Month: November 2020

The very good vaccine news

Very good news from Pfizer on the vaccine front.  And Zoom shares have been crashing.  Disney is soaring.  Book that wedding venue now!

Here is the woman who led the effortAnd:

If you want to tell positive stories about immigration, look no further than the BioNTech vaccine: company co-founders Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci are both children of Turkish Gastarbeiter who came to Germany in the late 1960s.

This also means a lot of the other vaccine candidates are quite likely to work.  Finally, please do note this:

In seriousness, the expected value of delaying getting sick just went way, way, way up.

Bravo to all those involved.  And from one reader:

What do you think of proposing a new holiday to your readers?

Most of them are going to celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving with their families during the peak of the pandemic, when immunity is available just around the corner. Perhaps “Vaccinalia” a two day celebration two weeks after your entire family is vaccinated, with presents AND turkey…

What I’ve been reading

1. Gregory M. Collins, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy.  Burke is underrated as an economist, and also more generally.  This very thorough and thoughtful book goes a long way toward setting the record straight.  In the meantime, it is not sufficiently well known just how much Keynes was influenced by Burke.

2. Terryl Givens, Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know.  Perhaps if one needs to read this book, one is also under-qualified to comment on it.  Still it seemed very good to me and providing one of the better introductions.  I hadn’t know for instance that Abraham and even Adam to some extent were “in on” the covenant all along.

3. R.F. Foster, On Seamus Heaney.  A very good “short book essay” on one of my favorite poets.  That is a UK link, here is what you get when you search U.S. Amazon.  How can that be?  These days you can search Amazon better using Google than using Amazon itself.

4. Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics.  It makes sense that a biography of Veblen should be…somewhat verbose.  Nonetheless this is a valuable contribution for anyone interested in the topic.  To me the main question is why the libertarian right takes Veblen more seriously these days than does the Left, perhaps it is because they read Veblen and immediately think of Wokeism?

5. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology.  From the 1830s, this remains one of the great scientific classics.  I had never known how well-reasoned or beautifully written it was, a big positive surprise for me.  Not just a bunch of crusty old rocks, though it is also about…a bunch of crusty old rocks.

There is Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.

John Fabian Witt, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to Covid-19 is a short but useful treatment of what its title promises.  I had not known that both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X were opposed to compulsory vaccination.

Should the young fear Covid more than the old?

Probably not quite, but I think people often get this calculation wrong.  The chances for long-term damage seem to be as high for the young as for anyone (this is not certain, but these costs do not skew in the same way that chance of death does, and quite possibly they are distributed in accord with genetic mutations, not age).

If you are 70 years old, and incur long-term damage costs, that wrecks your life for only say ten or twelve years, on average.  You will die or go senile anyway, and pretty soon.

If you are 30 and incur long-term damage costs, it could wreck your life for say fifty additional years, about five times more.

I am not sure how we should weight death costs vs. long-term damage costs, but in expected value terms it seems the latter are much worse for the relatively young, not for the old.

Not disappearing after November 3rd

Via Scott Gottlieb.  And how about North Dakota?  It is a low population state, but if all of the United States were putting in a comparable Covid performance we would be having about 12,500 Covid deaths a day.  That is certainly not my prediction, but it is one way to think about what could happen from a very bad policy and social norms response.  Is that the road we wish to be veering towards?

Sunday assorted links

1. They wouldn’t let Barbara Hannigan and Simon Rattle do this in the U.S. today (ten minute music video).

2. What the Chinese say.  If you are really for diversity, why don’t we give that writer a NYT column?  Why not a CCP columnist for every major outlet?  Isn’t that the alternative perspective we should care about the most?

3. The public sector wrestling culture that is Uzbekistan.

4. Vitalik on concave vs. convex temperaments.

5. “For non-college graduates and especially for 18-to 29-year-olds, local influencers as well as institutions like the FDA, CDC, and Mayo Clinic are all more trusted than Fauci, who actually ranks last for the under-30 crowd.

Graduating in a Recession Can Be Rough

Graduating in a recession can be rough. Wages start lower and advance more slowly. It’s hard to get hired at a top firm which means it takes longer to get on a rapid ascent career path. As Till von Wachter notes in a review of the long-term consequences of initial labor market conditions, failure to takeoff leads to choices which often makes things worse.

…initial labor market conditions persistently increases excessive alcohol consumption (Maclean 2015) and leads to higher obesity and more smoking and drinking in middle age (Cutler, Huang, and Lleras-Muney 2015)…College graduates entering during the 1980s recession experience higher incidence of heart attacks in middle age (Maclean 2013). Following all labor market entrants from these cohorts, Schwandt and von Wachter (2020) find that starting in their late 30s, unlucky entrants begin experiencing a gap in mortality compared to luckier peers that keeps increasing in their 40s, driven by higher rates of heart disease, liver disease, lung cancer, and drug overdoses.

