Month: September 2020
Should NBA referees call fouls objectively in playoff games?
I call them “rule of law” foul calls, because they are in accord with clearly defined standards for a foul call. In contrast, in the “good ol’ days” referees used to think: “I’m not going to let a foul call determine the outcome of this playoff game in the decisive moments.” So unless the defender really slugged the guy, or whacked his hand down when shooting, the refs would “let them play,” and the chips would fall as fate determined.
But Wednesday night I saw three critical foul calls (across two games) in the closing moments that were all “marginal fouls.” They were, in my opinion (and in the opinion of former referee Steve Javie), all legitimate foul calls. But just barely, and I am pretty sure that none of them would have been called fifteen years ago, or maybe not even five years ago. Bumping into a guy after he already missed his shot and the clock ran out? Is it a foul objectively speaking? Yes. Should it be called? Well…
The case against rule of law fouls is that games decided by the referees have less legitimacy, and that in turn hurts both the legitimacy and the popularity of the league. Even if it was “objectively a foul,” the fans either don’t know that, were unwilling to recognize that, or they may, like I, favor the good ol’ days when fouls were called less objectively and also less frequently in the closing moments of close games.
The case in favor of rule of law foul calls is that replays and social media make the truth easier to determine, and place extra burden on the refs to appear fair and consistent over time, to protect the legitimacy and popularity of the league. Furthermore, the heightened salience of racial issues encourages a more consistent standard to limit charges of discrimination, whether those charges are founded or not. It is more defensible to always call the same play the same way, regardless of the clock or the closeness of the score, which are ultimately somewhat subjective standards (just how close does the game have to be?).
So I recognize that rule of law foul calls may now be necessary, even if I do not myself prefer them.
One relevant point here is that with better recording and a wider dissemination of the recordings, the NBA has in fact moved much closer to the rule of law.
So it can be done, and perhaps others can do it too. Just like the spit testing.
Addendum from the comments: “The real reason must be gambling – they want gambling on the NBA to be legitimate, and this causes a lot of problems if the refs have a lot of latitude to make choices. The NBA has had problems with this.”
Friday assorted links
1. PBA cards, and implicit trades with police.
2. Australia: “Lawyers and civil liberty groups have expressed concerns about the way a pregnant woman was arrested at her home in Ballarat for allegedly encouraging people to take part in an anti-lockdown rally.” I guess she didn’t have a good enough PBA card.
3. The football culture that is Fargo. 10,000 at an indoors game? And is a two-puffin photo twice as good as a one-puffin photo?
5. New data on the Russian vaccine.
Parasite and Burning
I was asked by Russell Hogg to join him on his movie podcast with Agnes Callard and Abe Callard. We discussed Parasite and Burning. Russell labeled the podcast Alex Tabarrok Versus the People, although there was much agreement among the panel with my controversial analysis of Parasite! I also threw in a reactionary reading of Snowpiercer at the end. We also had a fine discussion of Burning and whether the orange peeling is a hint about the meaning of the ending.
Caleb Watney emails me
Hey Tyler,
Wanted to let you know that Alec Stapp and I are launching a new blog today called Agglomerations where we’ll be covering a wide range of tech + innovation policy issues.
My first piece today ties to disentangle technology, innovation, and industrial policy, as I feel the conversations there have been quite muddled as of late. I hope you enjoy it.
https://www.agglomerations.tech/untangling-innovation-from-industrial-policy/
On vaccine timing, from the comments
Another Derek Lowe vaccine update
Here goes, and here is the close:
Dang, that’s a lot of vaccine candidates. And as you can see, it’s a long-tail distribution – there are some big ones that everyone knows about, but a lot of people are bringing a lot of technologies to bear on the problem. This makes me think that we’re going to have a multichapter story, in the end. There will be the first vaccines approved, then the second wave, then the improvements on those, until we have (with luck, hard work, skill, and lots of money) tossed this virus out of the human population and back to the bats, pangolins, or whoever had it in the first place.
An excellent side effect is that vaccine technology will never be the same after this – it’s going to be like aircraft design before and after World War II, and for many of the same reasons. This whole pandemic has been awful, in many different ways, but we’re going to come out of it stronger and more capable than when we went in.
Recommended.
My dialogue with Freddie Sayers of Unherd, on herd immunity and related matters
It is about fifteen minutes, and also I give you all a separate clip of me praising the new Matt Yglesias book (which was alas cut from the main edit, note there is a lag before the short clip pops up) and discussing “family capacity libertarianism.” Here is the main episode, with a few clips of text beneath the video itself:
https://unherd.com/thepost/tyler-cowen-on-herd-mentality-and-herd-immunity/
I was quite happy with how this interview turned out, and I feel a bit that I got to jab just about everybody, including the herd immunity theorists.
