Your Media Bubble Bias is Likely Stronger than You Realize

A few months ago, I made a conscious decision to overhaul my Twitter feed. The vast majority of accounts I followed were not only economists, but they were white, male, and in an ideological range from libertarian to Technocratic Left. I eliminated a lot of those accounts, replacing them with accounts representing a diverse range of views/demographics. Even in this simple experiment, the A/B test gives me conscious conclusions about how one’s media bubble affects one’s line of thinking, and suggests there are even more implicit outcomes that I don’t recognize. It also made me realize how reasonable it is that nearly everyone is under-exposed to an optimally diverse set of views in their media diet.

B.O. (Before Overhaul), I was pretty sure there weren’t any smart socialist thinkers out there. And this extends past purist socialism and even into what you might now call the “Bernie Left.” Most arguments I read were caricature defenses of socialism that frankly could easily be refuted. Naomi Klein would make outrageous ad hominem attacks on Milton Friedman and claim it delegitimized the market economy, Jeremy Corbyn would defend the wonderful work Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela for the poor, college-aged kids would spew half-baked defenses of what they thought Marx meant, and a plethora of writers would accuse anyone against rent control as selfish idiots. If the best arguments I came across were entirely unconvincing, it only made sense that I became more confident in my views.

But that’s where the problem is. I assumed the views I was being exposed to were the best ones out there. By default, my media diet as a self-identifying liberal/cosmopolitan/technocratic/educated guy included MainstreamMedia sources like the New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, Vox.com, etc. Those sources don’t often include a prominent voice on the socialist left. Just as David Brooks and Thomas Friedman are unconvincing voices for a centrist conservatism, the voices I was being exposed to were making weak arguments for socialist and left-populist economic policy. The reasonable voices were in a narrow range of centrism somewhere between Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias, and Greg Mankiw. In hindsight, this group of people has way more in common than I or they ever realized. What I mean to highlight is that these sources, the ones I was reading as an Enlightened Educated Gentleman, were not amply exposing me to economic arguments for strong pro-labor, pro-nationalization, massive taxation, or significant adjustment to labor laws aiming to equalize gender/racial disparities. The people I was reading were all pretty in favor of markets as a basis for economic policy, where technocratic solutions through NBER papers and incremental adjustments were the road to ideal policy. The debates, in retrospect, were over the magnitude of redistribution and balancing economic liberty with regulation. Joseph Stiglitz would enter into the picture every now and then, but not enough to really shake my worldview.

It turns out there are a lot of smart people that have very far left economic views. Matt Bruenig, Elizabeth Bruenig, Marshall Steinbaum, to name a few, consistently are writing things that not only give a drastically different point of view – they are writing things that I find very difficult to argue against given my current toolkit of existing knowledge. This is when you know you’re actually exposing yourself to new ideas. Before, it was as if I was unconsciously exposing myself only to straw men arguments and red herrings in order to simultaneously reenforce my priors and give me a false sense of being open-minded. These people were always out there, but they don’t have a prominent (enough) voice in where I assumed a good media diet was found. [Elizabeth writes for the Washington Post now, and many of these people have some exposure, but you get my point]

The same can be said for the level of female economists out there. I used to rationalize not reading many female economists by saying that the field just didn’t have many women. While the discipline does seem to be hostile to women and it’s not at total parity, I was dead wrong. Some of the best work in academia is being done by people like Alice Evans, Claudia Goldin, Dina Pomeranz, and many many more. But except for Janet Yellen, Joan Robinson, Anna Schwartz, and a handful of others, female economists don’t have too much exposure in the mass media. Only one woman has ever won the Nobel Prize in economics (and she could be considered more of a political scientist). Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Mark Thoma, Brad Delong all seem to get much more exposure than their female counterparts. Without making a conscious effort to include more female voices in my media diet, I was left reading a much more homogenized set of views.

The same can be said for non-economists. I have made more of an effort to include historians, sociologists, and anthropologists in my twitter feed and blog roll. Robert Solow once quipped, “Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.” Economists are prone to see everything as an economic problem; it’s all about incentives. All other disciplines fall prey to their own unique narrow-mindedness. But forcing yourself to look through that lens can be quite revealing. Looking through a lens of “everything is gendered” or “everything is explained by our irrational cognitive biases” at least exposes you to the possibility of these ideas.

So far in my experiment, I’m happy to report I’m much less sure of any of my beliefs. When Matt Bruenig gives an analysis with thorough empirics and theory showing the greatness of socialism, I can scoff all I want but if I can’t convincingly refute his points, how sure am I of the greatness of markets? I think I have a good idea of how economic history shows that markets and liberalism set the stage for the industrial revolution, but when Pseudoerasmus talks about the oh-so-ridiculous conventional wisdom that I of course had wrong, how sure am I about any of those beliefs?

