Month: March 2018
Big Professor is watching you
At the University of Arizona, school officials know when students are going to drop out before they do.
The public college in Tucson has been quietly collecting data on its first-year students’ ID card swipes around campus for the last few years. The ID cards are given to every enrolled student and can be used at nearly 700 campus locations including vending machines, libraries, labs, residence halls, the student union center, and movie theaters.
They also have an embedded sensor that can be used to track geographic history whenever the card is swiped. These data are fed into an analytics system that finds “highly accurate indicators” of potential dropouts, according to a press release last week from the university. “By getting [student’s] digital traces, you can explore their patterns of movement, behavior and interactions, and that tells you a great deal about them,” Sudha Ram, a professor of management systems, and director of the program, said in the release. “It’s really not designed to track their social interactions, but you can, because you have a timestamp and location information,” Ram added.
That is from Amy X. Wang at Quartz.
Very good sentences about sex
Here is one of them:
But there is a risk too that repoliticising desire will encourage a discourse of sexual entitlement.
Here is another:
By contrast, gay men – even the beautiful, white, rich, able-bodied ones – know that who we have sex with, and how, is a political question.
Here are many more, by Amia Srinivasan, definitely recommended to those of you who are interested, and do note that sex is not like a sandwich. The piece closes with:
In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.
Via S.M. Here is more about the still massively underrated author.
Longevity FAQ
From Laura Deming, you will find it here, essential reading for our time. Here is one bit:
Senescence
at a glance: a fraction of your cells get older than the others, so we’d like to eliminate them
As you get old, so do your cells. But some of your cells get old in a way that is much worse than the others. You may have heard of a thing called telomerase. If you remember correctly, it’s the thing that keeps the end of your DNA long enough that your cells can still divide. When one of your cells runs out of telomerase, it can’t make many more copies of itself. If the cell sticks around, refuses to die even when it stops working, and starts secreting signals to the immune system, we call that a ‘senescent cell‘.
What happens when you get rid of these cells? Some animals that age faster than normal have a lot of these ‘senescent cells’ and are good experimental models in which to ask that question. In 2011, a group from the Mayo Clinic cleared out many of the senescent cells in one of those animal models, and found that the resulting mice were healthier in old age (among other things, they did not get cataracts and bent spines, which typically emerge in old age). In 2016, the same investigators found that getting rid of senescent cells in normal mice made them live a longer healthy lifespan. Knocking out senescent cells is tricky, because they don’t have many unique identifiers. Companies are working to either find things empirically that kill senescent cells, or figure out specific mechanisms by which to try to destroy them.
It starts off like this:
Hi! I’m Laura Deming, and I run Longevity Fund. I spend a lot of time thinking about what could increase healthy human lifespan. This is my overview of the field for beginners.
Does it end with you living to 129? I genuinely do not know.
Thursday assorted links
1. A new look at how U.S. health care is different, or not.
2. Jake Seliger reviews Caplan on education.
3. The Elaine Ou case for Bitcoin: no governance.
4. “Is irony connected with blast furnaces?” A quiz for those who dare to take it.
Strategic height adjustment
His [Barry Bogin’s] research, published in Anthropologischer Anzeiger: Journal of Biological and Clinical Anthropology, considered numerous other examples of migration and height change over the past 140 years, including rural Bangladeshis who came to London in the 1970s.
In each instance, migrant youngsters’ growth accelerated until their average height matched that of their new native peers.
“This is usually thought to be due to better food and health care in the new country,” said Prof Bogin.
“But also, because the emotional stress that limited growth in the old country has been lifted — and there is emotional stimulus for bigger body size in the new country.”
Professor Bogin’s study, carried out in collaboration with Dr Christiane Scheffler, at the University of Potsdam, and Professor Michael Hermanussen, from the University of Kiel, also explored a second phenomenon called competitive growth — where the ruling social classes adjust their height to exceed the subordinate population.
Prof Bogin said: “This is when the mean height of colonial or military migrants, who become the socially dominant group in the conquered country, surpasses the average height of the both the conquered people and the origin population.”
In one example, the researchers found that the height of Dutch colonial masters in Indonesia in the 19th and early 20th centuries was greater than the Indonesians they ruled, and also greater than social upper classes back in the Netherlands.
“This was also the case for English colonial masters in North America,” said Prof Bogin.
“We find that it is the superior social status of the conquerors that promotes their greater height.
Fascinating stuff, to what else might this apply? Here is the full link, via Anecdotal.
