If some strange magnetic pulse wiped out every blog post written since the format began, hardly anything memorable or important would be lost …

I denna anda har jag, efter en tids funderingar, bestämt mig för att sluta blogga. Jag tackar mina gästbloggare, läsare och kommentatorer. Jag låter bloggen stå kvar tills vidare.

Du kan fortsättningsvis ta del av mina tankar på Facebook, Twitter och Google+.

This paper examines the relationship between education and mortality in a young population of Italian males. In 1981 several cohorts of young men from specific southern towns were unexpectedly exempted from compulsory military service after a major quake hit the region. Comparisons of exempt cohorts from the least damaged towns on the border of the quake region with similar ones from neighbouring non-exempt towns just outside the region show that, by 1991, the cohorts exempted while still in high school display significantly higher graduation rates. The probability of dying over the decade 1991-2001 was also significantly lower. Several robustness checks confirm that the findings do not reflect omitted quake-related confounding factors, such as the ensuing compensatory interventions. Moreover, cohorts exempted soon after high school age do not display higher schooling or lower mortality rates, thus excluding that the main findings reflect direct effects of military service on subsequent mortality rather than a causal effect of schooling. The authors conclude that increasing the proportion of high school graduates by 1 percentage point leads to 0.1-0.2 percentage points lower mortality rates between the ages of 25 and 35.

Jag upplever det som att de elever som inte går ut skolan med godkända betyg uppmärksammas allt mer i den politiska debatten, vilket mot bakgrund av ovanstående resultat kan sägas vara bra. Frågan är om det finns effektiva politiska lösningar. Kanske kan regeringens mer distinkt yrkesinriktade program i gymnasiet vara en del av lösning?

Låt mig slutligen tillägga, apropå militärtjänst och utbildning, att Sveriges faktiska avskaffande av värnplikten kan förväntas ha positiva samhällsekonomiska konsekvenser, inte minst pga. en koppling till (i det här fallet högre) utbildning. Genom att ta ifrån unga män ett år eller mer som hade kunnat användas till att förbättra deras humankapital försämras ekonomins produktiva potential.

Within this framework, there are two possible roads to reconciliation between science and religion. One is to claim that science and religion are not incompatible because they speak to completely distinct sets of questions, and hence never come into conflict. The other is to assert that thinking scientifically does not lead to rejection of theism, but in fact that religious belief can be justified in the same way that any scientific theory might be. I will argue that neither strategy succeeds: science and religion do speak to some of the same questions, and when they do they get different answers. In particular, I wish to argue that religious belief necessarily entails certain statements about how the universe works, that these statements can be judged as scientific hypotheses, and that as such they should be rejected in favor of alternative ways of understanding the universe.

På detta tema, se även professorn i biologi Jerry Coyne.

Forskaren beskriver några av slutsatserna i sin studie:

The results of the “Thatcher Experiment” in the 1980s make the case and paved the way for reversing relative economic decline. Competition was much strengthened by ongoing trade liberalisation, deregulation, and discontinuing 1970s’ industrial policy. As competition strengthened, there were major changes in industrial relations which were associated with organisational change, together with divestment and restructuring in large firms.

At the sectoral level, stronger competition and greater openness were correlated with improved productivity performance. As the age of information and communication technology came along, Britain was able to embrace the opportunities associated with rapid diffusion of the new technologies, which required big changes in working practices and management hierarchies, better than its continental-European peer group. This would not have happened with 1970s-style industrial relations and a heavily-regulated service sector.

Kan Thatchers inriktning mot reformer som ökade konkurrensen bero på hennes insikter om entreprenörskapets betydelse?

Det mest intressanta tycker jag är trenden: Sverige har minskat statens storlek det senaste decenniet (liksom Tyskland lite grann), medan övriga har haft en motsatt utveckling. Det syns också att det under Alliansen har skett en tydlig nedgång igen, efter några års uppgång dessförinnan. Likaså har statsskuldens andel av BNP minskat kraftigt i Sverige, medan den har ökat i övriga länder. Det spelar nog viss roll vilken regering man har ändå.

Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction. They are made up of formal constraints (rules, laws, constitutions), informal constraints (norms of behavior, conventions, and self imposed codes of conduct), and their enforcement characteristics. Together they define the incentive structure of societies and specifically economies.

