Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents

Hat tip to Jakob Nays's comment on my post "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon"

In case it is too small to read above, here is the abstract, which says it much better than I could: 

Early warning signals of the coronary heart disease (CHD) risk of sugar (sucrose) emerged in the 1950s. We examined Sugar ResearchFoundation (SRF) internal documents, historical reports, and statements relevant to early debates about the dietary causes of CHD and assembled findings chronologically into a narrative case study. The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and downplayed evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor. The SRF set the review's objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The SRF's funding and role was not disclosed. Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD. Policymaking committees should consider giving less weight to food industry-funded studies and include mechanistic and animal studies as well as studies appraising the effect of added sugars on multiple CHD biomarkers and disease development.

For more contrarian discussion of nutrition, obesity and chronic diseases, don't miss:

Paul Krugman on John Taylor and Admitting Error

In his October 23, 2017 New York Times op-ed "Trumpal Infallibility," Paul Krugman attacks what he characterizes as Republican Party attitudes toward monetary policy. Paul fails to emphasize the many Republicans who have very sensible attitudes toward monetary policy, including my dissertation advisor Greg Mankiw and Ben Bernanke himself when Ben was still a Republican. Moreover there are many bloggers who seem fairly conservative who are very sensible on monetary policy. I am thinking here of the deeply perceptive Scott Sumner, whose party affiliation I don't know. Nevertheless, Paul is right about a key subset of Republican-Party-linked commentators on monetary policy: 

... when the 2008 financial crisis struck, the Federal Reserve, led at the time by Ben Bernanke, took extraordinary action. It cut interest rates to zero and “printed money” on a huge scale — not literally, but it bought trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds by creating new bank reserves.

Many conservatives were aghast. TV pundits hyperventilated about hyperinflation, and even seemingly more respectable voices denounced the Fed’s actions. In 2010 a who’s who of conservative economists and pundits published an open letter warning that the Fed’s policies would cause inflation and “debase the dollar.”

But it never happened. In fact, the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has consistently fallen short of its target of 2 percent a year. ...

An even bigger failure was the failure of this subset of commentators on monetary policy to admit their mistake: 

Four years after that open letter to Bernanke, Bloomberg tracked down many of the signatories to ask what they had learned. None of them — not one — was even willing to admit having been wrong.

I think of Paul Krugman as someone who is below average in willingness to admit a mistake. Yet even Paul is much better at admitting mistakes than that. Here is Paul's declaration of his own willingness to admit mistakes:

Now, every economist makes bad forecasts now and then — if you don’t, you’re not taking enough risks. I’ve certainly made my share, including a bad market call on election night — which I retracted three days later, acknowledging that my political dismay had gotten the better of my analytical judgment. But I always try to face up to my mistakes and learn from them.

I hope I am someone willing to admit mistakes. I promise to try in my bio (see the link at the top of my blog) where I write of myself "Miles ... holds many strong opinions—open to revision in response to cogent arguments." Many of my more popular storified Twitter discussions that you can see here feature me admitting error, as do many of my blog posts, and even two of my Quartz columns:

Now, apply that test of willingness to admit mistakes to John Taylor, who is being considered as Chair of the Federal Reserve Board:

Since the financial crisis, however, he has repeatedly demanded that the Fed raise interest rates in line with a policy rule he devised a quarter-century ago. Failing to follow that rule was supposed to cause inflation, which it hasn’t — but seven years of being consistently wrong hasn’t inspired any rethinking on his part.

What it has inspired is a descent into increasingly strange reasons the Fed should raise rates despite low inflation. Easy money, he declared, was part of a conspiracy to “bail out fiscal policy,” that is, an effort to help President Barack Obama. Or maybe it was like the monetary equivalent of rent control, discouraging lending the way rent control discourages building apartments — a bizarre analysis that had colleagues scratching their heads.

I like John Taylor personally very much, and have had several positive interactions with him at conferences. These positive interactions came in the years after I posted "Contra John Taylor," which Paul Krugman links to from the phrase "scratching their heads" in the passage just above. I have always wondered whether John didn't realize that I had written a post disagreeing with him so strongly, or if he did realize it but was fine with that kind of vigorous intellectual debate. If the latter, that should be counted in John Taylor's favor. The bottom line is that I haven't quite figured John Taylor out. If he does get appointed as Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, we will all learn a lot more about him and his deepest beliefs about monetary policy. 

