Month: November 2019
My Conversation with Ted Gioia
Here is the audio and transcript, the chat centered around music, including Ted’s new and fascinating book Music: A Subversive History. We talk about music and tech, the Beatles, which songs and performers we are embarrassed to like, whether jazz still can be cool, Ted’s family background, why restaurants are noisier, why the blues are disappearing, Elton John, which countries are underrated for their musics, whether anyone loves the opera, whether musical innovation is still possible, and much much more. Here are some excerpts:
GIOIA: …Spotify still isn’t profitable. I believe Spotify will become profitable, but they’re going to do it by putting the squeeze on people. Musicians will suffer even more, probably, in the future than they have in the past. What’s good for Spotify is not good for the whole music ecosystem.
Let me make one more point here. I think it’s very important. If you go back a few years ago, there was a value chain in music — started with the musician, worked for the record label. The records went to the record distributor. They went to the retailer, who sold the record to the consumer. At that point, everybody in that chain had a vested interest in a healthy music ecosystem in which people enjoyed songs. The more people enjoyed songs, the better business was for everybody.
That chain has been broken now. Apple would give away songs for free to sell devices. They don’t care about the viability of the music subeconomy. For them, it could be a loss leader. Google doesn’t care about music. They would give music away for free to sell ads. In fact, they do that on YouTube.
The fundamental change here is, you now have a distribution system for music in which some of the players do not have a vested interest in the broader musical experience and ecosystem. This is tremendously dangerous, and that’s the real reason why I fear the growth of streaming, is because the people involved in streaming don’t like music.
And:
COWEN: Do you think music today is helping the sexual revolution or hurting it? Speaking of Prince…
GIOIA: It’s very interesting. There’s market research and focus groups about how people use music in their day-to-day life. Take, for example, this: you’re going to bring a date back to your apartment for a romantic dinner. So what do you worry about?
Well, the first thing I have to worry about is, my place is a mess. I’ve got to clean it up. That’s number one. The second thing you worry about is, what food am I going to fix? But number three on people’s list — when you interview them — is the music because they understand the music is going to seal the deal. If there’s going to be something really romantic, that music is essential.
People will agonize for hours over which music to play. I think that we miss this. People view music as distance from people’s everyday life. But in fact, people put music to work every day, and one of the premier ways they do it is in romance.
COWEN: Let’s say you were not married, and you’re 27 years old, and you’re having a date over. What music do you put on in 2019 under those conditions?
GIOIA: It’s got to always be Sinatra.
COWEN: Because that is sexier? It’s generally appealing? It’s not going to offend anyone? Why?
GIOIA: I must say up front, I am no expert on seduction, so you’re now getting me out of my main level of expertise. But I would think that if you were a seducer, you would want something that was romantic on the surface but very sexualized right below that, and no one was better at these multilayered interpretations of lyrics than Frank Sinatra.
I always call them the Derrida of pop singing because there was always the surface level and various levels that you could deconstruct. And if you are planning for that romantic date, hey, go for Frank.
There is much more at the link, interesting throughout, and again here is Ted’s new book.
Revisiting NSA Spying
In 2013 in light of the Snowden revelations about NSA spying I wrote, Did Obama Spy on Mitt Romney?
Did Obama spy on Mitt Romney? As recently as a few weeks ago if anyone had asked me that question I would have consigned them to a right (or left) wing loony bin. Today, the only loonies are those who think the question unreasonable. Indeed, in one sense the answer is clearly yes. Do I think Obama ordered the NSA to spy on Romney for political gain? No. Some people claim that President Obama didn’t even know about the full extent of NSA spying. Indeed, I imagine that President Obama was almost as surprised as the rest of us when he first discovered that we live in a mass surveillance state in which billions of emails, phone calls, facebook metadata and other data are being collected.
The answer is yes, however, if we mean did the NSA spy on political candidates like Mitt Romney. Did Mitt Romney ever speak with Angela Merkel, whose phone the NSA bugged, or any one of the dozens of her advisers that the NSA was also bugging? Did Romney exchange emails with Mexican President Felipe Calderon? Were any of Romney’s emails, photos, texts or other metadata hoovered up by the NSA’s break-in to the Google and Yahoo communications links? Almost certainly the answer is yes.
As I read the situation, mass government surveillance has now become accepted in America, as in China. This bit remains relevant:
Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not. Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels.
“And what a decade it was”
From Alex X.:
With the decade coming to a close, I would be curious on everyone’s favorite of the decade [gives list of categories]:
Without too much pondering, here is what comes to mind right away:
Film: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or A Touch of Sin. Might Winter Sleep by next? It was probably the best decade ever for foreign movies, the worst decade ever for Hollywood movies (NYT).