Twitter is pretty much the worst, but also can be used for good. The freewheeling platform made it pretty easy to find these new alternative voices once I made the conscious effort. My worry is not that people don’t have access to a diverse set of views, it’s that their habits and circumstances will inevitably lead to equilibria that perpetuates echo chambers.

There’s still one thing everyone in my twitter feed agrees on: Trump is the worst. I’m not yet ready to start following alt-right accounts, Holocaust deniers, or MAGA fanboys. Yet it does beg the question: if I did, what would the mere exposure to these accounts do to my confidence in my own beliefs?

Advertisement

 

The Captured Economy

New podcast episode with Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles about their new book The Captured Economy:

Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles argue in their new book “The Captured Economy” that the last few decades have been characterized by an increase in political rent-seeking. Focusing on the financial sector, intellectual property laws, occupational licensure, and land use, they show how legislation has been captured by special interests in ways that slow growth and increase inequality. In this episode, Lindsey and Teles discuss how these policies distort various markets and cause upward redistribution, as well as the different ways we can work to better “rent-proof” our politics.

 

Misogyny and the Market Economy

Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, Donald, and on and on and on. There can no longer be any doubt about the existence of male privilege and how it breeds sexual entitlement. Something has to change.

The obvious answer for men on the individual level is to call out instances of misogyny and loudly condemn any sexual assault within our own immediate vicinity (in addition to not being a pig). But what to do on a systemic level? A lot of the commentary coming out now casually connects misogynist culture with some notion of capitalism, but it’s not clear to me what role the American economic system plays in all this.

[Anyone who has ever read this blog knows my sympathies to the market economy, though I’ll admit it’s not perfect and there can always be productive tinkering.]

Capitalism, in most real world manifestations of the word, allocates resources based on consumers’ preferences. When inequality is such as it is in the United States, rich people’s preferences are overrepresented massively because consumption is a function of income. If the consumers’ dollar is their vote, people with more dollars have a lot more votes. Money is power and I don’t think this is up for debate. In this sense, movies will be made that reflect men’s view of the opposite gender because they write the checks for the movies to be made and have more money to spend on movie tickets. If those with more money don’t want to see football players kneeling in social protest, then the profit-maximizing action for the NFL is to make a rule disallowing kneeling during the national anthem. Essentially, a capitalist system will shake out to reflect the interests of those with money and power, even if those interests are discriminatory and completely exploitative like in the case of Harvey Weinstein. Under these scenarios, I admit, the market economy is a system that rewards and perpetuates unethical behavior. [Not all corporate behavior is done under profit-maximizing conditions, however.]

On the other hand, I’m cognizant of arguments that show the market economy as being a force for good in this debate. Money talks, but this can go both ways. Bill O’Reilly was effectively forced out from Fox News because advertisers were boycotting. They didn’t want to be associated with such a vulgar human being. Were their decisions based on ethics, or just avoiding bad PR? Either way, the boycott worked. Similarly, Harvey Weinstein was forced out from his own company and seemingly blacklisted from the entire industry. Compare this to the President: his first wife alleged marital rape, he’s had countless sexual assault allegations, and the Access Hollywood tape was a smoking gun showing what kind of person he is. But he’s still in power. He’s not the only politician or person in government to retain their position after doing terrible things. We can all choose to support companies that we think are ethical and not use our dollar votes to support unethical ones, yet we are all bound to pay taxes to the same government.

So then I wonder: Under what circumstances do market forces punish men for this behavior better than the democratic process? It’s easy to look at the very real faults of a consumer-driven market economy and see an alternate system based on public control as the antidote. But if culture is the real problem, a new economic system might not make much of a difference. In fact, high-quality legislation from the democratic process could be disappointingly ineffective if the underlying culture is so engrained. If you think of different countries around the world with less ‘capitalist’ economies, how much of an improvement is there? For European countries that boast higher female participation in corporate boardrooms or the legislature, was it because of their culture or some sort of tinkering in how their economy is structured? I’m skeptical that replacing the current US economic system with, say, a full-on Bernie Sanders system will improve much. A sexist culture will still put sexist men in charge, though often we assume the right democratic outcome weeds them out.