Update: Lars Christensen adds this very interesting note on my Facebook page link to this post

Lars Christensen Krugman also forgets how silly many leftists are in regard to monetary policy. In fact most self-declared US leftist economist post-2008 said monetary easing would not work. Krugman himself said that. 

And Obama appointed hawks to Fed positions and since 2015 the Democrats Yellen and Fisher have argued for tighter monetary conditions despite the Fed continuing to undershoot its inflation target. 

But obviously as usual Krugman lets party political come before economic analysis. 

By the way Scott Sumner neither a Republican or a Democrats. He is a moderate (small l) libertarian. I think he voted for Hillary. But yes, he is traditionally seen on the right of US politics.

But Krugman should have the decency to acknowledge that the group of economists who consistently since 2008-9 has argued for monetary easing in the US have been market monetarists. And most of us a (mostly non-partisan) classical liberal/libertarians or conservatives.

Lars's note and Brad Delong's comment in response spilled over into an interesting debate on Twitter that I have storified as "Responses to the Great Recession." 

Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities

                                                                      &nbs…

                                                                                                Link to dianaberlin.com

                                                                                           Link to this letter from Diana

I had a wonderful conversation with my daughter Diana the other day. I didn't know quite why that conversation had gone so well until she shared with me this note for her blog. (We were both careful to get permission from the other to talk about this interaction with you.) Here is Diana's account:


Last Tuesday, my dad called. The plan was to talk briefly about a big decision I had coming up; Erik and I were considering making an offer on a house, and I’d texted my dad to see if he was free to talk it over.

On our way to the topic at hand, he asked: how are you? I mentioned that I’ve been busy at work recently, and that I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of my digestive problems. He picked up on the digestive thread, and said: I’ve been reading a book that could help you!

He started talking about the book. To be honest, it didn’t sound that related. But I listened politely, waiting for “my turn,” knowing he had my best interests at heart. We’d get around to talking about the house eventually.

And then the barest hint of an insight scraped the inside of my brain: he is so excited about this book.

“Dad!” I said at the next pause. “You sound so excited about this book.” And then a pattern that’s second nature from coaching tumbled out of me almost automatically. “What’s—what’s exciting about it?”

What happened next made me kick myself. That one simple question, born mainly of frustration, opened up an entire treasure chest.

The book was changing his life. He was realizing its topic was part of his life purpose—so much so that he’d added it to his Twitter bio. It wasn’t his discovery, but he figured that by steadily sharing the findings within his community of economists, he could still make the difference in the world that mattered most to him. It was a huge deal.

Before my question, my dad had been halfheartedly trying to wrap up his story—halfheartedly, because he couldn‘t really contain his excitement. His passion and the model of a balanced, see-saw conversation were in tension. After I asked my question, he shared at length—his voice going high and low, really expanding on what it all meant. As I listened, I couldn’t believe I’d nearly missed the chance to hear about something that mattered so much to him. Once I stopped rushing him with my polite, trying-to-be-patient silence, I started hearing about who he is and how he’s changing. One question changed the course of the conversation—and I wouldn’t be surprised if it changed the course of our relationship.

In the end, we got around to talking about the house. When we did, it felt natural—no more than a few minutes of comparing notes from a place of connection. Come to think of it, connection was probably all we both wanted in the first place. Connection comes from whatever’s true in the moment. And you can only hear what’s true in the moment if you’re really listening.


The ideas I was so excited about came from Jason Fung's books The Obesity Code and The Complete Guide to Fasting. (One of his key arguments is that going for periods of time without food has gotten a bad rap.) I distilled the insights I got from The Obesity Code in my post "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon," and a brief overview in a few tweets I arranged in the story "On Fighting Obesity." 

In dollar terms, establishing the truth about what has caused the rise of obesity and the diseases of affluence correlated with obesity would be worth trillions and trillions. The diseases of affluence (diabetes, heart disease, strokes, ...) have caused people around the world untold suffering. And for some, obesity itself causes suffering. I believe Jason Fung is on the right track, having himself synthesized a great deal from research that has been done on the body's internal regulation of fat storage and from his own clinical experience as a physician.

As it is, in most people's minds, including the minds of many scientists, the truth about the causes of obesity and the diseases correlated with it is obscured. The continued rise in obesity is a hint that the conventional wisdom about obesity is wrong. So it is exciting to be involved in trying to get things right, not only in my own mind, but in the world at large as well.   

