How rich should Iran be?

Iran is most famous for its extremely repressive government, and there is a perception that Iranians have high human capital. So I wanted to see how their development outcomes compare to nearby countries with similar GDP per capita in the region.

Jordan and Egypt are the comparison group. They are both slightly poorer. All data is from WB unless otherwise stated.

Life expectancy

Iran: 73.9

Jordan: 74.3

Egypt: 70.2

Infant Mortality

Iran: 10

Jordan: 12

Egypt: 16

Literacy Rate

Iran: 89

Jordan: 98

Egypt: 75

I wondered whether the low literacy rate in Iran is because of Iran-specific female seclusion so I looked it up.

Male Literacy Rate

Iran: 93

Jordan: 99

Egypt: 80

Ok, they look somewhat better, but this just tells me that Jordan is impressive and that Egypt is a shithole.

Male Labor force participation 

Iran: 71

Jordan: 63

Egypt: 71

This time Jordan is worse than the others.

I also looked at female labor force participation. Unsurprisingly all three are in the bottom seven. 

They are close in terms of HDI with Iran topping and Egypt bottoming.

Iran seems to have an IQ score of 80 using a dubious website,  Jordan is 5 points higher, and Egypt is 5 points lower, all in all, looks about average for that region of the world.

Conclusion

It looks to me that Iran doesn't look particularly impressive. The perception is probably fuelled by the impressive diaspora (more than a quarter of Iranian Americans have Master's degrees or higher).

Contra Haidt on the Teens

I was reading the Haidt piece on the kids, and he kept talking about major trends and statistics regarding teen suicide. I wanted to know how many deaths exactly a 131% increase in suicide entails.

*There are ~21 million kids aged 10 to 14, and their suicide rates increased by 1.4 kids per 100k from 2010 to 2021. There are also ~21 million kids aged 15 to 19, with an extra 2.5 kids per 100k unaliving.

So this is 294 extra deaths per year from suicide for the kids and 525 for the teens.  That's 819 extra suicide deaths per year. What percentage of this can we attribute to the phones?

The Cosmic Principle of Dramatic Irony

Notes on Prediction

Note: After writing this I found a Scott Alexander post similar to this that changes all my beliefs on the topic and renders this post half-obsolete, as is expected in any post by Scott.

Engel

There is this interesting phenomenon of people describing their current times and predicting based on it, and the conditions changing immediately after their observation. I noticed this after getting Engel’s The Condition of the Working Class in England. Where he describes doom and gloom and the honestly retched state the Industrial Revolution brought to England. The period Engel observed is now called Engels Pause. Mainly because Robert C Allen likes to spit on the graves of communists. Wikipedia says the period 1790-1840 is when productivity increased rapidly but real wages stagnated.

This means that the pause was already over by the time Engles observed it. Looking at some papers looks like you could extend the pause up to the mid-1850s, depending on the data you use. The difference could be that one set of data is for London and the other for all of Britain? I don't care enough about getting the years right to look into it closely. Some scholars like Gregory Clark apparently think Engels was Delulu, and everything was fine and dandy and real wages were rising, but Allen thinks Clark is the Delulu polemicist and I chose Allen as My Lord and Savior because he seems like less of a culture warrior.
 

Pinker 

One of the most popular posts on the SlateStarCodex Subreddit is called "Steven Pinker jinxes the world". It's about how Pinker's predictions about violence are unraveling after the publishing of his book*. I don't have much else to say so go read that and come back.

Fukuyama

After the fall of the Soviet Union Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History. Liberal Democracy is triumphant and has no real challengers. I didn't read his book but I did read the essay it's based on, and let me tell you. I think he is crazy. I consider myself a valiant defender of the Anglophone Analytic tradition in philosophy and seeing someone cite Hegel seriously makes me reconsider their humanity, intelligence, and foresight. So the realization that the biggest defender of American Hegemony thinks some Hegelian Spirit is the sole cause of it, is...terrifying.  

Regardless, I wanted to add Fukuyama to the list of the Cosmic Jinxers by citing the threat of Radical Islam, Nationalist Communism, and the Woke Authoritarian Left. However, Fukuyama says:

"Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble to announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict."

This basically means that he is the Chad-Wojak with a Large Conceptual Framework and any criticism and doubt by recent events makes you the Virign-Wojak news addict.

