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2021: Year in Reading

Not a great year for reading – 21 books, but one of those was a short story by the great Edith Wharton, sold as a little book. Again, the reduction in my daily commute is a big reason for the change. Links to earlier year-in-reviews here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017.

Narratives

  1. Pride and Prejudice: Beloved for good reason.
  2. The Mirror and the Light: Perhaps overlong, but a fantastic conclusion to the trilogy
  3. Solaris: Much scarier and unsettling than I had expected
  4. Vaxxers: Absolutely engrossing in the first half, less so in the second
  5. The Flatshare: A delightful romance with depth
  6. Jane, Unlimited: A one-of-a-kind rocketship that takes you into the narrative stratosphere.
  7. Rainbows End: Excellent portrait of a near-future world on the verge of singularity. Better on a second read because my expectations were properly calibrated.
  8. The Farthest Shore: The dragon is the star of the show
  9. Carrie: One big anxiety-sadness trip
  10. The Exorcist: Excellently done, but too close to the movie to give you much in the way of novelty if you’ve seen it.
  11. The Tombs of Atuan: A proto-feminist fantasy story!
  12. A Wizard of Earthsea: A bit episodic, but a creative new fantasy setting.
  13. Calvin and Hobbes: Ten Year Anniversary: Bill Waterson is such an idealistic, willful nut.
  14. The innovators: It takes an army to make a revolution.
  15. Liftoff: Musk’s gifts – a prophet’s power to lead, an eye for talent, and sociopathic ruthlessness.
  16. Amazon Unbound: Amazon’s growing bloat.
  17. Power Play: See Liftoff.
  18. Mr. Jones: A spooky trifle

Conceptual Non-Fiction

  1. The Precipice: In some ways it’s not as bad as you think, in others its worse.
  2. Four Thousand Weeks: Accept there is no lifehack to solve your problems.
  3. The Case for Space: Starts strongest, but eventually you have a sense we don’t actually know what economic case there is for space. I suspect we’ll get to orbit a lot more, but Mars will need to wait for us to become richest enough to pay for the 
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2020: Year in Reading

As with so many other things in the year of the plague, it was not a good year for reading. I read only 19 books in 2020, down from 50-53 in 2019, 45 the year in 2018, and 50 in 2017. There were three main factors:

  • When teaching went online, I stopped commuting 90 minutes a day, which I used to listen to audible.
  • I started using more of my (limited) free time to read papers for New Things Under the Sun.
  • I think the pandemic frazzled me a bit. It was hard to stick with long books. I started and stopped a lot more books than usual.

Regardless, here’s my take on this year’s reading, separated into conceptual non-fiction and narratives.

Conceptual Non-Fiction

  1. Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein: A great overview of the systemic problems bedeviling American politics. Warning: understanding will not make you feel better about the situation.
  2. Fully Grown by Dietrich Vollrath: An important rebuttal to the rising consensus that we are living amid a great stagnation of technological innovation. I wrote much more about this book here.
  3. The Great Reversal by Thomas Philippon: A good summary of the evidence that the problem of market power in the USA is on the rise.
  4. Why Not Socialism by G.A. Cohen: Argues that socialism, as a method of allocating resources in society, is desirable; though we may lack the social technology to make it work in a desirable fashion at present.
  5. The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski: A good complement to Why Not Socialism, this is all about whether we, in fact, already have the social technology to implement a desirable form of socialism. Good food for thought, but I’m skeptical we can do any better (at present) than robust welfare state capitalism.
  6. Digital Renaissance by Joel Waldfogel: A nice companion to Fully Grown, in that it contains an argument that the nature of cultural production may have changed, but probably for the better on the whole.
  7. Big Business by Tyler Cowen: The case that worries about market power in the USA are overblown. I didn’t think it grappled nearly enough with counterfactuals.

Narratives

  1. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin: “Nobody goes hungry while another eats.” My second read of this. Also fits in well with “Why Not Socialism” and “People’s Republic of Wal-Mart.”
  2. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien: Another re-read. Always wonderful.
  3. A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge: Another re-read. My all time favorite sci-fi book.
  4. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien: Another re-read.
  5. Slade House by David Mitchell: Fantastic horror story ambience.
  6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: It’s really long; some parts I would probably skim if I re-read, but other parts made me cry.
  7. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: This book keeps going up in my estimation. I think this is my third time reading this?
  8. Silas Marner by George Eliot: A great short Christmas tale.
  9. Exhalation by Ted Chiang: Much of this was fantastic, but I didn’t care for the long central story on the lives of digital objects.
  10. Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel: Great to be in this world, but at the end you’re kind of left thinking “what actually happened?”
  11. A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazney: Super fun Halloween pastiche that I will probably revisit again.
  12. SevenEves by Neal Stephenson: Memorably grim, but the last third didn’t work great for me.
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How Many Iowans Really Have covid-19?

This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate how many Iowans currently have covid-19. To begin with, as of July 23, here is the rolling 7-day average for the daily number of positive covid-19 test results, and the 7-day average for the daily number of deaths due to covid-19 (all data from the covid tracking project).

According to this data, Iowa has a bit over 500 new covid cases per day right now, slightly under the all-time peak. However, this data is confounded by the variation in test supply. The following figure is the share of test results that came up positive, over the prior 7 days. As you can see, it varied substantially. In early May, it was as high as 25%, compared to 9% at the second peak.

How many covid cases are we missing, due to inadequate testing? To get an idea, let’s assume the deaths data is basically accurate. Because there is a gap in time between when someone is infected and when they get tested, another gap between when they get tested and they die of covid (if they do), and another gap between when someone dies and when their death is reported, we need to adjust the date of deaths to use it to estimate case counts.

The covid tracking project suggests deaths may be reported 14-21 days after symptom onset.

If someone dies of covid-19, they will first experience symptoms 14-21 days before their death. If we push back the deaths time-line by 18 days (about halfway between 14 and 21), we get the following chart.

Now, the trends for deaths and new cases match much more closely. They both peak in early May and hit their nadir in late June.

We know a lot more today about how deadly covid-19 is than when we started, with most estimates converging on 0.5-1.0% of people infected eventually dying. Let’s take the low end of this, since Iowa’s medical system was never overwhelmed or short on ventilators, and estimate that 0.5% of Iowans who contracted covid-19 died. Since we know the actual number of deaths, we can calculate the likely true number of cases by dividing this by 0.5%. That generates the following figure.

According to this estimate, there were a total of 160,000 covid cases in Iowa by July 5, compared to an official count of 31,000. That is, the actual number is 5x the reported number. This is also within the bounds of estimates about how many cases are being missed, which is as high as 9 out of 10. It also suggests, as of July 5, only about 5% of Iowans have had covid-19, which suggests there is a long way to go before we can think about things like herd immunity.

This figure also suggests the decline in covid cases was much swifter in the month of May then official tests indicate, because through this period our testing supply increased and we began catching more and more of the actual cases. And on June 19, this suggests we may have been close to capturing 100% of the covid cases.

Nowcasting Covid-19

One problem with this data is that it only gives you an estimate of how bad things are 18 days ago. What about right now? I took a stab at it, but it involves a lot of assumptions, so take this with a heaping spoonful of salt.

To estimate the real number of covid cases in Iowa right now, I use the following formula:

(# of positive covid test results) = (# of actual covid cases) x (share identified by testing)

We know the # of positive test results, so we can estimate the actual number of covid cases by dividing that by the share we identify with testing. But we don’t know the share testing identifies. So we have to estimate that.

I’ll assume there is a stable relationship between the share of cases identified by testing, and the percent of tests that show up positive, at least once testing gets up to speed. I use the date of May 21, when Governor Reynolds said anyone in Iowa who wants a test can now get one. Specifically, I assume:

log(share identified by testing) = A + B*log(% of covid tests that are positive) + e

where I estimate A and B, and e is a random error. Using data from May 21 to July 5, here’s what the scatterplot looks like.

This suggests A = -6.08 and B = -1.94. As we would expect, the relationship is negative – the higher the percent of cases that are positive, the fewer of actual cases are being captured. The estimated relationship is:

share identified by testing = 0.002/(% positive)^1.94

With an estimate for the share of actual cases identified, I can estimate how many actual cases there are from the number of positive test results. The estimate of the number of actual cases, based on this testing data, is in yellow.

Thus, according to my estimates, this second wave peaked a bit below 2,500 new cases per day in mid July, and has since dipped to 2,000 cases per day.