Brian Flaxman: Yes! Economics Did Sway Obama Voters to Trump

Source: Brian.Flaxman@colorado.edu

Source: Brian.Flaxman@colorado.edu

Brian Flaxman is a student in the Economics PhD program at the University of Colorado Boulder where I am now a professor. He identified a very interesting set of facts about the presidential election that put Donald Trump in the White House. Email Brian with any questions (Brian.Flaxman@colorado.edu). From here on, I'll let Brian speak for himself:


Tuesday, November 8, 2016 is the day that Donald Trump was elected 45th President of the United States. Many people across the country believed that Hillary Clinton’s victory was all but inevitable, adding to the shock and surprise of this momentous event. Because of this, there has been a massive effort underway to try to understand how he could have won. One main school of thought is that Trump’s victory can be mostly contributed to right wing identity politics. The other is that there have been many people in the country who have struggled economically, have legitimate grievances with the current political establishment, and found Trump’s populist rhetoric very appealing.

I in no way would make the claim that right wing identity politics didn’t play a role in this election, and doing so would be foolish to say the least. However, not acknowledging the role that the rise in populist fervor played in Trump’s victory would be equally as foolish. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence to support this. Bernie Sanders received over 44% of the Democratic primary vote when facing Hillary Clinton, a mainstay in Democratic politics for the three decades. Now he is the most popular politician in the country according to most polls, including a Harvard-Harris poll released this past week. The Rust Belt, a part of the country that supported Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in their respective primaries, was likely the part of the country that contributed to Hillary Clinton losing the electoral college.

When discussing the role that economics played in Trump’s win, the main rebuttal is that “The people who voted for Donald Trump never would have voted for a Democrat, regardless of who it was!” Well, that’s a hypothesis that can be scrutinized empirically by looking at election, demographic, and economic data. We can analyze the effect of the Obama to Trump voters, and more importantly, how right wing identity politics and poor economic outcomes contributed to this effect. With the proper data in hand, we can analyze the contributing factors to this shift.

The data I will be analyzing is county level data from both the 2012 and 2016 elections, as well as economic and demographic data from various points, from 2010-2016. I have data from all counties and equivalents not in Alaska. There are several measures that can approximate the support that moved from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, but the one I will focus on I will call Trump’s “share shift”. This is devised from taking the percentage of votes from Donald Trump, and subtracting off Romney and independent and third-party votes. If we were to hold voting populations constant across the 2012 and 2016 elections, this would be the amount that remains would be the Obama voters that switched to Trump. Even though this is almost certainly not the case, it does describe how a county’s overall support moved from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, and provides a good proxy for Obama to Trump voters.

I will be testing the following four indicators of poor economic outcomes:

1.     Unemployment year annually from 2016

2.     Unemployment change over the past 20 years.

3.     Percent living below the poverty line in 2014

4.     Loss in overall population from 2010-2014.

I will test these variables after controlling for white population, Hispanic population, the log of income, female population, population that are veterans, population density, change in voter participation from the 2012 election, and for state fixed effects. Sure enough, negative economic indicators contributed significantly to the shift in votes from Obama to Trump.

When running all four variables at once, they are all positively correlated with share shift, and are all significant with 97% confidence or higher. When each variable is regressed alone with the controls, they are all significant and positively correlated.  The cross terms for 2016 unemployment and population loss were both positive and significant in their respective regressions. Furthermore poor economic outcomes are significant when dividing the population into certain subsets, like counties Obama won and the 500 top densely populated counties, and even remained when weighting each county by 2014 population[1].

The conclusion I have reached based on the empirical evidence? Negative economic indicators almost certainly contributed to people shifting away from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, and Trump’s populism was almost certainly one of the factors that helped him win the election.

So how large was the impact of negative economic indicators on per county shift share of votes from Obama to Trump? 2.71% of the vote per county on average. You could say that this doesn’t control for the vastly different sizes in population, except this number only drops to 2.29% percent of the vote when you weight the counties by population, meaning it had a huge impact even when you control for population[2]. The bottom line is that while some of the country’s darker tendencies contributed significantly to Donald Trump being the 45th president of the United States, so too did negative economic outcomes for many voters, contributing in part to the anti-establishment and populist sentiments growing in popularity both here at home and abroad.

Note: If you have trouble reading the tables below, here is a link to the tables in a Word document.