I'm not convinced by his analytic framework but I think he is basically right, there aren't that many big threats to liberal democracy at the size of 20th-century communism and fascism. Islamism has already peaked and the Gulf countries are modernizing. But I worry that if we buy into his thesis we will get lazy and our enemies might find a chance. Which brings me to...

Thiel

Yesterday I listened to an episode of Conversations With Tyler, by the eponymous Tyler Cowen, interviewing Billionaire and right-wing philosopher Peter Thiel. As Tyler does with the guests he likes he kept grilling him about the fact that "we'll just muddle through" and worrying too much about the future of Western Civilisation or  America or whatever is unnecessary. But Thiel expressed a worry about uttering the forbidden words as if he expected that the optimist incantation would somehow reverse our fortunes. 

Maybe the normie view of history where there is lots of possibilities and we have limited predictive power is the right one?

In Islamic culture,  there is this thing where whenever you talk hoping for something, like say test results or job applications you have to suffix it with the saying "Inshallah" meaning "if God wills it." So whenever you say that you will get an A or that the recruiters will call back, you have to say Inshallah after, or else you're risking getting cursed or something. My guess is that it reminds you that things are in God's hands, but the additional benefit is to remind God that things are in his hands!

So in conclusion what I'm trying to say is that even if Fukuyama, Tyler, and the boomer optimists are right and we'll be fine, we should avoid talking and gloating about it too much, and remember to say Inshallah after we do.

How much would it cost to get replacement birth rate?

 https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.2307/1972123  

In a 1987 paper,  it was estimated that raising the birth rate from 1.9 to 2.1 would cost $380 billion in social expenditure. That's about a trillion in 2023 dollars. But the birth rate is now 1.7, so assuming linearity, doubling the cost seems likely. 2 trillion dollars, which would be 2/7 of US govt expenditure. The population is 40% bigger so 2.8 trillion. This is about $28,000 per extra baby. It's likely an underestimate because americans are richer now.

Asian American suicide

Note: This is messy but I left it as is, sorry. You can ask me about it if you know who I'm and I will explain.

TLDR; While it's true that in terms of ordering, suicide is the number one killer for young Asian Americans, their suicide rates are lower than average, and they have the lowest all-cause mortality of all ethnic groups.

 I saw a greentext on Reddit about how suicide is the number one killer for young Asian American males.

I wanted to check, it's validity and I found this post by a Ph.D. student.

I found this doc with the data and went to see if true.

It's true that 15-24 Asian Americans have suicide as their leading cause of death.

all-cause, all races (51.5, 95.6)* suicide (11.8, 17)

all-cause, suicide 20-24 hispanic (76.1, 11.5)

all-cause, suicide 20-24 white (95.1, 20)

all-cause, suicide 20-24 black (140.8, 13.4)

all-cause, suicide 20-24 native (163.3, 42)

all-cause Asian (26.5, 44.2), suicide (8.6, 14.6).

asians have the lowest all cause at 20-24, and 

*brackets are for age groups (15-19, 20-24)

The number is even lower for 25-29 Asians, but similar in all races

All-cause Asian (26.5, 44.2), suicide (8.6, 14.6)

So young Asians have a much lower all cause and slightly lower suicide mortality.

Let's check by sex:

all causes, all races, male (72.7, 137.9), suicide (17.9, 27.2)

all causes, all races female (29.4, 50.9), suicide (5.4, 6.2)

all causes, Asian, male (35.9, 61.2), suicide (11.6, 21.4)

all causes, Asian, female (16.9, 26.8), suicide (5.4, 7.6)

As you can see Asians are still markedly lower on all cause mortality. Asian suicide is only somewhat lower for males, Asian females have the same rate from 15-19, but are slightly higher for the 20-24 group.

A brief look at the Easterlin Paradox

 I've been reading the original Easterlin paper * because it looked cool. I have a few thoughts. I haven't looked at the literature, but I'm confident that someone else pointed this out in the 50 years since the paper was published.

The paradox is basically that while the rich are happier than the poor, people don't get happier as they get richer.

Now when you look at Eaterlin data, it sure looks like there is a paradox.

This is the table for the interpersonal comparisons, as you can see, the poorest report a happiness rating of 1.8/4 with 16% saying they're very happy, while the richest report a happiness rating of 2.8/4, and 44% saying they're very happy.

