BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-09-28 Th
Deaths of despair among the less well-educated; Harvard grade inflation; Fox News misinformation is not just political; very briefly noted; McCoy on embers of autoregression, Steckel on the...
Deaths of despair among the less well-educated; Harvard grade inflation; Fox News misinformation is not just political; very briefly noted; McCoy on embers of autoregression, Steckel on the biological standard of living, Thompson is confused about antitrust & technology, & worth teaching efflorescences & dark ages, America’s broken civic bargain, & I briefly note…
MUST-READ: A Remarkable Increase in the Education-Adult Mortality Gradient:
Anne Case & Angus Deaton: Accounting for the Widening Mortality Gap between American Adults with and without a BA…
Look at New York vs. West Virginia! College-graduates in West Virginia are largely insulated from adverse mortality trends, and so are non-college graduates in in New York.
More from the Skinner slides:
Reasonable candidates (from Case and Deaton): Morbidity (e.g., pain), marriage rates, out-of-wedlock children, religious observance, institutional attachments, and wages/labor force participation….
State-level policies are consistent with these patterns: Tobacco tax, minimum wages, EITC, pollution controls, Medicaid coverage implemented only by high-income states in the 1970s-1990s (Montez et al., 2019, 2020)….
Yet there’s still likely a role for “economic opportunity”…. Ongoing research—even in progressive states, low-income counties lag behind…
ONE IMAGE: Grade Inflation:
Given the number of gatekeepers outside who think that grades mean something even if not very much, can I ethically give any of my U.C. Berkeley students less than an A in the future?
ONE VIDEO: Your Reminder: Fox News TV Is Awful Misinformation Outside of Politics as Well:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Leticia Miranda: FTC’s Amazon Lawsuit Is Really a Code of Conduct Manual: ‘The government antitrust case is a guide for operators of other online marketplaces in how to be better partners with their sellers…
Paul Krugman: Those manufacturing jobs we want back were good for a reason…
Andrea Matranga: ‘Teaching micro 1 the traditional way (supply and demand first) requires a lot of handwaving and trust me it will make sense later. And the smarter the students, the more hand waving is required…
Economic History: Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus (301): Edictum de Pretiis Rerum Venalium…
Finance: Bryce Elder: The art of keeping it simple, by JPMorgan’s Jan Loeys:
‘“Our industry does seem to love complexity and to abhor simplicity”…. You… need… a global equity fund and a broad bond fund in your own currency, with the relative amounts a function of your return needs, ability to withstand short-term drawdowns, and need to control long-term risk…
China: Noah Smith: What if Xi Jinping isn't that competent? (repost): ‘Plus a new update showing how right I was….
CogSci: Patrick Marren: ‘Here are some quick lessons…. 1. Prediction… based on data… ALWAYS… [in] the past…. 2. Prediction kills thought…. 3. No outcome assigned a low probability will ever receive adequate thought…. 4. Probabilities are… goofy… we think “29%” means… “not gonna happen.”… 5. Probabilities can only apply to simple, objective, “yes/no”-type situations…. 6. We all would have been better off… bound[ing] the universe of all plausible outcomes and examin[ing] EVERY ONE…. 7. The way we choose leaders encourages macho single-point forecasts and discourages holistic thought…
Public Reason: Matt Yglesias: Polarization is a choice: ‘This White House’s aversion to punching left slips into a tendency to avoid making choices among competing priorities in a way that isn’t tenable…. The Democratic Party establishment… decided… they should adopt more left-wing ideas about economic policy…. “Polarization” [does not] mean there’s no upside to trying to be more appealing on the level of either ideology or character…
Neofascism: Dave Karpf: Bullet Points: Oh-just-shut-up edition: ‘Conservatives aren't being barred…. The APSA council was not responding to “activist threats of violence.” It was responding to an open letter… [that] argued that, since APSA had passed a motion “strongly condemning” the events of January 6th, and since both Eastman and the Claremont Institute continued to proudly defend his role… APSA should rescind its relationship to both Eastman and Claremont…. In other words: The polite, measured, reasonable pressure tactic worked just fine…. Holding an institution responsible for the political acts of its leadership team that the institution still publicly defends is not “guilt by institutional association”… [but] enforcing a line that the APSA council had itself already drawn, against supporters of the January 6th insurrection…
Daniel W. Drezner: Everything I Learned About Corporate Leadership From Linda Yaccarino: ‘Twitter is so, so screwed…. Yaccarino has no idea what freedom of speech actually means and why content moderation might be a good idea….
NOTES & SubStack Posts:
Ann Case & Angus Deaton right now (Thursday) at BPEA:
GPT-LLM-ML Watch: Obvious, yet somehow not—at least not to most people. To use something like Chat-GPT successfully, the prompt has to tickle it to looking at those corners of the training-data space in which the high-quality word sequences you want it to produce are contained. Perhaps it is best to think of it as a Very Clever Hans. Clever Hans was the horse that could count. It was a neural network that implemented the function “when the human is really excited (because I have stamped my hoof the right number of times) stop the hoof-stamping.” Clever Hans could not “count”, but its map of the problem space was high enough dimension that it could find a function to emulate that would effectively do the same thing. Clever Hans was not very useful for anything other than county fairs. Very Clever Hans may turn out to be very useful indeed—but I think that is going to require a clearer-eyed view of what it is than the Silicon Valley Hype Machine allows:
Economic History Watch: It is the human shortness of stature and extremely slow population growth in highly patriarchal societies where one woman in three winds up without a surviving son in spite of the enormous benefits of having one—those are the things that make me a huge Debbie Downer on the standard of living and the level of comfort of the typical human in the long -6000 to 1500 (and in most of the world much later!) Agrarian Age:
Economics Watch: WAIT!! WHAT?! The claim that it makes no sense to “apply antitrust regulations that were created for the analog world” to Amazon when the analogies are very strong between what Amazon is doing to its suppliers and what Standard Oil did to its suppliers more than a century ago, and hence the FTC’s case is “compelling, but not convincing”—that makes little sense to me:
Shorter Matty: Joe Biden is making choices that I, in my accelerating turn to conservatism (and a hoped-for slot on the WSJ opinion page roster) don't agree with (or just don't like), therefore I deem Biden's choices "untenable".
"can I ethically give any of my U.C. Berkeley students less than an A in the future?"
It should be unethical to give all your students an 'A" grade. However, look at it another way. Your students clearly must differ in capabilities. Consider how the excellent student feels if their grade is no better than the rest of the class. It devalues their work.
IMO, it is just creating a moral hazard if all your students got 'A' grades and attend your classes knowing that.
Hold the line and keep the class grades averaging between B and C with you best students getting A's. Your excellent students will prefer this situation. [It might even deter the slackers with 'rent-a-moms' from signing up, saving you effort.] ;-)