Month: March 2018

My Conversation with Martina Navratilova

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the podcast and transcript, Martina was in top form and dare I say quick on her feet?  Here is part of the summary:

In their conversation, she and Tyler cover her illustrious tennis career, her experience defecting from Czechoslovakia and later becoming a dual citizen, the wage gap in tennis competition and commentary, gender stereotypes in sports, her work regimen and training schedule, technological progress in tennis, her need for speed, journaling and constant self-improvement, some of her most shocking realizations about American life, the best way to see East Africa, her struggle to get her children to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and more.

Here is one bit:

NAVRATILOVA: I just wanted to leave no stone unturned, really. The coach, obviously, was technique and tactics. The physical part was training, working very hard. I’ll give you my typical day in a minute. The eating was so that I could train hard and not get injured. So it all came together.

The typical day, then, when I really was humming was four hours of tennis, 10:00 to 2:00, two hours of drills and maybe two hours of sets. Then I would do some running drills on the court for 15, 20 minutes, sprints that if I did them now, I wouldn’t be able to walk the next day.

[laughter]

NAVRATILOVA: You know, 15- to 30-second sprinting drills. Then we would eat lunch. Then I would go either play basketball full-court, two on two for an hour and a half or little man-big man. It’s two on one. I don’t know, those people that play basketball. You just run. You just run.

COWEN: Which one were you?

NAVRATILOVA: It switches. Whoever has the ball is the little man. No, whoever has the ball, it’s one against two. Then you play little man, the person plays defense, and then the big man plays center. It’s not two on one, it’s one against one and then one. Then whoever gets the ball goes the other way. It’s run, run, run.

Then I would lift weights and have dinner either before lifting weights or after. So it was a full day of training.

COWEN: What about 9:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M.?

And this:

COWEN:Billie Jean King once suggested that you use writing in a journal every day to help you accomplish your goals. How does that work for you? What is it you do? Why do you think it works?

NAVRATILOVA: It worked because it really centers you. It narrows it down, whatever long-term goal you have. It becomes more real and more current because it narrows it down in that, “What do you need to do today?” and “Did you accomplish that goal?” You have a big goal. You break it into smaller goals, into smaller goals, until you get into, “OK, what do I do today to get to that goal?”

…Try to be honest with yourself. Be honest but also be nice to yourself. You see that with most champions. They’re perfectionists. You beat yourself up too much. I preach and I try to strive for excellence rather than perfection.

If you strive for excellence, perfection may happen. [laughs] It’s good enough to be excellent. That’s good enough. You don’t need to be perfect because perfection just happens by accident.

I asked her this:

COWEN: What was it like to go skiing with Donald Trump?

My favorite part was this:

NAVRATILOVA: Tyler, you need to drink more water. You’re not hydrating at all.

Remember, above all else, sports is cognitive!  These are some of the smartest humans of our time, even if it is not always the kind of intelligence you respect most.

How FDA-Approved Prescribing Information Lags Behind Real-World Clinical Practice

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Once a drug has been approved for some use it can be legally prescribed for any use. New uses for old drugs are often discovered. When physicians learn of these new uses, prescribing practices move beyond the uses that the FDA has evaluated and permitted. In Outdated Prescription Drug Labeling, Shea et al. compare off-label uses for cancer drugs that are graded as “well-accepted” by the National Comprehensive Cancer Drugs & Biologics Compendium (NCCN) with the labelled, “FDA-approved” uses. What they find is that most drugs have multiple off-label uses that are significantly different from FDA approved uses.

Our analysis of the NCCN Compendium and FDA drug labels for 43 cancer drugs approved between 1999 and 2011 identified hundreds of off-label uses, most of which were strongly supported by NCCN expert panels.

…Additionally, of the 253 off-label uses, 165 (65.2%) were categorized as “new indications,” meaning they were in disease settings not represented on labels

In my work on off-label prescribing (and with Klein) I have emphasized that the off-label world offers a window on what the larger world would look like with much less FDA control over new drug approvals. Notice that even today it’s physicians and the private approval process, as represented by the compendia, that determine actual prescribing and payment.

We found that 4 of the 5 largest private payers, as well as Medicare, cover over 90% of uses listed on the NCCN Compendium (uses graded 1 and 2A), suggesting widespread acceptance of these uses by diverse stakeholders. While standards for FDA approval differ from standards for coverage determinations, these findings indicate that the gulf between labeled uses and covered uses may be needlessly wide.

To bring FDA labeling up to real-world practice the authors recommend “a collaboration between the FDA and the developers of clinical guidelines and drug compendia to evaluate existing evidence about approved drugs and suggest updates to labeling.” In other words, the decentralized, private approval system should be used to determine which new uses of old drugs are safe and effective and those determinations should then be adopted by the FDA. I agree. But if private practices can be used to approve new uses for old drugs, why shouldn’t similar procedures be used to approve new uses for new drugs?