Validation

There are two ways I can think of to see if these estimates are right.

First, according to this model, the daily number of deaths should rise to a peak of about 12 per day (on average over a week), by early August, and then fall to about 10 per day (on average over a week) by mid August.

Second, if Iowa ever does widespread testing for antibodies, I estimate that, as of July 24, about 196,000 Iowans have had covid-19, or 6%.

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2019: Year in Reading

For the last few years, I’ve tried to loosely rank the books I read from most to least favorite. But, as you’ll see, I’m pretty enthusiastic about most of the books, since I usually just quit reading stuff I don’t like.

I read 50/53 books this year, depending on whether you count the Murderbot novellas as 1 or 4 books. Last year I started grouping books by “conceptual non-fiction” and “narrative fiction and non-fiction,” since Karl Ove Knausgaard’s books present as non-fiction, but narrate the events of his own life, so it felt weird to compare him to other non-fiction books. This year, things got even trickier, since my favorite book was probably Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar, which is a mix of narrative and conceptual non-fiction. I ended up filing it under a third category. Without further ado…

Conceptual Non-Fiction

  1. Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright: A wonderful marriage of modern cognitive science and (non-supernatural) Buddhism. Nearly convinced me to go Buddhist!
  2. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse: Evolution provides a wonderful organizing schema for thinking about the origin of “bad” emotions, mental disorders, and more.
  3. A Culture of Growth by Joel Mokyr: I hope to write a lot more about this book someday, but in short, I think it’s the most right theory of why the Industrial Revolution happened when and where it did.
  4. The Years That Matter Most by Paul Tough: An expansive portrait of how American higher education is and is not a good engine of social mobility that argues we can do better, even if there is no silver bullet
  5. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan: A great companion to my #1 and #2 choices that is every bit as good as people say
  6. Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch: We’re getting better at communicating and interacting with each other over this new internet thing
  7. Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Wienersmith: Somehow this year I ended up reading 3 Bryan Caplan books – he has a knack for finding thought-provoking positions on important issues. Efficiently delivered in a compelling and creative way, this one’s my favorite.
  8. The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan: The trouble with Democracy is the voters are people, and people are the worst.
  9. Building the Intentional University by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Ben Nelson, and Bob Kerrey: A top-to-bottom rethinking of higher education based on evidence (such as it is).
  10. The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan: High school and college are not nearly as efficient at building human capital as we think they are.
  11. Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen: An optimistic take on how the internet can be used to rethink the infrastructure of scientific enterprise.
  12. The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa: An interesting complement to my #1, from the perspective of someone whose done it – but my feelings are complicated after it emerged Culadasa was cheating on his wife without her consent.
  13. Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark: A nice overview of contemporary physics, a physics career, and Tegmark’s ideas about why there is something rather than nothing.
  14. Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder: In the absence of new data, foundational theoretical physics has gravitated towards aesthetically based criteria for evaluating theories. This may not be the best strategy for finding truth if reality feels no need to be pretty.
  15. Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda: A set of great first person case studies on how innovation happens in the context of Apple, with thoughtful analysis.
  16. The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti: A classic popular summary of the new urban economics literature which emphasizes the importance of agglomeration effects.
  17. The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper: A great example of fruitful interdisciplinary work – Rome’s decline was hastened by climatic changes and disease outbreaks.
  18. The Box by Marc Levinson: The history of the shipping container illustrates tons of cool ideas about the economics of innovation. Should be right up my alley, but I found it a bit dry at times.
  19. Jump-Starting America by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson: Good overview of important research on economics of innovation, and naturally I like that one of the places they think could be a new research hub is the Des Moines-Ames corridor.
  20. Make it Stick by Peter C. Brown: A good summary of the literature on learning, though I worry a lot of the lit won’t survive the replication crisis.
  21. The Rise of Universities by Charles Homer Hoskins: A very short history about… the rise of universities (in the middle ages).
  22. Life Finds a Way by Andreas Wagner: What can evolution teach us about innovation and creativity in general. Wagner is really good on evolution, but a lot of the other stuff was a bit surface level.
  23. Greek and Roman Education by R. Barrow: The deep roots of formal education in Europe.
  24. TED Talks by Chris J. Andrews: My takeaways – be comfortable, use throughlines, and only your speech from memory if you can do it really, really, well.
  25. More from Less by Andrew McAfee: The central idea that US consumption of natural resources is falling, is actually a pretty small part of the book and I already kind of knew the rest.

Narrative

  1. Middlemarch by George Eliot: A whole world of psychologically realized people (and features the ultimate nightmare of an academic; wasting your life on a project that ends up wrong and unpublished).
  2. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich: The human experience of World War II, from the perspective of Soviet women, who served throughout the ranks. It’s real war, which means it’s sad, not fun.
  3. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: The second time I’ve read the story of Lily Bart’s long and sad decline. Will read again.
  4. Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Much like the Buddhists described in my #1 non-fiction, Knausgaard has shed the assumptions that color and organize our perception of the world, so that he renders mundane life new and vivid.
  5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: Incredible characters; St. John could be someone straight out of my #2. The audiobook is read incredibly well by Thandie Newton.
  6. The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkein: Sad and hypnotic work with powerful and iconic passages.
  7. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin: A book that jolted me out of my routine (also features one of my favorite genres – arctic journey!).
  8. Silas Marner by George Eliot: What if a Hallmark movie was written by one of the greatest writers in the English language?
  9. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: A lovely modern fairy tale.
  10. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: Sherlock Holmes and Watson reimagined as monks just before the renaissance.
  11. A Confederacy of Dunces: A portrait of the kind of guy who today would haunt reddit and be a big fan of Mencius Moldbug.
  12. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler: Excellent. Uses the sci-fi time travel premise to unpack the psychology of American slavery in a way that would be very difficult to achieve otherwise.
  13. The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin: A mix of amazing sci-fi and cringingly bad stuff, but ultimately you’ll remember the high points more than the low.
  14. The Last Viking by Stephen R. Bown: An excellent companion to “The Worst Journey in the World,” (which I read last year) as it shows what might have been and makes the mistakes of the Scott expedition clear.
  15. Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore: I was not loving this book until it opened up after the first third and kept getting wilder and wilder.
  16. The Murderbot Diaries (#1-#4) by Martha Wells: Actually 4 novellas, but they tell the fun thriller-ey story of murderbot’s self-actualization.
  17. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer: Kind of cosmic horror that’s afraid of biology instead of physics.
  18. Daytripper by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon: The images do a good job of evoking day-to-day life.
  19. Under Red Skies by Karoline Kan: Interesting memoir of a country undergoing enormous change (China) – how representative are these views though? Who knows?
  20. Blacksad (#1-#3) by Juan Diaz Canales: Zootopia for adults.
  21. The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughan: I don’t believe the main theme about the baleful power of the internet, but it’s great to look at.
  22. The Department of Sensitive Crimes by Alexander McCall Smith: Not bad, but not for me.
  23. Fall, or Dodge in Hell: Amazing first 200 pages, but I was pretty unhappy with it after that.
  24. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss: Would have quit if this wasn’t a book we were reading for book club.

A bit of both

  1. Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar: What happens if you take seriously the notion that if you can save a life without losing your own, you have a duty to do that? One of my favorite books of the decade.
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2017: Year in Reading

This is an old post I made on goodreads, but I’m reproducing it here.

Fiction-ish
1. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich – A journey into the depths of human suffering, and occasionally triumph.
2. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton – How bad can things really get for a woman of privilege in 1800s New York? Bad.
3. Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard – See the world new again.
4. My Struggle Book 5 by Karl Ove Knausgaard – Knausgaard’s years as a struggling writer and all around not great guy.
5. My Struggle Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard – The concerns of a child, treated as weighty and serious as anything in literature.
6. My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard – Teenage years for Knausgaard: funny and obsessed with sex.
7. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi – Seven generations is a lot of generations and telling them parallel in America and Ghana makes the challenge twice as hard; staggering accomplishment.
8. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – I didn’t expect such a fully realized world.
9. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders – A relatively weak start for me that culminated in a very moving ending.
10. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates – Deserves the praise; Coates’ is a lot more than the caricature you read about in the media.
11. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton – Left me wanting more (so I read the House of Mirth).
12. Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories by M.R. James – Classically styled ghost stories.
13. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro – Wonderful evocation of regret.
14. Turn of the Screw by Henry James – Starts as a classic Victorian ghost story but sticks the knife in at the end!
15. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard – You can just see how great this would work on stage.
16. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel – Enjoyed it, but not sure it will stay with me.
17 & 18. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd & Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie – Had never read Christie before, and the endings make the books.
19. Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge – Really interesting and fun, but at the end, I was like “oh, that’s it?”
20. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2 by Alan Moore and Kelly O’Neill – I found Hyde and Nemo interesting characters, was generally entertained.
21. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1 by Alan Moore and Kelly O’Neill – Not bad, but some of the twists were spoiled by the movie.
22. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: the Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kelly O’Neill – An exercise in worldbuilding without much in the way of story or character.

