Executive
Office of the President, Social and Behavioral Sciences Team: Annual Report. Over its first year, SBST focused on executing
proof-of concept projects where behavioral insights could be embedded directly
into programs at a low cost and lead to immediate, quantifiable improvements in
program outcomes. To generate reliable evidence about the effectiveness of
integrating behavioral insights into programs, SBST designed these projects, in
nearly all cases, as randomized trials. This report presents the results of all
completed SBST projects, including projects that did not yield statistically
significant improvements.
Cass
R. Sunstein, NYT: Making Government Logical. There wasn’t a lot of fanfare, but last week may turn
out to be among the most consequential of President Obama’s second term. By
executive order, Mr. Obama directed federal agencies to incorporate behavioral
science — insights into how people actually make decisions — into their
programs. When government programs fail, it is often because public officials
are clueless about how human beings think and act. Federal, state and local
governments make it far too hard for small businesses, developers, farmers,
veterans and poor people to get permits, licenses, training and economic assistance.
The
Behavioural Insights Team Update 2013-2015, UK: The Update Report covers the past two years of the
Behavioural Insights Team’s work. It’s been an exciting period for the team.
We’ve managed to expand the breadth and scale of our work (having now run more
than 150 trials across almost every area of policy). But the core of what we do
remains the same as when we started life in No. 10 5 years ago: making public
services more cost-effective and easier for citizens to use; improving outcomes
by introducing a more realistic model of human behaviour to policy; and
wherever possible, enabling people to make ‘better choices for themselves’.
Simone
Moriconi, Giovanni Peri, NBER: Country-Specific Preferences and Employment
Rates in Europe.
European countries exhibit significant differences in employment rates of adult
males. Differences in labor-leisure preferences, partly determined by cultural
values that vary across countries, can be responsible for part of these
differences. However, differences in labor market institutions, productivity,
and skills of the labor force are also crucial factors and likely correlated
with preferences. In this paper we use variation among first- and
second-generation cross-country European migrants to isolate the effect of
culturally transmitted labor-leisure preferences on individual employment
rates. If migrants maintain some of their country of origin labor-leisure
preferences as they move to different labor market conditions, we can separate
the impact of preferences from the effect of other factors. We find
country-specific labor-leisure preferences explain about 24% of the top-bottom
variation in employment rates across European countries.
Lars
Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad, University of Chicago: Field of Study,
Earnings, and Self-Selection. We find that different fields have widely different payoffs, even
after accounting for institutional differences and quality of peer groups. For
many fields the payoffs rival the college wage premiums, suggesting the choice
of field is potentially as important as the decision to enroll in college. The
estimated payoffs are consistent with individuals choosing fields in which they
have comparative advantage. When disentangling the causal contribution of
institution and field of study, we find that field of study drives the
heterogeneity in the payoffs to post-secondary education. Indeed, we find
little evidence of significance gains in earnings to graduating from a more
selective institution once we hold field of study fixed.
Tyler
Cowen: British inequality: not what you think. Policies that increased or cut welfare expenditure
appear to have had very little impact on lifetime inequality. For instance,
while the benefit cuts of the late 1980s reduced benefits and increased
cross-sectional inequality, it had a much more muted effect on lifetime
inequality. And, similarly, although Gordon Brown’s massive expansion of
means-tested tax credits in the 2000s reduced cross-sectional inequality, they
had very little impact on cutting lifetime inequality. The paper also finds
that the redistribution performed by the British welfare state is, to a great
extent, smoothing incomes over people’s lifetimes rather than over their entire
lives. Whereas 36% of individuals receive more in benefits than they pay in tax
in any given year, only 7% do so over their lifetimes. Over half of all
redistribution is simply across peoples’ lifespans; the young pay in while they
work, and take out when they retire (see second chart).
MIT
Technology Review: Deep Learning Machine Teaches Itself Chess in 72 Hours,
Plays at International Master Level. While Deep Blue was searching some 200 million
positions per second, Kasparov was probably searching no more than five a
second. And yet he played at essentially the same level. Clearly, humans have a
trick up their sleeve that computers have yet to master. This trick is in
evaluating chess positions and narrowing down the most profitable avenues of
search. That dramatically simplifies the computational task because it prunes
the tree of all possible moves to just a few branches. Computers have never been
good at this, but today that changes thanks to the work of Matthew Lai at
Imperial College London. Lai has created an artificial intelligence machine
called Giraffe that has taught itself to play chess by evaluating positions
much more like humans and in an entirely different way to conventional chess
engines. Straight out of the box, the new machine plays at the same level as
the best conventional chess engines, many of which have been fine-tuned over
many years. On a human level, it is equivalent to FIDE International Master
status, placing it within the top 2.2 percent of tournament chess players.
Thomas
Hills, Eugenio Proto, Daniel Sgroi, VOXEU: Historical analysis of national
subjective wellbeing using millions of digitised books: Introducing the HPS
Index. With records
of subjective wellbeing going back less than half a century, this column asks
if we can know the impact of key past events on the happiness of our ancestors.
It presents a new historical index that draws on millions of digitised books in
the Google Books corpus of words using sentiment analysis. The index – which
goes back to the 1776 US Declaration of Independence, 200 years earlier than
any other index of happiness – makes it possible to analyse the historical
drivers of happiness in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US.