Brazil growing popularity of Bolsonaro fact of the day
As I have been saying, the median voter does not die of Covid-19, which means that many political responses will be highly imperfect. Here is one recent narrative:
Some 66 million people, 30% of the population, have been getting 600 reais ($110) a month, making it the most ambitious social program ever undertaken in Brazil, a shocking shift under President Jair Bolsonaro who railed against welfare, dismissed the virus — and now finds himself newly popular.
The government hasn’t published its own figures yet but data from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, one of Brazil’s top universities, show that those living on less than $1.9 a day fell to 3.3% in June from 8% last year, and those below the poverty line were at 21.7% compared with 25.6%. Both represent 16-year lows.
Here is is more from Lima, Rosati, and Iglesias at Bloomberg. By the way, Brazil’s primary deficit will be 11% this year.
Via Michael Pettengill.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn has reinstated Ms Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi to her post of royal noble consort, and returned her royal insignia and military ranks, the palace announced on the royal gazette on Aug 29.” Link here, short, and interesting throughout.
2. Straussian vaccine analysts: “And I don’t think people can use that information responsibly.”
3. “Staff at Hagerstown [Community College] must now go into their offices to work because they can’t access the VPNs.” No support for remote work there!
4. Morgan Kelly on understanding persistence. That is historical persistence, not the personal quality.
5. SPACs explainer, though it doesn’t convince me the implicit bid-ask spread/fees on securities offerings and deals will narrow so dramatically. Many of you are asking me about this, but it still feels poorly understood to me.
6. The Swiss canton of Zug will now accept taxes paid in either Bitcoin or Ether (Bloomberg). Limited to up to 100k, however, and maybe more of a marketing move than a real fiscal validation of crypto as money?
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.138 (no spoilers)
Some surprises have come, and I am liking it more. Is it fair to judge it against the Neapolitan quadrology? This book has only one major character rather than two, so is it doomed to be only half as good? Can any current book manage to be half as good? Can we read this one fresh at all? (Is it better to view the Mona Lisa “fresh,” or not?) Should we be trying to discard prior expectations, or not be trying to discard expectations for a book such as this?
You’ll be getting another report soon, please note I am deliberately not reading the book too quickly. Here is my previous post on the book. I agree with the commentator who described the male characters as mostly flat.
One of those boring yet fascinating innovation articles
Physicians who also have extensive training in scientific methods, often a Ph.D., are ideally suited to learn from the unusual clinical manifestations of Covid-19, such as strokes in young adults and autoimmune Kawasaki syndrome in children. Physician-scientists, however, are becoming extinct in the United States, comprising only about 1% of all physicians today, and with few young clinician researchers joining their ranks.
A solution to this crisis might be found in a quiet research program at the National Institutes of Health that flourished in the shadow of the Vietnam War. It may well have been the greatest medical research program in modern history. The two-year program, officially known as the NIH Associates Training Program, was started in 1953 as a way to bring newly minted physicians to the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md., so they could do research for two to three years under the guidance of senior NIH investigators…
Nine physicians who trained at the NIH during this period went on to win Nobel Prizes. From the class of 1968 alone, Robert Lefkowitz discovered a family of cellular receptors that one-third of all approved drugs target; Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein discovered a cholesterol receptor that led to the development of cholesterol-lowering statin medications; and Harold Varmus discovered some of the fundamental mechanisms of cancer.
Here is the full StatNews article by Haider J. Warraich.
Show your work, people — advice on vaccines and approval timing
Every day I read maybe twenty or more tweets decrying Trump’s acceleration of the FDA vaccine approval process. And yet I do not see a single blog post with back of the envelope calculations. This is such an important decision, and it deserves better, just as we analyze the Fed’s monetary policy decisions in great detail. On those points, here is my latest Bloomberg column, excerpt:
One of your weaker arguments is that Trump’s push is disturbing because it is making the FDA “too political.” First, American responses to crises, such as Sept. 11 or the Great Recession, have always been political. Second, and more to the point, there is a strong case that the FDA should take politics into account more, not less.
The FDA has been too risk-averse in the very recent past, for instance in its reluctance to approve additional Covid-19 testing. Economists have generally concluded that the FDA is too risk-averse in the long term as well, considering all relevant trade-offs. What kind of fix might there be for those problems, if not a “political” one? Of course the initial risk-aversion was itself the result of a political calculation, namely the desire to avoid blame from the public and from Congress…
The American people will not buy the claim that the current [pre-Trump] FDA is above politics. Nor should they.
And:
As a public-health expert, you are also missing the broader context behind the current vaccine debate. In the early months of the pandemic, as late as April, it was common to hear that there might not be a vaccine for at least four years, and many were not sure if it would be possible at all. It is now likely (though not certain) that there will be a pretty good vaccine within a year.
