Want to track the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs? The Tax Foundation has made that possible with its new tariff tracker. In the introduction, the analysts explain,
The Trump administration has imposed and threatened several rounds of tariffs in 2018, and other countries have responded to these measures in kind. Using the Tax Foundation Taxes and Growth Model, we analyze the effects of enacted, threatened, and retaliatory tariffs on the United States economy. Tariffs damage economic well-being, and lead to a net loss in production and jobs, and lower levels of income.
According to the Tax Foundation model, the tariffs enacted so far by the Trump administration would reduce long-run GDP by 0.06 percent ($15 billion) and wages by 0.04 percent and eliminate 48,585 full-time equivalent jobs. If the Trump administration enacts additional tariffs on automobiles and parts and additional Chinese tariffs, GDP would fall by an additional 0.3 percent ($89.60 billion), resulting in 0.2 percent lower wages and 277,825 fewer full-time equivalent jobs.
Other countries have also announced intentions to enact tariffs on U.S. exports. If these tariffs are fully enacted, we estimate that U.S. GDP would fall another 0.05 percent ($12 billion) and cost an additional 38,182 full-time equivalent jobs.
If all tariffs announced thus far were fully enacted, U.S. GDP would fall by 0.47 percent ($117.6 billion) in the long run, effectively offsetting one-quarter of the long-run impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Wages would fall by 0.33 percent and employment would fall by 364,593.
Several years ago, I linked to a Brookings post that highlighted parenting as having a massive effect on children’s outcomes. I was reminded of it while reading a 2016 post at the World Bank’s Development Impact blog. The author David McKenzie, Lead Economist in the Development Research Group, writes,
I was surprised by a paper by Todd Schoellman in the most recent AEJ Macro which argues that parents, not country, are what matters for early childhood development.
He studies the adult outcomes of refugees who immigrated to the U.S. as children, but who differed in the age of arrival. The main analysis is on IndoChinese refugees fleeing the Vietnam War and Khmer Rouge. The thought experiment is to compare the labor market outcomes and completed education of a refugee who arrived at age 1 to one who arrived at age 3 or 4. The latter had 2 or 3 more years of that critical early childhood period in a poor country (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) where conflict was going on, and then both come to the U.S. and grow up there. The key result is seen in this graph – which shows that adult wages are no different for those who arrived at age 4 or 5 versus those who arrive at age 0 or 1:
Schoellman argues (according to McKenzie)
that the theory most consistent with this data is that parents, rather than country environment, are the most important inputs to early childhood human capital formation. Of course one can argue that country environment in turn shapes parents – it determines parental education, parental wealth, etc. But the result that parents, and not goods or place, matter is a surprising one. By the way, if you are worried about external validity, he shows the same flatness of log wages with respect to age of arrival between 0 and 5 also holds for Ethiopian and Afghani refugees, Cuban immigrants, Mexican immigrants, and for the set of immigrants from poor countries as a whole.
If you want to argue about another type of external validity, I would argue that the U.S. may not be very good at providing early childhood care for refugees (at least at the time of the study) – this is not discussed in the paper, but it seems likely to me that the U.S. is a worse place to receive early childhood care if you are a poor family than most European countries or Australia and New Zealand – so perhaps it is only when you get into public schools here that you start to get the benefits. The type of data the authors have doesn’t tell us anything about what early childhood educational facilities, if any, were available to these refugee kids.
You can read a working paper version of the study here.
The question is cheeky, but appropriate given how “check your privilege” is all the rage. A new working paper suggests that high unemployment rates are actually found in wealthy countries rather than poorer ones. The researchers summarize,
[C]laims about unemployment in poorer countries are all over the map, with some studies finding that the highest unemployment rates in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa, at around 30% per year (World Bank 2004), while others posit that unemployment is almost non-existent in developing countries, since people there are too poor to have the luxury of not working (Fields 2004, Squire 1981).
In our paper (Feng et al. 2018), we contribute to the study of unemployment by building a data set of average unemployment rates covering 84 countries of all income levels. To address the issue of data comparability, we intentionally bypass existing data banks, such as those of the ILO, and build our own measures of unemployment from the ground up using household survey data. We draw on 199 nationally representative household surveys conducted in various recent years (but mostly between 2000 and 2010). Importantly, our data cover not just the rich countries of the world, but many poor nations, including a dozen from sub-Saharan Africa and many more from the middle of the world income distribution.