Apprenticeships
The Richmond Fed has a good overview of apprenticeships in the United States and some of the academic literature:
According to a 2013 World Bank and International Labour Office study
, only about 0.3 percent of the total U.S. workforce is in registered apprenticeships — about a 12th of the share in Germany. But some states, including South Carolina, have expanded “dual system” apprenticeships in recent years by building partnerships between colleges and firms and, in some cases, offering tax credits. Through the state’s “Apprenticeship Carolina
The review offers some useful ideas on why apprenticeships are less common in the United States. One problem is cultural:
In other countries, it’s more likely that college is seen as one option among many, and apprenticeships are considered a worthwhile route to middle-class employment. In the United States, parents are more likely to see college as a vital investment without considering other alternatives…
As I said in Launching the Innovation Renaissance:
The U.S. has paved a single road to knowledge, the road through the classroom. “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years,” we tell the students, “and all will be well.” Most of them, however, crash before they reach the end of the road — some drop out of high school and then more drop out of college. Who can blame them? Sit-down learning is not for everyone, perhaps not even for most people. There are many roads to knowledge.
Niger (U.S.) fact of the day
Green Berets working with government forces in Niger killed 11 Islamic State militants in a firefight in December, the American military acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday. The battle occurred two months after four United States soldiers died in an ambush in another part of Niger — and after senior commanders had imposed stricter limits on military missions in the West African country.
No American or Nigerien forces were harmed in the December gun battle. But the combat — along with at least 10 other previously unreported attacks on American troops in West Africa between 2015 and 2017 — indicates that the deadly Oct. 4 ambush was not an isolated episode in a nation where the United States is building a major drone base.
Here is the full NYT story, another mini-war it seems. Probably I’ll be doing a wee bit more Africa coverage on MR than has typically been the case.
*The Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard*
That is the new book by Cynthia L. Haven, which I was very enthusiastic about. I find about half of it to be a revelation, and the other half to be perfectly fine, though material I largely had seen before (but still useful to most readers). Here are a few of the things I learned:
1. As a child, “…his favorite game was a solitary one: with toy soldiers, he reenacted France’s major battles, taking all the roles himself.”
2. In 1944, at the age of 21, he saw many French collaborators killed or put on trial, and from that time started to develop some of his major ideas.
3. When he migrated to America, he associated the country with grandness and Avignon with petiteness. He was at that time “adamantly atheistic.”
4. He wrote his dissertation on “American Opinions on France, 1940-1943,” which at 418 pp. contained some early versions of his later ideas.
5. He was turned down for tenure at Indiana University, claiming he spent several years “devoted essentially to female students and cars.”
6. He insisted that he witnessed a lynching (likely in North Carolina) in the early 1950s, although after reading Haven’s discussion I suspect this was a fabrication.
7. He was significantly influenced by the Dante circle at Johns Hopkins where he ended up teaching, including by Charles Singleton.
8. Like myself, Haven considers Theater of Envy to be his most underrated book.
9. His work day typically started at 3:30 a.m.
10. Peter Thiel, as an undergraduate, actually took a class from Girard.
Definitely recommended to anyone with an interest in Girard. Here is my recent summary post on Girard.
Wednesday assorted links
My Conversation with Chris Blattman
The very very highly rated but still underrated Chris Blattman was in top form, here is the transcript and audio. We had a chance to do this one when he was in town for a week. We talked about the problem with cash transfers, violence, child soldiers, charter cities, Rene Girard, how to do an Africa trip, Battlestar Galactica, why Ethiopia is growing rapidly, why civil war has become less common, why Colombia and the New World have been so violent, the mysteries of Botswana, and Chris’s favorite Australian TV show, among other topics, including of course the Chris Blattman production function. Here is one excerpt:
BLATTMAN: There’s this famous paper on Vietnam veterans in the US where they find that being conscripted into fighting in Vietnam had positive effects on the wages of blacks and negative effects on the wages of whites. The reason was, it was really down to, what was your alternative labor market and training experience in the absence of this war?
We found something similar in Uganda, something eerily familiar, which is that the women economically weren’t so worse off. I wouldn’t say they were better off, but they weren’t necessarily affected adversely in an economic sense — they were adversely affected in other ways 5 or 10 or 15 years down the road — while the men were.
It spoke to just how terrible women’s options were. Being conscripted and abducted to be a rebel wife, to some degree, wasn’t that different than what your marriage opportunities looked like if there wasn’t a war.
For men, it just meant that you were out of the civilian labor market, getting a bunch of skills that had turned out not to be very useful. It was bad for them. A different war, a different context, and a different labor market, and that can switch.
COWEN: How many northern Ugandan child soldiers have you interviewed?
