Month: April 2019
How is the Swachh Bharat Mission Really Going?
One of the goals of the Swachh Bharat or Clean India mission was to achieve an “open-defecation free” (ODF) India by 2 October 2019 (the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth). OD is a big problem in India contributing to child sickness, stunting and a host of permanent problems including lower IQs. As of 2011, half of Indian households didn’t have access to a latrine but since that time millions of latrines have been built and the government has encouraged (sometimes “vigorously”) latrine use.
Unfortunately, the close connection between the Swachh Bharat mission and Prime Minister Modi has made achieving the mission, or claiming to have achieved the mission, not just a political goal but a test of patriotism and support for Modi. The Swachh Bharat website, for example, proclaims that India is now 99% open defecation free, including 100% coverage in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Utter Pradesh and Bihar.
In fact, surveys from the RICE Institute reported in an article for the India Forum show that open defecation is still common:
In Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, states that had been declared ODF by the time of the survey, we found rural open defecation rates of about 50% and about 25%, respectively. The vast majority of villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have also been declared ODF; the quantitative survey found open defecation rates of approximately 40% and 60%, respectively, in these states (Gupta et al 2019).
How do villages, and eventually blocks, districts, and states get declared ODF despite high levels of open defecation? One reason is that ODF status is often declared where latrine coverage is, in fact, incomplete: about 30% of households in the four states we studied did not own a latrine. Another reason is that many people who own a latrine still defecate in the open. In fact, latrine use among latrine owners has not changed since 2014: one in four people who own a latrine in the 2018 survey do not use it (Gupta et al 2019).
Ambitious program need not reach their goals to be successful–progress has been made and Modi can take credit–but it’s dangerous when problems are declared solved in order to meet political timelines and narratives. Work remains to be done.
Filibuster sentences to ponder
These data reveal that, in half of the Congresses over the past two decades, successful filibustering minorities usually represented more people than the majorities they defeated.
That is from Benjamin Eidelson in Yale Law Review, note that he is covering only 1991-2010.
What Explains Labor’s Declining Share of Revenue in Major League Baseball?
Somehow I had missed this earlier paper by John Charles Bradbury:
Since the early-2000s, the share of revenue going to Major League Baseball players has been diminishing similar to the decline of labor’s share of revenue observed in the US economy. This study examines potential explanations for the decline in baseball, which may result from related factors and provide information relevant to explaining this macroeconomic trend. The results indicate that the value-added from non-player inputs, collective bargaining agreement terms, and related changes in the returns to winning contributed to the decline of players’ share of income. Competition from substitute foreign labor and physical capital are not associated with the decline in labor’s share of income in baseball.
There is also this sentence:
The decline in labor’s revenue share in MLB is consistent with changes in revenue share in the hospitality and leisure industry that experienced a decrease in labor’s share of income from 65.7 percent to 62.1 percent between 1987 and 2011 (Elsby, Hobijn, and Şahin 2013).
Another hypothesis I have heard is that baseball players are not nearly as good at, or as well-suited for, the use of social media, as compared say to the more visible basketball players. Another (quite speculative) claim is that sabermetrics has commoditized a lot of players and in turn lowered their bargaining power.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Andrea O’Sullivan reviews Big Business for Reason magazine: “In true Cowenesque fashion, the book starts out with a markedly contrarian premise that by the last page seems so evident that you wonder why it first felt outlandish at all. I expect that even the most dogged big business critic will feel just a little tenderer towards today’s titans by the end (whether they want to admit it or not).”
2. Boeing and innovation (NYT).
3. Interview with Preston McAfee.
My Conversation with Ed Boyden, MIT neuroscientist
Here is the transcript and audio, highly recommended, and for background here is Ed’s Wikipedia page. Here is one relevant bit for context:
COWEN: You’ve trained in chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, and neuroscience, correct?
BOYDEN: Yeah, I started college at 14, and I focused on chemistry for two years, and then I transferred to MIT, where then I switched into physics and electrical engineering, and that’s when I worked on quantum computing.
COWEN: Five areas, actually. Maybe more.
BOYDEN: Guess so.
COWEN: Should more people do that? Not the median student, but more people?
BOYDEN: It’s a good question.
And:
COWEN: Are we less creative if all the parts of our mind become allies? Maybe I’m afraid this will happen to me, that I have rebellious parts of my mind, and they force me to do more interesting things, or they introduce randomness or variety into my life.
