Why I Am Not a Physicist

Link to "Why Can't We Find the Theory of Everything? Einstein, Rogue Genius, String Theory | Eric Weinstein" on YouTube."

Above is a very interesting peek into the world of theoretical physics. Theoretical physics are making mathematical progress, but are stalled out in an effort to better understand reality, despite being an incredibly smart and highly-skilled group of people. 

At one point in my youth, I said to everyone that I wanted to someday be a physicist. (And my interest in physics was great enough that I took a full two semesters of the most advanced freshman physics course at Harvard.) But at some point I realized just how stiff the competition would be because of how smart and highly-skilled the community of physicists is. So I decided to go into a field where the competition wouldn't be so stiff: economics. By comparison with physics, economics is still the Wild, Wild West, and it is much easier to make a real contribution in economics.  

It is not lost on me that thinking about how much competition there would be in physics demonstrated some tendency to think like an economist. All the more reason I still think it was the right decision for me to become an economist rather than a physicist. 

Monetary Policies in the Age of Uncertainty

  • Miles's presentation on negative interest rate policy begins right after the 35 minute mark.
  • Eric Lonergan's presentation on helicopter drops is right after MIles's presentation, beginning not long after the 52 minute mark
  • Q&A begins right after the 1 hour and 22 minute mark.
  • Eric Lonergan's answer in the Q&A begins at the 1 hour and 41 minute mark
  • Miles's answer in the Q&A begins 5 seconds before the 1 hour and 59 minute mark

Powerpoint file for Miles's Presentation

Link to the video above on YouTube

I was invited to speak at an October 2, 2017 Bruegel conference with the title "Europe and Japan: Monetary Politicies in the Age of Uncertainty." My presentation starts right after the 35 minute mark of the video above.

The great thing about this session was the Eric Lonergan's advocacy of massive helicopter drops made my advocacy of deep negative interest rates as a key tool look moderate :) For my views on helicopter drops, see my post "Helicopter Drops of Money Are Not the Answer." 

I think many of you, my readers, will find the parts of this video I bulleted above quite interesting. For example, for the Bruegel presentation, I boil down my views on negative interest rate policy to 17 minutes. For the 5-minute version, see my CEPR interview posted here in "How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide." For the 87-minute version, see "18 Misconceptions about Eliminating the Zero Lower Bound (or Any Lower Bound on Interest Rates): The Video." (Those 87 minutes includes excellent Q&A. The video quality is tolerable, but not great.) 

See Jan Musschoot's blog post "Carrot or stick? The Lonergan-Kimball debate" based on what you see in the video above.  

Also: I added some of Eric Lonergan's tweets about the conference to the end of my story "Miles Kimball, Roger Farmer, Stephen Williamson and Joe Little on Recent Japanese Monetary Policy." 

 

Miles's Recipe for Success

The thing I would recommend for success is pretty simple. Try every day to get smarter. Learn something. Think. Think hard about some math. Try to figure things out. 

If every day you try to get smarter, you are going to find that you are—certainly ten years later, twenty years later, thirty years later. If you really keep thinking, thinking, thinking all the time, it's also going to keep your mind in better shape when you get older. 

People often, in our society, have the attitude, "You're born smart—or not smart." I think that is a terrible attitude to take. You can make yourself smarter by trying. One of the key things is to have patience with it. People say they can't do math. Math is something you need a lot of patience with. Almost everybody learns math slowly. That is true of a lot of other things, too. Just keep working on it, and you'll find that you do get smarter and smarter. 

 

Update: Nelson Mark shares this on my Facebook page for this post:

I think it was Sherwin Rosen who told us that the “economic intuition” that the faculty tried to teach us is familiarity. Totally consistent with your recipe. Keep working at it and thinking about stuff.

The same can be said about intuition for many other pursuits. 

 

Hal Boyd: 
The Ignorance of Mocking Mormonism →

You might also like some of my other religion posts. Here are my UU sermons I have posted:

Here some religion posts beyond those sermons, leaning towards posts related to Mormonism:

Noah Smith also did a series of religion posts on my blog. Please help me to persuade him to do more! Here they are in chronological order:

  1. God and SuperGod
  2. You Are Already in the Afterlife
  3. Go Ahead and Believe in God
  4. Mom in Hell
  5. Buddha Was Wrong About Desire
  6. Noah Smith: Judaism Needs to Get Off the Shtetl
  7. Why Do Americans Like Jews and Dislike Mormons?
  8. Render Unto Ceasar
  9. Original Sin
  10. Islam Needs To Separate Church and State
  11. Noah Smith—Jews: The Parting of the Ways
  12. Noah Smith: You With the Fro
  13. The Fight of the Ages: Pain and Death
  14. Noah Smith: Sunni Islam is Failing

21 Experts Tell Us What the Future Looks Like for Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain

                                                   Link to the article above

                                                   Link to the article above

I was one of the "21 experts" in the FocusEconomics article "21 experts tell us what the future looks like for cryptocurrencies and blockchain." My bit reads as follows:

Governments will retain control of currencies. But the blockchain technology is very exciting. What is most exciting is the possibility that the credit-card/debit card oligopoly might be disrupted so that fees come way, way down.  