Blockbuster/action film: Transformers 4? Big screen only, live or die by CGI!
Album: Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Single: I don’t see an obvious, non-derivative pick here that really stands out. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” probably is the mainstream choice, but do I ever go over to the stereo to put it on? Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” is another option, but is it such a big step beyond Prince? Lorde or Beyonce? LCD Soundsystem seems more about the entire album, same for Frank Ocean. Something from Kanye’s Yeezus? To pull a dark horse option out of the hat, how about Gillian Welch, “The Way It Goes“? Or Death Grips “Giving Bad People Good Ideas“? I’ve spent enough time on Twitter that I have to opt for that one.
TV Show: Srugim, Borgen, The Americans.
Single Season: Selections from same, you know which seasons.
Book Fiction: The Ferrante quadrology and Houllebecq’s Submission.
Book Non Fiction: Knausgaard, volumes I and II.
Athlete of the Decade: Stephen Curry or Lebron James.
What are your picks?
Tuesday assorted links
Can we spend another $52 trillion without raising middle class taxes?
The question seems like a joke, right? Yet because so much of our elite media class wants Elizabeth Warren to win, they are contorting themselves into every possible direction to make this one sound coherent. It is not a question of whether total nominal expenditures on health care go up or down, but rather of thinking through incidence and opportunity cost and where the real burdens of the plan will fall. Those are the core themes of my Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Another part of the plan is to pay lower prices — 70% lower — for branded prescription drugs. That is supposed to save about $1.7 trillion, but again focus on which opportunities are lost. Lower drug prices will mean fewer new drugs are developed. There is good evidence that pharmaceuticals are among the most cost-effective ways of saving human lives, so the resulting higher mortality and illness might be especially severe.
And the close:
Warren’s proposals, when all is said and done, are best viewed not as a way of paying for her program but as a series of admissions about just how expensive it would be. Whether or not you call those taxes, they are very real burdens — and many of them will end up falling on the middle class.
By the way, here is a good NYT summary of Warren’s financing plan. Here is a good Maxim Jacobs tweet:
It’s really hard to pick out which part of her plan is most insane?: – Lowering brand drug pricing by 70%? – CMS paying specialists less money – Taxing unrealized capital gains – Claim hiring more IRS agents will raise $2.3 trillion – “Not one penny in middle-class tax increases”
Here is more from Peter Suderman.
The Global Kidney Exchange Programme
In my WSJ review of Al Roth’s excellent book Who Gets What—and Why I wrote about Roth’s proposal to extend the idea of kidney swaps globally:
It’s often the case that a living donor is willing to give a kidney to a loved one, but the loved one can’t accept it because of immunity mismatch. But if a pair of such mismatched donors could be found (call them A and A´ and B and B´), then perhaps a match could be found by a crisscross pairing: Donor A could give to recipient B´ and donor B could give to recipient A´, thus solving the mismatch problem and saving lives.
…Today such multi-way exchanges are becoming common….Mr. Roth, however, wants to go further….why not open U.S. transplants to the world? Imagine that A and A´ are Nigerian while B and B´ are American. Nigeria has virtually no transplant surgery or dialysis available, so in Nigeria patient A’ will die for certain. But if we offered a free transplant to him, and received a kidney for an American patient in return, two lives would be saved.
The plan sounds noble but expensive. Yet remember, Mr. Roth says, “removing an American patient from dialysis saves Medicare a quarter of a million dollars. That’s more than enough to finance two kidney transplants.” So offering a free transplant to the Nigerian patient can save money and lives.
It’s hard to think of a better example of gains from trade (or a better PR coup for the U.S. on the world stage).
Recently, Rees et al., (including Roth) announced the first such global kidney exchange:
We report the 1‐year experience of an initial Filipino pair, whose recipient was transplanted in the United states with an American donor’s kidney at no cost to him. The Filipino donor donated to an American in the United States through a kidney exchange chain. Follow‐up care and medications in the Philippines were supported by funds from the United States. We show that the logistical obstacles in this approach, although considerable, are surmountable.
Naturally, some people aren’t happy because of “ethical” objections. Minerva, Savulescu and Peter Singer write in defense of the program:
Lurking behind all the arguments against the GKE is the assumption that people who are poor are incapable of autonomous choices. So, if they appear to choose to act in ways that benefit not only themselves, but people in HICs, they must have been coerced, exploited, or commodified.
…Poverty does not necessarily make a person unable to choose to donate a kidney to a loved one, nor does it make someone incapable of weighing the pros and cons of an option like that offered by the GKE. Poverty does narrow down the options available to people, and often forces them to settle for an option that is not as good as a wealthy person would choose. That, however, is irrelevant to the ethics of the GKE if that programme provides a better option to patients in LMICs who need a kidney than any other option currently available to them.