BOYDEN: This is a question that I think is going to become more and more urgent as neurotechnology advances. Already there are questions about attention-focusing drugs like Ritalin or Adderall. Maybe they make people more focused, but are you sacrificing some of the wandering and creativity that might exist in the brain and be very important for not only personal productivity but the future of humanity?
I think what we’re realizing is that when you intervene with the brain, even with brain stimulation, you can cause unpredictable side effects. For example, there’s a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That’s actually an FDA-approved site for stimulation with noninvasive magnetic pulses to treat depression. But patients, when they’re stimulated here . . . People have done studies. It can also change things like trust. It can change things like driving ability.
There’s only so many brain regions, but there’s millions of things we do. Of course, intervening with one region might change many things.
And:
COWEN: What kind of students are you likely to hire that your peers would not hire?
BOYDEN: Well, I really try to get to know people at a deep level over a long period of time, and then to see how their unique background and interests might change the field for the better.
I have people in my group who are professional neurosurgeons, and then, as I mentioned, I have college dropouts, and I have people who . . . We recently published a paper where we ran the brain expansion process in reverse. So take the baby diaper polymer, add water to expand it, and then you can basically laser-print stuff inside of it, and then collapse it down, and you get a piece of nanotechnology.
The co–first author of that paper doesn’t have a scientific laboratory background. He was a professional photographer before he joined my group. But we started talking, and it turns out, if you’re a professional photographer, you know a lot of very practical chemistry. It turns out that our big demo — and why the paper got so much attention — was we made metal nanowires, and the way we did it was using a chemistry not unlike what you do in photography, which is a silver chemistry.
And this:
COWEN: Let’s say you had $10 billion or $20 billion a year, and you would control your own agency, and you were starting all over again, but current institutions stay in place. What would you do with it? How would you structure your grants? You’re in charge. You’re the board. You do it.
Finally:
COWEN: If you’re designing architecture for science, what do you do? What do you change? What would you improve? Because presumably most of it is not designed for science. Maybe none of it is.
BOYDEN: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, actually, lately. There are different philosophies, like “We should have open offices so everybody can see and talk to each other.” Or “That’s wrong. You should have closed spaces so people can think and have quiet time.” What I think is actually quite interesting is this concept that maybe neither is the right approach. You might want to think about having sort of an ecosystem of environments.
My group — we’re partly over at the Media Lab, which has a lot of very open environments, and our other part of the group is in a classical sort of neuroscience laboratory with offices and small rooms where we park microscopes and stuff like that. I actually get a lot of productivity out of switching environments in a deliberate way.
There is much more of interest at the link.
Terrorism at GMU and the Very Long Arm of the Law
I found this email from the GMU Police about GMU and terrorism surprising and somewhat disturbing:
On Wednesday, March 20, 2019, Mason Police informed the Mason community about an individual who had threatened harm to the University in a video posted on social media. At the time of the threats, the suspect was located in Morocco and was not an immediate or credible threat to the Mason community. However, because the suspect’s actions violated Virginia criminal law, Mason Police secured five felony warrants of arrest related to bomb threats against the University. Additionally, Mason Police worked with Interpol and several federal law enforcement agencies to track the suspect through several countries in the Middle East before he was ultimately arrested on the Virginia warrants while trying to enter Israel.
The suspect, Nassim Darwich, was extradited back to the US through JFK International Airport in New York City. Yesterday, Mason Police were in New York to take custody of Mr. Darwich and return him to Virginia. He is currently in the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center where he is being held on $100,000.00 secured bond.
Mason Police would like to thank Interpol, the US Customs Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the FBI/NY for assisting Mason Police with monitoring and arresting the suspect. We also appreciate the Mason community members who saw Darwich’s internet-based threats and acted to alert Mason Police. If anyone has any additional information about this case, please give the Mason Police Department a call at (703) 993-2810.
The email was from April 5 so a university police department was able to reach out to the Middle East, arrest and extradite an individual to the United States in about two weeks. Impressive. As a potential target, I guess I am pleased. But it’s somewhat frightening to see how long the arm of the law has become, at least for terrorism related crimes.
Sentences to ponder
…modest genetic selection/concentration was evident for teen pregnancy and poor educational outcomes, suggesting that neighbourhood effects for these outcomes should be interpreted with care.
Note however:
Findings argue against genetic selection/concentration as an explanation for neighbourhood gradients in obesity and mental health problems.
Here is the full piece, via K.
Are big projects up and running again?
