Month: June 2020

1. Training the professional auctioneer, good story.

2. New economic history podcast.

3. Predictive performance of the IHME model: doesn’t beat the baseline forecast.

4. Early June case spikes from four different cities with four different reopening regimes.  Hmm.

5. Why hasn’t coronavirus been worse in Haiti?

6. MR readership much higher than TLS readership.  What a strange world we live in.

7. Dominic Cummings vs. NIMBY?

8. Ross is completely correct here (NYT).

A long-time reader asks for advice:

I’ve been a MR reader for years. It sounds like you’re concerned about cancel culture and the associated political situation. I’m from eastern europe and caught the tail end of communism. What’s happening now in the US terrifies me. It seems like every week I learn that someone I respect is being tried in a court of public opinion for crimes that didn’t exist six months ago.

I’m in Silicon Valley, and realistically it’s impossible to operate here without lying. And I’m not right wing either, I’ve always considered myself a liberal! Some people seem to be dealing with it all right, but having to maintain a facade really eats at me. I effectively have to self-quarantine in a political closet. I hate it. I never could have imagined that I would need to choose between truthful expression and career/friendships in America. There’s always some finesse in human interaction of course, but this is so qualitatively different it may as well be another country altogether.

Do you have any advice for how to act, survive, and thrive in this political climate? I don’t know how to navigate this at all.

Social media has messed with our minds. The madness of crowds used to be limited by geography, time, and transaction cost–all of which have been lessened by social media. As a result, the crowds are now bigger and madder. And our brains, which are finely tuned to listen to the crowd (meaning the tribe or village ala Dunbar’s number), are overwhelmed when the crowd is in the thousands or millions. We should discount signals which come at the cost of a tweet but we can’t and so the pressures to conform are intense. If your job isn’t protected, stay off social media or at least use a pseudonym. Even if you do nothing today, the crowd may come after you years later so you can never feel safe.

I wish I had better answers. Readers?

1. Deaths are still falling.  Including in some key states.  Don’t take this for granted (at all), but be accordingly suspicious of those who are not dealing with this fact in some manner.

2. Dick Cavett interviews James Baldwin.

3. China is now starting to use a vaccine on its military.

4. Miami fact of the day (NYT): “One-third of all patients admitted to the city’s main public hospital over the past two weeks after going to the emergency room for car-crash injuries and other urgent problems have tested positive for the coronavirus.”

5. Five-day course of Remdesivir will be priced at $2,340.  One-third more for insurers, cheaper in other countries.

6. Will higher ed just snap back?

7. Claims about virus mutation, and increased infectiousness (speculative, but at the very least an important caution about all the premature moralizing you are seeing.  I at least know I don’t know enough to judge this one, do the other commentators you are reading?).

1. Ross Douthat on fast-forwarding to 2030 (NYT).

2. DC region doing an actually fairly good job of containing coronavirus (so far).

3. Current immigration policy will be making us poorer.

4. People missing the early call on coronavirus.

5. “Thus, the happiness advantage favoring high-SES adults has expanded over the decades.“

Schwitzgebel and Rust famously found that professors of ethics are no more ethical than other professors. Peter Singer being perhaps a famous exception to the rule. In follow-up research Schwitzgebel and psychologist Fiery Cushman tried to find philosophical arguments to change people’s willingness to donate to charity. They were unable to find any. But perhaps they just weren’t good at coming up with effective philosophical arguments. Thus, they challenged moral philosophers and psychologists to a contest:

Can you write a philosophical argument that effectively convinces research participants to donate money to charity?

By a philosophical argument they meant an argument and not an appeal to pity or emotion. No pictures of people clubbing baby seals. The contest had 100 entrants which were winnowed down in a series of tests.

The test had people read the arguments and then decide how much of a promised payment they would they like to give to charity. An average of $2.58 was contributed to charity (of $10) in the control group (no argument). The best argument increased giving by 54% to $3.98. Not bad.

Here’s the argument which won:

Many people in poor countries suffer from a condition called trachoma. Trachoma is the major cause of preventable blindness in the world. Trachoma starts with bacteria that get in the eyes of children, especially children living in hot and dusty conditions where hygiene is poor. If not treated, a child with trachoma bacteria will begin to suffer from blurred vision and will gradually go blind, though this process may take many years. A very cheap treatment is available that cures the condition before blindness develops. As little as $25, donated to an effective agency, can prevent someone going blind later in life.

How much would you pay to prevent your own child becoming blind? Most of us would pay $25,000, $250,000, or even more, if we could afford it. The suffering of children in poor countries must matter more than one-thousandth as much as the suffering of our own child. That’s why it is good to support one of the effective agencies that are preventing blindness from trachoma, and need more donations to reach more people.

Now here’s the kicker. The winning argument was submitted by Peter Singer and Matthew Lindauer. Singer is clearly screwing with Schwitzgebel’s research!

You can read some of other effective arguments here. I don’t think it’s an accident that the winning argument was the shortest and also the least purely philosophical. I’m not saying Singer and Lindauer cheated, but compared to the other arguments the Singer-Lindauer argument is concrete and by making people think of their own children, likely to arouse emotion. That too is a lesson.