…Marital patterns of unlucky cohorts are affected from the time they enter the labor market up into middle age, when these cohorts have fewer children (Currie and Schwandt 2014), are more likely to have experienced a divorce, and are more likely to live on their own (Schwandt and von Wachter 2020). Initial labor market conditions also have been found to have effects on attitudes towards economic success and the role of the government (Giuliano and Spilimbergo 2014) and to lead to increasingly lowering individuals’ self esteem (Maclean and Hill 2015).

Don Peck had a good popular survey of these effects in The Atlantic in 2010 that remains vital:

Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and “a kind of bereavement” in its own right. Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home.

Especially in middle-aged men, long accustomed to the routine of the office or factory, unemployment seems to produce a crippling disorientation. At a series of workshops for the unemployed that I attended around Philadelphia last fall, the participants were overwhelmingly male, and the men in particular described the erosion of their identities, the isolation of being jobless, and the indignities of downward mobility.

Of course, most people who graduate during a recession do just fine in the grand scheme of things.You could have graduated in Sierra Leone. But if you want to be on a rapid ascent career path remember that your first job is not your last job, look for opportunity, and be prepared to take a risk and switch jobs early. Stay off drugs and alcohol.

Secularization and the Tribulations of the American Working-Class

That is a work in progress by Brian Wheaton, job market candidate from Harvard University.  Here is the abstract:

Over the past several decades, working-class America has been plagued by multiple adverse trends: a sharp increase in social isolation, an even sharper increase in single parenthood, a decline in male labor force participation rates, and a decline in generational economic mobility – amongst other things.  Material economic factors have been unable to fully explain these phenomena, often yielding mixed results or – in some cases, such as that of single parenthood – lacking explanatory power altogether.  I study the decline in religiosity and, using a shift-share instrument leveraging the fact that different religious denominations are declining at different rates, I find that religious decline has a strong adverse effect on the aforementioned variables.  The effects are not weakened by including other potential explanatory factors (such as China trade shocks and variation in public assistance).  I present evidence that, to the extent reverse causality exists, it creates bias in the opposite direction of my estimates.  These findings are also robust to several alternative instruments, including the repeal of the state blue laws banning retail activity on Sundays and the Catholic church scandals of the 2000s.  Two instruments – the blue laws and the state anti-evolution laws mandating teaching of creationism in school – allow me to ascertain whether the effect proceeds through religious attendance or beliefs.  I find that, for most outcomes, the bulk of the effect is driven by religious attendance.

To be clear, that is not Brian’s job market paper, which covers “Laws, Beliefs, and Backlash.” Or you might wish to try these results on corporal punishment in schools (with Maria Petrova and Gautam Rao):

We find that the presence of corporal punishment in schools increases educational attainment, increases later-life social trust and trust in institutions, and leads to less authoritarian attitudes toward child-rearing, and greater tolerance of free speech. Additionally, exposure to corporal punishment in school decreases later-life crime. We find no effects on mental or physical health.

Here is his paper about flat tax reform in Eastern Europe:

Using static and dynamic difference-in-differences approaches, I find that the flat tax reforms increase annual GDP growth by 1.36 percentage points for a transitionary period of approximately one decade.

I praise the scholarship and courage of Brian N. Wheaton.

This election’s winners and losers

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and no I do not mean the politicians.  Here is one excerpt:

…the political-science hypothesis of “retrospective voting” took a whacking. Retrospective voting suggests that the electorate evaluates incumbents by recent economic performance and votes accordingly, regardless of whether the incumbents are actually at fault. Yet Trump presided over about 320,000 excess deaths related to Covid-19, as well as huge contractions in GDP and employment. Even if he loses, as now seems likely, those failures didn’t knock him out of the race. A lot of his supporters still seem to have felt he would cope better with matters moving forward.

And to close:

American democracy: Maybe this one is premature, but so far the U.S. has held a closely contested election under pandemic conditions. Turnout was much higher than usual, and so far there hasn’t been much election-related violence. Could it be that the system really works?

And when will the “money in politics” people admit they were wrong?

Saturday assorted links

1. Scholars of civilizational collapse (NYT).

2. Paying people to get vaccinated.

3. Harvard’s Stephanie D. Cheng: another job candidate focused on the economics of science.

4. Yang You, Harvard job market candidate.

5. From the Korean War: ” I show that a one standard deviation increase in wartime racial integration caused white veterans to live in more racially diverse neighborhoods and marry spouses with less distinctively white names.”  That is from Daniel Indacochea, job candidate at the University of Toronto.

