I tried asking Claude to come up with a list of arguments on both sides of this. Then I asked it to come up with its final take. I thought that this kind of analysis was far more reasonable than what Caplan did.
(Obviously, this was a very basic job. A more thorough one would probably look like asking an LLM to do some amount of background research and a large amount of brainstorming and then summarize that.)
Thanks for sharing, Ozzie! I think Bryan is right people barely care about how their income compares with that of their neighbours. However, I believe they care about how their income compares with that of their peers, which will remain the same to a significant extent even if people move to lower income areas.
Yea, this seems like a remarkably basic defense for the title “People Barely Care About Relative Income”. I want to expect more from economists like this.
I tried asking Claude to come up with a list of arguments on both sides of this. Then I asked it to come up with its final take. I thought that this kind of analysis was far more reasonable than what Caplan did.
(Obviously, this was a very basic job. A more thorough one would probably look like asking an LLM to do some amount of background research and a large amount of brainstorming and then summarize that.)
https://claude.ai/share/5e2f1332-095e-4858-b960-55fc566b61ee
Thanks for sharing, Ozzie! I think Bryan is right people barely care about how their income compares with that of their neighbours. However, I believe they care about how their income compares with that of their peers, which will remain the same to a significant extent even if people move to lower income areas.