Non-Fiction
1. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich – Tentative masterpiece presenting a definitive theory of what makes humans unique among animals.
2. The Invention of Science by David Wootton – A model of how to study cultural change presenting a novel theory on a topic I find fascinating.
3. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi – Shifted my beliefs. *Caveat: I haven’t read much on this exact topic, and that makes it harder to evaluate non-fiction.
4. Structure: or Why Things Don’t Fall Down by J.E. Gordon – What a pleasure to discover a whole world of things you didn’t know about.
5. One Economics, Many Recipes by Dani Rodrik – Simultaneously a brilliant framework for thinking about economic development, a counter-argument to monocausal economic theories, and remarkably prescient about the globalization backlash we’re living in.
(NOTE: at this point I got tired of writing the massive subtitles to all these books)
6. The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy by Chris Miller – Fantastic short primer on why the USSR collapsed.
7. The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum – First half is a cool argument that there are basically “bubbles” (in the financial market sense) in evolution; the second half turns its eyes on human evolution and takes it to 11.
8. The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon – Useful for me, but probably more detail than most would want.
9. How Building Learn by Stewart Brand – Idiosyncratic book that’s basically about how ‘top-down’ planning by architects can’t compete with ‘bottom-up’ design by tenants.
10. The Almost, Nearly, Perfect People by Michael Booth – I found this utterly charming and learned I’m a scandinavia-phile.
11. Compassion, by the Pound by F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk – Great primer on the economics of farm animal welfare, and good-enough primer on the philosophy of same.
12. From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett – I feel like Dennett books never deliver on what they promise and sometimes get bogged down in academic squabbles, but are nonetheless stuffed with a lot of interesting ideas.
13. The Most Powerful Idea in the World by William Rosen – The story of the industrial revolution with an emphasis on the inventions and technology; a much needed corrective, but makes it feel more like a collection of essays than a coherent whole.
14. Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka and Kira Obolensky – Scratched an itch I didn’t know I had.
15. The Refusal of Work by David Frayne – I love that this book asks why we, as a society, have decided to work so much… but I felt like it missed a lot of opportunities in answering that question.
16. The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker – More of a grab bag than an argument, but I continue to really like Steven Pinker.
17. The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse – Sasse and I have some similar concerns, but we approach them from different angles.
18. Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky – A tour de force undermined by a complete refusal to grapple with the replication crisis sweeping through the studies that comprise the book.
19. Talking Picture by Ann Hornaday – I liked the framing of how to think about what makes a movie “good”, but after the chapter on screenplays I found it increasingly less useful.
20. White Working Class by Joan C. Williams – This is the second book I’ve read about class issues among white Americans, and in both cases I find the description of classes resonant, but the analysis disappointing.
21. Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz – Interesting, but I think this work needs more development/vetting.
22. Scale by Geoffrey West – Maybe 50 pages of very cool stuff… embedded in a much longer book.
23. The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson – More an argument that the arts would be better off if they drew on biology… written by an eminent biologist…
24. American Philosophy by John Kagge – Didn’t really work for me; I think I’m just not that interested in this school of philosophy.
25. Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken – I really liked this when I read it, but one of the reasons was because it seemed like Franken was being forthright and honest (rare in a politician’s memoir)… that belief has been undermined by subsequent events.

I also read 3 plays by Shakespeare. I’m planning to read his collected works this year, so if I succeed, I’ll do a complete Shakespeare category at the end of the year.

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Best of the Decade: 2010s

As 2019 wraps up, here were my top 3 non-fiction books, movies, and music of the 2000-teens.

Best Non-Fiction I read

  1. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich
  2. Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar
  3. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind

Prior to reading The Righteous Mind, I primarily thought about morality from a religious or philosophical perspective. The book introduced me to a naturalistic way of thinking about morality that has informed my thinking ever since. Not “what is right?” but “why do humans believe this is right?” Even if Haidt’s preferred explanation is under critical scrutiny, just the notion that why we believe things are right might not actually come down to philosophy has been an extremely useful thinking tool for me this decade.

Back in 2013, I went into Haidt’s book extremely skeptical. I knew that he was a proponent of motivated reasoning (then a new concept to me), which as a rationality-loving economist I found suspicious. But Haidt won me over.

Haidt is an effective arguer. He knows just how to pace and order his arguments, and how to open you up to his ideas with intuition and empathy before turning to reason and evidence. He doesn’t challenge you with a provocative thesis off the bat… instead, he feeds it to you spoonful by spoonful until you are surprised to see how much you’ve swallowed.

Strangers Drowning

I feel like I need to have a couple copies of this book, so that I am able to give it to people who are at a critical juncture in their lives. In college I once found myself in a crisis of revulsion against the simultaneous existence of extreme poverty and extreme affluence in our world. It happened to some friends of mine too, and I’m sure it happens to many others. For me and my friends, eventually the crisis passed and we accepted a basically conventional life (to some degree). But there’s always the unknown of paths not taken. Was there another way?

There is, and MacFarquhar will show you those terrible and beautiful paths.

The book revolves around Peter Singer’s famous drowning child story. In brief, this parable has five parts:

  1. Would you save a drowning child if you could do it with little risk to yourself? (answer – obviously)
  2. What if you would ruin a $1,000 suit though? (no problem)
  3. Then why don’t you donate $1,000 to save the life of a non-hypothetical person separated from you by space? (uhh, wait…)
  4. Actually, what if there was an ocean of drowning kids? (uh, I guess I would need to at least try to save as many as I could)
  5. So why don’t you devote your life to saving the lives of non-hypothetical people who just need your money? Is the money more important to you than their lives?

It’s a moral trap that tends to catch all of us. Well, almost.

This book is a series of profile of people for whom the trap does not apply. This is a brilliant strategy that instantly cuts through tomes of philosophical back-and-forth and dives right into the reality of escaping Singer’s trap.

These vignettes are wonderful purely as a way to grapple with the diverse possibilities of human life. It’s easy to think we have to live a certain way, because that’s the way it’s always done. This book shocks you with the reminder that you have a lot more autonomy than you think, and there are lot more ways to live than you think.

But the vignettes also illustrate the complexities (and absurdities) associated with escaping Singer’s trap. In a moral crisis, is there time for indulgences like candy apples? What about moral acts that make you feel good but don’t help as many people as other moral acts (for example, being a social worker instead of a banker who donates enough money to pay the salaries of two social workers)? What about sleep? What about children? These questions seem like philosophical thought experiments, but the people in this book really do struggle with them.

Woven through the book is a reflection on how society came to be skeptical, rather than admiring, or these extreme do-gooders. MacFarquhar notes throughout the book the discomfort her subjects feel at being called modern saints. Sainthood is simultaneously a form of praise, and an exculpation, because it implies “ordinary” people should not be held to the same standard. The subjects, in contrast, assert that the way they choose to live is the only decent way to live.

The Secret of Our Success

The Secret of Our Success is a tentative masterpiece. While I have no doubt a lot of the claims will need further shoring up and revision, the book has the contours of a comprehensive theory of humanity.

The key idea is that humans are fundamentally incomplete as isolated autonomous individuals. We have been shaped and molded by evolution to serve as components of a group. We are incapable of thriving without various technologies that we do not know how to create, but must instead be taught. Our jaws are too weak and our intestines too small to pull necessary nutrients out of uncooked food. But we aren’t born knowing how to make fires. We are world class distance runners, but only if we have access to water, which we can carry in containers we must be taught to make. Our nimble hands are among the most dexterous in the animal kingdom, but we need to know how to make tools to put that wonderful ability to use. We are incredible at throwing objects; but we must be taught to make anything worth throwing.