Many central banks are working toward issuing their own digital currencies. The simplest way is to give fintech entrepreneurs low-cost access to a central bank clearing mechanism with streamlined regulations for fintech accounts that are 100% backed by central bank reserves. Some central banks are thinking of giving individuals the equivalent of a central bank reserve account.

There are two big effects on the world economy and financial markets. The first is that a 1 percentage point reduction in credit card/debit card fees from disruptive digital competition is like a 1 percentage point reduction in distortionary taxes. The second big effect on the world economy and financial markets is that when a bigger and bigger fraction of transactions are electronic, central banks will see a smaller political cost to modifications in paper currency policy that allow deep negative interest rates. See "How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide"  for a discussion of possible changes in paper currency policy that keep paper currency in the picture but allow deep negative interest rates.

Visit Miles' blog Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal and follow him on Twitter here.

We can see what the other experts say in the article. 

How Sugar Makes People Hangry

Low blood sugar can put people into a bad mood and make them aggressive. But let me argue that the implications of this fact are a little different than some might naively think.

A big cause of low blood sugar is when you have eaten sugar, refined carbs or some other food with a high insulin index a couple of hours earlier. When sugar, refined carbs or something else high on the insulin index causes insulin to spike, that insulin causes blood sugar to be removed from the bloodstream (some to the muscles and some to be stored as fat in the fat cells). It is like waking up from being asleep at the wheel, seeing you are drifting off to the right, and then overcorrecting to the left. 

So, a good way to reduce the chances of blood sugar low enough to make you "hangry" is to avoid sugar, refined carbs and other foods high on the insulin index. If you do avoid sugar, refined carbs and other foods high on the insulin index, you will find that you don't need food handy in order to avoid being hangry. Indeed, if, when you do eat, you eat foods low on the insulin index, you can skip meals entirely and still have a reasonable level of blood sugar because keeping insulin low leads your body to make blood sugar from the fat in your fat cells.  

Many, many people in the US think of skipping a few meals as if it were torture. And that is the way skipping meals will seem to you if when you do eat, you eat sugar, refined carbs and other foods high on the insulin index.

People often blame bad nutrition on eating "processed foods." There is a lot of truth to this, if only because most processed foods contain a lot of sugar or some kind of flour or starch that your body quickly converts into sugar. It is easy to verify the high sugar content of most processed foods by looking at the ingredients on the side of the package if you know all the different names for various kinds of sugar. Googling "top types of sugar in processed foods" I came immediately to an post by "Dr. Axe" with this useful list of different types of sugar you might find on an ingredient list:

  • Corn syrup or high-fructose corn syrup
  • Dextrose or crystal dextrose
  • Fructose
  • Maltose
  • Lactose
  • Sucrose
  • Glucose
  • Evaporated cane juice or fruit juice
  • Caramel
  • Carob syrup
  • Brown sugar
  • Raw sugar
  • Dextrin and maltodextrin
  • Rice syrup
  • Molasses
  • Evaporated corn sweetener
  • Confectioner’s powdered sugar
  • Agave nectar
  • Other fruit nectars (for example, pear nectar)

For most processed foods, the sugar content is high enough to cause enough harm that it is not so easy to tell whether there is also something else in a particular processed food that also causes substantial harm.

Of course, it isn't sugar per se, but anything that spikes insulin that is the problem. To learn more about which foods are high on the insulin index, see "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid." To learn more about the insulin theory of obesity, see my post "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon." 

You might also be interested in these other related posts:

Also see the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life."

Katherine Ellen Foley—Candy Bar Lows: Scientists Just Found Another Worrying Link Between Sugar and Depression →

John Locke: Land Title is Needed to Protect Buildings and Improvements from Expropriation

The importance of land is often not the land by itself, but the fact that something valuable can be done to the land or something valuable can be built on the land. It is important that people be able to get title to land in order to make such improvements or to build such buildings without fear that those improvements or those buildings will be taken away. John Locke makes that argument in section 34 of 2d Treatise on Government: “Of Civil Government” (in Chapter V "Of Property"):

God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that had as good left for his improvement, as was already taken up, needed not complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another’s labour: if he did, it is plain he desired the benefit of another’s pains, which he had no right to, and not the ground which God had given him in common with others to labour on, and whereof there was as good left, as that already possessed, and more than he knew what to do with, or his industry could reach to.

I have several miscellaneous thoughts about this:

1. Hernando de Soto became famous for talking about how important giving slum-dwellers title to the land they live on can be for economic development. When this advice is followed, it is an interesting example of "squatters" usurping land title when the land was mostly unimproved, and then being given land title after building a shack on a (small) piece of land. 

2. Often what stands in the way of building is not the difficulty of getting standard legal title to a piece of land, but the political monopoly over how a piece of land may be used that local governments have. If a local government holds sway over too large an area, the urge to stifle competition and fear of congestion can often lead to a political failure—and political obstruction in the way—of delivering on the social justice imperative I enunciate in "Building Up With Grace" that every substantial city have a district with essentially no height limits and excellent bus service to the rest of the city, so that people of modest means can afford to move to attractive cities—cities that work, cities that have jobs and amenities. 

