Tag Archives: cowen

Are Younger Police Officers More Productive Than Older Ones?

by BrianneDetwiler Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points us to a study from last year which concludes that police officers become “less productive” as they gain experience. Here’s the abstract:

This study analyzes two decades of data from a municipal police agency and describes the average patrol officer career productivity trajectory. We find that declines in productivity begin immediately after the first year of service and worsen over the course of officers’ careers. After their 20th year, patrol officers generate 88% fewer directed patrols, 50% fewer traffic warnings, 58% fewer traffic citations, 41% fewer warrant arrests, and 57% fewer misdemeanor arrests compared to officers with 1 year of experience. Using a patrol officer productivity metric called Z-score per Productive Time (Z-PRO), we estimate that each additional year of service decreases an officer’s overall productivity by about 2%. Z-PRO also indicates that after 21 years of service, an average officer will be approximately 35% less productive overall than an officer with 1 year of service.

There’s an issue of framing here: What is the “proper” level of productivity for a police officer? Perhaps the real issue is that newish police officers are overzealous. They’re eager to ticket anyone going 6 miles over the speed limit. They arrest anyone hanging out on a corner who turns out to have a joint in their pocket. Etc.

It’s not necessarily the case that more is always better. To really judge this stuff, you’d also need to measure the quality of arrests and traffic citations in some way. It’s possible that older officers arrest less because their experience tells them it’s better to let the small stuff go, but have a better eye for genuinely dangerous behavior.

Then again, maybe they just get lazy.

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Are Younger Police Officers More Productive Than Older Ones?

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Brexit Threatens British Ice Cream Imports

by JeanK77hdeizk Posted on October 12, 2016

Mother Jones

Tyler Cowen points to the following tidbit in the Financial Times:

The plummeting pound is threatening UK households’ supplies of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Marmite spread, as Tesco, the country’s biggest supermarket, pulled dozens of products from sale online in a row over who should bear the cost of the weakening currency.

Unilever has demanded steep price increases to offset the higher cost of imported commodities, which are priced in euros and dollars, according to executives at multiple supermarket groups. But Tesco signalled it would fight the rises, removing Unilever products from its website and warning that some of the items could disappear from shelves if the dispute dragged on.

Um, what? Tesco thinks that if the pound falls, prices on imported items shouldn’t change? How do they figure that? Then again, maybe it’s nothing:

An executive at another consumer goods manufacturer said Unilever would probably regard Tesco’s action as a negotiating tactic rather than a serious threat.

Roger that. But in the long run, there’s no getting around this. A weak currency means cheaper exports and more expensive imports. You can try to jam a finger in the dike for a little while, but eventually you have to give in.

I don’t know what the long-term impact of Brexit will be. I suspect it will be moderately negative on several levels, and in particular, will probably hurt the blue-collar workers who were suckered into voting for it. Rage-based voting rarely does anyone any good. In the short-term, however, the impact will be unambiguously bad. Prices of imports will go up before the benefits of rising exports work their way through the economy, and uncertainty over Britain’s final status will paralyze lots of decisions from foreign firms about whether they should continue to invest there. This will all shake out in the end, but there will be some pain in the meantime.

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Brexit Threatens British Ice Cream Imports

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Drum vs. Cowen: Three Laws

by AudreaDKSytd Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today Tyler Cowen published his version of Cowen’s Three Laws:

1. Cowen’s First Law: There is something wrong with everything (by which I mean there are few decisive or knockdown articles or arguments, and furthermore until you have found the major flaws in an argument, you do not understand it)

2. Cowen’s Second Law: There is a literature on everything.

3. Cowen’s Third Law: All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.

I’d phrase these somewhat differently:

1. Drum’s First Law: For any any problem complex enough to be interesting, there is evidence pointing in multiple directions. You will never find a case where literally every research result supports either liberal or conservative orthodoxy.

2. Drum’s Second Law: There’s literature on a lot of things, but with some surprising gaps. Furthermore, in many cases the literature is so contradictory and ambiguous as to be almost useless in practical terms.

3. Drum’s Third Law: Really? Isn’t there a correlation between real interest rates and future inflationary expectations? In general, don’t low real interest rates make capital investment more likely by lowering hurdle rates? Or am I just being naive here?

In any case, you can take your choice. Or mix and match!

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Drum vs. Cowen: Three Laws

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What Do America’s Most Admired Men and Women Say About America?

by ChristiCharlesw Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is a month old, but Tyler Cowen happened to highlight it today so I thought I’d pass it along. Here are America’s most admired men and women at the end of 2014:

I suppose there are no huge surprises here. Presidents and first ladies always do well. People in the news often do well. And while I was alarmed when I saw Vladimir Putin on the list in Cowen’s post, I’m a little less alarmed now. He’s at the very bottom of the 1 percenters, which likely means he was named by something like 0.6 percent of Americans and then rounded up. This comes to a grand total of about five people in the survey group, which I suppose is nothing to get too stirred up about.