That is a wonderful development, and it speaks well of your intelligence and hard work. Still, given that recent history, is it crazy for the American people to wonder if the process could be accelerated further? After all, the Chinese have a vaccine right now (albeit probably an inferior one), and they have been known to complete complicated infrastructure projects with a speed not previously thought possible.
And:
It’s not just about wanting to speed things up. One might argue that, due to the unprecedentedly high number of vaccines currently under consideration, the optimal threshold should be higher, not lower, for fear that the world will be left with a suboptimal choice.
Finally:
Too often I have seen one of you cite a single factor on one side of the approval equation, then invoke your authority or some previously existing institutional standard to suggest that this factor is decisive. In a Trumpian world, where credentials and authority no longer settle a debate — on public health or other matters — this kind of argument is not sufficient.
My plea is that such arguments and others be accompanied by concrete numbers, if only rough back-of-the-envelope estimates, and that all of the factors be considered together. Those numbers should incorporate the human, economic and public-health costs of allowing the current situation to continue for months. The result could be a useful public debate about the optimal speed of vaccine approval.
Yes, blah blah blah. But — public health experts — show your work.
The Solomonic solution?
Or should that be “Solve for the equilibrium”? How about “China Civil War of the Day”?:
The largest province in Solomon Islands has announced plans for an independence referendum as tensions with the country’s national government over China policy rise.
Malaita, a province of 200,000 people in the country’s east, “will soon conduct a provincial-wide referendum on the topic of independence”, a statement from premier Daniel Suidani said on Tuesday.
In a phone interview with the Guardian, Suidani confirmed the plan, saying a vote would be held as soon as this month.
The referendum plan comes after a year of tensions between Suidani’s provincial government, which is supportive of Taiwan, and Solomon Islands’ national government which has adopted a pro-Beijing stance.
Here is the full story.
Wednesday assorted links
1. An actual willingness to pay study for in-person university attendance.
2. How big is the “dry tinder” effect for Sweden?
4. “Thus, in ecologically valid real-world samples, people who do good are also likely to look good.”
5. The state that is California: “”I miss when it was just a pandemic and depression,” my mom told me.”
Monkey Parenting Matters
In a new NBER paper, a group of economists, including James Heckman, have joined with researchers who study child development to analyze data from a multi-generational monkey raising experiment. It’s well known from the Harlow experiments of the 1950s that monkeys raised without their mothers don’t do so well. (It’s also from these experiments that the mantra of skin-to-skin mother-child contact comes from.) What’s distinctive in the new paper is that there are two generations of monkeys who are raised by their mothers or in nurseries and in each generation the treatment is randomly chosen. Indeed, I believe this new paper includes the children of monkeys discussed in this earlier paper which also included Heckman. The multi-generational experiment lets the researchers test whether disadvantage is transmitted down the generations and whether it can be alleviated.
The analysis indicates first that being raised by a mother results in better health and higher social status than being raised in a nursery (as measured by who wins disputes and ELO scores similar to those used in chess!). Second being raised by a mother who was raised by a mother is better than being raised by a mother who was raised in a nursery. The latter indicates that disadvantage transmits down the generations. Indeed, being raised by a mother who was raised in a nursery is just as bad as being raised in a nursery. In other words, it’s hard to ameliorate disadvantage in one generation.
The sample is small (about 100 monkeys in generation one and 60 in generation two) but because of random assignment still potentially useful.
The authors suggest that there are lessons for humans:
Our findings are in line with results from a social experiment on humans. Heckman and Karapakula (2019) document the intergenerational effects of the Perry Preschool Project,which was a randomized social experiment in the 1960s that provided high-quality preschool experiences to socially disadvantaged children. They find that the positive effects of the preschool program were transmitted into the next generation. The offspring of the treated participants were more likely to have better health, achieve higher education, and were more likely to be employed than the offspring of the non-treated participants. In the same way that early-life advantage via maternal presence for rhesus-monkeys led to improved health and higher social rank for their offspring, early-life advantage via high-quality preschool in humans led to better health and social outcomes for their children.
But note the subtle shift in “treatment” meaning. In the monkey experiment, mother-raised is better and it’s the nurseries which are bad but in the human experiment it’s the nurseries that are good. It’s hard enough to justify external validity across human experiments in different places or times doing so across species is an even more perilous leap.
CatintheHat addds:
For the opposite case, don’t forget this earlier in August post of Alex’s.
I would very gladly run further estimates of this kind. To be clear, I am not endorsing any particular conclusion, rather I think several hundred smart people should be working on this full time. My personal suspicion is that the decisive factor will be “the gains from possibly ending a global depression a few months earlier” vs. “the risk that with a lower quality vaccine we don’t end said depression more effectively than we otherwise might have.” And I hardly see anyone considering that trade-off at all.
There is also a closely related but conceptually separate question of how many vaccines to approve on an earlier basis, and also for how many should we be in a position to do so.