BLATTMAN: A few hundred. At least a couple hundred, maybe more. It depends if you count someone who’s involved for a month versus two years. Certainly, the long, long-term soldiers who were there for many, many years are few, maybe only a couple dozen.
COWEN: Those contacts, those conversations, how have they changed your outlook on life emotionally, intellectually, otherwise?
And:
COWEN: True or false, most humans are bad at violence?
BLATTMAN: I think they learn quickly. Probably they’re bad at first.
COWEN: In the micro evidence on violence, and the more individual-level evidence, and then finally macro evidence — like will there be a civil war? — do you think there’s ultimately an overarching theory that ties these all together? Or are they just separate levels of investigation, where you have empirical results, and they stand somewhat separate, and they’ll always be distinct areas?
How optimistic are you about a grand unified theory of violence?
BLATTMAN: I think these individual, how I react in the moment, fight-or-flight-type mechanisms are quite distinct from the way that small groups or large groups or nations go to war. But once you get beyond that to the level of small groups and larger groups and nations, I see a lot of unity in the theory.
Do read or listen to the whole thing. By the way, he says the Canadian political system is overrated.
Who Benefits from Targeted Property Tax Relief?
If you want to lower the price of housing and still house lots of people there is really only one way: build more housing. Yet politicians and voters continually seek to repeal the laws of supply and demand. A case in point, many states reduce property tax rates for seniors, veterans or the disabled or combinations thereof. Great for seniors, veterans and the disabled, right? Wrong. If supply doesn’t increase, lowering property taxes simply increases the price of housing.
If the property tax relief is targeted to a very small group then demand won’t increase much and the benefits will accrue to the targeted group but seniors and veterans are both a significant fraction of the population and an even more significant fraction of homeowners. Thus, we might expect that a significant fraction of the tax relief will be capitalized into housing prices–that’s exactly what Moulton, Waller and Wentland find in a new paper:
While property tax relief measures are often intended to aid specific groups, basic supply and demand analysis predicts that an unintended consequence of this particular kind of tax relief is that, on the margin, it increases demand for homeownership among its expected beneficiaries. Accordingly, we examine two property tax relief measures in Virginia that applied to disabled veterans and the elderly, finding that these policy changes had an immediate effect on home prices after the
voters approved them on Election Day. Overall, we find that home prices rose by approximately 5 percent in response to the increase in demand for homeownership. Indeed, the tax relief policies provide a unique, quasi-experimental methodological
setting where the treatment is exogenously assigned to specific groups within this market. We find that the effect was as much as an 8.1 percent price appreciation for homes in areas with high concentrations of veterans, 7.3 percent in areas with
more seniors, and 7.4 percent for senior preferred homes in all areas. The effect was highest, 9.3 percent, in areas with high concentrations of seniors and veterans, which translates to about $18,900, or roughly full capitalization, for the average
home. Conversely, the tax relief measures had little if any effect on homes in areas with fewer potential beneficiaries….
A cynic might argue that the true intent of the policy is to raise housing prices but this gives politicians and voters too much credit. The intent is sincere, it’s the means that are false.
Sentences about immigration and assimilation
Because of measurement issues and data limitations, Mexican Americans in particular and Hispanic Americans in general probably have experienced significantly more socioeconomic progress beyond the second generation than available data indicate. Even so, it may take longer for their descendants to integrate fully into the American mainstream than it did for the descendants of the European immigrants who arrived near the turn of the twentieth century.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Brian Duncan and Stephen J. Trejo.
How might game theory shed light on Trump talking to Kim?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, they chose a nice photo. Here is an excerpt:
If North Korea and the U.S. simply talk, and nothing comes of it, that raises the status of Kim Jong Un, who then would keep improving his missiles anyway. So if the U.S. goes ahead with the talks, you might rationally infer that the risk of war has gone up. Furthermore, there is the risk that Trump or Kim could feel humiliated by a summit that yielded nothing, again raising the chance of war or miscalculation leading to disaster.
In chess there is a concept known as “zugzwang,” or “compulsion to move.” It’s used to describe the position of a player with no good options who would prefer to do nothing at all. That’s not a possibility in chess, so the unfortunate player faces a situation in which all roads involve a deterioration of his position.
There is much more at the link, only one scenario being even somewhat optimistic.
Russia facts of the day
Vodka, circuses, and public libraries are in decline.
Russians love Lada (why?), microwaves, and IKEA. And contrary to what many people believe, the population is now growing.
On top of all that, Vladimir Kramnik is playing brilliantly in the Candidates’ Tournament in Berlin. I don’t know the time series on poisoning spies and double agents with WMD.
For the pointer I thank Ray Lopez.