I en ny studie, ”Institutional Comparative Statics”, vidgas perspektivet något:

Our main contribution to this literature is to emphasize that institutional quality or ”strength” influences the way that the political economy equilibrium will respond to shocks and changes in the economic environment. This point is, we believe, important but not widely understood. For instance, though development problems are often blamed on poor institutions, policy advice is independent of the institutional environment. Consider Africa. Nearly every economist regards the poverty of Africa as being closely related to institutional problems. Yet they continue to make policy prescriptions which ignore this, for instance discussing the benefits of allowing African countries to export more freely to OECD countries without considering how the initially poor institutions determine the consequences of export booms. We think history and a great deal of cross-national evidence shows that the consequences of changes in economic opportunities or the environment is conditional on the institutions of a country. This implies that there is no necessity that opening markets to exports from Africa would stimulate economic growth in Africa.

Denna insikt gör nationalekonomens analys mer komplicerad, för det räcker inte att beakta hur en förändring av ekonomisk politik (eller viktiga teknologiska, medicinska eller ekonomiska händelser) i isolering skulle påverka ekonomins utveckling — dessutom måste det övergripande ekonomisk-politisk-juridiska regelverket beaktas, som påverkar hur en given förändring av ekonomisk politik (eller teknologiska, medicinska eller ekonomiska händelser) faller ut. En synnerligen intressant fråga mot denna bakgrund blir: Vilka förändringar i institutioner behöver komma till för att olika förändringar i omgivningen ska falla väl ut? Varför leder t.ex. vissa institutioner till att nya naturresurser försämrar ekonomins utveckling och andra till att nya naturresurser förbättrar ekonomins utveckling? (Tre svenska forskare har gjort bidrag här.) Hur kan den förra typen av institutioner ersättas av den senare — med avseende på nya naturresurser och mer allmänt? Det vet vi fortfarande ganska lite om.

We propose that moral self-worth is one of the gauges that indicate when moral action is needed. Past work has shown that people’s self-worth is defined to a large extent by how moral they perceive themselves to be (Dunning, 2007). Behaving immorally has a negative influence on perceptions of self-worth, and people engage in moral behavior in order to regain some of that lost worth. This set of compensatory behaviors can be included under a blanket term—moral cleansing, which refers to actions people engage in when their moral self-worth has been threatened. … More recently, it has been shown that people will literally and figuratively cleanse themselves in response to violations of certain moral rules. For example, participants might express an increased desire to donate their organs or to volunteer for an ideological cause after contemplating paying the poor to harvest their organs (Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000), or they might literally disinfect themselves with an antiseptic hand wipe after duplicating an unethical story by hand (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). Taken together, these results suggest that people monitor their feelings of moral self-worth and use cleansing behaviors to maintain those feelings. If moral cleansing is used as a means to compensate when moral self-worth is below some standard, then compensation might also occur, in the form of amoral or immoral behavior, when moral self-worth is above an ideal level. That is, if people feel ”too moral,” they might not have sufficient incentive to engage in moral action because prosocial behavior is inherently costly to the individual. For example, people might not feel the need to donate blood or volunteer if they have already established their reputation as a moral person. This type of response can be thought of as moral licensing. People may be licensed to refrain from good behavior when they have accrued a surplus of moral currency.

Forskarna finner också experimentellt stöd för sin tes. Intressant, detta, att det kan utgöra en impuls att bete sig omoraliskt, om man känner sig mycket moralisk. Detta gör kanske att man inte kan lita på att de som verkar moraliska kommer att fortsätta vara det. En sak jag undrar är dock vad som händer med personer som upplever sig vara i moralisk ”jämvikt” — fortsätter de bara att bete sig som de redan gör? Vad är det då som kan rubba jämvikten?

This paper investigates, in a simplified macro context, the joint determination of the (incorrect) perceived model and the equilibrium. I assume that the model is designed by a self-interested economist who knows the true structural model, but reports a distorted one so as to influence outcomes. This model influences both the people and the government; the latter tries to stabilize an unobserved demand shock and will make different inferences about that shock depending on the model it uses. The model’s choice is constrained by a set of autocoherence conditions that state that, in equilibrium, if everybody uses the model then it must correctly predict the moments of the observables. I then study, in particular, how the models devised by the economists varies depending on whether they are ”progressive” vs. ”conservative”.