Slide1.png
                  Brian Flaxman

                  Brian Flaxman

[1] I can provide specific empirical results by request. My email is Brian.Flaxman@colorado.edu

[2] Calculated by taking the coefficients from the main regression with all four negative economic indicators, multiplying by that county’s data, summed together.


Roundtable Discussion of the Reproducibility Crisis and the Proposal to Make Half a Percent the Standard for Statistical Significance

If you were interested in my post "Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance," you might be interested in this online roundtable discussion. Here is the announcement: 

This Friday, October 27th at noon Eastern time, the International
Methods Colloquium will host a roundtable discussion on the
reproducibility crisis in social sciences and a recent proposal to
impose a stricter threshold for statistical significance. The
discussion is motivated by a paper, "Redefine statistical
significance," recently published in Nature Human Behavior (and
available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0189-z).

Our panelists are:

Daniel Benjamin, Associate Research Professor of Economics at the
University of Southern California and a primary co-author of the paper
in Nature Human Behavior as well as many other articles on inference
and hypothesis testing in the social sciences.

Daniel Lakens, Assistant Professor in Applied Cognitive Psychology at
Eindhoven University of Technology and an author or co-author on many
articles on statistical inference in the social sciences, including
the Open Science Collaboration's recent Science publication
"Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science" (available
at https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716).

Blake McShane, Associate Professor of Marketing at Northwestern
University and a co-author of the recent paper "Abandon Statistical
Significance" as well as many other articles on statistical inference
and replicability.

Jennifer Tackett, Associate Professor of Psychology at Northwestern
University and a co-author of the recent paper "Abandon Statistical
Significance" who specializes in childhood and adolescent
psychopathology.

E.J. Wagenmakers, Professor at the Methodology Unit of the Department
of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, a co-author of the paper
in Nature Human Behavior and author or co-author of many other
articles concerning statistical inference in the social sciences,
including a meta-analysis of the "power pose" effect (available at
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23743603.2017.1326760).

To tune in to the presentation and participate in the discussion after
the talk, visit http://www.methods-colloquium.com/and click "Watch
Now!" on the day of the talk. To register for the talk in advance,
click here:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/45c571249ce37c8d8c34be5db4a05ad8

The IMC uses Zoom, which is free to use for listeners and works on
PCs, Macs, and iOS and Android tablets and phones. You can be a part
of the talk from anywhere around the world with access to the
Internet. The presentation and Q&A will last for a total of one hour.

My Most Popular Storify Stories, as of October 2017

Link to Miles Kimball's Storify page

Link to Miles Kimball's Storify page

Most of the literal Socratic dialogues never happened that way. Plato made them up. But in the 21st century, I have had many genuine (though not literal) Socratic dialogues on Twitter. I have arranged the tweets for many of these Twitter convos into Storify stories. You can see the full archive of my storify stories here. Below, I give links to all of my stories with 200 or more pageviews, starting from the most popular story. The number of pageviews is listed beside each link. (I did this once before, for my August 5, 2014 post.)

