Month: August 2021

More Saturday assorted links

1. Papua New Guinea fact of the day.

2. Progress Studies in San Francisco.  What it looks like “on the street.”

3. “But in Stockholm, the average waiting time for a rent-controlled property is now nine years, says the city’s housing agency Bostadsförmedlingen, up from around five years a decade ago.

4. Crypto companies wish to access the payments network, banks are resisting (WSJ).

5. Tsai Ming-liang (New Yorker).

U.S.A. fact of the day

Hispanics are slightly less likely to be jailed than whites…

Council on Criminal Justice analysis found that in 2000, the rate of being on probation was 1.6 times higher and the rate of being parole was 3.6 times higher for Hispanics than non-Hispanic whites. But by 2016, the probation disparity had disappeared and the parole disparity had shrunk by 85%. Hispanics still faced a 60% higher risk of being incarcerated in a state prison. This is an enormous and worrying disparity, but the Council noted that it decreased by 60% since 2000…

The dwindling of Hispanic-white disparities is even more remarkable in light of criminal behavior being so heavily concentrated in adolescence and young adulthood,. The median age for Hispanics is 29.8 years versus 43.7 for whites, meaning even in a system free of prejudice that punished solely on the basis of crimes committed, we would expect criminal justice disparities between the populations to be growing, not shrinking.

That is from the Matt Yglesias Substack, but the actual writer is Keith N. Humphreys.

Saturday assorted links

1. The Chinese war against celebrity (NYT).  And how much of the burden of The Woke falls upon (Western) female pop stars? Very important point in this piece, and oft neglected, about the incidence of Wokeness.

2. The most translated book from every nation?

3. Robin now sees a more fundamental problem in society.  Perhaps I would focus more on cruelty?

4. Drinking the Peter Leeson Kool-Aid.  And more here, why not?  I’d love to go.

5. The protest culture that is New Zealand.

“When did we all become women?”

Here is an essay by Kathryn Robinson, from 2006 (!), via “Chad”, here is the opening excerpt:

Hang around the zeitgeist long enough and a pattern will emerge. You flip on the TV and there’s a young woman announcing that Eagle Hardware is her social life. Change the station and see the newest Nike ad: no more the command to Just Do It, but now a ringing paean to self-esteem: I Can. Maybe another station will be broadcasting OlympicGames human-interest stories; maybe the winning American wrestler will be weeping lavishly.

Or maybe the vice president of the United States will be the one weeping, standing on the dais of the Democratic convention relating the tragedy of his sister’s lung cancer. You open a men’s magazine and read about the Nine Steps to a Toned Derriere. You log on to the Internet where designer Donna Karan reports that the top fashion trends are not wide lapels or sheer skirts, but “Compassion. Caring. Embracing.” You go to church and pray to God the Mother. You flee to a restaurant for a scotch and a steak, but find yourself in a cafe with wine and low-fat beefalo.

You wonder when we all became female.

If you cast a critical eye backward, you will see that it’s happened over the last three decades, in a shift as gradual and inevitable as the changing tide, surging over everything from business, education, and religion to politics, fashion, and interpersonal relations. One of the great cultural revolutions of our time, it’s also been as invisible as the air we breathe, shifting the default position of our behavior to “feminine” as imperceptibly as our evolution toward light eating, self-empowerment, and public intimacy…

The upshot, discovered in that campaign and exploited ever since: men vote for policies, women vote for symbols. Handlers found that where men’s voter turnout is dictated by political attentiveness, women’s voting has increased more rapidly than their interest or knowledge warrant. Therefore, women are more susceptible to campaigns waged through potent emotional symbols. Sick of the mudslinging and soundbiting that have since come to characterize political campaigning? Blame feminization.

Way too much generalization of course, that one is from Seattle Weekly (!…but where else?).  Interesting throughout.

Friday assorted links

1. How much do cam girls make?

2. Will California pay people to remain sober?

3. Arnold Kling responds on inflationSummers is skeptical about QE.

4. Which investors are most likely to freak out and engage in panic selling?

5. Singapore pulls the plug on Yale-NUS.  Here is the response of the Yale president.  So Singapore basically just told them to get lost?

6. “Visualizing the Expanding Space of Consecration in American Sociology, 1980–2020.

New fluvoxamine results from McMaster University (and Fast Grants)

From Kelsey Piper at Vox:

In a large, randomized clinical trial conducted with thousands of patients over the past six months, researchers at McMaster University tested eight different Covid-19 treatments against a control group to figure out what works.