Amazon’s plan to launch thousands of internet satellites to connect billions of people around the world represents a serious and underappreciated entrant in the space business, multiple analysts and industry executives told CNBC.
Here is the full story. And for Facebook and Africa:
The company is in talks to develop an underwater data cable that would encircle the continent, according to people familiar with the plans, an effort aimed at driving down its bandwidth costs and making it easier for the social media giant to sign up more users.
Both developments promise to contribute to the central achievement of our age, namely tying people to information, and to other people, at a hitherto unprecedented scale, mobile devices included of course.
The best argument for the gold standard
No, I do not favor a gold standard, for reasons explained in this Bloomberg column. Still, it is sad/funny to watch the mood affiliation circus of those trying to suggest, in more or less the same breath, that Trump’s Fed picks are dangerous and terrible, and also that the gold standard is the worst idea ever. Here is one point of mine:
Historical data indicates that industrial production volatility was not higher before 1914, when the U.S. was on the gold standard, compared to after 1947, when it mostly wasn’t. And there are similar results for the volatility of unemployment. That’s not quite an argument for the gold standard, but it should cause opponents of the gold standard to think twice. Whatever the imperfections of a gold standard might be, monetary authorities make a lot of mistakes, too.
And here is the closer:
Most generally, I still think central bank governance can do a better job than a gold-based system that sometimes creates excess deflationary pressures.
Nonetheless, the contemporary world is always testing my belief in central banking. Exactly how will matters unfold when so many world leaders are not behaving as responsibly as they should? Might that irresponsibility seep into monetary policy? After all, populations are aging and debt is accumulating. Surely it is reasonable to worry that some of these governments will seek to monetize their debts and move toward excessively easy money.
Oh, but wait — I forgot one big new argument in favor of a gold standard: President Trump himself. Perhaps his management of central bank affairs is somewhat … erratic? Might it not be a good idea to have the operation of monetary policy protected by a greater reliance on rules? My personal preference is for a nominal GDP rule, but the irony is this: At the end of the day, the advocates of the gold standard, and their possible presence on the Federal Reserve Board, are themselves the best argument for … the gold standard.
Interesting throughout.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Will space colonization be fully automated?
3. Earlier 20th century criticisms of the Electoral College, maybe not what you think.
4. “Two-thirds of roads in Sweden are privately operated and managed by local Private Road Associations (PRAs).” Link here.
5. High-speed rail Addis Ababa to Djibouti (NYT, recommended).
Wall Street Journal reviews *Big Business*
By George Melloan, here is one bit:
So Mr. Cowen’s book is timely, and his writing style is a refreshing contrast to the strident left-wing declamations that are so common today. He is calm and conversational, splashing cool water on the firebrands. He writes: “All of the criticisms one might mount against the corporate form—some of which are valid—pale in contrast to two straightforward and indeed essential virtues. First, business makes most of the stuff we enjoy and consume. Second, business is what gives most of us jobs. The two words that follow most immediately from the world of business are ‘prosperity’ and ‘opportunity.’”
Here is the full review, very well done in my admittedly biased view.
Better Police, Less Crime in Camden, NJ
Camden NJ has thrice been named the most dangerous city in America. Camden suffered not only from high crime but from poor policing under a rigid union contract. Jim Epstein described the situation in 2014:
Camden’s old city-run police force abused its power and abrogated its duties. It took Camden cops one hour on average to respond to 911 calls, or more than six times the national average. They didn’t show up for work 30 percent of the time, and an inordinate number of Camden police were working desk jobs. A union contract required the city to entice officers with extra pay to get them to accept crime-fighting shifts outside regular business hours. Last year, the city paid $3.5 million in damages to 88 citizens who saw their convictions overturned because of planted evidence, fabricated reports, and other forms of police misconduct.
In 2012, the murder rate in Camden was about five times that of neighboring Philadelphia—and about 18 times the murder rate in New York City.
In May of 2013, however, the entire police department was disbanded nullifying the union contract and an entirely new county police department was put into place.
The old city-run force was rife with cops working desk jobs, which Cordero saw as a waste of money and manpower. He and Thomson hired civilians to replace them and put all uniformed officers on crime fighting duty. Boogaard says she didn’t see a single cop during the first year she lived in the city. “Now I see them all the time and they make friendly conversation.” Pastor Merrill says the old city-run force gave off a “disgruntled” air, and the morale of Metro police is noticeably better. “I want my police to be happy,” he says.