  1. A More Personal Bio: My Early Tweets 2872
  2. How the Mormons Became Largely Republican  2554
  3. Did the Gold Standard Help Bring Hitler to Power? (Twitter Round Table)  1938
  4. Noah Smith, Miles Kimball and Claudia Sahm on Math in Economics  1220
  5. Miles Kimball and Brad DeLong Discuss Wallace Neutrality and Principles of Macroeconomics Textbooks  813
  6. How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy  740
  7. Roger Farmer, Noah Smith, Miles Kimball, Tony Yates and Others on Math in Economics  724
  8. Umair Haque on Liberalism  666
  9. Why Does the Left Hate Markets?  652
  10. The True Marginal Product of Studying Hard and the Perceived Marginal Product of Studying Hard  637
  11. Jonathan Portes, Brad DeLong and Noah Smith Set Me Straight When I Praise John Cochrane's Shoddy OpEd  631
  12. The Marginalization of Economists at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau  615
  13. Does the Fed Really Want 2% Inflation?  605
  14. Why the Nominal GDP Target Should Go Up about 1% after a 1% Improvement in Technology  557
  15. Miles Kimball and Noah Smith on Balancing the Budget in the Long Run  537
  16. Daniel Altman and Miles Kimball: Should We Expand Government or Expand the Nonprofit Sector?  495
  17. The Time Miles was Called a “Neoliberal Sellout” by Matt Yglesias and was Glad for the Compliment in the End  490
  18. Miles Kimball, David A. Levine, Robert Waldmann and Noah Smith on the Design of a US Sovereign Wealth Fund  454
  19. The Paul Ryan Tweets  446
  20. Narayana Kocherlakota and Miles Kimball Debate the Size of the US Output Gap in January, 2016  436
  21. Should We Have Tight Monetary Policy in Order to Help Virtuous Savers?  425
  22. Which is More Radical? Electronic Money or a Higher Inflation Target?  410
  23. Unlearning Economics, Sanders Wagner and Miles Kimball: Nature, Nurture and Individual Agency  390
  24. Is Hari Seldon a Bad Influence on Macroeconomists?  379
  25. Claudia Sahm on Reforming the Refereeing Process in Economics  378
  26. Is Math Used to Illuminate or Obfuscate in Economics?  377
  27. If You Had to Choose, Would You Want Your Employee to Know Some Statistics or Know Some Calculus?  374
  28. Noah Smith and Company: What Economic Things are Better Now than They Used to Be?  360
  29. Twitter Melee on Minimum Wages . 358
  30. Tomas Hirst Recoils at the Starkness of Efficiency Wage Theory  350
  31. Business Cycles: A Shocking Discussion  323
  32. On the Deregulation of Social Science Research  322
  33. Do Nordic Countries Do Well Because of Democratic Socialism or Because of Nordic Culture?  322
  34. Daniel Altman and Miles Kimball: Is It OK to Let the Rich Be Rich As Long As We Take Care of the Poor?  317
  35. Miles Kimball and David Andolfatto Defend John Cochrane Against the Wrath of John L. Davidson  311
  36. On Schools of Thought in Macroeconomics  296
  37. Where is the Republican Party on Monetary Policy?  285
  38. Miles Kimball’s Comments on the Scott Sumner/David Andolfatto Debate 281
  39. The Balance Between Persistence and Finding Your Own Comparative Advantage  279
  40. Gender Roles, Economics and the Labor Market  277
  41. What is Consumption for the Purposes of a Consumption Tax?  277
  42. Noah Smith, Brad DeLong and Miles Kimball on Wallace Neutrality  275
  43. Sticky Prices, Sticky Inflation and the Cost of Inflation as Reflections of Cognitive Costs  273
  44. Critiques of Economics  271
  45. Stephen Williamson and Miles Kimball Debate Nominal GDP Level Targeting  267
  46. Genes vs. Hard Work in Learning Math  266
  47. Matthew C. Klein and Miles Kimball on the Effects of Negative Interest Rates on Savers  264
  48. Anti-Construction is Anti-Poor  261
  49. Edward J. Epstein, Miles Kimball, Brad Delong, Alex Bowles and Ramez Naam: Was Edward Snowden a Spy?  256
  50. Twitter Debate on Monetary vs. Fiscal Policy: Take 1  251
  51. Monetary Policy and Financial Policy Discussions Sparked by the Kimball and Konczal vs. Peter Schiff HuffPost Live  251
  52. Noah Smith's Tweetstorm on Making Everyone a 'Math Person'
  53. Preaching in the Temple: Presenting “Breaking Through the Zero Lower Bound” at the Fed  248
  54. Showing How Charles Murray is Wrong Instead of Shouting Him Down  245
  55. Are Central Banks Scared to Admit that the Zero Lower Bound is a Policy Choice, Not a Law of Nature?  241
  56. What is Monetary Policy? 238
  57. Socialism and Capitalism: A Conversation of Miles Kimball, Unlearning Economics, Adam Gurri and Daniel Hart  237
  58. Tomas Hirst and Miles Kimball on Fiscal Stimulus vs. Negative Rates  234
  59. Immigration Tweet Day, February 4, 2013: Archive  233
  60. Why I Won't Join the AARP  230
  61. Twitter Round Table on Targeting Core Inflation  230
  62. College as a Marriage Market: A Twitter Discussion 229
  63. Twitter Round Table on Targeting Core Inflation 227
  64. High Bank Capital Requirements Defended  225
  65. Socialism and Capitalism: A Conversation of Miles Kimball, Unlearning Economics, Adam Gurri and Daniel Hart 224
  66. Why Wasn't There Massive Inflation or Massive Deflation During the Great Recession?  223
  67. Immigration Tweet Day, February 4, 2013: Archive 221
  68. Electronic Money, Nominal GDP Targeting, and the Transmission Mechanisms for Monetary Policy  221
  69. Daniel Altman and Miles Kimball on the Long-Run Target for Inflation 220
  70. Noah, Richard, Miles and Jake Talk about God and SuperGod  219
  71. On Bringing the Questions and Concerns of Sociology into Economic  216
  72. Is There Any Excuse for U-Shaped Average Cost Curves?  212
  73. Eliminating the Zero Lower Bound: An Introduction  212
  74. Beatrice Cherrier on the Weaponization of the Lucas Critique  208
  75. Noah, Richard, Miles and Jake Talk about God and SuperGod 208
  76. Tomas Hirst and Miles Kimball on Fiscal Stimulus vs. Negative Rates 207
  77. Twitter Round Table on Our Disastrous Policy of Pegging Paper Currency at Par  208
  78. Rich People Do Create Jobs  204
  79. Adam Ozimek, Miles Kimball and Neal Hockley on Paternalism and Other-Regarding Preferences  203