The economy is not always a zero-sum game. We can both be better off without it coming at the expense of someone else. But power is a zero-sum game. So the asymmetric power of men, reenforced by their asymmetric holdings of money and connections, does come at the expense of women. Closing this power gap absolutely needs to be a policy priority, but more importantly it must be a cultural priority. Market forces should be used in tandem with legislation and the democratic process; anyone suggesting only markets or only a new economic system will cause the change which we would like to see should rethink their approach.

 

The Ethics and Culture of Corporations

Two oft-repeated assumptions about big companies in market economies:

1. Corporations pursue profit by all means without regard to concerns for ethics, the environment, diversity (racial/gender/socioeconomic), and community externalities.
2. Corporations consistently underpay minorities and women for doing the same work that white men do.

I see these as contradictory. A vast amount of literature shows that diversity at a company is good for its bottom line. Having more women and people of color in an office is good for everyone’s productivity and increases the likelihood of good ideas that are essential for keeping a company strong. Furthermore, if a company was only concerned about its bottom line, it’d only employ women and minorities (much cheaper!). The obvious reality is that companies do pursue profit, they do discriminate against women and minorities, but they engage in behavior that is not always profit-maximizing.

Consider an alternate proposition:

• Corporations pursue profits in an environment that is constrained by the prevailing culture and ethical norms; sometimes that culture leads to discriminatory behavior and sometimes it means putting ethics over profits.

This means that if the higher-ups at a corporation come from a culture that gives them implicit bias towards men, white people, or those that went to their alma mater, hiring decisions will be made that reflect those biases even when it is against the self-interest of the company. At the same time, culture can also influence business decisions that put ethics over profits. Price-gouging during a natural disaster, for example, might not happen (even if profit-maximizing) because cultural norms shun such behavior.

Essentially, prudence is not the only thing guiding human behavior, even if economic models often suggest so. What’s interesting to me is the overlap of people who a) attack the utility-maximizing framework of mainstream economics as being oversimplified; and b) say that people in a “capitalist” economy are purely self-interested.

 

 

 

New episodes: Nepalese Migration, Stylized Facts, Vernon Smith

Three new podcast episodes, starting with most recent:

1. 2002 Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith talks about his work in experimental economics and how Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments influenced his work.
2. Dan Hirschman of Brown University discusses “stylized facts” and their role in the process that takes ideas from academia to public policy, specifically inequality.
3. Nell Compernolle of the University of Michigan tells the migration story of Nepalese men and its impact on marital attitudes.

Lots more episodes coming soon, hopefully. If you know anyone that would be interested in being interviewed, let me know!

 

The Urban Neighborhood Trilemma

Many left-leaning urbanists* try to prevent the perceived injustices from gentrification through an unrealistic combination of goals and means.

The trilemma that many city-dwelling progressives face in urban policy comes down to wanting three things that cannot simultaneously exist: 1) Maintenance of city charm via restrictions on building and construction; 2) Affordability; 3) Maintenance of existing neighborhood ‘character’ and demographic identity.

I’ll go into a little more detail on all three before proceeding:

1. San Francisco maintains its charm by having short historic buildings that don’t give the feeling of congestion or block the sunlight. Paris keeps that cutesy feeling by not allowing building above the Eiffel Tower in the bulk of the city. If either of these cities became dominated by tall/ugly/modern condominiums, residents and visitors wouldn’t enjoy them as much.
2. People from all ends of the socioeconomic spectrum should be allowed to access the amazing advantages cities have to offer, from jobs to ideas to cultural experiences.
3. Neighborhoods that have served particular groups (ethnic, religious, socioeconomic) should be protected from an invasion of yuppies that threaten the existing neighborhood character because of their ability to pay much higher rents and shift demand to different business establishments.

So let’s start with the premise that policy should generally make a neighborhood safer, more beautiful to walk through, and easier to get around. Or at least, if these things happen we shouldn’t stop them. The desirability to live there will increase. An increase in desirability means an increase in demand. If this is not met with an increase in the supply of places to live or work, rents and property values will go up. This is supply and demand, and those laws have not been repealed.

Policies that maintain bullet point 1 take the form of construction regulations, height restrictions, and Floor Area Ratio laws. No one wants a billboard, casino, or ugly condo blocking a great view of the Washington Monument. Shorter buildings allow more sunlight, fresher air, better vibes. Historic buildings look nicer. So almost all cities put in place limits on the type and height of construction. The whole point of these laws is to make it harder to build. Often their stated intention is often to just give oversight to the process so that the community has a voice in what’s being built. But it’s fair to say that these are more restrictive than just a typical paperwork formality. As San Francisco has exploded in popularity, supply has not kept up. So what would we expect to happen to price?