The predictions depend greatly on the specifics of the economy being considered. But in many cases, they are plausible. For example, conservative economists will tend to report a lower keynesian multiplier, and a greater long-term inflationary impact of output expansions. On the other hand, the economists’ margin of manoeuver is constrained by the autocoherence conditions. Here, a ”progressive” economist who promotes a Keynesian multiplier larger than it really is, must, to remain consistent, also claim that demand shocks are more volatile than they really are. Otherwise, people will be disappointed by the stabilization performance of fiscal policy and reject the hypothesized value of the multiplier. In some cases, autocoherence induces the experts to make, loosely speaking, ideological concessions on some parameter values.

Jag finner denna analys fascinerande och tror att den har ett hyfsat stort förklaringsvärde. Verkligheten och förväntan om en sammanhållen analys (”autokoherens”) sätter förstås sina gränser, men inom ett fält som makroekonomi, med mycket osäkerhet om hur ekonomin och politiska åtgärder fungerar, kan man nog tänkas komma undan med att faktiskt driva en relativt ideologisk linje som uppfattas, av politiska beslutsfattare och allmänhet, som icke-ideologisk. Kan man tänka sig att risken för ideologiskt inflytande över ekonomens uttalanden är som minst när en ekonom som i sin övergripande ideologi står till vänster (höger) förespråkar en modell som i en given kontext minskar (ökar) statens engagemang i ekonomin? När en keynesian beskriver multiplikatorn som mindre än alla andra, när en neoklassisk ekonom gör det motsatta?

There is a large body of work showing that speech impairments are associated with sharply lower scores on tests of reading and math (Catts 1993; Walker et al. 1994; Stothard et al. 1998; Catts et al. 2002; Knox 2002; Nathan et al. 2004; Catts et al. 2008; Harrison et al. 2009; Eide and Showalter 2010; Law et al. 2010). There is also evidence, albeit weaker, that children with speech impairments go on to receive fewer years of education than their counterparts without speech impairments (Snowling et al. 2001; Johnson et al. 2010). The results of these studies could indicate that speech impairments
lead, in a causal sense, to reduced academic performance and educational attainment. However, most studies in this area have used non-representative samples, and, to our knowledge, none have attempted to account for the potential influence of unobservables. Thus, there exists the possibility that their results were driven by difficult-to-measure factors at the level of the community, family or individual.

Som tur är försöker denna studie ta sådana faktorer i beaktande för att utröna om stamningen kan sägas ha kausal effekt på skolprestationer. Följande resultat erhålls:

Our baseline ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates are consistent with the findings of previous studies: respondents who reported having a problem with stuttering tend to have lower grades than their counterparts who did not report a problem with stuttering. Stuttering is also associated with a lower probability of graduating high school and a lower probability of attending college. However, when we restrict our sample to full biological siblings (including twins) and add family fixed effects, these associations become much smaller in magnitude, suggesting that family-level unobservables play an important role. Moreover, when we control for a history of ADHD or the presence of another learning disability, the estimated effects of stuttering shrink dramatically and become statistically indistinguishable from zero at conventional levels. These findings suggest that the impact of stuttering on human capital acquisition is much weaker than previously argued.

Måhända kan dessa resultat lugna föräldrar till stammande barn, i alla fall över själva stamningen.

I can see a Darwinian reason why there might even be be a negative correlation between intellect and susceptibility to pain. I approach this by asking what, in the Darwinian sense, pain is for. It is a warning not to repeat actions that tend to cause bodily harm. Don’t stub your toe again, don’t tease a snake or sit on a hornet, don’t pick up embers however prettily they glow, be careful not to bite your tongue. … Isn’t it plausible that a clever species such as our own might need less pain, precisely because we are capable of intelligently working out what is good for us, and what damaging events we should avoid? Isn’t it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement? At very least, I conclude that we have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do, and we should in any case give them the benefit of the doubt. Practices such as branding cattle, castration without anaesthetic, and bullfighting should be treated as morally equivalent to doing the same thing to human beings.

Jag är också för ett strikt djurskydd. (Utan religiösa undantag.)

The literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings. This conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and the countries studied. An alternative approach – of limiting the focus to studies of the relationship in rich countries, measuring government size as total taxes or total expenditure relative to GDP and relying on panel data estimations with variation over time – reveals a more consistent picture. The most recent studies find a significant negative correlation: an increase in government size by 10 percentage points is associated with a 0.5% to 1% lower annual growth rate. We discuss efforts to make sense of this correlation, and note several pitfalls involved in giving it a causal interpretation. Against this background, we discuss two explanations of why several countries with high taxes seem able to enjoy above average growth. One hypothesis is that countries with higher social trust levels are able to develop larger government sectors without harming the economy. Another explanation is that countries with large governments compensate for high taxes and spending by implementing market-friendly policies in other areas. Both explanations are supported by ongoing research.