One drug stood out: fluvoxamine, an antidepressant that the Food and Drug Administration has already found to be safe and that’s cheap to produce as a generic drug.

…This study, called the TOGETHER study, is a lot bigger — more than 3,000 patients across the whole study, with 800 in the fluvoxamine group — and supports the promising results from those previous studies. The authors released it this week as a preprint, meaning that it is still under peer review.

Patients given fluvoxamine within a few days after testing positive for Covid-19 were 31 percent less likely to end up hospitalized and similarly less likely to end up on a ventilator. (Death from Covid-19 is rare enough that the study has wide error bars when it comes to how much fluvoxamine reduces death, meaning it’s much harder to draw conclusions.) It’s a much larger effect than any that has been found for an outpatient Covid-19 treatment so far.

The role of Fast Grants is discussed toward the end, note that for us this was a major investment and done on very short notice, as befits the name Fast Grants.

Does the expectation of technological progress worsen the experience of the present?

Various domains of life are improving over time, meaning the future is filled with exciting advances that people can now look forward to (e.g., in technology). Three preregistered experiments (N = 1,602) suggest that mere awareness of better futures can risk spoiling otherwise enjoyable presents. Across experiments, participants interacted with novel technologies—but, via random assignment, some participants were informed beforehand that even better versions were in the works. Mere awareness of future improvement led participants to experience present versions as less enjoyable—despite being new to them, and despite being identical across conditions. They even bid more money to be able to end their participation early. Why? Such knowledge led these participants to perceive more flaws in present versions than they would have perceived without such knowledge—as if prompted to infer that there must have been something to improve upon (or else, why was a better one needed in the first place?)—thus creating a less enjoyable experience. Accordingly, these spoiling effects were specific to flaw-relevant stimuli and were attenuated by reminders of past progress already achieved. All told, the current research highlights important implications for how today’s ever better offerings may be undermining net happiness (despite marking absolute progress). As people continually await exciting things still to come, they may be continually dissatisfied by exciting things already here.

That is a newly published paper by Ed O’Brien, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

My emails to Arnold Kling about the correct inflation model

After I cited low ten-year securities yields, Arnold asked for my basic model of inflation, here was my first email:

  • Price level dynamics and money supply processes are murky, at least in recent times
  • The median voter hates inflation
  • The Fed won’t let inflation happen

…is my model.

I would add a dose of “inflationary pressures really do seem to be distributed pretty unevenly.”

End of email!  Here was my second email to Arnold:

I think the Fed knows the true model in gross terms.
I also think there is a good chance the Fed will create a recession in limiting inflation.

But look at Japan. The EU. Even Italy. It’s not just the US.

Temporary inflation pressures all over the place, due to Covid and post-Covid adjustments. No fiscal financial crises. No long-term inflationary expectations of much note. Not in the developed nations.

The stock of saved wealth is now quite high relative to debt and deficits, especially if you count human capital.

So both the basic model and the markets predict no catastrophe, and also no run-away inflation. And central banks know how to boost the demand for money when needed.

Seigniorage returns from inflation are especially low in the contemporary environment, checking another motive for inflation. No “Assignats” revenue is in the works here.

I just don’t see what we’ve got “in the toolbox” to override all of that.

End of email!  I should note that I agree with Summers that inflation is higher than it needs to be, that is bad, and it is because we overshot on our combined monetary/fiscal response.

I’ll also repeat my standard challenge: are you short the long bond?  Are you buying those puts?  I’m not so convinced if all you’ve got is “I’m not buying so many equities any more!”

Thursday assorted links

1. Vaccination rates and air travel are not correlated as they should be.

2. If I understand this correctly, UT Austin professors are now free to pay students to wear masks in their classes.  Many are outraged.

3. South Australia Trials App To Monitor Quarantine Compliance Through Facial Recognition and Geolocation.  And New South Wales update.

4. Truly amazing that Australia is just sitting on six million doses of AstraZeneca [Covishield] — it might be the most effective vaccine right now!

5. The rhetoric here is not entirely safe for work, but the piece is about the behavioral economics of the cam sector.  Startlingly good.  And Alex’s earlier post.