John Locke on How Things That Are No One's Property Become Someone's Property

Who owns Mars? Despite the common ownership principles of the Moon Treaty ("Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies") that nations that make space launches have declined to ratify, if a private company were the first to reach Mars and set up a community of humans on Mars that persisted over time, it would almost surely be treated as owning the land the community sat on and a radius of a few kilometers around that community that the community regularly used. This is especially true if it took the precaution of having its settlement of and claim to that piece of Mars officially sponsored by a small Caribbean island recognized as a sovereign nation by the UN that had not signed the Moon Treaty.

John Locke explains the relevant part of natural law in section 30 of his 2d Treatise on Government: “Of Civil Government” (Chapter V "Of Property"):

Thus this law of reason makes the deer that Indian’s who hath killed it; it is allowed to be his goods, who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though before it was the common right of every one. And amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind, who have made and multiplied positive laws to determine property, this original law of nature, for the beginning of property, in what was before common, still takes place; and by virtue thereof, what fish any one catches in the ocean, that great and still remaining common of mankind; or what ambergrease any one takes up here, is by the labour that removes it out of that common state nature left it in, made his property, who takes that pains about it. And even amongst us, the hare that any one is hunting, is thought his who pursues her during the chase: for being a beast that is still looked upon as common, and no man’s private possession; whoever has employed so much labour about any of that kind, as to find and pursue her, has thereby removed her from the state of nature, wherein she was common, and hath begun a property.

The step of getting sponsorship from a small Caribbean island nation that had not signed the Moon Treaty may seem as if it makes it a matter of ordinary international law rather than just natural law. But what it does is simply to ensure that the law of nature applies. As John Locke writes in section 14, even in his day and ours, rulers are still in the law of nature:

 It is often asked as a mighty objection, where are, or ever were there any men in such a state of nature? To which it may suffice as an answer at present, that since all princes and rulers of independent governments all through the world, are in a state of nature, it is plain the world never was, nor ever will be, without numbers of men in that state. I have named all governors of independent communities, whether they are, or are not, in league with others ...

In the more immediate future, if a private company mined a metallic near-earth asteroid and brought some of the more valuable metals back to earth, there would be a great deal of sentiment that the company ought to be able to claim title to those metals and sell them. The way US law is going, it should be easy for a company to get sponsorship of the US for this. John Locke would call that sentiment the law of nature. 

On the other hand, if a company that was mining a small portion of an asteroid tried to claim the whole asteroid, or even more clearly, if the company that had set up a community at one spot on Mars tried to claim the whole planet, that would seem like overreaching. John Locke explains why: if only a small part of the asteroid is being mined or only a small part of Mars has been settled, then the rest seems still to be a part of the commons. 

Of course, people and groups of people often do claim ownership of something in the commons that is much larger than they are actually able to use. But that ends up seeming unfair. The exception is if something close to the entire set of people currently exploiting the commons resource become part of a formal or informal agreement about the use of the resource. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize for studying how communities of exploiters regulate the exploitation of commonly held resources. One important incentive for setting up such a system is to convince oneself and others that additional people who want to join the group of exploiters can be excluded from use of that resource. 

All existing title to something that was not made by humans in the first place goes back to some original moment of appropriation. For most things on the Earth, the moment of appropriation from nature was many years ago. But for the asteroids, moons and planets, many of those alive will witness the moment of appropriation from nature. 

Don't miss other John Locke posts. Links at "John Locke's State of Nature and State of War."