3. In the modern world, very often, a great part of the value of a piece of land has to do with the other buildings and streets that it is near. One of the themes of "Density is Destiny" is about cities as the key element of a socially increasing-returns-to-scale technology. If it were possible to create more cities that work, cities that have jobs and amenities, on land that is now far enough away from other things that it is inexpensive, that would be great. Overall, great cities are underprovided. Part of the answer is letting existing attractive cities grow more; but ideally (and this is not excuse for those existing cities not to grow), it would be good to also have new, attractive cities arise. Here, I think there is an externality. If someone made a wonderful city come into being, shehe would capture only a small share of the value generated. 

4. One case in which it is easier to get a city to arise is when that city has a significantly better legal structure than the surrounding cities. Think Shenzhen. This is Paul Romer's idea of a charter city. In addition to the value of a charter city in helping make the transition toward a better legal structure in a particular country, a charter city is also valuable simply because it is an additional city. 

5. There is a severe shortage of land in the world available for conducting high-level political experiments. That is, you can buy land, but you can't easily buy the right to set up your own nation on a patch of land. To me, this seems unfortunate. The ability to create space colonies—either on space stations or asteroids—may change this in the next century or two. Expect a flowering of new political experiments. Now is the time to develop the ideas for those political experiments. 

 

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

 

 

 

On the Virtue of Scientific Disrespect

A toy model. Image source.

A toy model. Image source.

Looking at Narayana Kocherlakota's brief on "Toy Models" that Noah Smith flags, my reaction is that in macroeconomics these days, there is much too much respect for the older generation of macroeconomists. Scientific progress requires a certain level of disrespect for one's elders. I feel the needed level of disrespect for one's elders is currently lacking. Many rules were set down at the dawn of the Rational Expectations Revolution. It is time for more of those rules to be broken. You can see some of my opinions on how the old rules should be broken in my post "Defining Economics." 

I understand that many young economists feel the need to get tenure before they start breaking the rules. But then it is imperative to have a plan for how to keep your determination to someday break the rules alive during the long road to tenure, so that you haven't been totally coopted by the system by the time you get tenure. My post "Breaking the Chains" also talks about this struggle to nurture the authentic scientist within during that long journey. 

In the many interactions with young macroeconomists that have been generated by my sojourn in the blogosphere, I have run into the following phenomenon more than once: a yearning for a different way to do macroeconomics, coupled with a resignation because there is only one allowed way to do things. Balderdash! There are many ways to do macroeconomics. Collectively, we make up our own rules. I think macroeconomics would be better off if the rules established by a now aging group of macroeconomists were set aside for new rules made up by the younger generation of macroeconomists. Any rule that is 40 years old deserves to be isolated and examined closely to see if it still serves scientific progress in macroeconomics. 

Unfortunately, many of most prestigious macroeconomists in the world have an authoritarian streak or are possessed by intolerant ideological zeal. (I mean "ideological" in a scientific sense, not a political one.) It is important to notice authoritarian streaks and intolerant ideological zeal and to be prepared to disobey when you see fit in order to further the progress of science.  

Don’t miss these other posts on posts on being human, on being a scientist and on being an economist.

The Keto Food Pyramid

Link to the source for this graphic

Link to the source for this graphic

I consider the amount of insulin a food or beverage causes the body to produce a key benchmark for nutrition research. For any nutrition claim, I want to know how much of the causality is working through insulin and what effect is left over when insulin production is held constant either experimentally or statistically. You can see why I take this view in "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon" and "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid."

Bonnie Kavoussi pointed me to the graphic above, which does a good job at showing how to avoid the types of food that are the very highest on the insulin index. However, taking the insulin index that I discuss in detail in "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid" as the gold standard, let me point to a few problems with this graphic: 

  1. The Keto Food Pyramid doesn't do a good job at distinguishing between types of food that are medium on the insulin index and those that are low on the insulin index. Avoiding high is most important, but leaning toward low in the choice between low and medium also matters. In particular, any fruit (including berries), as well as most types of meat, poultry and fish need to be eaten in moderation.

  2. While skim milk is high on the insulin index, whole milk is not.

  3. While some types of beans are high on the insulin index, other types of beans are reasonably low on the insulin index.

  4. While I suspect typical American spaghetti is indeed quite bad, existing evidence on the insulin index suggests (surprisingly) that there may be some types of pasta that are not so bad. More research is needed on this.

  5. It is only raw carrots that are OK. Cooked carrots have a higher glycemic index, suggesting a high insulin index.

  6. Potatoes should be on the banned list.

  7. Most important of all, soft drinks, punch and juice need to be on the banned list!

In addition to the key posts mentioned above,

don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Other Health Issues

VII. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography. I defend the ability of economists like me to make a contribution to understanding diet and health in “On the Epistemology of Diet and Health: Miles Refuses to `Stay in His Lane’.”

Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid' →