Links to Consider, 12/6/2024

Daniel A. Cox on young single women; Noah Smith on persistent myths; Scott Galloway on age verification by social media apps; Byron Carson and me on subjective value

Daniel A. Cox writes,

our research found that nearly half (47 percent) of single young women believe that single women are happier than married women.

…

Not only are single women less interested in marriage, but fewer have a desire to become parents. Pew found that less than half (45 percent) of single women said they eventually want children someday. A majority (57 percent) of single young men said this is an important life goal.

What will society look like when young women with this outlook exit the gene pool?

Noah Smith writes,

Basically, the chart does two very misleading things. First, it uses different measures of inflation for the two lines, meaning they’re not directly comparable numbers. There’s just really no good excuse for presenting data this way.

Second, the productivity number is an average or mean, while the compensation number is a median or something close to it. When inequality grows, the mean grows faster than the median. So this chart mostly just reflects the fact that inequality of compensation between workers grew since 1980.

He refers to a chart from the Economic Policy Institute, which purportedly shows that labor compensation and productivity have diverged. Among others, Lorenzo Warby has fallen for this one.

He also debunks the myth that over half of American households live paycheck to paycheck.

As I contemplate social epistemology, I keep pondering the role of beliefs that are false but nonetheless appealing for some reason.

Scott Galloway writes,

The platforms could design technology that reliably collects sufficient information to confirm a user’s age, then wipes the information from its servers. They could create a private or public entity that processes age verification anonymously. Remember the blockchain? Isn’t this exactly the kind of problem it was supposed to solve? They could deploy AI to estimate when a user is likely underage based on their online behaviors, and seek age verification from at-risk people. If device manufacturers (or just the device OS duopoly of Apple and Alphabet) were properly incentivized, they could implement age verification on the device itself. (This is what Meta says it wants, when it isn’t fighting age-verification requirements.)

My guess is that no age verification system would be unbreakable. But I would bet that it is feasible to implement a system that more than 99 percent of under-age users would not break.

He makes the point that we have age limits for driving, alcohol, and other dangers. But the analogy with social media strikes me as strained. Social media has many benefits as well as dangers.

Byron Carson writes,

Buchanan sets the stage for his big reveal. He argues that our confusion over costs rests in the selection—consciously made by individual economists—of particular objective measures of opportunity costs at the expense of the more genuine nature of value and opportunity cost, namely that it is subjective.

His essay is on James Buchanan’s important book, Cost and Choice.

Although I did not mention that book, I was influenced by it when a dozen years ago I wrote an essay on subjective value.

My own view is that GDP has some use as a rough measure of value. Large differences across country or over time are meaningful. However, it is a mistake to treat GDP or other computed values as if they were exact or, even worse, more accurate than the information that individuals use to arrive at their own decisions.

For me, the doctrine of subjective value does not automatically preclude government intervention. Nor does it preclude any attempt to arrive at objective estimates of value. However, it does remind us to be aware of the information that is discarded when a social researcher attempts to estimate value, and not to treat such estimates as if they embodied absolute truth. The standard practice, I am afraid, is instead to treat such calculations as if they were fully accurate. This implicit assumption leads proponents to over-estimate the likely success of government intervention. In a world where knowledge of value has a large subjective component, acting as if value were objective is a dangerous practice.

substacks referenced above:

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Scott Galloway Explains Why Age Gating Social Media Is Both Necessary and Doable

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"Paycheck-to-paycheck" and five other popular myths