 2013 to 2021 (861,104 tweets from 140 senators), we identify a psycholinguistic factor, greed communication [TC: basically accusing other people of greed], that robustly predicts increased approval (favorites) and reach (retweets). These effects persist when tested against diverse established psycholinguistic predictors of political content dissemination on social media and various other psycholinguistic variables. We further find that greed communication in the tweets of Democratic senators is associated with greater approval and retweeting compared to greed communication in the tweets of Republican senators, especially when those tweets also mention political outgroups.
That is from new research by Eric J. Mercadante, Jessica L. Tracy, and Friedrich M. Götz. Via David Lilienfeld.
The post Which political tweets do best? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Anticipating food crisis outbreaks is crucial to efficiently allocate emergency relief and reduce human suffering. However, existing predictive models rely on risk measures that are often delayed, outdated, or incomplete. Using the text of 11.2 million news articles focused on food-insecure countries and published between 1980 and 2020, we leverage recent advances in deep learning to extract high-frequency precursors to food crises that are both interpretable and validated by traditional risk indicators. We demonstrate that over the period from July 2009 to July 2020 and across 21 food-insecure countries, news indicators substantially improve the district-level predictions of food insecurity up to 12 months ahead relative to baseline models that do not include text information. These results could have profound implications on how humanitarian aid gets allocated and open previously unexplored avenues for machine learning to improve decision-making in data-scarce environments.
Here is more from Ananth Balashankar, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, and Samuel P. Fraiberger.
The post Better predicting food crises appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Measures of well-being have often been found to rise with log (income). Kahneman and Deaton [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 16489–93 (2010)] reported an exception; a measure of emotional well-being (happiness) increased but then flattened somewhere between $60,000 and $90,000. In contrast, Killingsworth [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2016976118 (2021)] observed a linear relation between happiness and log(income) in an experience-sampling study. We discovered in a joint reanalysis of the experience sampling data that the flattening pattern exists but is restricted to the least happy 20% of the population, and that complementary nonlinearities contribute to the overall linear-log relationship between happiness and income. We trace the discrepant results to the authors’ reliance on standard practices and assumptions of data analysis that should be questioned more often, although they are standard in social science.
That is from a recent collaboration by Matthew A. Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman, and Barbara Mellers. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis. So if you’re rich, don’t be a sad sack! No need for that. And via Daniel Lippman, here is some Bloomberg coverage of the same.
The post Income and happiness, revisited appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A reverse Flynn effect was found for composite ability scores with large US adult sample from 2006 to 2018 and 2011 to 2018.
Domain scores of matrix reasoning, letter and number series, verbal reasoning showed evidence of declining scores.
Three-dimensional rotation scores generally increased from 2011 to 2018.
Differences in ability scores were present regardless of age, education, or gender.
The steepest slopes occurred for ages 18–22 and lower levels of education.
That is from a new paper by Elizabeth M. Dworak, William Revelle, and David M. Condon. Alex T. comments.
The post Uh-oh, reverse Flynn effect edition appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
That is the title of a new paper by Christos Makridis, Louis Hickman, and Benjamin Manning, here is the abstract:
Automation and technology are rapidly disrupting the labor market. We investigated changes in the returns to occupational personality requirements—the ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that enable success in a given occupation—and the resulting implications for organizational strategy. Using job incumbent ratings from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET), we identify two broad occupational personality requirements, which we label intellectual tenacity and social adjustment. Intellectual tenacity encompasses achievement/effort, persistence, initiative, analytical thinking, innovation, and independence. Social adjustment encompasses emotion regulation, concern for others, social orientation, cooperation, and stress tolerance. Both occupational personality requirements relate similarly to occupational employment growth between 2007 and 2019. However, among over 10 million respondents to the American Community Survey, jobs requiring intellectual tenacity pay higher wages—even controlling for occupational cognitive ability requirements—and the earnings premium grew over this 13-year period. Results are robust to controlling for education, demographics, and industry effects, suggesting that organizations should pay at least as much attention to personality in the hiring and retention process as skills.