Our enormous brains are primed to imitate, to infer intention, and to retain information. This lets them soak up technologies, but only if teachers are out there. Our brains are not large enough to reinvent these technologies anew out of whole cloth. We spend a very long time helpless or as juveniles; all the better to learn from others, and to allow others to protect and care for us until we are ready, after two decades, to fend for ourselves. Our goals and values are plastic rather than hardwired. Social norms can be internalized and we learn what is important from the group, rather than sensing it innately.

This is largely a book about the primacy of culture in human evolution. It’s not the first book to tackle the importance of cultural evolution, but I think it succeeds brilliantly by adopting a much more interdisciplinary strategy than other books in the genre. The book is a great example of how to weave together evidence from disparate fields: economics, anthropology, neurobiology, history, archeology, etc. He uses case studies, statistical studies, simulations, and laboratory experiments with equal skill.

Other Notable Non-Fiction of the 2010s

  • The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined by Steven Pinker
  • The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
  • The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves by Brian Arthur (technically published in a few months before 2010)

Best Genre Movies I Saw

  1. Mad Max: Fury Road
  2. It Follows
  3. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Though many disagree, for me, as a movie The Last Jedi works great, anchored by fantastic performances from everyone, but especially Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. It’s operatic and larger than life: star-crossed magic space wizard in love but destined to be enemies! But what I love about the movie is that I can think about it so much – it’s packed with ideas about failure, symbolic actions, the weight of the past, heroism, sacrifice, and the power of ideas/information.

It Follows

We are living in a new golden age of horror. From Hereditary and Midsommar to The Babadook, The Witch, and The Invitation, the new horror is smart and relies on ideas and craft rather than gore to scare. An incredible decade for horror, but I think this one tops the list (barely). Its an instant classic that finds inventive new ways to make the mundane scary. Who knew people walking straight towards the camera could be so scary?

Mad Max: Fury Road

Music, acting, characters, story, world building, dialogue, set design, editing, cinematography – the movie excels along every dimension. It’s basically perfect.

Best Songs I Heard

  1. Time, as a Symptom by Joanna Newsom
  2. Power by Kanye West
  3. Two by The Antlers (technically released in 2009)
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Are Horror Movies Getting Scarier?

Number of films released in previous 10 years mentioned on any “Scariest Movies of All Time” list, and Number of top 25 such films

A few weeks ago, I ran across the following argument from Scott Sumner’s blog:

“The film industry is in long-term decline, which happens to all art forms after they express their most potent ideas.  Painting peaked in the 1500s and 1600s.  Pop music in the 1960s and 1970s.  So on film I’m a pessimist.”

Sumner isn’t the only one who seems to think film has peaked. The BFI Sight and Sound top movies poll gives only  4 out of 100 spots to movies made since 1990(!).

This is a bit puzzling for two reasons. First, technology in general continues to improve year after year. Movies are sort of a technology, so why don’t they also get better? After all, surely film-makers are learning all the time from what worked in the past. And they have much improved technical tools. And there’s just a lot more movies being made by a lot more people around the world. Why doesn’t that translate to steady improvement in film?

Second, some movie genres don’t seem to have peaked. In particular, one of my favorite genres – horror – appears to be in the midst of a golden age. If horror movies are getting better, why not the rest?

The problem, of course, is that producing great art is about both craft and originality. Craft may indeed be improving all the time, but it gets harder to be original with every passing year. The need to be original is a handicap not faced by technology in general, and likely accounts for the difference between film and technology.

But it would still be interesting to see if the craft of film-making is improving. How do you measure the advance of film making craft though? Well, with horror, I think it’s pretty obvious. A well executed movie should be scary. There are lots of techniques related to framing, sound design, and editing that can put an audience on edge or have them jump in fright. If these techniques have to be discovered, then later film-makers have advantages over earlier ones, since they can copy them.

So I decided to see if there’s any evidence horror movies are getting scarier. (Of course this is not a decisive proof about anything, but it was a fun evening project).

Ideally, I would have some human subjects watch horror movies across different eras while being hooked up to instruments measuring their physiological responses: heart rate, sweat, goosebumps, etc. As far as I can tell, no one has done this. And since I doubt the NSF will go for it if I submit a proposal, I’m taking a simpler approach.

I spent my lunch hour searching the internet for lists of the “scariest movies of all time.” I restricted my attention to lists published in the last two years (so I can capture the new golden age of horror), and put together by staff at publications. So no fan lists. I found 8 such lists from Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Reader’s Digest, NME, Complex, Newsday, Consequence of Sound, and Hollywood Reporter. These lists ranked (or simply listed) between 10 and 100 movies each, for a total of 302 rankings.

There are 144 unique movies included in these 8 lists. These are all movies that someone thought were scary enough to merit inclusion on a list of top scariest movies of all time. In the figure up top, I plot the number of such movies released in the previous 10 years, from 1929 to 2017. This is the line in black.

By this metric, there was relatively steady progress in making scary movies up through the 1980s, followed by a major retrenchment in the 1990s. While progress has not been steady (at all), we are indeed in a new golden age of scary movies. The previous peak of 1982 (35 scariest movies released in previous 10 years) was passed in 2010 (37 scariest movies released in previous 10 years) and shows no sign of abating.

By another measure though, horror has indeed peaked. To try and identify the top 25 scariest films, I gave each film a vote for each list it appeared in, where it was ranked in the top 25. There were two lists that named 32 and 35 films, but did not rank them, so in these cases I assumed each film in the list had a 25/32 and 25/35 probability of being in the top 25. I gave them votes weighted accordingly. I took the 25 films with the most votes to assemble a list of the top 25 scariest movies of all time.

I then repeated the same exercise, plotting the number of top 25 films released in the previous decade. That’s the red line above.

Here we see that the first golden age of horror has not been surpassed. Twelve of the films most likely to appear in the top 25 were released between 1973 and 1982. That’s nearly half in one decade! While there has been a minor resurgence in the 2000s, we are far below the peak.

So which is it? Are movies getting scarier or not? I actually think these figures support the general idea that the craft of making horror movies has risen. To see why, let’s take a look at these top 25 horror movies.

Psycho (1960)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
The Exorcist (1973)
Black Christmas (1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Jaws (1975)
Carrie (1976)
The Omen (1976)
Halloween (1978)
Alien (1979)
The Shining (1980)
The Evil Dead (1981)
Poltergeist (1982)
The Thing (1982)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
The Fly (1986)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Ringu (1998)
Audition (1999)
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
The Descent (2005)
Paranormal Activity (2007)
The Strangers (2008)
Hereditary (2018)

These are pretty scary movies! But they’re not just well crafted movies. Many of them are also original or ground-breaking in an important way. Even though these lists are supposedly about what is scary, not what constitutes great art, I don’t think the presence of so much originality is necessarily (or only) because “great” movies are sneaking onto a list of movies that are just supposed to be scary. Instead, I think it’s because we are scared by the unknown, the unfamiliar, and the shocking. The scariest stuff tends to have something original that keeps us on the edge of our seats.

It may be that film-makers today have an edge over their peers in the past, when it comes to making a pretty scary movie. The craft has improved, and it’s never been more likely that a movie released in the recent past is very scary. That’s the black line above. But to make the scariest movies, good craft isn’t enough. You need an original and frightening idea, something the audience hasn’t grown used to. And as time goes on, the threshold for originality keeps getting raised. Hence, the red line.

Bonus:

As we approach the end of the 2010s, my list of the greatest (not scariest) horror movies released during the golden age of the last 10 years:

  1. It Follows
  2. Midsommar
  3. Under the Skin
  4. Hereditary
  5. The Wailing
  6. The Invitation
  7. The Witch
  8. Cabin in the Woods
  9. Get Out
  10. The Babadook

Happy Halloween!

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Economics of Innovation: Detailed Reading List

This semester I’m teaching a new class on the economics of innovation targeted to interested undergraduates from a wide range of backgrounds (the only prerequisite is Econ 101) and I thought others might find the reading list interesting. The readings are usually anchored to recent research in the economics of innovation, but to make the course accessible to people without degrees in economics I’ve tried to find and create accessible overviews of the research. So I hope this is useful for anyone interested in the topic, regardless of their background.

Caveat: these readings are selected to illustrate a big concept in the economics of innovation and to lead to a good discussion. They aren’t necessarily the “best” or “most convincing” paper on the topic and of course this list is far from exhaustive. Needless to say, I don’t necessarily endorse all the arguments made either.

Preliminaries

Why study innovation?

Where do ideas come from?

Is necessity the mother of invention?