My advice for a Paris visit

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is for another friend, here are my pointers:

1. Find a very good food street/corner and take many of your meals there.  I’ve used Rue Daguerre and around Rue des Arts (Left Bank) for this purpose, but there are many others.  Spend most of your money in the cheese shop, asking them to choose for you, but supplement with bread, fruit, and of course chocolate.  This beats most restaurant meals, noting it won’t be cheap either.  And yes it is worth paying $8 for a bar of chocolate there.

2. Do track down medieval Paris, most of all the cathedrals.  This will bring you by other delights as well.

3. Especially on the Left Bank, Paris is one of the very best walking cities.  Avoid Champs-Élysées and environs, a broad-avenued, chain store-intense corruption of what Paris ought to be.  Avoid Jardin Luxembourg and the surrounding parts as well, they are urban deserts.

4. Get a peek of the major bridges over the Seine, if only by traversing them.

5. You don’t in fact have to stand in line to see the Mona Lisa.  It’s a lovely painting, but at this point in human civilization it is OK to skip it.  You don’t need to hear “Bohemian Rhapsody” again either.  But you should go to the top of the Eiffel Tower.  And in the Louvre, don’t neglect the Poussin room, the Michelangelo sculptures, or the Flemish and 17th century works.

6. The Louvre, d’Orsay, Cluny, and Branly (ethnographic) are the essential museums in town.  Check out Grand Palais and Petit Palais for possible exhibits.  When walking around, keep your eye out for posters (yes, posters) advertising exhibits and concerts.

7. If you want to spend forty euros for a very good but not revelatory lunch, find a “cool” area with lots of restaurants and poke your head in at their opening, at 12:30, to ask for a table.  By 12:45 it is too late and you are screwed and back to your favorite cheese shop.  By the way, I don’t think Paris is the best city in which to spend $200 on a meal.

8. In most of the parts of Paris you are likely to frequent, do not try to eat any Asian or “ethnic” foods.  The best restaurants of those kinds are in north Paris, on the way to the airport, but no one visits there.  Couscous in Paris is boring.

9. Belleville is the gentrifying Brooklyn of Paris, with relatively few tourists, if that is what you are looking for.  Avoid Montmartre.  For practical reasons, I’ve spent a lot of my Paris time near Unesco, in a neighborhood that is a bit sterile but very beautiful and it gives you a decent sense of well-to-do residential Paris life.  Develop your mini-Paris residential life somewhere, and make your time there more than just a tourist visit.  The site I should not enjoy but do is Le Dôme des Invalides, also the tomb of Napoleon.

10. The essential Paris movies are lots of Godard (Breathless, Band of Outsiders, others), Jules and Jim, and Triplets of Belleville.  Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 for those with an experimental bent.  Eric Rohmer for something light-hearted.  Amélie and Before Sunset are both rewarding, though at the margin Godard usually is what Americans are lacking.

11. Carry along Hugo and Balzac to read.  Flaubert and Proust are wonderful, but they are more “interior” authors and thus you can imbibe them anywhere.  Do not forget Houllebecq’s Submission.  I do not love most of the well-known non-fiction books on Paris; perhaps they become corrupted through the chance of being truly popular.  Do read Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France and try to dig up a useful architectural guide to the city.  I’m also a big fan of Hazel Rowley’s Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

12. Don’t go expecting Parisians to be rude, I have never (well, once) found that to be the case in more than six months spent in the city.

13. My overall take is this: Paris today is fairly sterile in terms of overall creativity, or for that matter business dynamism.  But Parisians have perfected the art of taste along a number of notable dimensions, like nowhere else in the world.  If your trip allows you to free ride upon those efforts in a meaningful way, it will go very well.

What Should You Do to Make an Impact?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Suppose you want to help the world, what sort of problems should you work on? The good folks at 80,000 Hours recommend looking for big, neglected, solvable problems. Sounds obvious when written down but bringing these issues up to system-two thinking often results in changed perspectives and new approaches. The video has interesting examples.

Will American mass transit make a comeback?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Transit ridership fell in 31 of 35 major metropolitan areas in the United States last year, including the seven cities that serve the majority of riders, with losses largely stemming from buses but punctuated by reliability issues on systems such as Metro, according to an annual overview of public transit usage.

…Researchers concluded factors such as lower fuel costs, increased teleworking, higher car ownership and the rise of alternatives such as Uber and Lyft are pulling people off trains and buses at record levels.

I know, I know — if only we would spend more money, do it better, and so on.  An alternative and really quite simple hypothesis is that mass transit is largely a 20th century technology, it is being slowly abandoned, and in the United States at least its future is dim.  The more you moralize about the troglodyte politicians and voters who won’t support enlightenment, the harder it will be to give that hypothesis an analytically fair shake.

And what about the D.C. area?:

Metro’s ridership dropped by 3.2 percent. The trend was largely driven by a 6 percent decline in bus ridership. Dramatic losses to subway ridership, including a 10 percent decline in 2016, had appeared to level off by 2017, when the total number of trips fell by about a percent and a half.

Metro has said about 30 percent of its ridership losses are tied to reliability issues, with teleworking, a shrinking federal workforce, Uber and Lyft, and other factors to blame for the rest.

