Month: July 2020
The Ivy League culture that is Major League Baseball
But the rise of analytics also has resulted in another massive shift: an influx of white, male graduates of Ivy League schools and other prestigious universities into teams’ front offices. In a data analysis conducted by ESPN, the percentage of Ivy League graduates holding an organization’s top baseball operations decision-making position — which, depending on the club, could be its president, vice president or general manager — has risen from just 3% in 2001 to 43% today; while the percentage of graduates from U.S. News & World Report’s list of the top 25 colleges — both universities and liberal arts schools — holding the same positions has risen from 24% to 67%.
Here is more from ESPN, via Adam Minter. How do you think other economic sectors will be evolving? And what would Malcolm Gladwell say?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Who funds WHO?
2. “Rather than reflect current practical realities, the CDC’s Atlanta address apparently stems from concerns about mosquito breeding patterns back in the 1940’s.” A good look at why the CDC has so many political problems.
3. What different people have learned from Conversations with Tyler.
4. Ross Douthat on cancel culture, recommended (NYT).
5. For Covid deaths four weeks out, some models predict they will go down, other models predict they will go up. And here are some related Arizona disputes (Bloomberg).
Rewatching *The French Connection*
I had not seen this 1971 movie since I was thirteen or so, and I was startled by how well I remembered the famous “subway scene.” This time around, it struck me much more as a portrait of the decline of New York City than as a plot-driven vehicle per se. “Popeye” (Gene Hackman) has no back story or love interest whatsoever, so I viewed this as a tale of how the dysfunctionality of New York simply was absorbing everything in its wake. It is perhaps the best movie to view to understand just how much NYC has improved, and if you click on the top link you can see they were not just filming in dumpster bin sites but rather in the heart of Manhattan.
It is striking how tacky, and indeed poor, the “rich people” appear to be when the movie is trying to make a point about income inequality. The critique of “the War on Drugs,” as it later became known, is ahead of its time. The shots of Marseille are lovely.
It is hard to believe they almost cast Jackie Gleason in the lead.
Recommended.
Unbundling disability rights
From my email:
My name is Max Grozovsky. I’m an economics student at the University of Delaware (until I finish a few more papers and can start my life) and a fan of your blog/column.
Thanks a lot for using your platform to elevate disability rights. I hope you’ll write more on the topic going forward, perhaps mentioning supported decision-making mechanisms which have been touted by the National Council on Disability as alternatives to guardianship that actually help people rather than bundle and strip their rights wholesale based on the canard that incapacity in one area implies incapacity in an unrelated one.
Also, since you (or is it someone else?) sporadically post on Islamic architecture/history, here’s my favorite nonficiton book, unsolicited.
When did average end?
There was a dramatic negative structural break in college graduates’ employment rates, beginning around the 2005 entry cohort, that shows no sign of abating.
Here is the full NBER paper from Jesse Rothstein.
Monday assorted links
1. An unusual and indeed very positive book review, of a book about China.
2. South Africa reinstates alcohol ban.
3. Smart piece on why cancel culture is not so bad today, the reader who sent it in insisted that I not mention/thank him by name.
5. Celine Halioua on tech vs. biotech.
What should I ask Matt Yglesias?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part on his new forthcoming book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. While I have not yet read it, I strongly expect it will be excellent.
And to be clear, this will be the conversation with Matt I want to have, not the one that you might think you wish to hear.
So what should I ask?
Another attempt to address the Fermi paradox — aestivation
According to a research paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, extraterrestrials are sleeping while they wait. In the paper, authors from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and Milan Cirkovic argue that the universe is too hot right now for advanced, digital civilizations to make the most efficient use of their resources. The solution: Sleep and wait for the universe to cool down, a process known as aestivating (like hibernation but sleeping until it’s colder).
And:
The universe appears to be cooling down on its own. Over the next trillions of years, as it continues to expand and the formation of new stars slows, the background radiation will reduce to practically zero. Under those conditions, Sandberg and Cirkovic explain, this kind of artificial life would get “tremendously more done.” Tremendous isn’t an understatement, either. The researchers calculate that by employing such a strategy, they could achieve up to 1030 times more than if done today. That’s a 1 with 30 zeroes after it.
Here is the full article, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Our regulatory state is failing us, antibodies edition
It might be the next best thing to a coronavirus vaccine.
Scientists have devised a way to use the antibody-rich blood plasma of COVID-19 survivors for an upper-arm injection that they say could inoculate people against the virus for months.
Using technology that’s been proven effective in preventing other diseases such as hepatitis A, the injections would be administered to high-risk healthcare workers, nursing home patients, or even at public drive-through sites — potentially protecting millions of lives, the doctors and other experts say.
The two scientists who spearheaded the proposal — an 83-year-old shingles researcher and his counterpart, an HIV gene therapy expert — have garnered widespread support from leading blood and immunology specialists, including those at the center of the nation’s COVID-19 plasma research.
But the idea exists only on paper. Federal officials have twice rejected requests to discuss the proposal, and pharmaceutical companies — even acknowledging the likely efficacy of the plan — have declined to design or manufacture the shots, according to a Times investigation. The lack of interest in launching development of immunity shots comes amid heightened scrutiny of the federal government’s sluggish pandemic response.
Here is more from the LA Times, substantive throughout, via Anecdotal.
What is the future of the intellectual right?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. I suggest it will take three major forms, namely anti-China, pro-internet as a communications medium (as an offset to left-wing media), and dislike of the Left, most of all the latter. Note these are predictions rather than normative claims about what should happen. Here is one excerpt:
Last and perhaps most significant, the intellectual right will dislike the left. It pretty much does already, but the antagonism will grow. Opposition to political correctness and cancel culture, at least in their left-wing versions, will become the most important defining view. As my colleague Bryan Caplan succinctly put it four years ago: “Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist.”