If people randomly come up with new ideas, does more people = more ideas?

Do new ideas come from new knowledge?

Do better ideas come from experience and learning?

Is innovation just another form of evolution?

Is innovation about combining different things in a new way?

Putting it all together:

What background factors matter for innovation?

Why do big cities generate more ideas?

How is innovation affected by institutions?

Why do so many people accept things as they are?

How can we incentivize innovation?

What are spillovers and what challenges do they present to businesses doing R&D?

What if we just innovate without using the market at all?

Which is better: secrecy or intellectual property rights?

What about innovation prizes?

Can we use tax policy to steer innovation where we want it to go?

Can we boost innovation by increasing the supply of scientists?

How can we encourage scientists to take bigger risks?

Do we need to stop thinking of individual incentives to innovate?

How should we organize to make innovation happen?

Putting it all together:

What’s the past and future of innovation?

How has the USA organized research in the past?

What have been the big inventions?

Is innovation getting harder?

Or is the singularity approaching?

  • “The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence: Parts 1 and 2” (2015) by Tim Urban.
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A Beginner’s Guide to #EconTwitter

My #1 advice to new economists is to get on twitter and plug into the #EconTwitter community. This document is a guide on how to do that. It’s a bit geared towards academics, since that’s what I know best, but #EconTwitter is a lot more than academics and I’ve tried to write so it’s useful to people outside academia too.

What’s #EconTwitter? 

Literally? Twitter is a website that lets users broadcast 280 characters of text to other users. These are call tweets, and they can also include photos and stuff. You can “follow” other users so that you automatically see their tweets. #EconTwitter is a subnetwork of twitter users who tend to be economists (academic, professional, aspiring), who tweet about economics, and who follow each other. 

Metaphorically? Twitter is the hallway of a global economics department. Conversations break out spontaneously in the hall, you overhear it, and go over to listen or join. People post job and seminar announcements up on department corkboard. But it’s a lot more than academia, so maybe a better metaphor is a pub or coffeeshop where users hang out to talk about whatever interests them; but it’s a pub where there’s always an open chair for you. 

Why join #EconTwitter? 

You’ll learn a ton. It’s a forum people use to share interesting research (their own and others), job notices, grant opportunities, calls for papers, conferences, and other opportunities. It’s a place people rigorously discuss methodological questions. It’s a place for experts to talk about current events. And it’s a place where the hidden curriculum of economics – the advice about how to thrive, not usually disseminated in articles – is freely discussed.  

You can publicize your own work. It’s common for #EconTwitter people to announce publication of their papers and write short summaries. When other users find your work interesting, it gets “retweeted” (re-broadcast to the followers of your followers), expanding awareness of your work to an audience who might otherwise never encounter it. 

You’ll be part of a community. Being an economist has its own set of unique frustrations, whether those relate to grad school, research, publishing, teaching, the academic hierarchy, public sector employment, private sector employment, outright discrimination; you name it. #EconTwitter if full of people who know what it’s like, who are friendly, and who support each other. And there’s nothing stopping connections that start on #EconTwitter from moving into the real world. The conference circuit, to take one example, is a great place to meet up in real life. You might even find a collaborator!

Why is there a “#”? 

Twitter lets you attach keywords to your tweets by putting a hashtag (#) in front of them. In theory, you can find tweets about #EconTwitter by searching for it in twitter. It doesn’t actually work that well (people don’t usually attach the #EconTwitter keyword). But don’t worry, you’ve got this guide! 

Setting up a Twitter Profile 

Joining twitter is like joining any other social media website. It’s free. 

One of your first choices is your choice of handle and name. Like an email address, your handle (or username) is unique to you. It’s preceded by an “@” sign. Mine is @mattsclancy. It’s public so choose one that you don’t mind associating with your professional identity. Your name is not unique and can be anything. Mine is just my real name: “Matt Clancy.”  You can change your name with little consequence (and people sometimes do for whimsical reasons).

The norm on #EconTwitter is to use your real name, since you are usually intending to link the account to your professional identity as an economist. There are exceptions (@pseudoerasmus being the most prominent example to my mind), but they’re rare. 

Next, pick a picture you like for your profile. Again, the norm is to use a real picture of yourself, but not nearly as universal as the norm of using your real name. Your picture will be small and attached to every tweet you make, so if you do your whole body, it will be hard to see your face.  

You also have space to write a little bit about yourself and to link to a website. This is the main way people who don’t know who you are going to find out about you, so tell them what you want them to know as succinctly as possible. Most people aren’t going to scroll through your tweets to learn who you are. Some archetypal examples:

“Economist studying [topic]. Asst. prof at [short name for university]. [one other thing]”

“[Country] treasury economist. Tweets about [list of areas of particular interest/expertise]”

“PhD Econ student at [university]. [Areas of interest]. [One more thing]”

“Researcher at [company]. [non-professional identity (e.g., “Dad”)]. [topics]”

Following People 

Once you set up your account, the one thing that will most impact your twitter experience is who you follow. When you sign into twitter, three kinds of content will form the bulk of what you see: 

  1. The tweets of people you follow. This is the majority of the content you’ll see, so who you follow will significantly shape your perception of the site. 
  2. Tweets of people you do not follow, but which have been retweeted by people you do follow. 
  3. Tweets the twitter algorithm thinks you would like.  

Getting Started

When you first join, twitter is going to recommend a bunch of popular people to follow after it asks you some general questions. You do you, but my advice is to ignore all of twitter’s suggestions for now. #EconTwitter is an unusually warm and welcoming part of twitter; the rest of the site is… not. It’s frequently called “this hell site” by its own users. Better to avoid all the toxicity and drama until you find your feet. Start with #EconTwitter. 

You might think you should just follow economists you’ve heard of who happen to be on twitter. Your Paul Krugman’s, Ben Bernanke’s, the top people in your field, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you may be surprised that this won’t get you very far into the #EconTwitter community. One of the most interesting things about #EconTwitter is that to the extent it has a hierarchy, it’s a hierarchy with very low correlation with the traditional econ hierarchy. The people everyone follows aren’t necessarily the same people that are on the short list for this year’s Nobel. 

Who should you follow? This was recently asked on #EconTwitter, so I stole the list of recommendations (which I definitely endorse) and made a public list. To find it, navigate to my profile by searching for @mattsclancy, then go to my lists. Click on the #EconTwitter Starter Set list to see a good group of people to get you started. This is very much a non-exhaustive list, but I don’t want to get into the game of picking and choosing who belongs on it, so I’m just going to leave it as it (unless anyone wants off). There is no easy way to “add all” with twitter, so you’ll have to follow each person by hovering over their name and clicking follow. I’ve also listed everyone on the list at the bottom of this post, in case the list ever goes down. 

Naturally, you should also follow anyone you know in real life if they’re on twitter and you want to get in touch. 

Some additional lists:

After You’re Set Up

Once you have a community started, the main way you’ll learn about new people is: 

  1. Retweets from people you follow 
  2. Replies to your tweets and the tweets of people you follow 

Whenever you run across someone who seems interesting, follow them. You can unfollow at any time, so if someone is annoying you with tweets that aggravate you, just unfollow. They can figure out that you unfollowed if they notice your profile no longer says “following you” or if they see you are missing from their list of followers, but twitter won’t give them any kind of specific notification that you have unfollowed them. 

Finally, twitter at it’s best is a serendipity machine that lets you encounter ideas you wouldn’t normally see. The best kinds of innovation are frequently born from seeing a connection between previously unrelated ideas. So follow widely, outside your field and indeed, outside economics, so long as the people you follow enhance rather than detract from your twitter experience.

Getting Followers 

You can get plenty out of #EconTwitter just by following other people. You don’t have to interact. But if you want to participate in the discussions or toss your own thoughts out there, you’ll probably want some followers – otherwise, you’re just talking into a void.  

What follows is some common ways to get followers. It’s worth knowing about them, but to be honest, I wouldn’t recommend being too calculating or strategic about using this information. People can usually tell when you’re only doing something to get a follower; best to be genuine! Still, on the margin… 

One way to get followers is simply to follow other people. Anytime someone follows me on twitter, I get a little notification. When you only have a couple hundred followers like me, a new follow is interesting, so I’ll click over to see who they are. If they seem interesting, I’ll follow them back. I can always unfollow in the future if they turn out to be annoying (almost never happens). This is one reason it’s important to be clear about who you are in your profile, since that’s how people will learn who you are and decide if they want to follow back. 