…We define work as wage employment, self-employment, and unpaid work in a family farm or business. We exclude those doing home production of services like cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Our search measures cover job search activity in some recent period, like the last week (in our preferred metrics). We compute unemployment rates in each survey as the number of adults not working but searching for work / (number working + those not working and searching). We then average over all surveys for each county in our data.
What we find is that average unemployment rates are in fact substantially lower in poor countries than in rich countries. In the poorest quartile of the world income distribution, unemployment averages around 2.5%, while in the richest quartile, around 8% of the labour force is unemployed on average. Interestingly, we find that the higher unemployment rates of richer economies hold for workers of all ages, for men and women separately, and within both urban and rural areas. Thus, our data suggest that unemployment is largely a rich-country phenomenon, rather than a feature of underdevelopment.
Why is this the case?
The figure below plots the ratio of unemployment for the low educated to that of the high educated against the log of GDP per capita. In the poorest countries, this ratio is below one, meaning that the low educated are less likely to be unemployed than the high educated. The exact opposite is true of the richest countries, all of whom have ratios above one. For instance, in the US, the ratio is 2.3, meaning that those without high school education are more than twice as likely to unemployed as those that finished high school (or went on to college or beyond). Whereas one might have thought this pattern is a universal feature of labour market outcomes, our data show that unemployment concentrated among the less educated is actually confined to richer economies.
The authors explain,
Countries differ only by their productivity in the modern sector, with the traditional sector offering the same (low) level of output per worker in all countries. This assumption is central to our analysis and based on the emerging consensus that cross-country productivity differences are skill-biased, rather than affecting unskilled and skilled tasks and workers equally (Caselli and Coleman 2006, Malmberg 2016).
The model predicts that in countries with low modern-sector productivity levels, the bulk of the workforce sorts into the traditional sector. Only workers with the highest skill levels choose the modern sector. Then, as modern-sector productivity rises – our proxy for ‘development’ – more and more lower skilled workers are drawn into the modern sector. This raises overall unemployment, as more workers now search for jobs, with some of them being unemployed each period in equilibrium. As in the data, our model predicts that development also brings a rise in the ratio of unemployment for the less- to more-skilled. The reason is most of the higher skilled workers are already in the modern sector and searching for wage jobs in poor economies. As modern-sector productivity grows, it is the less skilled workers that switch sectors, and their unemployment rate rises faster as a result.
They conclude,
Our research suggests that unemployment is largely a feature of advanced economies. In poor countries, only the most skilled workers search for wage jobs, while most of the less skilled workers select into traditional self-employment activities. Thus, few workers in poor economies are actually unemployed in practice. In advanced economies, the modern wage-paying sectors have relatively high productivity levels and employ the bulk of the labour force. As a consequence, as modern firms and positions come and go, workers are occasionally cast into unemployment. While unemployment per se is undesirable, the high underlying productivity level of the modern sector is not.
Paul Krugman once famously said, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.”[ref]The Age of Diminished Expectations: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s, 3rd ed., pg. 11.[/ref] Harvard’s Greg Mankiw writes, “Almost all variation in living standards is attributable to differences in countries’ productivity[.]”[ref]Principles of Economics, 7th ed., pg. 13.[/ref] This study demonstrates at least two important points:
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are targets for global development adopted in September 2015, set to be achieved by 2030. All countries of the world have agreed to work towards achieving these goals.
Our SDG Tracker presents data across all available indicators from the Our World in Data database, using official statistics from the UN and other international organizations. It is the first publication that tracks global progress towards the SDGs and allows people around the world to hold their governments accountable to achieving the agreed goals.
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals are defined in a list of 169 SDG Targets. Progress towards these Targets is agreed to be tracked by 232 unique Indicators. Here is the full list of definitions.
This new version of our SDG-Tracker was launched on 28th June 2018. We will keep this up-to-date with the most recent data and SDG developments through to the end of the 2030 Agenda.