The intensity of this dislike will mean that, within right-wing circles, free speech will prosper. As long as you take care to signal your dislike of the left, you will be allowed to hold many other heterodox views without being purged or penalized.
If you are on the Left, note that it does not suffice to dislike the Right, you have to dislike most parts of the Left as well (why is that? Can you model this?).
I also consider social conservatism, libertarianism, communitarianism, and Sam’s Club Republicanism as possible alternative directions for the intellectual Right. The entire column repays careful study.
Sunday assorted links
1. As I had promised I would report, there is now an uptick in the seven day moving average for Covid-19 deaths, take a look. Here is a claim that the increase is a reporting spike, due to previously unreported past deaths. “54% of deaths reported in the week of July 11 ( if her data is correct) actually occurred over 2 months earlier.” At the present time I am unable to confirm the actual distribution of numbers one way or the other — opinions and leads welcome!
3. Thread on the new Klein and Pettis book.
4. Is Shostakovich overrated or underrated? (I say underrated.)
5. Markets in everything: Meet the company that sells your lost airplane luggage, recommended, excellent link. It seems to be a natural monopoly as well.
Ethiopia dam fact of the day
Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam when filled will have capacity to hold 74bn cubic metres of water, more than the volume of the entire Blue Nile. Makes Egypt nervous about water supply in a drought.
That is from Adam Tooze.
Too many autistic adults are denied basic rights
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Some of the very worst treatment of the vulnerable is hardly being discussed. There is an entire category of American adults being denied almost all of their basic legal rights: to hold a job, choose a residence, determine their health care, enter into contracts and even decide what to do with their own body. These are adults under legal guardianship — a court-imposed process, in Ohio as elsewhere, “by which a person is relieved of the right to make personal life decisions and another is appointed to make those decisions on that person’s behalf.”
Among the adults who have lost such rights, or live under the fear that they will, are those with autism. It is entirely possible that they will end up in guarded and segregated communities, often against their will.
Perhaps you think many of these individuals are unable to care for themselves and therefore their full rights cannot be respected. To whatever extent that may be true, it is not a reason for trampling on human rights. And even if you believe it is, you must concede that the legal system is prone to horrible misjudgments and mistakes.
After recent revelations about institutional racism, it is hard to believe that prejudices do not affect decisions about guardianship. The justice system is already heavily biased in favor of plea bargains, in effect favoring efficiency over constitutional rights. And even when there is no bias, there is the reality of simple error — which are common enough in hospitals, where the stakes are much higher.
Definitely recommended, do read the whole thing. And don’t forget this:
When it comes to guardianship, is there any reason to be so sure that liberty-protecting institutions are in place? Especially since basic information is so hard to come by? As both a people and a polity, Americans do not always behave best “when no one is watching.”
Overall it is remarkable to me how little good information, or for that matter argumentation, is available on this topic.
Philosopher J. emails me about free speech and Straussianism
I won’t add extra formatting, here goes (and here is my original post):
“Nice point about a Straussian reading of the free speech letter, and the general constraints of working in groups…But I have this worry about your post. I am not myself a Straussian, but I will express the point as a way of taking further the Straussianism already in your post. Maybe this is what you intend, so that a post making a Straussian point explicit should have a kind of meta-Straussian point. But, here goes: Taking your point about working in groups, I’m worried about you saying:
- we have a new bunch of “speech regulators” (not in the legal sense, not usually at least) who are especially humorless and obnoxious and I would say neurotic
I would think the Straussian position (in the fuller sense, not just the sense of covert or hidden) would be that working in a group, in a city (or state, country, etc.), always requires constraints — some way of encoding and reproducing enough of a common morality to make living together and coordination possible. From the position of “the philosophers” (as Straussians would say, but in this case I’m thinking of you) these may always be humorless, obnoxious, and maybe neurotic too. So why not think that the old speech regulators were equally so, just enforcing different rules? Why not think we’ve moved from rules of propriety (e.g. more censorship of sexual content, for example), to rules forbidding racism, etc.? You might then think that recent changes have broadened the openness for some kinds of speech. People I know who are interested in police violence, and remedies, report experiencing such a broadening.
An optional addition to this thought would be the idea that different sets of codes, equally and unfortunately all-too humorless, can still do better and worse judged with respect to the good, as Platonist-Straussians would say. In that sense, I would think the new humorless codes an improvement.
Granted, there is a strong strand in Straussianism that would think it just most important that there is some way for “the philosophers” to be able to have some space free of such codes to do the actually important stuff (as they see it) in ways that are not humorless, etc. But even that strand in no way holds the standard is that “the philosophers” should be freely expressing their views *publicly*! I would think that this is a pretty essential part of the point of Straussianism in the first place.
thanks as always for your work and the inspiration to think less about raising and lowering statuses, less from the perspective of Platonic thumos, as the Straussians would put it…”
TC again: More anonymity! Hmm…
Saturday assorted links
1. What the auction listing for a campus looks like.
2. As fewer kids played football, hospitals saw a big drop in ER visits.
3. Polite explanations of why so many professional athletes test positive for coronavirus (NYT). Why can’t they just come out and write the likely truth about multiple sex partners?
5. Carrying cost of cruise ship > liquidity premium, at least for now (Bloomberg).
6. The shooting cops problem is much worse out in the west, and other regularities.
7. I do a 45-minute podcast with Dwarkesh Patel (he is interviewing me, mainly). My only podcast where I use “the f word”? (Not for any good reason, I just felt like it.)