I also get notifications whenever someone “likes” one of my tweets or replies to it, so I’ll usually check out who is responding and follow if they seem interesting. 

Note that this strategy only really works for people with a limited number of followers. For me, a new follow is interesting. But for someone with an order of magnitude (or two) more followers, follow requests come so fast and furious that I’m sure most are never investigated. Other people never check their notifications, or just don’t use twitter much. So don’t be offended if no one follows you back. It’s not personal! 

The other thing to do when you get started is to send out a first tweet. Something like “Hello! I’m an economist working on [topic] at [org], excited to join #EconTwitter!” If you have some followers already (from above), they might retweet you to their own followers, essentially introducing you to the community. If you want some help, tack an @mattsclancy to the end of your first tweet, so that I’ll see it, and I can retweet you. 

After you get set up, the main way to get followers is to tweet interesting stuff. If your tweet gets retweeted by people who follow you, your tweet is exposed to a new audience of potential followers.  

Another avenue is to reply to other people’s tweets. Your reply is viewable by other people reading the conversation. For example, suppose I tweet out a link to my latest publication. You and I follow each other, so you see my tweet. You reply to it (see how below) “Cool article. I’ve been thinking about this topic too.”  

Anyone who follows me also sees my original tweet. They’ll also see a notification that there are replies to my tweet. If they click on my tweet, they will see all the replies, including yours. And maybe they are also interested in the same topic, so they decide to follow you. 

Finally, if applicable, you can get yourself added to the RePEc lists of twitter users. Follow the instructions when you click “How to get listed” on this page.

How to Tweet 

There are four main types of tweet. 

  1. The most common is a standard text tweet. You have 280 characters of text. Twitter uses a URL shortener that reduces the number of characters in any URL to 23 characters. You can add up to 4 pictures to a tweet, or 1 gif. 
  2. If you want to make a larger point, you can thread several tweets together. When you do this, your followers will typically see the first tweet in your thread, along with an indicator that there are more tweets in the thread. If they click on the first tweet, the thread is expanded and they see all your tweets in sequence. It’s kind of like reading a post sentence by sentence. Works surprisingly well!
    There are two ways to make threads. One option is to hit the little “plus” button in the corner when you compose your first tweet. You can do this as much as you like, drafting all the tweets in your thread at once and editing them before you hit “tweet all.” Alternatively, you can just compose your thread on the fly by hitting “reply” to the latest tweet in your thread. If you do this, followers will see each of your tweets as they come, instead of just the first tweet with an indicator that there is a thread below. But when you thread by replying to your own tweets, you can’t go back and edit the earlier tweets in the thread. 
  3. If you like what someone else said and want to share it with your own followers, you can retweet it by hitting the retweet button under the tweet. When you do this, you’ll have the choice to simply retweet or to retweet with comment. If you simply retweet, your followers will see the tweet in its original state, with an indicator that it was retweeted by you. If you retweet with comment, your followers will see the original tweet in a little box, embedded in your own tweet, where you have the standard 280 characters to make a comment on it. 
  4. You can also reply to other people’s tweets. Just click on the “reply” icon under the tweet. You’ll have the usual 280 characters to respond. Twitter will notify the person whose tweet you are replying to that you have replied, but it will also notify anyone “tagged” in that tweet. The etiquette of this is discussed a bit in the “best practices” section. In general, your followers will not see your reply unless they also follow the tweet you are replying to (but if they are really curious, they can find them by going to your profile and looking at your “tweets and replies”). People who follow the tweet you are replying to will not see your reply either, unless they choose to read the replies to that tweet (which is common). 

There’s also an option to conduct a poll with your tweet. This lets you ask your followers a multiple-choice question with up to 4 answers. Respondents have between 5 minutes and 7 days to respond (your choice, but default is 24 hours). After that interval the results of the poll are visible to all, but individual responses are anonymous (except you can infer they come from the population of people who see your tweet). 

It’s important to realize that twitter does not allow you to edit your tweets after they are posted. This can be really annoying if you make a typo on a tweet that becomes really popular, but it’s designed to prevent various abuses. Twitter (not #EconTwitter) is full of trolls who would likely abuse the ability to edit tweets, for example, by changing a benign message to an abusive one. Everyone who retweeted or liked the tweet would then be seen to be liking or retweeting an abusive message. If you really want to rephrase your tweet, you can always delete it and try again. 

Lastly, it’s also possible to “like” tweets. Socially, this has roughly the same function as liking on any other social media. As noted above, users will usually be alerted that you like their tweet. 

What to Tweet 

Whatever you want! If you want to get an idea of what kinds of things people tweet on #EconTwitter, check out what the tweets from people in the #EconTwitter Starter Set.

Best Practices 

Adhering to a couple best practices will also make your experience and the experience of everyone else better. 

Tone 

Probably the most important thing to realize is that #EconTwitter is not Econ Job Market Rumors (EJMR). It’s much friendlier and supportive. The community is quite diverse and everything you say is publicly viewable. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t punch down. Think carefully about how you phrase critical comments and tweets that can be misinterpreted. Bigoted comments will be called out. 

Two things differentiate #EconTwitter from EJMR. First, everyone knows who you are. Yes, you can use a pseudonym, but it’s hard to get many followers that way. Anonymous trolls don’t get much traction. Second, everyone on twitter curates their own feed by choosing their followers. If they don’t like what you’re putting out, they can un-follow, mute, or block you (see below). Nobody has to follow anyone. 

Blocking and Muting 

As noted above, if another user irritates you, there are a hierarchy of responses.  

Suppose @troll is bothering @economist. First, @economist can unfollow @troll. They’ll no longer see @troll’s posts, but this does nothing to dissuade @troll from bothering @economist if they are persistent. @troll can still see all of @economist’s posts, and can reply and tag @economist, which brings up a notification for @economist each time. 

The next step up the chain is to mute @troll. This blocks all communication from @troll to @economist. @economist will no longer see @troll’s tweets, even when @troll tags @economist or replies to their tweets. And @troll is not told they’ve been muted, though there are third-party apps they can use to figure this out.  

The problem with muting is that a particularly nasty troll can still pollute your threads for other followers. By muting a troll, you don’t see what they’re doing, but all your followers do and @troll can still interact with them. This is why many people prefer to block irritating users. Blocking a person means they can no longer see your tweets, and therefore cannot reply to them either. This means your followers do not see @troll either, unless they follow @troll. 

That said, really nasty trolls command followers that they can ask to harass you on their behalf. It can be exhausting to individually block all these followers, and twitter doesn’t have great tools yet for dealing with this. 

For a variety of reasons, I haven’t had to deal with any kind of harassment: I’m not that popular on twitter, I’m not part of a demographic that people are bigoted against, and the stuff I study isn’t too controversial. But those who do have to deal with twitter harassment seem to recommend a policy of fast and easy blocking to keep the experience positive. Basically, it’s fine to block for the slightest infraction: e.g., a single rude comment. There are also lists of twitter users who are known trolls, and some people will just automatically block everyone who appears on these lists. You can always unblock later if you’ve made a mistake (this usually happens via an intermediary – the blocked party asks another user to ask you to unblock them). 

Finally, one last trick: if you want someone to stop following you, you can block and then immediately unblock them. This drops them from your follower list (and does not alert them to this fact), though they can re-follow you if they want.

Quote Tweeting vs. Replies 

Retweeting with a comment (also called quote tweeting) and replying are both ways of responding to a tweet, but there are norms about how to use them. Quote tweeting posts your comment to all your followers, but not the followers of the person you are retweeting. Replying does not post your comment to your followers (unless they also follow the tweet you are responding to). This makes it tempting to respond with quote tweets by default. But actually, quote tweeting as a default is considered kind of rude.  

There are a few reasons. First, it’s much harder to follow a conversation where everyone responds by quote tweeting. Replying keeps the conversation in one relatively easy-to-navigate place, while quote tweeting splinters it into many separate tweets that are hard to follow. Also, your quote tweet is posted to your followers, but not to the followers of the original tweet (unless they also follow you). So they can’t easily respond to you, and you end up hijacking the conversation.  

Often this is perfectly appropriate. If you are not really looking to engage with the existing conversation and just want to make a quick comment, then quote retweeting is great. But if your goal is to actually have a conversation with people interested in the first tweet, replies are best. If you really want to bring your own followers into the conversation, you can reply and then retweet your own reply. 