Now let's look at the intrapersonal data.

As you can see, as incomes rise, reported happiness remains flat. I have some thoughts on explanations, but we can talk about those later. What I'm more interested in, is the damn graphs.

Let's look again at the relationship between happiness and income.  People's happiness generally increased by 0.2 points for every $10,000. I'm assuming that the "less than 10,000" group is 0 to 10,000, and I would expect people with incomes of $0 a year to be very different from those who make $5,000. I expect way much more heterogeneity from this group than the others. The life cycle data starts from 10,000 anyway, so we can safely ignore it. I'm also ignoring incomes higher than $50,000. Why? Because they go up to 75,000 which is a $25,000 increase. And the $75,000 goes up to infinity??? Is this where the meme that happiness peaks at $75,000 comes from?

So we're stuck with the 10,000 to 50,000 groups. We have a 0.2 increase from 10-20k to 20-30k. The same increase for the 20-30k group and the 30-40k group, and a 0.1 decrease from going up to the 40-50k income group from 30-40k. This gives us a mean increase of 0.1 increase per $10,000. The longitudinal data shows that the sample started from an income of about $12,000 in their 20s, and ended up with maybe $22,000, I'm eyeballing it so a bit unsure. 

This gives us an increase of $10,000 maybe $15,000 from ages 22 to 55. We would expect a 0.1, maybe 0.15 increase in happiness, so for example the happiness line would go from 2.3 or to 2.4 or something. This doesn't show in the data. But the y-axis is way too big to see it. It starts from 0 and goes up to 4, but in our rich-poor data, it starts from 1.8 and goes up to 2.8. And when I exclude the less than $10,000 and the more than $50,000 populations. We would have a happiness line that goes from 2.1 to 2.4, a measly 0.3 increase. It's not too surprising when your ginormous y-axis doesn't show that. 

I'm not saying that by zooming in we would find the hidden solution to the paradox, but the paradox itself is, from looking at this dataset, exaggerated. And the fact that the 40-50,000 group is 0.1 points less happy than those 10,000 poorer, is evidence for the "there is nothing going on, bad nongranular dataset produces funny results sometimes" hypothesis.  Although I would love to download the dataset and tweak it in R to see what's going on, I don't know how to use R. 

*This isn't actually the original, which was published in 1974, this is another one that was published in 2001, which includes his hypotheses for the paradox.

Wealth, compound interest, and race

In my opinion, the best argument for what is called "systemic racism" is the compound interest argument and it goes as follows. Due to a long history of racist policy, even if the policies have ended, disparities would persist because wealth is intergenerational, and past investments grew greatly in size. And banning blacks from owning certain properties, or getting certain jobs, means they have less to give their children, compared to whites. This strikes me as plausible.

I tried estimating the size of intergenerational wealth transfer and then compared it to the size of the black/white wealth gap. There are other effects of racism unaccounted by this, like black-owned property being less worthwhile due to antiblack sentiment. But I don't think this is relevant.

About 20% of people inherited wealth. The amount is usually 10k-50k, although some of it is much higher sometimes. I will assume that the average is $50,000 and that all those who inherited are white. I will also assume that the whole gap is due to racist policies.

To rectify this, you want to transfer about $50,000 to 20% of the black population or $10,000 to 100% of them. (10k is 20% of 50k). You can even play around with it and create a 1% of millionaires or something.

Regardless, this works up to be about 400 billion. There are 40 million US blacks, so this is $10,000 per person.

Unfortunately, the black/white wealth gap is a staggering $164,000. ($188,000 for whites and $24,000 for blacks). This wouldn't change it greatly. 

In the Atlantic article, Coates says that we should take the entire difference in wealth and assume it's all due to racism, this is ridiculous and innumerate. I will ignore it.

Regardless, the small transfer might still be still worth it. Because calculating an amount and giving it to the aggrieved would greatly weaken many attempts to use past wrongdoings (e.g. Slavery) to justify much more destructive policies to rectify the issue. But it depends on convincing blacks that this is just and proper, which might prove difficult.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/  

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22320272/inheritance-money-wealth-transfer-estate-tax

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/23/5743056/you-can-be-a-beneficiary-of-racism-even-if-you-re-not-a-racist 

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/08/the-black-white-wealth-gap-left-black-households-more-vulnerable/

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/03/consider-reparations.html