Pro-choicers frequently claim that making abortion illegal won’t decrease the number of abortions; it will only decrease the number of safe, legal abortions. They suggest that there is no practical use to restricting abortion legally and that if pro-lifers really cared about decreasing abortion rates, they would focus on decreasing unplanned pregnancies (through better access to contraception, better sex education, etc.)
So pro-choicers claim.
But there’s a lot of research to show that abortion law affects abortion rates–and not just legal abortion rates, but total abortion rates. Studies often measure the changes in fertility in areas where abortion access recently changed. Secular Pro-Life has compiled a list of such studies if you’re interested.
I’ve now had a few conversations where I point out this reality, and the pro-choice person’s response is to claim that even if abortion restrictions have some nonzero effect on abortion rates, that effect is dwarfed by the decrease in abortions thanks to contraception access. It’s easy for me to believe that both more access to contraception and less access to abortion will decrease abortion rates, and personally I’m for taking both approaches. But the claim that the effect of contraception access trounces the effect of abortion access sounds like just a slightly watered down version of the false claim that abortion access doesn’t affect abortion rates at all. That is, it’s an ad hoc, ill-founded claim to justify our country’s incredibly liberal abortion laws, but the evidence (at least what I’ve seen so far) doesn’t bear it out.
While the drop mirrors the closure of abortion clinics nationwide, experts say the figure is likely down to more effective use of contraception and the falling pregnancy rate.
The article references this CDC report, which has found a net decrease in the abortion rate (number of abortions per 1,000 women age 15-44) of 22% (from 15.6 to 12.1). This is great news, but it’s not clear from the CDC report the extent to which different factors contributed to the decrease. The CDC authors explain
One factor that might have contributed to this decrease is the increase that occurred during the same period in the use of the most effective forms of reversible contraception, specifically intrauterine devices and hormonal implants, which are as effective as sterilization at preventing unintended pregnancy (102–105). Although use of intrauterine devices and implants has increased in recent years, use of these methods remains low in comparison with use of oral contraceptives and condoms, both of which are less effective at preventing pregnancy (102,104).
So contraception likely played a role, but the CDC can’t quantify it, and they still find that the most effective forms of contraception are not used much compared to the less effective forms. They certainly aren’t asserting that the entire 22% decrease is due solely to contraception access, and their report doesn’t attempt to compare the effects of contraception access to the effects of abortion access.
There are studies that looked at both factors. For example, this Guttmacher report found that between access to the Pill and access to abortion, abortion was associated with a birth rate decrease twice that for the pill.
Among white minors, having had access to the pill was associated with a 9% drop in the overall birthrate and an 8% drop in the rate of nonmarital first births. In this same group, access to an abortion was correlated with a 17% decline in the nonmarital birthrate and a 16% decline in the rate of nonmarital first births.
Another study found that, for women under age 19, “liberalized abortion policy predicts a 34 percent decline in motherhood” whereas “the results do not provide evidence that pill policies had a substantial effect.” The author explains
The birth control pill’s effects on family formation are theoretically ambiguous: The pill was a technological innovation in contraception, but with a failure rate of about 9 percent in the first year of typical use (Trussell, 2004), it still provides an imperfect means of preventing pregnancy. Trends in sexual behavior suggest that any reductions in unintended pregnancies among teens due to safer, pill-protected sex were offset by large increases in sexual activity. Difference-in-difference estimates also provide little evidence to support the view that pill policies had a substantial influence on age at first birth and marriage. Results in Goldin and Katz (2002) and Bailey (2006, 2009) that suggest otherwise are not robust to reasonable perturbations of the authors’ research designs including addressing discrepancies in the legal codings, choosing alternative data sets, and/or adjusting sample selection procedures. Rather, the results robustly point to policies governing abortion, a second, less lauded but more certain means of preventing unwanted births, as the driving force behind delayed family formation in the 1970s. [Emphasiss added]
This study is not a perfect comparison to claims about more modern contraception. The idea is that the most effective forms of contraception (e.g. IUDs instead of the Pill) do a better job of decreasing unintended pregnancy rates because even if users increase their sexual activity as a result, the increase in risk-taking behavior does not offset the decrease in risk these more effective contraceptive methods provide.