6. Will rural America see a lot of rapid change soon?

7. Corporate America’s $50 billion vow — surprisingly good feature story, requires only a modicum of Straussian reading.

8. Why the press is (sort of) hawkish on Afghanistan (Bloomberg).

*Smashing the Liquor Machine*

The subtitle is A Global History of Prohibition, and the author is Mark Lawrence Schrad.  I blurbed the book with this:

The best book on Prohibition, period. It is a revelation on the causes and nature of the Prohibition movement, and takes a properly international perspective, considering colonies and indigenous peoples as well. You will never look at Prohibition the same way again.

Highly recommended, you can buy it here.

Labor supply is behaving strangely

In an unusual job posting on Facebook, a pizzeria in Alabama has offered to “literally hire anyone,” a sign of how restaurants are still struggling to attract workers.

“We will literally hire anyone,” Dave’s Pizza, in the Birmingham suburb of Homewood, said in a Facebook post Wednesday. “If you’re on unemployment and can’t find a job, call us; we’ll hire you.”

What if they gave a job and nobody came?  Here is the story, via the excellent Samir Varma.  And elsewhere, via Heather Long:

Face masks are required again in major US auto factories and, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley, that has some workers deciding not to show up for work. In some factories, absentee rates can exceed 20%, he said in an interview with CNN Business.

“When a fifth of your workforce isn’t coming in, in a manufacturing operation where everyone has their job and you don’t know who’s going to be missing every day, man, it’s really challenging,” Farley said.

Labor supply is…behaving strangely. And here is a very good Scott Sumner post on unemployment insurance.  Might one of the simpler lessons here be that when job circumstances and working conditions remain uncertain, it is much harder for markets to make good job matches?

My Conversation with Zeynep Tufekci

Here is the audio and transcript.  Here is part of the summary:

Zeynep joined Tyler to discuss problems with the media and the scientific establishment, what made the lab-leak hypothesis unacceptable to talk about, how her background in sociology was key to getting so many things right about the pandemic, the pitfalls of academic contrarianism, what Max Weber understood about public health crises, the underrated aspects of Kemel Mustapha’s regime, how Game of Thrones interested her as a sociologist (until the final season), what Americans get wrong about Turkey, why internet-fueled movements like the Gezi protests fizzle out, whether Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise in Turkey, how she’d try to persuade a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, whether public health authorities should ever lie for the greater good, why she thinks America is actually less racist than Europe, how her background as a programmer affects her work as a sociologist, the subject of her next book, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Max Weber — overrated or underrated as a sociologist?

TUFEKCI: Underrated.

COWEN: Why?

TUFEKCI: Part of the reason he’s underrated is because he writes in that very hard-to-read early 19th-century writing, but if you read Max Weber, 90 percent of what you want to understand about the current public health crisis is there in his sociology. Not just him, but sociology organizations and how that works. He’s good at that. I would say underrated, partly because it’s very hard to read. It’s like Shakespeare. You need the modern English version, conceptually, for more people to read it.

I would say almost all of sociology is underrated in how dramatically useful it is. Just ask me any time. Early on, I knew we were going to have a pandemic, completely based on sociology of the moment in early January, before I knew anything about the virus because they weren’t telling us, but you could just use sociological concepts to put things together. Max Weber is great at most of them and underrated.

COWEN: Kemal Mustafa — overrated or underrated?

TUFEKCI: Underrated.

COWEN: Why?

TUFEKCI: Why? My grandmother — she was 12 or 13 when she was in the Mediterranean region — Central Asia, but Mediterranean region, very close to the Mediterranean. She was born the year the Turkish Republic had been founded, 1923, and she was 13 or so. She was just about to be married off, but the republic was a little over a decade — same age as her. They created a national exam to pick talented girls like her. The ones that won the exam got taken to Istanbul to this elite, one of the very few boarding high schools for girls.

The underrated part isn’t just that such a mechanism existed. The underrated part is that the country changed so much in 13 years that her teacher was able to prevail upon the family to let her go. To have a 13-year-old be sent off to Istanbul, completely opposite side of the country, to a boarding school for education — that kind of flourishing of liberation.

I’m not going to deny it was an authoritarian period, and minorities, like Kurds, during that period were brutally suppressed. I can’t make it sound like there was nothing else going on, but in terms of creating a republic out of the ashes of a crumbling empire — I think it’s one of the very striking stories of national transformation, globally, within one generation, so underrated.

There are numerous interesting segments, on varied topics, to be found throughout the dialog.