Överlag ett negativt tecken på sambandet, alltså. Som påpekas ovan är dock kausalitetsfrågan svår att klargöra:

[A]lthough there is close to a consensus on the sign of the correlation, there is also consensus on the fact that causality is very hard to establish with certainty using the method of instrumental variable estimation – or any other method currently available. … The main lesson to be learned from exploring these important mechanisms is that a negative coefficient on government expenditure in growth regressions need not imply that large government causes slower growth. On the other hand, a negative coefficient on taxes actually provides rather strong evidence that high taxes cause lower growth, because reverse causality leads us to expect a positive correlation.

När det gäller hur högskatteländer som Sverige kan växa så pass bra tycker jag om de två förslagen till förklaringar. Författarna skriver t.ex.:

It seems likely that many reforms in Sweden in the 1980s and the 1990s compensated for the negative effects of high taxes. The Scandinavian countries … also have relatively high levels of economic freedom.

Detta är i linje med Richard Posners tolkning, och jag finner den själv rimlig. Frågan är: Med lägre skatter på arbete, som Sverige har fått på senare år, har inte landet potential att växa ännu bättre?

We are able to document a large and statistically significant negative effect from quantity to quality: each additional child decreased the chances of finding literacy among all family siblings by more than eight percentage points, thus lending strong support to the Beckerian trade-off hypothesis.

Författarna påpekar att övergången till färre men mer välutbildade barn kan utgöra en central förklaringsfaktor till den ekonomiska utveckling som tog sin början i och med den industriella revolutionen. Man ska förvisso ha i åtanke att dessa resultat gäller en tid då allmän skolgång inte förelåg. Med moderna data verkar resultaten blandade. En svensk studie finner små eller inga effekter, liksom denna. Samtidigt finner vissa andra stöd för Beckers teori, inte minst i Kina: se t.ex. här och här.

1. Borde inte effekten av ojämlikhet på olycka vara mindre om de med allra högst inkomster drar ifrån övriga, jämfört med om skillnaderna ökar längre ner i inkomstfördelningen? Om olycka av ojämlikhet följer av att vissa noterar att andra drar ifrån, och om personer med vanliga inkomster aldrig råkar på personer med toppinkomster, torde det inte spela någon större roll om de senare tjänar 15 eller 20 gånger mer än de förra för vanliga inkomsttagares olycka. Det verkar också vara just så, att den ökade ojämlikheten i Sverige (och andra länder) har uppkommit därför att de med de allra högsta toppinkomsterna har ökat sina inkomster snabbare än andra. Det kanske inte är så farligt?
2. Ger inte uppmärksammandet av ojämlikhet i sig upphov till ökad olycka? När politiker och  media trumpetar ut att de rika blir rikare och att barnfattigdomen ökar, riskerar inte det, snarare än det faktum att de rika blir rikare och att barnfattigdomen ökar, att öka olyckan? Om mekanismen är att de relativt fattiga måste notera att de har det sämre än andra, och om de tidigare inte noterade det, kan uppmärksamhet förvärra problematiken. Förvisso kan de som trumpetar ut hävda att endast om de trumpetar ut kan omfördelande politik, som minskar ojämlikheten, komma till stånd. Det må så vara, men om det yttersta målet är att minska den olycka som noterad ojämlikhet ger upphov till är det i alla fall inte uppenbart att offentliggörande av ojämlikhet leder till minskad olycka. Ignorance may, indeed, be bliss. 

Se även det tidigare inlägget ”Okunskap om ojämlikhet”, om hur amerikaner underskatter ojämlikheten, samt OECD-rapporten ”Inequality and Well-Being in OECD Countries: What Do We Know?”.

Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate—as measured by a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge—does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails.

Även experters filosofiska uppfattningar verkar alltså kunna bestämmas av icke-intellektuella faktorer, som personlighet. Detta är i linje med tidigare forskning, som antyder att filosofiska experter är lika människor i allmänhet i tänkande och beteende: se t.ex. här, här och här. Ändå är vi många som hänvisar till stora filosofer allt som oftast.

• Brennan och Lomaskys bok Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference.
• Hamlin och Jennings artikel ”Expressive Political Behaviour: Foundations, Scope and Implications”, accepterad för publicering i British Journal of Political Science.
• Hillmans artikel ”Expressive Behavior in Economics and Politics”, publicerad i European Journal of Political Economy.