Of course that is very much accord with some of the claims Daniel Gross and I make in our book on talent. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post Earnings Are Greater and Increasing in Occupations That Require Intellectual Tenacity appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I think consistent with Matt's point here — you see young people identifying social media as a source of worsening mental health; but also emphasizing politics and national media.https://t.co/scOXEMNFjJ https://t.co/MGgdNIsz0m pic.twitter.com/hY47EOZFAO
— Arpit Gupta (@arpitrage) March 1, 2023
I would stress this point. Most of the explanations for declining teen mental health invoke contagion at one stage of the argument or another. That in turn means the initial causes can be fairly small, relative to the final outcome. Contagion itself is arguably the most important cause.
The post What young people say is driving changes in their mental health appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Such investigations are invariably somewhat speculative, but from some new research here goes:
The strongest predictor of attractiveness-enhancing behaviors was social media usage. Other predictors, in order of effect size, included adhering to traditional gender roles, residing in countries with less gender equality, considering oneself as highly attractive or, conversely, highly unattractive, TV watching time, higher socioeconomic status, right-wing political beliefs, a lower level of education, and personal individualistic attitudes.
That is from a paper by Marta Kowal, et.al.
The post What predicts attractiveness-enhancing behavior? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift of consumption from services to goods. We study this demand reallocation in a multi-sector model featuring sticky prices, input-output linkages, and labor reallocation costs. Reallocation costs hamper the increase in the supply of goods, causing inflationary pressures. These pressures are amplified by the fact that goods prices are more flexible than services prices. We estimate the model allowing for demand reallocation, sectoral productivity, and aggregate labor supply shocks. The demand reallocation shock explains a large portion of the rise in U.S. inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic.
That is from a new paper by Francesco Ferrante, Sebastian Graves, and Matteo Iacoviello. From the Board of Governors, 3.5 percentage points if you had to say how much. Via Nick Timiraos.
The post The Inflationary Effects of Sectoral Reallocation appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Tyler Cowen: I am, by the way, not so convinced by the Jon Haidt piece on social media and mental illness: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1221094&post_id=104255435&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
Tyler Cowen: He readily admits that across individuals social media use explains only a tiny portion of the variation in happiness. His response is that it is other people’s usage of social media that makes you unhappy, because you can’t go talk to them.
Tyler Cowen: So there are (in his view) only system-wide effects, nothing that can be verified at the micro level. [TC: note the “to the point” style of WhatsApp leads to certain exaggerations and inaccuracies]
Tyler Cowen: It seems to me that if the stuff makes you so miserable, young people should be able to build small social “pods” of individuals who don’t do the stuff so much, hang out together, and are just way happier.
Tyler Cowen: Furthermore, if a lot of the problem is “young girls comparing themselves to thinner others on Instagram” and the like, that should show up as an individual-level effect. Not a group effect. There can be those beautiful, envy-inducing models on Instagram even if only a small percentage of one’s peers are on Instagram.Tyler Cowen: I agree the problem is larger with girls. And I think it is a mix of bullying, cyberbullying, envy, and unrealistic expectations. I just don’t think it is nearly as a large a problem as he claims.
Tyler Cowen: And I think that often “going to talk to other people” — you know the “Mean Girls” — is the problem itself. In that sense his various hypotheses contradict each other.
You will note also the recent result that school closures lower not raise the rate of youth suicide. It is thus hard for me to string together the hypothesis of a) “youth suicide rates are way up,” b) “this is because of social media,” and c) “social media make us miserable by taking away people to talk to and hang out with.”
The post From my WhatsApp appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
By David Rozado, who has hit a bunch of home runs lately. Look at his charts, to my eyes they show woke terminology in the NYT as having peaked and as now declining. Here goes, they are very different from the earlier charts (also at the link) ending in 2019:
Climate change issues, however, continue to receive more coverage. Not all of the charts “go my way,” but this is hardly what you would expect if Wokeness were simply rising, rising, rising out of control. Oh, and check out these trends in pronoun usage. Also here is more from Rozado, mostly on how the positive sides of woke rhetoric are gaining at the expense of the negative sides.