Bullet point 2 is a goal all cities should aim for. Cities are tremendous sources of ideas, culture, and professional opportunities that everyone should have access to. When rents and property prices are too high, only those who start off with a high income can afford to access the amazing parts of cities. Social mobility decreases, productivity suffers, and innovation declines. People now settle to live in places they can most afford, not in places where they are most productive. This is bad.

Bullet point 3 is one of the trickier parts to maintain. The character of a neighborhood – including its desirability and hence property prices – do not stay static over time. The Upper East Side is oddly becoming one of the more affordable Manhattan neighborhoods below 95th street while Chelsea is solidifying its spot as one of the most expensive. 40 years ago? The roles were switched. Should policies really be focused on stopping the unpredictable dynamism of city culture? What if SoHo was legislated to stay as a garment district or the Meatpacking District as a meatpacking district? Everyone seems to want the mom-and-pop sandwich shop that’s been there for a hundred years over the boring chain, but who’s to say laws should determine which preferences should prevail?

What about rent control? The flaws in these policies are well-documented, so I’ll just give a quick rundown. Just as price controls caused long lines at gas stations in the 70s, rent control’s main effect is to cause a shortage of housing. Those that are lucky enough to get in rent-controlled buildings are drastically outnumbered by those that do not. Cities like Stockholm or Copenhagen that have a decent amount of rent control can have waiting lists of up to eight years (!) – of course, that’s unless you know the right person or are politically connected. Rent control pushes the air in the balloon to the other side of the balloon. The remaining properties become even more in demand and more unaffordable. In addition, rent control can incentivize building owners to sell on the buyers’ market rather than the renters’ market. When this happens, the supply of housing available for rent goes even further down. Rent control has also been proven to lead to inefficiently maintained buildings – landlords will only keep the apartments up to the quality the price determines they should.

What I want to scream from the rooftops to those disappointed with the results: do you expect these neighborhoods to stay exactly as they are forever and always, with affordability staying the same? If a neighborhood ‘improves,’ why do you think it will not get more expensive unless you allow for more building? No one wants a casino, billboard, or ugly condo in their backyard. But peeps gotta live somewhere!

The unfortunate political equilibrium is that those with any political voice in cities are the ones who already live there. They want to keep their property prices high, their views undistorted, and their neighborhoods just as they are. They are fine with change, and would never call themselves that dirty word ‘conservative,’ but they’d rather it be Not In My BackYard. The large swath of people who would love access to the Bay Area’s treasure trove of ideas, cultural capital, and jobs don’t vote on the laws in those towns because they don’t live there.

I’ll state the obvious admission that I am the white yuppy people say is ‘the problem’ when it comes to gentrification. I know that when I talk about neighborhoods changing, I am much more likely to be the beneficiary than the person kicked out. But I still stick to my guns that city-dwellers need to accept a) things change, and not always in a way that is immediately pleasing; b) as the benefits of living in a city continue to increase WE NEED TO BUILD MORE.

 

*For the record, regardless of whether people identify as left- or right-leaning, I think the majority of people living in cities engage in NIMBYism and want to keep their settings the way they are. It’s just kind of human nature. I chose to pick on ‘progressives’ here because they especially emphasize the desire to stop gentrification and increase housing affordability.

 

Silent Revolution

I have written a concept album with a band called The Benevolent Dictators all about Adam Smith, and the first song was just released.

My motivations for writing the album and general vibe will be left for another time, but I feel inclined to discuss more about this particular song’s thematic significance. The song is inspired by text from The Wealth of Nations, Book 3, Chapters 2-4. The summary: commerce liberated the masses from the feudal system.

[Adam Smith was an 18th century Scotsman. His first book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, is about morality and human nature. His second book, Wealth of Nations, is considered the starting point for modern economic thought.]

The story begins just after the Roman Empire’s demise. Everything is in chaos and eventually order is restored via different sovereign monarchs throughout the former Empire. The monarchs don’t have the capability to enforce laws and protect everyone in their respective polities, so they enlist the help of others in exchange for big chunks of land. These estates produce enough food for the feudal landlords to survive. But, Smith observes, our desire for food is limited to the extent our bellies can make space. To utilize the surplus food, the feudal lords give their additional food to individuals in exchange for their servitude in the feudal estate. At the time, the feudal lords had no other outlets for their surplus food. Thus, their best option was to increase their power by making commoners dependent on them for food.

