Month: September 2021
Monday assorted links
1. Explaining the black-white mental health gap.
2. Do inflation expectations matter for inflation?
3. Mega-thread on Gadamer (not unrelated to “cracking cultural codes“).
4. The Covid polity that is Australia: “TGA admits delay in at-home testing until vax rates higher was deliberate.”
4b. “Home delivery drones in Australia had to be suspended after they were repeatedly attacked by birds.”
5. The armed children of Ayahualtempa.
6. Why don’t we study public health policy interventions more?
7. ChinaTalk podcast on Evergrande. With transcript.
Air Filtration and UV Disinfection Greatly Reduce Viruses in Hospital Wards
As I wrote earlier, it’s puzzling that there isn’t more attention given to air filtration and UV light disinfection in hospitals, since these techniques have been shown to kill superbugs.
A recent paper also shows that air filtration and UV disinfection can greatly reduces SARS-COV-II in hospital wards. The authors installed portable air filters with UV disinfection on two COVID hospital wards in the UK. The air was tested for viruses, bacteria and fungi before the filters were turned on, during the time the filters were on and then again after the filters were turned off.
The results:
Airborne SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the ward on all five days before activation of air/UV filtration, but on none of the five days when the air/UV filter was operational; SARS-CoV-2 was again detected on four out of five days when the filter was off.
Importantly, in addition to greatly reducing SARS-CoV-2 the portable filters and UV light also greatly reduced multiple viral, bacterial, and fungal pathogens. In the figure at right Air Filter Off is on the left and Air Filter On is on the right.
16th and 17th century Protestantism (that was then, this is now)
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant culture is, despite both popular and popular scholarly persuasion, diametrically opposed to each one of the cardinal positions of the liberal tradition listed above. Those central features of early modern evangelical culture might be quickly and crudely summarized thus: enslavement of the will, with total repudiation of works as currency in the economy of salvation, and the permanent shadow of despair; a sense of self subject to an impossibly high bar of authenticity, and forever vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy; a fear of dramatic performativity, now described as seductive, irrational, and lethal magic; repudiation of visual images, both material and psychic, as the destructive allurements of idolatry; obsessive focus on the literalist written as the source of salvation; and non-toleration for freedom of religious conscience.
The author, James Simpson, later lists some traits of this earlier [sic] ideology:
- posited unmediated power relations between highly centralized, single sources of power on the one hand, and now equalized, atomized, interiorized, and terrorized subjects on the other…
- produced a small cadre of internationally connected, highly literate elect who belonged to the True Church, and who felt obliged by revolutionary necessity both to target the intellectuals of the ancient regime, and to impose punishing disciplines on the laity…
- generated revolutionary accounts of both ecclesiology and the individual life: both could achieve a rebirth, wholly inoculated from the virus of the past;
- demanded total and sudden, not developmental, change via spiritual conversion,
- targeted the hypocrisy of those who only pretended to buy into the new order;
- abolished old and produced new calendars and martyrologies…
- actively developed surveillance systems;
- legitimated violent repudiation of the past on the authority of absolute knowledge derived from the end of time…
- promoted the idea of youth’s superiority over age;
- redefined and impersonalized the relation of the living and the dead…
- legitimated revolutionary violence by positing a much more intimate connection between violence and virtue…In this culture, persecution and violence were a sure sign that the Gospel was being preached…The absence of tumult was symptomatic of somnolent hypocrisy.
That is all from the excellent book Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism, Belknap Press 2019, again by James Simpson.
In case you don’t know when the Reformation was, it was a long time ago.
I also loved the author’s take on how Shakespeare was in fact, for his time, a deliberate answer to the (what we now would call) Wokeism surrounding him. Here is one of the best sentences I have read this year:
By the seventeenth century, Shakespeare began to educate audiences out of the revolutionary discipline of sincerity, by inventing partial escape routes from the schismatic and intolerable logic of early modernizing authentic, singular selfhood.
CS should like that sentence! It is followed by a very good analysis of Measure for Measure and Winter’s Tale.
And I thank GC for carrying this book to me.
What should I ask General Stanley McChrystal?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, and he also has a new book coming out Risk: A User’s Guide. Here is his Wikipedia page.
So what should I ask him?
Sunday assorted links
1. On gender segregation in chess and sports.
2. What if Marx and Freud had never lived?
3. Bainbridge critique of the Rubio war against Woke Capitalism, good piece.
4. Very good Vox coverage of Jason Crawford, progress, and progress studies.
5. In talent search, are we too biased toward “naturals”?
6. Fresh Vitalik: “As I wrote above, “any system which claims to be non-finance, but does not actually make an effort to prevent collusion, will eventually acquire the characteristics of finance”.”
7. A complicated story about Jeff Sachs investigating the origins of Covid (WSJ). In my view he remains underrated.
Building Capacity versus Getting Things Done
Lant Pritchett makes an excellent point that building capacity and getting things done are sometimes in conflict.
