Hassan Sayed, banned from Princeton?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Hassan Sayed, a fifth year PhD candidate in economics, it seems was banned from Princeton.  Ostensibly for partaking in illegal demonstrations.

I am not saying whether this is justified or not, as I do not know the circumstances.  I can assure you I am fine with “being tough on students,” and I am far from having pro-Hamas sympathies.  But surely this deserves some discussion?  What exactly happened?  What kind of due process did Sayed receive?  After all, university presidents have been known to make mistakes.  Is there any appeal or recourse?

So what is the story here?  Here is partial coverage, noting that another student, of Indian origin, was involved (and banned) as well.  The Indian press is starting to cover this story, with an emphasis on the Indian student Achinthya Sivalingan, but those links have too many pop-ups and at least so far don’t seem to have additional information.

From a well-known development economist at Yale

by  Tyler Cowen in

Click through to read the whole tweet storm.

Trade reform and economic growth

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the excellent Doug Irwin:

Do trade reforms that significantly reduce import barriers lead to faster economic growth? In the twenty-five years since Rodríguez and Rodrik’s (2000) critical survey of empirical work on this question, new research has tried to overcome the various methodological problems that have plagued previous attempts to provide a convincing answer. I examine three strands of recent work on this issue: cross-country regressions focusing on within-country growth, synthetic control methods on specific reform episodes, and empirical country studies looking at the channels through which lower trade barriers may increase productivity. A consistent finding is that trade reforms have had a positive impact on economic growth, on average, although the effect is heterogeneous across countries. Overall, these research findings should temper some of the previous agnosticism about the empirical link between trade reform and economic performance.

Here is my much earlier CWT with Doug Irwin.

What should I ask Paul Bloom?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is Wikipedia:

Paul Bloom…is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, and art.

Here is Paul’s own home page.  Here are Paul’s books on Amazon.  Here is Paul on Twitter.  Here is Paul’s new Substack.  Here is Paul’s post on how to be a good podcast guest.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Works in Progress will be running an “Invisible College” in Cambridge, UK.

2. How much was Britain already industrializing in the 17th century?

3. Something, something, blah blah blah, but probably interesting? Research article is here.

4. “We find that once the sales of foreign exporters are taken into account, U.S. market concentration in manufacturing was stable between 1992 and 2012.”

5. Is the newly rediscovered Klimt portrait (NYT) a picture of Helene Lieser, a female Austrian economist who studied with Mises?

6. Shruti and Rasheed Griffith podcast on the Caribbean.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Non-Competes

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I agree with Tyler, that the FTC ban on non-competes is overly broad and not tailored to fields where the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Additionally, the FTC’s authority to enact this rule, rather than Congress, is questionable.

Nevertheless, I don’t think banning non-competes is without merit. The reason is not the standard Twitter-econ view that non-competes are bad for workers. Indeed, some non-competes, so-called “gardening leave”, pay the worker during the non-compete period. Sounds pretty good! More generally, non-competes are just one item in the wage bargain like hours, health and pension benefits. As a result, the FTC is quite wrong to think that banning non-competes will raise wages–the most immediate effect will be to reduce wages. Indeed, more workers will be willing to work at lower wages precisely to the extent that non-competes were a burden. Can’t have it both ways. Instead of being bad for workers, my skepticism about non-competes is that they are bad for industry.

The problem with non-competes is that every firm wants non-competes on the workers it fires but no firm wants non-competes on the workers it hires. However, firms only control the terms on which they hire workers so it’s possible for each firm acting in its self-interest to create a situation which is in the interests of none. Or, to put it differently, firms may approve of the decision to ban non-competes because it’s a package deal, firms can’t restrict their own former employees but they gain the ability to recruit freely from competitors.

More generally, worker mobility often carries externalities. As I wrote earlier, ideas are in heads and if you don’t move the heads, often the ideas don’t move either. The innovation that results from mobility is a public good. Non-competes are a type of intellectual property, call it intellect property. Once again, firms want to lock up their intellectual property but they also want to use ideas from other firms. Firms only control the former decision not the latter so IP in general has a prisoner’s dilemma issue which is one reason IP in the US is too strong (see the Tabarrok Curve) and non-competes are part of that package. Ultimately, if the innovation effects are important, wages could rise but those effects would be for more or less all workers not specifically for those with non-competes.

Governments aren’t good at the fine details of optimizing IP so perhaps a heavy-handed approach is the best we can expect. Non-competes also aren’t a huge issue for most firms, even firms that use them, so given the above I am willing to give the experiment a try.

The Norwegian ban on smart phones in middle schools

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a new paper by Sara Abrahamsson.  Perhaps there is Norwegian exceptionalism at work, but the results reflect my expectations reasonably closely.  The basic setting is that smart phones were banned in middle school, but at varying (and exogenous) rates around the country.  Here are some of the core findings, noting that reading the paper gives some different impressions from some of the Twitter summaries:

1. Grades improve, for instance for the girls it goes up by 0.08 standard deviations.  Worth doing, but hardly saving a generation.  For girls, the biggest improvement comes in their math scores.

2. The girls consult less with mental health-related professionals, with visits falling by 0.22 on average to their GPs, falling by 2-3 visits to specialist care.

3. “I find no effect on students’ likelihood (extensive margin) of being diagnosed or treated by specialists or GPs for a psychological symptom and diseases.”  So more visits, but those visits don’t lead to much.

4. Bullying falls, by 0.42 of an SD for girls, 0.39 of an SD for boys.  That is a larger effect than I would have expected.