Note also that research suggests when abortion is legalized the abortion rate increases more than the birth rate decreases. See Footnote 8 of this report, p8 of the PDF, which explains in part:
Note, however, that the decline in births is far less than the number of abortions, suggesting that the number of conceptions increased substantially –and example of insurance leading to moral hazard. The insurance that abortion provides against unwanted pregnancy induces more sexual conduct or diminished protections against pregnancy in a way that substantially increases the number of pregnancies. [Emphasis added]
People are less cautious about avoiding pregnancy when they know they can get abortions as a back up option. This idea is further substantiated by a study published in the June 2015 edition Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health which concluded:
Women who lived in a state where abortion access was low were more likely than women living in a state with greater access to use highly effective contraceptives rather than no method (relative risk ratio, 1.4). Similarly, women in states characterized by high abortion hostility (i.e., states with four or more types of restrictive policies in place) were more likely to use highly effective methods than were women in states with less hostility (1.3).
This research also suggests that teasing out the effects of abortion access compared to contraception use may prove challenging, since the two appear to be inversely correlated.
So with that brief overview of just a few studies, so far these are the conclusions I’m drawing:
Petition your state legislatures to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries: blessing them as they go, and saying to them in the name of the Lord, go thy way and sin no more. Advise your legislators when they make laws for larceny, burglary or any felony, to make the penalty applicable to work upon roads, public works, or any place where the culprit can be taught more wisdom and more virtue; and become more enlightened. Rigor and seclusion will never do as much to reform the propensities of man, as reason and friendship. Murder only can claim confinement or death. Let the penitentiaries be turned into seminaries of learning, where intelligence, like the angels of heaven, would banish such fragments of barbarism: Imprisonment for debt is a meaner practice than the savage tolerates with all his ferocity. “Amor vincit omnia.” Love conquers all. – Joseph Smith, 7 Feb. 1844[ref]Hat-tip to Russell Stevenson for pointing this out.[/ref]
America should abolish prisons. Perhaps not all of them, but very close to it.
That’s the argument in a recent, provocative paper by Peter Salib, a judicial clerk to Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Frank Easterbrook.
According to Salib, the idea behind the criminal justice system should be to punish and deter crimes. But prisons are arguably a very inefficient way to do that. The research shows that long prison sentences have little impact on crime, and a stint in prison can actually make someone more likely to commit crime — by further exposing them to all sorts of criminal elements. At the same time, prisons are incredibly costly, eating up funds that could go to other government programs that are more effective at fighting crime.
So why not, Salib suggests, consider alternative approaches to punishment that can let someone actually pay their debt back to society without forcing taxpayers to shoulder the burden of paying for his full confinement?
Salib gave the example of an accountant who burned down an office building. Instead of locking him up for potentially decades, Salib suggests keeping an eye on him through other means, such as GPS monitoring, and forcing him to work as an accountant to pay back the cost of the office building. This would, he argues, be much better for everyone involved; the office building owner gets paid back for the damage, and society has to pay much less to confine this person.
…Salib makes one of the clearer cases for how this change would be better not just for prisoners, but for society as a whole. You should read the full paper for more detail.
In 2012 the American Journal of Political Science published a study that, in part, measured correlations between political attitutes and personality traits such as being “uncooperative, hostile, troublesome, and socially withdrawn.” The original article stated upfront that the authors expected such traits to correlate to conservative political attitudes, and that was the result the study found. I remember when the study came out and several of my friends reposted it as evidence of how backward and problematic conservatives can be.
But it turns out the article had interpreted the data incorrectly. In 2015 the journal published an erratum to correct the mistake, stating:
The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
The error was first spotted by Dr. Steven Ludeke, a researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, who said it is significant, pointing to the frequency at which the study was cited.
“The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly, in the wrong direction; and then cited at rates that are (for this field) extremely high,” Dr. Ludeke told Retraction Watch.
Given social science’s apparent pattern of pathologizing conservatives, this kind of mistake is unfortunate but not particularly surprising.
Migrants and asylum seekers provide big net benefits to their host countries reports a new study in Science Advances by three French economists. The researchers used 30 years of data on migrant and asylum seeker flows into 15 western European countries. They were seeking to find what effect permanent migrants including refugees who sought and obtained asylum between 1985 and 2015 have had on subsequent GDP per capita, unemployment rates, government spending and tax collections in those countries.