…It would be tragic if such misguided objections were to prevent the GKE from realising its potential to reduce suffering and save the lives of rich and poor patients alike.
Hat tip: Frank McCormick.
Harvard sentences to ponder
We show that Harvard encourages applications from many students who effectively have no chance of being admitted, and that this is particularly true for African Americans.
Here is the whole abstract, by Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and Tyler Ransom:
Over the past 20 years, elite colleges in the US have seen dramatic increases in applications. We provide context for part of this trend using detailed data on Harvard University that was unsealed as part of the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit. We show that Harvard encourages applications from many students who effectively have no chance of being admitted, and that this is particularly true for African Americans. African American applications soared beginning with the Class of 2009, with the increase driven by those with lower SAT scores. Yet there was little change in the share of admits who were African American. We show that this change in applicant behavior resulted in substantial convergence in the overall admissions rates across races yet no change in the large cross-race differences in admissions rates for high-SAT applicants.
And from the paper’s conclusion:
If the goal of recruiting African Americans is not simply to increase the diversity of matriculants, but also to achieve racial balance in the admit pool and/or racial balance in admit rates, then the policy could be deemed a success. As an example, admit rates for African American applicants were twice as large as admit rates for Asian American applicants in 2000, but by 2017 were approximately the same. Why Harvard might careabout the racial distribution of admit rates and applicants is not obvious. What is clear is that each year there are a significant number of African American high school students who have a potentially false impression about their chances of being admitted to Harvard.
Here is the full paper. And here is a recent paper by Howell, Hurwitz, and Smith, with related results.
The effect of district attourneys on criminal justice outcomes
In the United States, elected district attorneys’ offices prosecute over 85% of all felony cases, but we know little about their effect on local criminal justice outcomes. Using a newly-collected dataset of district attorney elections, I show that Republican district attorneys lead to a 18-21% increase in new prison admissions in the two years following their election, while nonwhite district attorneys lead to a 10% decline. In both cases, there are no significant effects on local crime or arrest rates. These results show that the identity of the local district attorney is an important determinant of incarceration rates.
Here is the paper, by Sam Krumholz, on the job market this year from UCSD, that is not his job market paper, here is his full portfolio, public economics and law and economics, to me one of the more interesting candidates this year.
Monday assorted links
1. WSJ covers the Sahm rule and Claudia Sahm.
2. Was the Industrial Revolution caused by a combinatorial explosion? One author of that piece is Abigail Devereaux, now on the job market, and here is the full list of GMU job market candidates.
The Prescription Escalator
Ask anyone and they will tell you that their prescription costs are rising. But generic drug prices are falling (also here) and generics are 80-90 percent of all prescriptions. Moreover, although branded drugs are expensive total out-of-pocket costs for the population as a whole are flat or even decreasing as Michael Mandel points out:
[A] May 2019 research report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that average out-of-pocket spending for prescribed medications, among persons who obtained at least one prescribed medication, declined from $327 in 2009 to $238 by 2016, a decrease of 27 percent. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey shows that average household spending on prescription drugs fell by 11% between 2013 and 2018.
Moreover, OECD data shows that average out- of-pocket spending on prescribed medicines in the United States ($143 per capita in 2017) is actually lower than countries such as Canada ($144), Korea ($156), Norway ($178), and Switzerland ($215).
So are people simply mistaken about what they are experiencing? Not quite. Mandel uses the metaphor of the prescription escalator to explain the apparent paradox:
It turns out that an escalator is the appropriate model for prescription drug costs for individuals. As people get older, they unwillingly ride the prescription escalator, with their average spending on prescription drugs rising by about 5-6% per year. This figure assumes no change in the underlying price of drugs. Rather, people fill more prescriptions as they age.
In other words, every individual experiences an increase in prescription costs as they age even though for the population as a whole prescription prices are flat or falling–a form of Simpson’s paradox. The driver of higher costs is usage not price. People aged 65-74 have on average 25 (!) prescriptions to fill, more than two and half times as many as people aged 25-34 (about 9 per year).
Understanding the prescription escalator is important because regulating drug prices–aside from being a bad idea–won’t solve the perceived problem.
…even if drug reform efforts were successful and there were no more increases in drug costs, every individual would still face a 5.6% increase each year in drug spending as they got older. That would total 30% after five years, and 70% after ten years, across the board.These are enormous increases.
Indeed, the prescription escalator is a sign of success. If drugs weren’t successful we wouldn’t buy more of them when we were older and sicker and costs wouldn’t rise.