5. The grade gains are highest for students with lower SES backgrounds.

6. When you look into the details of the data (p.22), the improvement in grades does not seem correlated with the decline in the number of visits to mental health professionals.

So if you ban smart phones from schools, grades go up by a very modest amount, bullying falls by a less modest amount, and actual mental health diagnoses stay the same.  In the United States at least, parents seem to hate cellphone bans, because they cannot reach their kids at will.

And there you go.  Here is some commentary on the p values in the paper.

Why do I prefer current airport procedures?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Michael Stack writes me:

“Hi Tyler – you wrote about preferring current airport procedures to pre-9/11 procedures. Do you plan to elaborate on this? I have a hard time understanding why you’d feel that way.

Here is the list I produced – these are guesses as to why you might feel the way you do:

  • Because friends/family can’t meet you at the gate, it reduces crowding in some of the stores, restaurants, and waiting areas.
  • Security imposes a higher cost on travelers which reduces crowding – what are the pricing effects? Is this a transfer from airlines? From travelers?
  • You’re very worried about another terrorist attack and think our security substantially reduces the chance of an attack.

I can’t really think of many other reasons you’d prefer the current approach.”

TC again: My view is fully his third explanation.  Whether we like it or not, people and policymakers respond irrationally to terror attacks on airplanes, or terror attacks using airplanes.  I do think the current procedures stop or discourage some number of idiots, noting they likely would not stop a sufficiently sophisticated attack attempt.  But a lot of criminals are simply some mix of stupid and incompetent or poor on execution.  You don’t want to have attacks on airplanes become any more focal/copycatted than they already are.

I fully get all the “why don’t they just set off a bomb by the passengers waiting to get through security” points, and the like.  I just don’t think that is how it works.  Why don’t school shooters go to playgrounds instead, or wherever?  Maybe someday they will, but for now there is an odd stickiness in the nature of the events.

I don’t doubt that various features of the status quo could be improved, such as more security entry points being open and a better bureaucracy for generating and confirming pre-check privileges.  Some of those improvements, however, might be more rather than less intrusive, such as more spot checks of passengers at security or during boarding.

Many people have objected to the point I made, but I don’t think the benefit-cost analysis on this one is close.  Nor do I see a huge voter or elite demand to return to the pre-9/11 world for airports.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. U.S. vs. Taiwanese work culture.

2. Albert Wensemius and the rise of Singapore.

3. Unusual questions answered by Megan McArdle.

4. Why Panama dollarized.

5. New open access book on prices and games by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein.

6. Canada now limiting immigration.

7. “In the fiscal year 2023, more than half of the irregular arrivals at the US’s southern border were from countries outside Mexico and northern Central America for the first time…”  FT here, source here.

7. Helen Vendler, RIP.

8. A possible plateau in opioid and drug overdose deaths? (limited data, but possibly true)

9. A different way to deal with non-competes?

What can LLMs never do?

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Rohit Krishnan, he and I are both interested in the question of what LLMs cannot do, and why.  Here is one excerpt:

It might be best to say that LLMs demonstrate incredible intuition but limited intelligence. It can answer almost any question that can be answered in one intuitive pass. And given sufficient training data and enough iterations, it can work up to a facsimile of reasoned intelligence.

The fact that adding an RNN type linkage seems to make a little difference though by no means enough to overcome the problem, at least in the toy models, is an indication in this direction. But it’s not enough to solve the problem.

In other words, there’s a “goal drift” where as more steps are added the overall system starts doing the wrong things. As contexts increase, even given previous history of conversations, LLMs have difficulty figuring out where to focus and what the goal actually is. Attention isn’t precise enough for many problems.

A closer answer here is that neural networks can learn all sorts of irregular patterns once you add an external memory.

And:

In LLMs as in humans, context is that which is scarce.

Interesting throughout.

What is the proper policy toward tourists?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, basically you should charge them fees rather than discourage them through other means>  Here is one excerpt:

By this reasoning, the Japanese decision to raise bullet train prices for tourists is exactly the right approach. In the meantime, the Japanese government, which faces high pension costs, has more money at its disposal. There is no need to resent or otherwise restrict the tourists at all, and indeed I have found the Japanese people to be extremely gracious and helpful to foreigners. Higher prices for tourist train tickets will make it easier for them to stay this way.

If there is any problem with Venice’s five-euros-a-day charge, it is that it is not nearly high enough, given crowding and accumulated wear and tear on the city. How about 50 euros? But with a smile!

The same goes for the bus in Barcelona: Why not raise the fare? Just for tourists. It is easy enough to (partially) enforce this differential treatment with spot checks on the bus line. An alternative or possible complement to this plan is to run more buses to the park, to alleviate congestion. Higher fees for tourists can help pay for them.

Here is an interesting problem:

Amsterdam has a more difficult challenge. Barcelona and Venice have some unique attractions and sites that can be priced at higher levels, with exclusion applied to non-payers. In contrast, for many Amsterdam tourists the attractions are booze, pot and sex, all of which have prices set in basically competitive markets. I’m all for more expensive tickets to the Rijksmuseum, but that might not make much of a difference to Amsterdam’s “party tourism” problem.

Worth a ponder.

More Tuesday links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. AI Camera turns your images into poetry.

2. Highly capable model locally on your phone.

3. Clara Piano reviews GOAT.  “Perhaps, in his emphasis on the importance of ideas, Cowen reveals that he is ultimately a Simonian. After all, the human mind is the ultimate resource.”

4. Market liberalism, Chinese style.

5. Red flags for improper judicial conduct.

6. Data on the economics of bookselling, designed to dissuade would-be authors.