The Relative Citation Ratio

A key problem with citation counts is that they disadvantage fields or subfields that are either small or have a culture of short reference lists. I am intrigued by the solution offered by B. Ian Hutchins, Xin Yuan, James M. Anderson, George M. Santangelo in their paper "Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level." This is a concept defined at the article level. At a senior hiring, tenure or promotion meeting, I would love to see annotation of the candidates curriculum vitae with relative citation ratios for each paper. 

The key idea behind the relative citation ratio is defining a target article's subfield by the articles cocitation network: the set of papers that appear together in some paper's reference list along with the target article. This seems a great way to flexibly define the target article's subfield in a data-based way. It is also a way of defining the target article's subfield in a way that can evolve over time. 

One advantage of taking an article's cocitation network as the comparison group for a relative citation ratio is that for articles that get cited at all, the cocitation network quickly becomes quite large, so there isn't a small numbers problem. 

Conceptually, the idea of a relative citation ratio is to compare citations per year (not counting the calendar year of publication) for the target paper to average citations per year for the articles in the cocitation network. To make the denominator of the ratio even more stable, the authors substitute the average citations per year in the relevant journal for citations per year of a comparison article in the cocitation network.  

The authors B. Ian Hutchins, Xin Yuan, James M. Anderson and George M. Santangelo provide code for the calculation of the relative citation ratio, as well as the values of the relative citation ratio for every article in PubMed (where the National Institutes of Health requires all articles it supports to be posted). The image below illustrates their iCite tool for the relative citation ratio. 

Screen Shot 2017-10-14 at 7.43.41 AM.png

In addition to the intuitive appeal of the relative citation index, B. Ian Hutchins, Xin Yuan, James M. Anderson and George M. Santangelo report the results of several analyses that show the relative citation ratio is doing what one would hope it would do. 

In addition to annotating CV's by relative citation ratios for each publication, I would like to see overall relative-citation-ratio-based measures of a scholar's overall productivity. These rankings can be used in various ways. For example, just as I pay attention to the pageviews on my blog, I also watch the evolution of my author rank by different measures on REPEC. And I occasionally cite the REPEC data for a relatively impartial measure of someone's scholarly prominence, as I did explicitly for Jeremy Stein in "Meet the Fed's New Intellectual Powerhouse" and implicitly for Andrei Shleifer in "Adam Smith as Patron Saint of Supply-Side Liberalism?"

I would love to see REPEC add measures of productivity based on the relative citation ratio to the many measures they have now. 

  1. The sum of relative citation ratios for all of a scholar's publications
  2. The sum of (relative citation ratio/number of authors) for all of a scholar's publications
  3. The sum of relative citation ratios for all of a scholar's publications in a five-year window, say from calendar years t-6 through t-2, where t is the year of publication. 
  4. The sum (relative citation ratio/number of authors) for all of a scholar's publications in a five-year window, say from calendar years t-6 through t-2, where t is the year of publication. 

Measures 3 and 4 are related to the tough goal I hope tenured professors (who aren't working towards an even more important objective) strive for: to have a tenurable record for each five-year window after getting tenure as well as for the five-year (or sometimes longer) window that actually won them tenure.  

I honestly don't know how I personally would fare by these measures. So this wish is driven by my curiosity, not by thinking it will necessarily make me look better. I tend to think I personally write in subfields with relatively high rates of citation and so would probably look a little worse by these measures than by some of the other citation-based measures. But maybe there are other subfields that have even higher rates of citation, so correcting for subfield could make me look relatively better.

There are limitations to any citation-based measure of scholarly productivity. But to the extent we end up looking at citation-based measures of scholarly productivity, those of us who love data can't help but want to stare at the best possible citation-based measures. 

 

Matthew Shapiro, Martha Bailey and Tilman Borgers on the Economics Job Market Rumors Website

Disgusted with the widespread misogyny, racism and more random viciousness on Economics Job Market Rumors that is becoming more widely appreciated because of Alice Wu's research, I wrote "Signalling When Everyone Knows about Last-Place Aversion: An Application to Economics Job Market Rumors."

As an Emeritus Professor of the University of Michigan Economics Department, I am still on its email lists. I am grateful to Matthew Shapiro, Martha Bailey and Tilman Borgers for giving me permission to share the thoughts about Economics Job Market Rumors that they had expressed to University of Michigan Economics faculty.