Opioids and labor market participation
The onset of the opioid crisis coincided with the beginning of nearly 15 years of declining labor force participation in the US. Furthermore, the areas most affected by the crisis have generally experienced the worst deteriorations in labor market conditions. Despite these time series and cross-sectional correlations, there is little agreement on the causal effect of opioids on labor market outcomes. I provide new evidence on this question by leveraging a natural experiment which sharply decreased the supply of hydrocodone, one of the most commonly prescribed opioids in the US. I identify the causal impact of this decrease by exploiting pre-existing variation in the extent to which different types of opioids were prescribed across geographies to compare areas more and less exposed to the treatment over time. I find that areas with larger reductions in opioid prescribing experienced relative improvements in employment-to-population ratios, driven primarily by an increase in labor force participation. The regression estimates indicate that a 10 percent decrease in hydrocodone prescriptions increased the employment-to-population ratio by about 0.7 percent. These findings suggest that policies which reduce opioid misuse may also have positive spillovers on the labor market.
That is from a job market paper by David Beheshti at the University of Texas at Austin.
What I’ve been reading
C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, is a beautifully written history of exactly what the title and subtitle claim.
Also noteworthy is Richard Brookhiser, Give Me Liberty: A History of America’s Exceptional Essays, a kind of companion volume. Can you beat the title, especially given world trends today?
Eric Schwitzgebel, A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures. Collected essays, interesting throughout, and among other points Schwitzgebel shows that ethicists do not in fact behave better than other human beings, higher rates of vegetarianism aside.
I do not have time to read David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, but based on a browse it is 918 pp. of substance on everything from the Polynesians to the monsoon to sailing across the Atlantic, and then some.
I am a big fan of Yuval Levin, and now he has a new forthcoming book A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.
Sunday assorted links
*Terminator: Dark Fate*
Much of the movie is set in Mexico, to excellent effect, and arguably the main lines of the plot mirror some themes from Nahua culture and history:
“…the Aztec saw themselves as “the People of the Sun,” whose divine duty was to wage cosmic war in order to provide the sun with his tlaxcaltiliztli (“nourishment”). Without it, the sun would disappear from the heavens.” Link here.
Quetzalcoatl descending into the land of the dead, and the breaking of the bones.
“…a sibling rivalry grew between Quetzalcoatl and his brother the mighty sun, who Quetzalcoatl knocked from the sky with a stone club.”
“…When the Aztecs sacrificed people to Huitzilopochtli (the god with warlike aspects) the victim would be placed on a sacrificial stone. The priest would then cut through the abdomen with an obsidian or flint blade.” Link here.
Overall the movie reminded me of Rogue One. Rogue One did not have the freshness or originality of the core Star Wars movies, but it was a member of the actual franchise in a way that some of the later sequels were not, and thus a refreshing reminder of what the whole thing was all about in the first place.
The Causal Effect of Cannabis on Cognition
Does smoking lots of pot make you dumb or do dumb people smoke lots of pot? Mostly, the latter. Ross et al. (2019) write:
Although many researchers have concluded that cannabis causes impairment in cognition, there are alternative explanations. First, poor cognitive functioning is a risk factor for substance use. Specifically, EF measured in childhood predicts later substance use and substance use disorders (SUDs; Ridenour et al., 2009). Thus, studies need to control for prior cognitive functioning (Meier et al., 2012). Second, poor cognitive functioning and cannabis use may also be related, not because one causes the other, but because they share common risk factors, like lower SES (Rogeberg, 2013). Lynskey and Hall (2000) proposed that early use is likely to occur in a social context characterized by affiliations with substance using peers, poor school attendance, and precocious adoption of adult roles including dropping out of school; such an effect on educational participation may also influence later cognitive functioning.
Indeed–twin studies which control for genetics and family environment–do not find that cannabis reduces cognition:
Lyons et al. (2004) examined MZ twins discordant for use 20 years after regular use, and found a significant difference between twins on only one of 50+ measures of cognition. Second, Jackson et al. (2014) found no evidence for a dose-dependent relationship or significant differences in cognition among MZ twins discordant for cannabis use. Similarly, Meier et al. (2017) found no evidence for differences in cognition among a combined sample of MZ and DZ twins discordant for cannabis dependence or use frequency. Thus, quasi-experimental, co-twin control designs have yielded little evidence that cannabis causes poorer cognition.
Ross et al. run a similar study but testing also for executive function skills–the ability to plan, focus, control impulses and so forth which are skills related to IQ but distinct–and they conclude:
Families with greater cannabis use showed poorer general cognitive ability. Yet within families, twins with higher use rarely had lower cognitive scores. Overall, there was little evidence for causal effect of cannabis on cognition.
Hat tip: The excellent Kevin Lewis.