Without the expensive union contracts the new force added officers and also introduced more technology such as Shotspotter. So what has been the result? Violent crime is down and clearances are up (charts from Daniel Bier, who also notes that the fall in violent crime and increase in convictions far exceed that in comparison to New Jersey more generally or Philadelphia.)
As I have long argued, we need more police and better policing in America.
Genes, income, and happiness
Significant differences between genetic correlations indicated that, the genetic variants associated with income are related to better mental health than those linked to educational attainment (another commonly-used marker of SEP). Finally, we were able to predict 2.5% of income differences using genetic data alone in an independent sample. These results are important for understanding the observed socioeconomic inequalities in Great Britain today.
That is from a new paper by W. David Hill, et.al. And from Abdel Abdellouai’s summary:
Educational attainment shows a larger genetic overlap with subjective wellbeing than IQ does (rgs = .11 & .03, respectively), while income shows a larger genetic overlap with subjective wellbeing than both education or IQ (rg = .32).
All via Richard Harper.
Monday assorted links
Using Nature to Understand Nurture
An excellent new working paper uses genetic markers for educational attainment to track students through the 
high school math curriculum to better understand the role of nature, nurture and their interaction in math attainment. The paper begins with an earlier genome wide association study (GWAS) of 1.1 million people that found that a polygenic score could be used to (modestly) predict college completion rates. Panel (a) in the figure at right shows how college completion is five times higher in individuals with an education polygenic score (ed-PGS) in the highest quintile compared to individuals with scores in the lowest quintile; panel b shows that ed-PGS is at least as good as household income at predicting college attainment but not quite as good as knowing the educational level of the parents.
Of the million plus individuals with ed-PGS, some 3,635 came from European-heritage individuals who were entering US high school students in 1994-1995 (the Add Health sample). Harden, Domingue et al. take the ed-PGS of these individuals and match them up with data from their high school curricula and their student transcripts.
What they find is math attainment is a combination of nature and nurture. First, students with higher ed-PGS are more likely to be tracked into advanced math classes beginning in grade 9. (Higher ed-PGS scores are also associated with higher socio-economic status families and schools but these differences persist even after controlling for family and school SES or looking only at variation within schools.) Higher ed-PGS also predicts math persistence in the following years. The following diagram tracks high ed-PGS (blue) with lower ed-PGS (brown) over high school curricula/years and post high-school. Note that by grade 9 there is substantial tracking and some cross-over but mostly (it appears to me) in high-PGS students who fall off-track (note in particular the big drop off of blue students from Pre-Calculus to None in Grade 12).
Nature, however, is modified by nurture. “Students had higher returns to their genetic propensities for educational attainment in higher-status schools.” Higher ed-PGS students in lower SES schools were less likely to be tracked into higher-math classes and lower-SES students were less likely to persist in such classes.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that higher-SES schools are uniformly better without understanding the tradoffs. Lower SES schools have fewer high-ability students which makes it difficult to run advanced math classes. Perhaps the lesson here is that bigger schools are better, particularly bigger schools in poorer SES districts. A big school in a low SES district can still afford an advanced math curriculum.
The authors also suggest that more students could take advanced math classes. Even among the top 2% of students as measured by ed-PGS only 31% took Calculus in the high-SES schools and only 24% in the low SES schools.It’s not clear to me, however, that high-PGS necessitates high math achievement. Notice that many high-PGS students take pre-calc in Grade 11 but then no math in Grade 12 but they still go on to college and masters degrees. Lots of highly educated people are not highly-educated in math. Still it wouldn’t be a surprise if there were more math talent in the pool.
There is plenty to criticize in the paper. The measure of SES status by school (average mother’s educational attainment) leaves something to be desired. Moreover, there are indirect genetic effects, which the authors understand and discuss but don’t have the data to test. An indirect genetic effect occurs when a gene shared by parent and child has no direct effect on educational capacity (i.e. it’s not a gene for say neuronal development) but has an indirect “effect” because it is correlated with something that parent’s with that gene do to modify the environment of their children. Nevertheless, genes do have direct effects and this paper forces us to acknowledge that behavioral genetics has implications for policy.
Should every student be genotyped and tracked? On the one hand, that sounds horrible. On the other hand, it would identify more students of high ability, especially from low SES backgrounds. Genetics tells us something about a student’s potential and shouldn’t we try to maximize potential?
For homework, work out the equilibrium for inequality, rewatch the criminally underrated GATTACA and for an even more horrifying picture of the future, pay careful attention to the Mirrlees model of optimal income taxation.