Tagging etiquette 

When you “tag” someone in your tweet, that person will receive a notification that they have been tagged. You can tag someone by adding their username to your tweet (for example, I suggested new users introduce themselves and tag me by adding @mattsclancy so I would see the tweet and retweet it). These kinds of tags count towards your 280 character limit. 

However, when you reply to a tweet, your reply automatically tags the person who posted the original tweet, and anyone tagged in that tweet. These tags do not count towards your 280 character limit. 

Tagging creates two issues. First, if you are talking about someone else’s work, should you tag them? I don’t think there is unanimity of opinion on this, but my view is that when you are saying something nice about someone, it’s probably slightly better to tag them. Compliments about academic work tend to be rarer than criticisms (even friendly criticisms), so people appreciate hearing good things about their work. The issue is much stickier when you are being critical. Some people don’t like to be notified by twitter that someone out there on the internet is criticizing them. Others think being critical without tagging is tantamount to talking about someone behind their back. I don’t know what’s best here, but be aware of the issue. 

The second issue with tagging is that when you are replying to tweets in a conversation, sometimes people will be automatically tagged who aren’t interested. For example, suppose economist A tweets a new article evaluating some health policy intervention. Economist B replies to the tweet saying they wished this article had used a DAG (directed acyclic graph) approach. Economist C responds to B’s comment asking where they can learn more about DAGs. Economist D responds to C with a list of textbooks. Economist E jumps in with some comments on which of these textbooks is their favorite. And so on. The thing with replies is that economist B’s reply tags A; C’s reply tags A and B; D’s reply tags A, B, and C; and E’s reply tags A, B, C, and D. If a long conversation then breaks out between D and E, every one of their back-and-forth will also tag A, B, and C. This can get annoying, especially if A doesn’t even care about DAGs.  

To avoid this problem, you can untag people. When you are jumping into a conversation based on replies to a tweet, it can be a good idea to take a look at who is tagged and to untag anyone who doesn’t seem particularly engaged in your corner of the conversation. 

Pinned Tweets 

Twitter lets you choose one of your tweets to be a pinned tweet. This tweet is always displayed at the top of your list of tweets, so it is a useful supplement to your profile. It can tell people about whatever it is you most want them to know about. It can also be a way to get traction on a tweet that didn’t get much attention the first time around, since everyone who checks out your profile will likely see the tweet. In academia, announcements of a recent publication are a popular kind of pinned tweet. To pin a tweet, click on the little icon at the top-right corner of your tweet.

Direct Messages 

Twitter also lets you communicate privately with other users via direct messages (DMs). Normally you can only send direct messages to users who have followed you, though it’s possible to enable the ability to receive DMs from anyone (under settings; “privacy and safey”; receive direct messages from anyone). If you really want to talk privately with someone who isn’t following you, you can tag them in a tweet that requests they follow you.  

Focus?

To close, Gray Kimbrough (@graykimbrough) had this advice: “My biggest suggestion is to spend some time thinking about what you want your contribution to be. Many people here feel like they need to comment on every issue and event. Focusing on areas where you have value to add (your area of research? Baking?) is helpful, in my opinion.”

I think that advice is particularly useful for someone new to twitter. When you don’t know anyone, focusing on a particular area can help potential new followers figure out who you are and give them a reason to follow you, especially if the “one thing” is your strong suit. Speaking for myself, I get way more interest in my tweets on the economics of innovation (my area) than my attempts at jokes (even when I think they’re quite good).

Some people go as far as to set up separate twitter accounts that each focus on different topics (e.g., professional and personal, economics and politics). On the other hand, as Gray notes plenty (plenty) of people don’t follow anything like this kind of rule and it works for them.

Additional Resources

Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) made a presentation about using twitter as an economist back in 2015.

Sarah Jacobson (@SarahJacobsonEc) has written a similar guide to using twitter professionally. See pages 21-24. Updated set of slides available here.

Anne Burton (@anne_m_burton) gives a grad student perspective in these slides.

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman (@itsafronomics): “How to Hack #EconTwitter: A Resource Guide.

The End 

Hope you found this helpful! If you have any suggestions, questions or comments, you can email me. Better yet, contact me on twitter! 

The #EconTwitter Starter Set (link to twitter list here)

@causalinf 

@leah_boustan 

@jenniferdoleac 

@lukestein 

@jmorenocruz 

@JustinWolfers 

@wwwojtekk 

@dlmillimet 

@graykimbrough 

@alexoimas 

@cantstopkevin 

@ENPancotti 

@paulgp 

@DinaPomeranz 

@Undercoverhist 

@SarahJacobsonEc 

@saskatchewin 

@economeager 

@florianederer 

@KirbyKNielsen 

@nomadj1s 

@eugen_dimant 

@BenBushong 

@ben_golub 

@BarbaraBiasi 

@SimonDeDeo 

@arindube 

@NeumarkDN 

@AustnNchols 

@imbernomics 

@gelbach  

@Susan_Athey 

@snavarrol 

@mikekofoed 

@SHamiltonian 

@danilaserra_eco 

@SarahJacobsonEc 

@etjernst 

@seema_econ 

@Claudia_Sahm 

@drlisadcook 

@Marietmora 

@ProfNoto 

@jmorenocruz 

@J_C_Suarez 

@TrevonDLogan 

@indigenalysis 

@saskatchewin 

@DaveEvansPhD 

@KiraboJackson 

@charlesjkenny 

@vijramachandran 

@JustinSandefur 

@gyude_moore 

@dynarski 

@dhsandler 

@evelyn_a_smith 

@judy_chevalier 

@MCLevenstein 

@Econ_Sandy 

@BetseyStevenson 

@itsafronomics 

@annastansbury 

@anna_tranfaglia 

@vnbateman 

@ekfletch 

@rothtran 

@OS_Mitchell 

@ShellyJLundberg 

@A_Lusardi 

@AEACSWEP 

@dclingi 

@itaisher 

@aliceevans 

@pseudoerasmus 

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Rehabilitating the Death of Distance to Revitalize Rural Economies

People are writing about how to revitalize flagging rural economics, so it seems a good time to share my thoughts (a bit of background – I recently moved back to Iowa after living in Washington, and lived in London for a few years before that). At the most fundamental level, the dynamic driving rural decline is the benefits of physical agglomeration. People are more productive and innovative when clustered together and this effect favors cities. Higher productivity and more innovation leads to more and better paying jobs in cities. These, in turn, draw people out of rural economies and into cities, further depressing opportunity in rural economies. This is not to say other factors don’t matter at all, but the biggest challenge for rural economies is how to thrive in a world with strong agglomeration benefits.

Greetings Iowa Skyline Metal Magnet
Source: “Raygun, the greatest store in the universe” (https://www.raygunsite.com/)

The best thing we could do for rural economies is to kill the link between physical proximity and agglomeration benefits by using information technology to push agglomeration benefits out of physical space and into the digital realm. My vision is a world where remote work is common (if not the norm), and where better online social networks and socializing options substitute for the invisible networks of social connection and information exchange which are currently based on physical proximity. If people everywhere can enjoy the benefits of agglomeration without the need to physically cluster together there will no longer be a need to flee the country for the city. If we succeed, not only will we bring rural economies into the virtuous cycle of agglomeration benefits, but we may even accelerate innovation and growth by connecting up the entire country into one digital city.

An Idea Ahead of it’s Time?

This is hardly a new idea. At the dawn of the internet era, it was conventional wisdom that the world was flat and the internet would spell the death of distance. It didn’t happen. Instead, the rising importance of knowledge work favored returns to agglomeration more than ever before, accelerating the clustering of knowledge workers into cities. So what went wrong?

I think we all made the classic mistake of underestimating how long it would take for us to figure out how to effectively use a new general purpose technology. I’m reminded of how it took decades for the benefits of electrification to become fully manifest. It wasn’t particularly effective to simply substitute electric motors for the old gigantic steam ones; new distributed production systems had to be invented and built. Why should it be any different for the internet?

In this post, I’ll point to three benefits of physical agglomeration, and speculate on how people can use the internet to retain these benefits without the need for physical proximity (today or in the future). What’s changed is not so much technical advance (although that has happened as well), but social innovations in how we interact with each other online. It may yet turn out that the death of distance is right, but was just ahead of its time.

Making Remote Work Work

Most obviously, pushing agglomeration benefits out of meat space and online will require making remote work work. I have some experience with working remotely. At my previous job in DC I worked remotely two days a week. Most people I socialized with worked remotely at least some of the time too. After moving back to Iowa, I continued to work remotely both at home and out of a regional field office. In my current position, I collaborate with researchers who are geographically separated.