The post Update on the New York Times Word Frequency Chart appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Bolotnyy: We found that these moderate to severe symptoms of depression and anxiety were about two to three times more prevalent among PhD students in these eight top-ranked economics PhD programs than in the general population. Suicidality was also about two times what you’d see in the general population.
And:
Economic students are about half as likely as other Harvard PhD students to be in treatment if they have some of these serious symptoms. That’s something that we’ve talked a lot about and tried to understand.
Here is more, brought to you by the AEA. I am very happy to see this work being done, kudos to Valentin Bolotnyy. And I am all for more social connections, better campus mental health counseling, and involved advisors, all of which are listed as potential partial remedies. Yet if I were the AEA, I would be wondering about pushing yet another recommendation — discouraging some people, at the margin of course, from even starting graduate school in economics? And other fields too.
Somehow that option does not receive much consideration. (When I advise people. in part due to this and other data, I am much less likely to recommend graduate school than in earlier times.) Should not part of the mission of the AEA be to think like an economist? What about “exit”? Or is that only for other sectors?
The post Why not get out? Really appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here is a new tack, or rather a very old one:
Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the otherwise positive relationship found between GDP per capita and adult life satisfaction for the same countries. Results are robust to various model specifications and both macro and micro approaches. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this apparent paradox can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries. Effects are found to be more pronounced for girls than for boys.
That is from a new paper by Robert Rudolf and Dirk Bethmann. Is it the learning per se, or is the learning a proxy for a very particular kind of peer interaction? Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post Why are adolescents so unhappy? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I worry about the distribution, but of course the news could be worse:
The International Monetary Fund said a mining boom helped the Democratic Republic of Congo’s economy perform “significantly stronger” last year than earlier forecast.
The economy of the mining giant is estimated to have grown 8.5%, compared with an earlier projection of 6.6%, the IMF said Wednesday in an emailed statement.
The fund also raised its growth forecast for this year to 8% from 6.7%, as it warned of downside risks “from the armed conflict in the east, uncertainty ahead of the elections, the continued effect of the war in Ukraine, and adverse terms-of-trade shocks.”
Congo produces almost 70% of the world’s key battery mineral cobalt and tied Peru last year as the second-largest copper producer, according to the US Geological Survey. The central African nation also produces significant amounts of gold and tin. Its mining industry as a whole grew 20% last year, the IMF said.
Here is more from Michael J. Kavanagh at Bloomberg.
The post Democratic Republic of Congo growth estimate of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here is much more from Musa al-Gharbi. Via John Cunningham.
The post Has the Great Awokening in scholarship peaked? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
And here is part of the abstract:
We gathered extensive data on equity investments made by foreign companies headquartered in the European Union (EU) and G7 nations and checked whether following the outbreak of armed conflict divestment of their Russian subsidiaries could be confirmed. At the end of November 2022, our analysis shows that 8.5% of EU and G7 companies had divested at least one of their Russian subsidiaries. We performed extensive robustness checks that confirm our overall findings while also revealing some notable variation in divestment rates.
That is from a recent paper by EVenett and Pisani, via Charles Klingman.
The post Russia fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Are the best-paying jobs with the highest prestige done by individuals of great intelligence? Past studies find job success to increase with cognitive ability, but do not examine how, conversely, ability varies with job success. Stratification theories suggest that social background and cumulative advantage dominate cognitive ability as determinants of high occupational success. This leads us to hypothesize that among the relatively successful, average ability is concave in income and prestige. We draw on Swedish register data containing measures of cognitive ability and labour-market success for 59,000 men who took a compulsory military conscription test. Strikingly, we find that the relationship between ability and wage is strong overall, yet above €60,000 per year ability plateaus at a modest level of +1 standard deviation. The top 1 per cent even score slightly worse on cognitive ability than those in the income strata right below them. We observe a similar but less pronounced plateauing of ability at high occupational prestige.
That is from a new paper by Marc Keuschnigg, Arnout van de Rijt3, and Thijs Bol.
The post The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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