6. Did the Libertarian Party hurt Trump?

San Diego on the mind

Arthur Johnston emails me:

Back in 2013 you wrote a post “What has San Diego Contributed to American Culture” I published an answer that I hope you find satisfactory.

Here is an excerpt from that interesting post:

In the Cities and Ambition model this means that San Diego ‘discourages’ you from producing cultural artifacts. Which means San Diego has fewer cultural artifacts that are legible to people not living here. Its contribution to the wider American culture is instead encouraging people to be more active and social.

A concrete example, a few weeks ago on a Monday I asked what everyone did over the weekend and the answers were:

  1. sailing lessons
  2. jumping from an airplane with a parachute I packed myself
  3. surfing
  4. brewing beer [to share with friends]
  5. “just” hiking [with family]

Some things to note, first that four of those five things involve interacting with other human beings for enjoyment, which is a fundamental part of what we define as culture. “surfing” the lone solitary activity was mine the person who created a cultural artifact you’re currently consuming.

Secondly those activities are all ephemeral.

For one thing, I would think this means well-being during the pandemic declined less in San Diego.

Are body cameras effective for constraining police after all?

Controversial police use of force incidents have spurred protests across the nation and calls for reform. Body-worn cameras (BWCs) have received extensive attention as a potential key solution. I conduct the first nationwide study of the effects of BWCs in more than 1,000 agencies. I identify the causal effects by using idiosyncratic variation in adoption timing attributable to administrative hurdles and the lengthy process to the eventual adoption at different agencies. This empirical strategy addresses limitations of previous studies that evaluated BWCs within a single agency; in a single-agency setting, the control group officers are also indirectly affected by BWCs because they interact with the treatment group officers (spillover), and agencies that give researchers access may fundamentally differ from other agencies (site-selection bias). Overcoming these limitations, my multi-agency study finds that BWCs have led to a substantial drop in the use of force, both among whites and minorities. Nationwide, they reduce police-involved homicides by 43%. Surprisingly, I do not find evidence that BWCs are associated with de-policing. Examining social media usage data from Twitter as well as data on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, I find that after BWC adoption, public opinion toward the police improves. These findings imply that BWCs can be an important tool for improving police accountability without sacrificing policing capabilities.

That is from a new paper by Taeho Kim, on the job market from the University of Chicago, a Steve Levitt student.  The piece has a revise and resubmit from ReStat.

Is research productivity declining in China and Germany?

In a recent paper, Bloom et al. (2020) find evidence for a substantial decline in research productivity in the U.S. economy during the last 40 years. In this paper, we replicate their findings for China and Germany, using detailed firm-level data spanning three decades. Our results indicate that diminishing returns in idea production are a global phenomenon, not just confined to the U.S.

Here is the full paper by Phillip Boeing and Paul Hünermund.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Friday assorted links

1. Jan Myrdal obituary.

2. All the good news in one place.  And my March column on the Progressive Left having peaked.

3. My 2016 post on the male nature of current populism, recommended.  And Peloton is now worth more than Ford.

4. “The movement [#MeToo] increased reporting of sexual crimes by 10% during its first six months.”  From Martin Mattsson, job market candidate from Yale.

5. Zeynep Tufekci on masks (NYT).  Very good piece.

6. “AR 70-28 required that Army aircraft had to be named after “Indian terms and names of American Indian tribes and chiefs.” It also directed that tanks would be named after American generals, infantry weapons “would receive names for famous early American pioneers,” and assault weapons would have “fearsome reptile and insect names,” according to the press release.”  Link here.

Our regulatory state is failing us, FAA edition

The Federal Aviation Administration has for months been weighing whether to allow the nation’s more than 500 federally subsidized airports to spend their money on screening passengers for the coronavirus, an issue teed up by a plan developed by a fairly small airport in Iowa.

Marty Lenss, director of Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids, began working on the plan in the spring, when the spread of the virus and lockdown orders brought air travel to a near standstill.

Lenss worked with a local hospital to craft a plan to quickly screen travelers before they passed through security. He figured he could cover the $800,000 cost by using some of the $23 million the airport received under the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package known as the Cares Act.

The local airport commission signed off on the plan in July, agreeing to make the screening mandatory. At a public meeting shortly before the vote, Lenss predicted he would have the program up and running by September.

But months after Lenss started work, no passengers have been screened. Airport funds are tightly controlled by federal rules, so Lenss started asking the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in May if his plan qualified. He’s still waiting for an answer.

“We would have started the FAA conversation much earlier if we’d anticipated the time it’s been taking,” Lenss said. “At this point, I really don’t have a timeline when we might hear. We’re in limbo.”

Here is the full story, outrages throughout.