The biggest challenge to remote work is the perception that a remote work force is not as productive as a physically present one. This may because collaboration is hobbled when workers are not physically together or because individual workers shirk when working remotely. In my experience, remote workers are quite heterogeneous but these criticisms are true of some.

Let’s take collaboration and communication first. The trouble with remote work is the increase in transaction costs to transmit information. This isn’t a problem for important information because the value of the communication exceeds transaction costs. When something important needs to be communicated, a conference call, emailed slide deck, or memo will get the job done.

The problem is instead the heap of minor communications, too small to individually exceed transaction costs but cumulatively significant. It’s the absence of spontaneously popping by a co-worker’s cubicle to ask for a clarification, advice, or simply to chat. It’s the absence of body language cues in a teleconference call. I’ve even heard people say the lack of peripheral vision and pheromones impedes communication in meetings. Collectively, these gaps in information add up; problems/opportunities are not identified as early as they could; corporate culture is harder to sustain; trust between employees is harder to build.

But I think a lot of these problems are already being solved by a combination of technological and social innovations. Things like slack substitute for “popping in to ask for a clarification.” Better video technology adds back visual cues in a teleconference. But perhaps most important are cultural adaptations. It’s been interesting to see gifs and emojis emerge as an increasingly robust substitute for body language and vocal tone. Video chatting is something we’re all getting experience with now. And there is at least one highly selective university where all student collaboration happens online.

Similarly, I think we’ll find ways to solve the problem of worker shirking. In my experience, some workers do take advantage of reduced monitoring to shirk their duties, but this tends to be because old systems of monitoring effort (like walking around and keeping an eye on people) are ill suited to remote work. In principle, it’s actually easier to monitor the work of remote workers than physical ones, since you can make a comprehensive record of their digital work (for example, by continuously recording what’s on the screen). Now, that may not end up being necessary. Maybe giving managers the option to call up a live view of their worker’s screens will suffice to prevent shirking. Or maybe a working norm will evolve where you can see your whole team all the time, muted in a ribbon at the bottom of your screen. Or something else entirely.

Thick Labor Markets

A second benefit of urban economies are thick labor markets. If you want to make a movie, you can be confident there will be a plethora of people with just the skills you need, if you live in Los Angeles. If you want to make a new digital product, there will be no shortage of qualified engineers if you locate in the Bay area. If you need the capacity to rapidly scale up manufacturing, qualified workers and managers can be found in Shenzen.

But it’s not just the presence of these workers that matters. It’s also the network of informal social connections that helps match people to the right jobs. You can ask a trusted colleague for advice on a candidate or the firm they work at. Once we can make remote work work, the biggest problem will be building a comparable system for matching remote workers to employers.

In the long run, if we succeed in pushing a lot of work online, this won’t be an issue because the same informal networks that exist in cities will exist in online communities. To some extent then, we just need to be patient. If remote work works, then there will probably be cost advantages to using it (a lower cost of living in rural economies will mean remote workers can out-compete urban ones in terms of wages). Industries most suited to remote work will lead the way, and informal professional networks will follow.

But this process can be accelerated with online services that match employers with employees, like LinkedIn or Upwork. But to really substitute for thick labor markets, we need the digital equivalent of person-to-person networking events and other mixers. Offline, it may be enough to serve drinks, put on some kind of notional speaker, and then let people socialize. But new kinds of events will be needed online. The best candidates to my mind are online games and collaborative educational workshops.

Instead of an after work mixer at the bar, there could be an after work fortnite party (or some more professionally appropriate game). We’ll have to experiment to find what works best, but I suspect a game with low cognitive burden (so you can focus on socializing) and frequent shuffling of the players would be ideal.

Instead of an educational workshop, imagine an online workshop that uses active learning pedagogy, so participants have to interact to learn the material. As with remote work, a generational shift may make existing technology much more effective in the future. The combination of better technology and the ascent of “nerd culture” means more young people today have extensive experience socializing over large online multiplayer games. At the same time, the rise of online active learning education (though nascent) means the next generation may have experience doing school work in a collaborative online environment.

Knowledge Spillovers

Most subtle of all, but perhaps most important in the long run, are the agglomeration benefits related to innovation. Density appears to promote innovation. Why?

Part of it is thick networks. Most innovation happens in teams, and if you know more people, you can put together a better team. For ideas in a very preliminary stage, big networks make it easier to find someone trustworthy to talk things over with. The same kinds of digital activities that promote professional network development could also promote innovation supporting networks.

But cities are also probably better for innovation stemming from serendipity and unexpected connections. Websites like twitter are probably the best online substitute for the unexpected connections and encounters that occur in dense cities. Though there is a strain of toxicity running through much of the site, it also houses wonderfully supportive online communities gathered around common interests.

My experience is with #EconTwitter, a collection of professors, researchers, private sector economists, students and enthusiastic amateurs. The forum genuinely facilitates the open exchange of ideas and knowledge, including much of the “hidden curriculum” that is traditionally communicated in person-to-person contact, and is not typically codified in handbooks and academic articles. I’ve met people in real life that I first encountered on twitter, and even started a research collaboration with someone I’ve never met in the real world. And I’m sure many others have had similar experiences.

I have a hunch that one reason for the advantage of physical meeting of video conference (so far) has been that their high bandwidth nature makes it easier to build trust and openness. This, in turn, gets people to let down their guard and share some of their wilder ideas. Many of these are likely to be duds but wilder ideas are also more likely to lead to major innovations.

If online norms can evolve to make people comfortable taking a risk and sharing ideas that might be bad (e.g., maybe this whole post?), then it may turn out the internet is even better at promoting fruitful connections leading to innovation, since the audience for such ideas is so potentially large. The trouble is, with the internet (especially twitter), unlike at the bar, a screenshot can make a permanent record of any bad take. There may be some technical fixes, but again I think (hope?) in the end we’ll just develop new social norms to deal with it. Part of that may be thick skin, part of it may be liberal uses of block/mute features, and part of it may be an increased threshold before we get outraged about something. Indeed, I see all three of these being hashed out online even now.

Policy Implications

To some extent, all of this is just going to take time. We need to learn to communicate as well online as we do face-to-face, and how to run organizations online. We’re on our way, but it may take a generation raised in this environment. But there are some obvious things we can do to hasten its arrival.

First off, it’s crucial to promote rural broadband and other IT infrastructure, if this policy is to get off the ground. In addition to simply laying down the cable necessary to connect rural communities, this could include low-interest loans to individuals to purchase computer equipment they would need to work remotely. Alternatively, it may turn out to be better to build small communal co-working spaces with necessary equipment and an on-site IT technician.

Second, to promote the use of remote work, it may be desirable for states and small towns to offer wage subsidies and other incentives for distant firms to hire local remote workers. This would be a micro version of the much larger tax breaks that are used today to try and lure businesses to invest locally. The argument for subsidies for remote work from the perspective of an economist is that there is a positive externality from remote work. As more firms experiment with remote work, best practices for its conduct will emerge and this knowledge will diffuse, tipping other firms to increase their use of remote workers.

Third, local universities should offer online degrees tailored to the needs of remote workers. By being online, the courses would be accessible to people who would most hope to subsequently obtain remote work. The degrees would also provide an opportunity to develop the soft skills necessary to be a successful remote worker. They could even practice collaborative team-based pedagogy, to accelerate the development of norms for online collaboration and work.

Fourth, further research on what kinds of social networks facilitate the free exchange of information and formation of social ties is needed.

Fifth and finally, we can promote online gaming and other communal digital activities. Promotion could be cultural, in that we encourage kids to join e-gaming leagues in the same way we now encourage physical sports leagues. Or it could be financial, with subsidies to these industries until they reach a level of maturity where they are a common mode of meeting new people.

There are other aspects of agglomeration economies that also warrant discussion, but for which I have little to add. Capital and finance tend to be clustered in certain geographic regions. Transport infrastructure may be another avenue worth exploring, since it will probably be desirable to continue to maintain some physical interaction. And it’s certainly true that not all industries are amenable to remote work.

I hope we can figure out a way to make it work, because as other have noted there are few other options. Industries where rural areas have comparative advantage, such as agriculture, are rare and increasing productivity means they are shedding workers. And the industries of the future appear to be ones where agglomeration matters. It’s just too powerful a force to be ignored.