Friday assorted links
1. Scott Alexander reviews Toby Ord’s The Precipice, about existential risk.
3. A critique of the Paycheck Protection Program — it might help already stable restaurants the most. See also this tweet storm.
4. Should we pivot to a service trade agenda?
5. Full paper assessing health care capacity in India.
6. Claims about Covid and the future economics of cultural institutions.
7. I could link to Matt Levine every day, but do read this one on liquidity transformation.
8. How is the cloud holding up? A good post.
9. Immunity segregation comes to Great Britain.
10. Robin Hanson on the variance in R0 and how hard it is to halt the spread of the virus.
11. New program for on-line “Night Owls” philosophy by Agnes Callard.
12. The true story of the toilet paper shortage: it’s not about hoarding, rather a shift of demand away from the commercial sector into the household sector (you are doing more “business” at home these days).
13. “U.S. ALCOHOL SALES INCREASE 55 PERCENT IN ONE WEEK AMID CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC.”
14. Fan, Jamison, and Larry Summers 2016 paper on the economics of a pandemic. I wrote at the end of the blog post: “In other words, in expected value terms an influenza pandemic is a big problem indeed. But since, unlike global warming, it does not fit conveniently into the usual social status battles which define our politics, it receives far less attention.”
15. Buying masks from China just got tougher.
16. How to produce greater capacity flexibility for hospitals.