The weakness of love, which is so much indulged in ages of humanity and politeness, is regarded among savages as the most unpardonable effeminacy.

In this paper, I argued that pharmacologically-induced parental love can satisfy reasonable conditions of authenticity. I also explained why someone might want to take such a pill, and I claimed that inducing parental love pharmacologically need not promote narcissism or result in self-instrumentalization, although I recognize that these are significant concerns.

Fram för kärlekspillren!

När är livet mest kul?
– Livet är en besvärlig tid, men vi måste alla igenom det. Det enda som gör livet värt att leva är andra människor, och att göra deras liv värda att leva. Jag tror människan vill göra gott, vilket är vackert med tanke på all ondska och elände som finns. Ville vi inte gott skulle livet vara komplett meningslöst. Nu är det bara lite meningslöst.

Why are there national differences in the propensity to bribe? To investigate this question, we conducted a correlational study with cross-national data and a laboratory experiment. We found a significant effect of the degree of collectivism versus individualism present in a national culture on the propensity to offer bribes to international business partners. Furthermore, the effect was mediated by individuals’ sense of responsibility for their actions. Together, these results suggest that collectivism promotes bribery through lower perceived responsibility for one’s actions.

Att stå på egna ben kan alltså vara relaterad till en starkare ansvarskänsla. Men inte nog med att individualism är negativt relaterad till korruption: dessutom verkar individualism kunna generera högre välstånd och högre tillväxt i ett land.

Margaret Thatcher:

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

In the recent financial crisis, macroeconomic stimuli produced mixed results across developed economies. In contrast, China’s stimulus boosted real GDP growth from an annualized 6.2% in the first quarter of 2009 trough to 11.9% in the first quarter of 2010. Amidst this phenomenal response, land auction and house prices in major cities soared. We argue that the speed and efficacy of China’s stimulus derives from state control over its banking system and corporate sector. Beijing ordered state-owned banks to lend, and they lent. Beijing ordered centrally-controlled state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to invest, and they invested. However, our data show that much of this investment was highly leveraged purchases of real estate. Residential land auction prices in eight major cities rose about 100% in 2009, controlling for quality variation. Moreover, higher price rises occur these SOEs are more active buyers. We argue that these centrally-controlled SOEs overbid substantially, fueling a real estate bubble; and that China’s seemingly highly effective macroeconomic stimulus package may well have induced costly resource misallocation.

Med andra ord styrdes statliga banker att öka långivningen och statliga företag att investera, vilket har lett till enorma satsningar på att bygga fastigheter. Ett stort antal av dem står fortfarande tomma. Fallet Kina illustrerar att staten förvisso kan stimulera mer kraftfullt i en ekonomi med starkt centralstyrda inslag, men frågan är om resurserna därigenom (och, förstås, rent allmänt) används effektivt och om investeringarna är hållbara. Det förefaller tveksamt vid en närmare titt på situationen i Kina. Detta är inte helt förvånande: bl.a. Mario Rizzo har pekat på problem med att endast tänka på stimulanspaket och deras effekter i ett strikt makroperspektiv, utan att beakta resursallokeringens effektivitet — se här och här.

Our main empirical findings are three. First, according to results obtained using our preferred specification (2SLS estimates with country by education and education by year fixed effects), immigrants flows do not cause a decrease in natives employment rates, but rather increase them; moreover, higher immigration pushes natives to occupations with higher skill contents: a doubling of the immigrants’ share in a labor market (defined by skill-country cells) increases natives’ specialization in complex skills by 6%. Second, we document that such a positive reallocation takes place through an increase in the average complexity of jobs offered to new hires relative to separations. Third, we split countries in two groups, those with strong employment protection laws (EPL) and those with weak employment protection. We then allow the response of net employment and specialization of natives to differ across groups. We find that the natives’ positive reallocation towards complex jobs triggered by migration is more intense in less protected markets, in particular for workers with low education. This implies that in countries with high EPL, less educated workers tend to remain in simple-manual occupations that suffer much more the wage competition of immigrants, while in countries with low EPL the mechanisms of upgrading natives’ occupations moves less educated workers away from immigrants’ wage competition.

En enkel illustration:

Talar inte detta för att de inhemskt sysselsatta snarast har gynnats av invandring? Och att en flexibel arbetsrätt kan underlätta en omställning som innebär mer avancerade jobb för dessa (förutom ett underlättande för invandrare att få jobb överhuvudtaget)?