Meanwhile, a bunch of city dwellers (called “Burghers”) were given a special exemption by the king to start making stuff. These are the artisans and merchants. Soon, the Burghers had shiny baubles and trinkets that they were looking to sell. The feudal landlords might have limits for their desire to fill their bellies, but they have no boundaries on their childish vanity. The feudal lords wanted to show off how great they were and get their hands on these diamond trinkets. As a result, they started to trade their surplus food not for the servitude of commoners, but for the luxury goods the merchants were selling.

What they used to exchange for the servitude of hundreds, sometimes thousands of men, was now going to service their childish vanity. As the demand for these trinkets went up, so did the supply, so the previously dependent commoners now could join in on the market. Before, when the commoners were given subsistence-level resources in exchange for their work, there was of course no incentive to innovate or increase efficiency. They did the bare minimum that allowed them to survive, because any extra work would go unrewarded. Now, they began to cultivate different areas, knowing the fruits of their labor would mean more money for themselves. Prosperity follows.

In addition to the cultivation, this new market brought about interdependence where dependence used to be. In a sense, all of the parties involved were just as reliant on each other as before. The commoners of course needed the landlords as consumers of their goods, and the landlords needed an outlet for their surplus food. The difference now was that the power was completely decentralized. Rather than a commoner being subjected to the whims of one feudal lord, the market gave him the ability to appeal to the childish vanity of all the landlords to which he could ship his goods.

What is more exciting than reading about how peaceful commercial exchange liberated the masses from the tyranny of the feudal system? Smith emphasizes how this ‘silent revolution’ came about not because a top-down authority dictated it, and not because anyone was consciously trying to bring about positive change for the masses.

A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.

There are free PDFs all around the internet if you’d like to read the passages in their entirety. Here is one.

I leave you with the lyrics of Silent Revolution:

They say beauty is in order
What’s left over in so few hands
But the landlords spell their doom
Wanting the jewelry the merchants have

The price they paid could buy them
A thousand different men
And though they get the diamond
Power leaves them
And commerce wins instead

Here comes the silent revolution
Moving slowly, no certainty
Interdependence, cultivation
From no design comes prosperity

Without any intention
Without beneficence
The feudal system’s dying
Lords made obsolete from
Their childish vanity

Without any intention
Without beneficence
The feudal system’s dying
Lords made obsolete from
Their childish vanity

 

The Euro is Doomed

A new post at Novel Stance is up about the fragility of the euro currency given its current institutional structure.

The institutional arrangement is not set up to support a stable currency area and the cultural differences across the eurozone make it nearly impossible to move towards a regime that makes the currency integration beneficial. As countries experience more frustration and powerlessness from giving up significant political and economy autonomy, the arrangement will come apart and the currency will no longer exist in the same form as it does today.

And:

Simply put, the United States got to be where it is today after more than two centuries of friction and it wasn’t easy. Even with all that, it benefitted from having tremendously more linguistic homogeneity than Europe has and it didn’t have millennia of regional identity baked in to individual identity. Furthermore, Project Euro has attempted to expedite this tough process of integration and identity in a mere 17 years. Having eurozone citizens suddenly consider themselves “European” before considering themselves “German” or even “Bavarian” isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Do read the whole thing.

 

Development Podcast Series

For those of you not aware, I did a podcast series with the Development Research Institute at NYU earlier this year. It was nine episodes focusing on development that happens on a level other than the nation-state. Each episode featured me discussing a paper with its author and is worth checking out. My favorite one is probably the fourth episode, focusing on the centuries-long history of one New York City block. Here’s the summary:

Between Houston and Prince Streets on Greene Street in lower Manhattan, one city block has undergone dramatic changes over the course of four centuries. Today this Greene Street block is home to luxury retail and expensive residences, but not too long ago it was filled with art galleries, brothels, and garment manufacturing. The shifts in the block’s physical character and value were often sudden and totally unanticipated. Looking only at the nation-state level can obscure meaningful growth that occurs on much smaller levels, but how much can we learn from looking at just a city block? William Easterly of New York University tells us about this exciting and surprising history of one New York City block and what it can teach us about development.

Here’s a link to the iTunes page.

 

Ignore Brexit and Trump, we’re better off than we used to be

I’ve got a new post over at Novel Stance about putting the “economic anxiety” of the Western working class in the greater context of global income trends. A couple excerpts:

Whatever legitimate economic anxiety Brexiteers and Trumpkins have from the last few decades of increasing globalization, it is dwarfed by the historic rise in living standards nearly everywhere else in the world.

…

In a sense, we can think of the “Western working-class” being pushed aside by an “Emerging Market working-class.” Emerging market economies like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia are building their own middle classes, simultaneously lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and displacing the Westerners that used to do that work.