Flows of asylum seekers and migrants varied between countries. For example, Austria received 2.35 asylum seekers and 4.06 migrants per 1,000 residents; Germany 1.51 and 3.79; France 0.68 and 1.14; Italy 0.27 and 2.56; and the United Kingdom 0.63 and 2.36 respectively. Portugal received the lowest of both at 0.03 and 0.47 per 1,000 residents. Over all, the flow of asylum seekers and migrants into the 15 countries averaged 1.13 and 2.57 per 1,000 residents respectively.
Once the economists crunched the numbers they found that migrant flows during the past 30 years have had substantial positive effects on European economies. Specifically, the researchers report that migrants “significantly increase per capita GDP, reduce unemployment, and improve the balance of public finances; the additional public expenditures, which is usually referred to as the ‘refugee burden’, is more than outweighed by the increase in tax revenues.”
…This new study bolsters the results of similar research on refugees and migrants in this country, including a review reportedly suppressed by the Trump administration last year, that finds that they increase incomes and are a net fiscal benefit.
In today’s fast-paced and complex information environment, news consumers must make rapid-fire judgments about how to internalize news-related statements – statements that often come in snippets and through pathways that provide little context. A new Pew Research Center survey of 5,035 U.S. adults examines a basic step in that process: whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it.
The findings from the survey, conducted between Feb. 22 and March 8, 2018, reveal that even this basic task presents a challenge. The main portion of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong. Even more revealing is that certain Americans do far better at parsing through this content than others. Those with high political awareness, those who are very digitally savvy and those who place high levels of trust in the news media are better able than others to accurately identify news-related statements as factual or opinion.
…Trust in those who do the reporting also matters in how that statement is interpreted. Almost four-in-ten Americans who have a lot of trust in the information from national news organizations (39%) correctly identified all five factual statements, compared with 18% of those who have not much or no trust. However, one other trait related to news habits – the public’s level of interest in news – does not show much difference.
In addition to political awareness, party identification plays a role in how Americans differentiate between factual and opinion news statements. Both Republicans and Democrats show a propensity to be influenced by which side of the aisle a statement appeals to most. For example, members of each political party were more likely to label both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side.
First, this trades on a questionable and controversial view about whether normative statements are objective and provable. American K-12 schools dogmatically teach the view that all normative statements are subjective and mere opinion, but that’s in fact (and this is not mere opinion) a highly controversial philosophical claim. See this NY Times blog complaining about this: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/
Second, the normative statements in the bottom are what we might call “thick” rather than “thin” normative claims. A thin claim simply offers an evaluation, e.g., “Crooked Timber is bad.” A thick claim contains both normative components but also encapsulates, presupposes, encompasses, or in some way contains background descriptive claims. For example, “Corey Robin is intellectually dishonest” or “Michael Huemer is brave.”
Most of these statements are “thick” in that sense.
Is government wasteful and inefficient? I’m not sure if that is to be interpreted entirely as an opinion claim, or whether it is not entirely provable. “Efficiency” has multiple descriptive meanings in economics. “Wasteful” can be seen as a slightly normatively loaded version of “inefficient”; e.g., “This engine is less efficient than that engine, so it’s wasteful.” Economists regularly make claims like this when studying various institutions, and they see themselves as doing descriptive, positive work.
Are immigrants a big problem? Again, this question presupposes some normative commitments. However, we also tend to summarize descriptive claims in normative ways when the background normative commitments are shared. Someone reading this might think the statement is–as it often would be in conversational English–a way of summarizing a longer statement: “Immigrants cause crime, undermine social cohesion, and strain government budgets by consuming public goods, schooling, and social insurance.” (Note that I do not endorse these descriptive claims.) Similarly, if a medical doctor said, “Jason, your cancer is a aggressive and is going to be a big problem,” I wouldn’t think to respond, “Just give me the facts, doc.” Instead, it’s a way of summarizing such things as “The cancer has metastasized and is unlikely to respond to common treatments.”
Similar comments apply to the other opinion statements. Yes, they contain normative components, but nevertheless, the study both A) presupposes a problematic view about the objectivity of normative statements and B) seems to ignore or have questionable views about the pragmatics of thick normative statements.
America should abolish prisons. Perhaps not all of them, but very close to it.