Here is the full WaPo story by Faiz Siddiqui.

Will there be a trade war with China?

by  Tyler Cowen in

No.  That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one bit:

Keep in mind that the U.S. is a relatively large buyer in many markets; in economic lingo, it has some monopsony power. So if it cuts back purchases of, say, Chinese toys, China cannot simply reroute those now-surplus toys and sell them to Canada or Indonesia at the same price. This gives the U.S. significant power in trade conflicts. And China cannot throw around its weight as a buyer in similar fashion because it does not import on the same scale.

The Chinese don’t have that many ready American targets for economic retaliation. Aircraft are one of the major U.S. exports to China, where market demand for domestic flights is rapidly growing. Beijing has a backlog of about 400 orders with the Boeing Co. It could try to switch some or all of those orders to Airbus SE, but that would mean delays. Airbus would also know it could increase its prices and the Chinese would have to pay. As a buyer, China doesn’t have as much leverage in this market as it might appear.

The U.S. has many more targets when it comes to restricting foreign investment, as there is plenty of Chinese capital that would love to flee. The Chinese government already limits the activities of the big technology companies and many other U.S. multinationals in China, so they don’t have as many extra sticks in this regard.

The reality is China has margins for responding to the U.S., but they are mostly not in the economic realm.

I thank Ray Lopez for a useful email conversation related to this column.

Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen

Rich People Will Soon Be Able To Buy Fake Meteor Showers On Demand.

In the latest scheme of the booming private space industry, a Japanese company proposes to light up the night with made-to-order shooting stars…

The fireworks will come courtesy of a satellite some 220 miles high, owned by the world’s first “aerospace entertainment” firm, Astro Live Experiences, or ALE.

The brainchild of University of Tokyo astronomer Lena Okajima, the spacecraft will circle the globe and kick out 15 to 20 small metallic pebbles on command.

Here is the story, and for the pointer I thank DL.

How much more can be built in Los Angeles?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Now, a bill under consideration in Sacramento would upend that arrangement, allowing multistory apartments and condominiums in neighborhoods where city leaders have long prohibited them. Senate Bill 827, written by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), would loosen or eliminate restrictions on height, density, parking and design for residential properties near major rail and bus stops.

The impact could be huge. A Times analysis found that about 190,000 parcels in L.A. neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes are located in the “transit rich” areas identified in SB 827. Residences in those neighborhoods could eventually be replaced with buildings ranging from 45 to 85 feet, city officials say.

“While we are still evaluating the full effects of the bill, close to 50% of the city’s single-family homes would be impacted under SB 827,” said Yeghig L. Keshishian, spokesman for the Department of City Planning.

That is from Zahniser, Dillon, and Schleuss at the LA Times.  Via Matt Yglesias, who adds:

Note that ecologically the big win isn’t even about transit-oriented development. California’s mild climate and low-carbon electricity mix make it one of the greenest places in America, so more houses in California is an environmental win.

It is time for this referendum to translate into larger excitement at the national level, as say Proposition 13 once did and some of the marijuana referenda have done as well.

Here is a thread on real estate in the Bay Area, worst is maybe Menlo Park.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Europe is dropping the ball on AI and in some ways positively discouraging it.  And too many crummy firms in Europe: “Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and countries would raise EU GDP by at least 25 percent.”

2. Remember when Clearchannel was going dominate all radio, forever?

3. Marcel Gauchet on democracy and the sweep of history.

4. How two economists got access to IRS tax data.  Bravo to them I say, but it’s worth noting that the shift from regression-driven to data set-driven economics has been a remarkably inegalitarian development, widely praised by most top academic economists.  So often progress means a willingness to disregard or even stomp on egalitarian norms.

5. The economics of why some restaurants need to leave Queens.

6. Kling on the new Chetty-Hendren-Jones-Porter results.

7. Those new service sector jobs: Iraqi war architect Paul Bremer now a ski instructor in Vermont.

Opioids are not mainly an economic phenomenon

by  Tyler Cowen in

Overall, our findings suggest that there is no simple causal relationship between economic conditions and the abuse of opioids. Therefore, while improving economic conditions in depressed areas is desirable for many reasons, it is unlikely to curb the opioid epidemic.

That is from Janet Currie, Jonas Y. Jin, and Molly Schnell in a new NBER working paper.

The day job

by  Tyler Cowen in

ONCE UPON A time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

That is from Katy Waldman in the NYT.  You will find similar themes discussed in my earlier book In Praise of Commercial Culture.  In her article I also enjoyed this part:

Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albania, sometimes feels his hand doodling as he contemplates a political decision. The art pours out to center and steady him. In 1998, Rama left a promising career as an artist in Paris to become Albania’s minister of culture. Now the country’s leader, he shows his loose, improvisatory drawings and sculptures in galleries around the world. “I found myself drawing almost all my working time whilst interacting with people in my office or on the phone,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I began to understand that my subconscious was being helped … by my hand to stay calm while my conscious had to focus on demanding topics.”

Recommended.