Not a single dead person continues to make the list, which explains why Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher are off the list. Queen Elizabeth II is a perennial favorite and she’s still alive, but after the excitement of her Diamond Jubilee faded, I guess she did too.

What’s the biggest surprise on the list? I’d say Condoleezza Rice. She’s remarkably high on the list for someone associated with an unpopular war and not much recent news coverage. She’s at the very top of the list among Republicans, though, so there must be more going on here than I realize. Rice has been rising in popularity over the last couple of years, and surely that’s not just because she was part of college football’s playoff selection committee last year, was it? Nor do I feel like I see her on Fox News a lot. So what’s going on?

Completely missing from the list are: sports stars, military figures, authors and artists not already famous for something else, and liberal pundits of any kind. Almost missing are politicians aside from ex-presidents and first ladies (Elizabeth Warren is the exception—barely); Republican presidential wannabes (Ben Carson is the exception); and scientists (Stephen Hawking is the exception, almost certainly based solely on the recent biopic). Overall, conservative men do much better than conservative women.

As Cowen asks, “Given who is on the list, what should we infer about America as a nation? About human nature?”

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What Do America’s Most Admired Men and Women Say About America?

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Quote of the Day: No Dessert For You!

by QuyenClarkson Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Tyler Cowen:

I would be happy enough if all desserts were simply dark chocolate ice cream or gelato, consumed rapidly and perhaps at a different venue altogether.

Well, that would certainly put a crimp in the dessert business, wouldn’t it? It would actually work out OK for me, but I have a feeling the rest of the world might get bored pretty quickly by an endless series of meals that finish off with dark chocolate gelato.

Anyway, it turns out that restaurant owners are on Cowen’s side. Desserts don’t bring in much money, but they do cause diners to linger around their tables. “You have to turn the tables,” says one restaurant owner, and desserts just get in the way of that. Very sad.

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Quote of the Day: No Dessert For You!

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Incompetent Scheming Is Just as Bad As Competent Scheming

by AlissaVigna Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of months ago I wrote about new evidence suggesting that several big Silicon Valley firms had explicitly agreed not to hire away each others’ workers. This case has now gotten more attention, and Tyler Cowen comments about it:

I would suggest caution in interpreting this event. For one thing, we don’t know how effective this monopsonistic cartel turned out to be. We do know that wages for successful employees in this sector are high and rising. Many a collusive agreement has fallen apart once one or two firms decide to break ranks, as they usually do. More follows about how this might play out in the real world

Cowen is an economist, and I don’t want to knock him for doing some economic analysis. Still, this is the kind of thing that gives economics a bad name. Who cares if this scheme was effective? Maybe it was the Keystone Kops version of collusion. What matters is merely that they tried. These companies felt perfectly justified in conspiring to hold down wages in a tight labor market. Like so many titans of capitalism, they think free markets are great just as long as workers who are in high demand don’t get any fancy ideas about what that means.

Throw the book at them. If their scheme didn’t work, it just means they’re incompetent plotters. But they’re plotters nonetheless.

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Incompetent Scheming Is Just as Bad As Competent Scheming

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Want Better Broadband? Unbundle the Local Loop.

by XOCKellieqnkfp Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Felix Salmon says we have plenty of bandwidth in America. Contra Tyler Cowen, we don’t need to spend a bajillion dollars rolling out a new nationwide network based on new pipes or new technology:

What we do need, on the other hand, is the ability of different companies to provide broadband services to America’s households. And here’s where the real problem lies: the cable companies own the cable pipes, and the regulators refuse to force them to allow anybody else to provide services over those pipes. This is called local loop unbundling, it’s the main reason for low broadband prices in Europe, and of course it’s vehemently opposed by the cable companies.

Local loop unbundling, in the broadband space, would be vastly more effective than waiting for some hugely expensive new technology to be built, nationally, in parallel to the existing internet infrastructure. The problem with Cowen’s dream is precisely the monopoly rents that the cable companies are currently extracting. If and when any new competitor arrives, the local monopolist has more room to cut prices and drive the competitor out of business than the newcomer has.

Cable companies have a thousand ready-made technical incantations to explain why they can’t possibly open up their networks to competitors. To listen to them, you’d think this would be akin to letting a five-year-old mess around with your electric wiring. This is delicate stuff! You can’t just let anyone start sending bits around on it.

It’s all special pleading, of course, of the same type that Ma Bell engaged in when people wanted to start putting answering machines on their phone lines. But everyone understands there would be technical requirements they’d have to meet, just as answering machines had to meet reasonable technical requirements back in the day. Regulators would have to be involved to make sure everyone plays nice with each other, but that’s far from impossible.

No, this is all about money, as you already guessed. Allowing other companies to use their last-mile pipes would (a) take away some of their broadband rents, (b) force cable companies to genuinely compete on price and features, and (c) allow competitors onto their network who couldn’t care less about cannibalizing TV business. If I were a cable company, I’d fight that tooth and nail too.

But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to take their arguments seriously. The rest of us should be in favor of competition, not the profit margins of local cable TV monopolies.

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Want Better Broadband? Unbundle the Local Loop.

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