Matthew Shapiro (September 8, 2017 email to UM Economics graduate students with the faculty cc'd)

Dear Colleagues:
 
I am writing to call your attention to a statement on the EJMR site by Olivier Blanchard, President-elect of the American Economic Association. 
 
I endorse this statement and urge our students to shun social media activities that propagate sexism, racism, or bigotry.
 
Matthew Shapiro

 

Martha Bailey (October 5, 2017 email to UM Economics faculty)

Dear Colleagues,

As you may (or may not) be aware, the AEA has thus far chosen *not* to make a statement about EJMR. This refusal of the association to take action is, in part, what prompted the eloquent (personal) statement by Olivier Blanchard, President-elect of the American Economic Association. CSWEP [Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession] (where Justin [Wolfers] and I are both board members) has recommended that the AEA take action. Other associations in economics are starting to. One organization that has succeeded is the Economic History Association’s statement (https://eh.net/eha/15371), which Paul [Rhode, Chair of Economics at the University of Michigan] and I both endorsed.

Here is something easy you can do today: sign this petition to encourage the AEA to take action: http://www.iaffe.org/forms/Petition-AEA-EMJR/  (link to petition webpage -- http://www.iaffe.org/petition-aea-emjr/) (See below)

I haven’t ever sent an email like this to my colleagues, but this is an issue very personal to me and one I think deserves more attention. To be clear, I do not believe this is a freedom of speech issue. EJMR has been used as a platform to bully and attack prominent economists—especially women economists.  Sexist, racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic statements, particularly when those comments target and bully particular scholars, present a large barrier to the diversity of the economics profession and limits our openness to new ideas.

Our department’s hiring strategy notes that, “we wish to create a department that reflects diversity in life experiences, including diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and family background. A diversity of representation of faculty and students will encourage the highest quality research and teaching to address the needs of a diverse world.” Achieving this goal requires that our department and the economics profession promote an intellectual environment and academic discourse that is respectful and collegial for *all*.

The profession has remained silent for too long on this subject, tacitly encouraging the persistence of this harassment and refusing to name it the hate speech that it is. Taking no action is a political statement that can only serve to encourage the perpetuation of harassing and exclusionary discourse. I hope that you will consider speaking to your students and colleagues about this issue, bringing this up in your respective associations, signing a petition, and doing other things to encourage respectful and collegial academic dialogue.  

With warm regards,

Martha

 

Tilman Borgers (October 5, 2017 email to UM Economics faculty)

Dear Colleagues, 

I am sure that you will not welcome an extended exchange of comments on the “Economic Job Market Rumors” (EJMR) website on the department email list. I had this in mind when I nonetheless decided to follow up on Matthew’s and Martha’s recent emails. I want to add two thoughts to the debate. Thank you for your patience, if you read them.  I believe they are important.

1) In addition to being a forum for misogynist comments, EJMR has been a forum for discriminatory remarks towards Asian faculty and students. This hasn’t been emphasized enough. 

2) EJMR has, at times, fulfilled a "whistleblowing" role, giving a forum to legitimate concerns, for example about publishing practices, expressed by those who otherwise would not have a voice.  As people think about alternatives to EJMR, I believe it would be good to find a forum that allows “whistleblowing” outside of the context of racism and misogyny.

Regards,

Tilman

 

Update: Three days after this post appeared, the American Economic Association sent out an email to its members with this:

Statement of the AEA Executive Committee

October 20, 2017

To: Members of the American Economic Association
From: Peter L. Rousseau, Secretary-Treasurer
Subject: Statement of the AEA Executive Committee

Many members of the economics community have expressed concern about offensive behavior within our profession that demeans individuals or groups of individuals. The American Economic Association strongly condemns misogyny, racism, homophobia, antisemitism and other behaviors that harm our profession. 

AEA President Alvin E. Roth has charged an ad hoc committee on professional conduct to formulate a set of guidelines for economists to be considered by the Executive Committee. The ad hoc committee is charged with evaluating various aspects of professional conduct, including those which stifle diversity in Economics. It will submit a report in time for discussion in January. There will be a period for comment by the AEA membership on that report following its release.

The Association is also exploring the possibility of creating a website/message board designed to provide additional information and transparency to the job market for new Ph.D.s, and will be surveying departments to assess what information about their search processes might be shared.

Valerie Ramey, Vice President of the AEA, responds to this update in this thread on my Facebook page (which is totally public). This has started an interesting discussion you can see at this link. (Valerie also "liked" my note there that I was posting this link.)