A third common flaw in development efforts is to “cocoon” projects from the normal channels of implementation. If one feels very strongly that something needs to be done and one knows that the existing national mechanisms are to weak to do it, there is a temptation to bring in foreign contractors and import the capability. Given the resources and capabilities of American government and contracting firms, of course many things can be done quickly. But this usually not just does not build capability, it both undermines the building of national capability and does not improve a government’s legitimacy. Moreover, this gets done at costs that are astronomical relative to what the national government could ever hope to afford. At one point great claims were being made about the improvements in the health sector and health outcomes in Afghanistan. Even if we grant those were major and important gains, since it was being done by American contractors it meant an Afghan doctor could make many-fold more income working as a driver for the health project than he could as a doctor in a regular government clinic. Back of the envelope calculations were that the cost per person of the health system exceeded not just the potential total government expenditure per person but total post-withdrawal GDP per capita.
The context is Afghanistan but the point is widely applicable in development economics and also to say child development.
Addendum: See also my paper with Shruti, on Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State.
What I’ve been reading
1. Anne Enright, The Green Road. Could Enright be the least heralded, English-language novelist in the United States today? I also was a big fan of her last book Actress. Her short pieces are wonderful as well. Having won a Booker, she is hardly obscure, and yet I have never had anyone tell me that I absolutely must read Anne Enright? Even after the very recent burst of interest in Irish writers…I will read more of her!
2. Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands. My favorite Fermor book, the best sections were on Trinidad and Haiti, but you might have known I would think that.
3. Nadia Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907. Back then vaccines were quite often dangerous: “Victorian public vaccinators used a lancet (a surgical instrument) to cut lines into the flesh in a scored pattern. This was usually done in at least four different places on the arm. Vaccine matter, also called lymph, would then be smeared into the cuts…[often] vaccinators required infants to return eight days after the procedure to allow lymph to be harvested from their blisters, or “vesicles.” This matter was then inserted directly into the arms of waiting infants…After 1871, a fine of up to 20 shillings could be imposed on parents who refused to allow lymph to be taken from their children for use in public vaccination.” Oddly, or perhaps not, the arguments against vaccines haven’t changed much since that time.
4. Andrew G. Farrand, The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity. There should be more books like this! Imagine a whole book directed at…not getting someone tenure, but rather helping you understand what it is actually like to be in Algeria. Sadly I have never been, but this is the next best thing. As I say repeatedly, there should be more country-specific books, simply flat out “about that country” in an explanatory sense. As for Algeria, talk about a nation in decline…
Eswar S. Prasad, The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance is a useful overview of its source material.
Anna Della Subin, Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine, starts with the question of how Emperor Haile Selassie became a god to Rastafarians in Jamaica, and then broadens the question accordingly, moving on to General Douglas MacArthur, Annie Besant, and much more. I expect we will be hearing more from this author. At the very least she knows stuff that other people do not.
You can learn the policy views of Thomas Piketty if you read his Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021. Oddly, or perhaps not, his socialism doesn’t seem to involve government spending any more than fifty percent of gdp, which would be a comedown for many European nations.
Kathleen Harward and Gabriella Sulbarán, The Shared Dog, for young children, teaching the economics of property rights through the tale of a dog. From BrandyPie Books.
A simple, reductive account of my visit to the National Gallery, London
From the 15th through the 17th centuries, the most skilled physical producers in the West were also the best applied chemists and they had ample financial support and they were working out all visual permutations of expressing the best idea the West ever has taken up.
Pretty amazing when you think of it in those terms.
Saturday assorted links
1. Malcolm Gladwell on Norm MacDonald.
2. Knausgaard cultural recommendations.
3. Rawls on caste and eugenics.
4. Very good interview with Amia Srinivasan.
5. Callard on the Bergman remake and the nature of marital loneliness (New Yorker).
6. Good Steven van Zandt piece on management, his life, and The Sopranos (FT). “As Dante became Tony Soprano’s consigliere, “I was able to use my real-life dynamics with Bruce Springsteen as the basis of that relationship. I knew what those dynamics were — the one guy who didn’t want to be the boss, the one guy who he could trust, the one guy who wasn’t afraid of him.””
Guardianship, in practice, is often worse than you might think: the surveillance of Britney Spears
Britney Spears’s father and the security firm he hired to protect her ran an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored her communications and secretly captured audio recordings from her bedroom, including her interactions and conversations with her boyfriend and children, according to a former employee of the security firm.
Alex Vlasov, the employee, supported his claims with emails, text messages and audio recordings he was privy to in his nine years as an executive assistant and operations and cybersecurity manager for Black Box, the security firm. He came forward for a new documentary by The New York Times, “Controlling Britney Spears,” which was released on Friday.
Recording conversations in a private place and mirroring text messages without the consent of both parties can be a violation of the law. It is unclear if the court overseeing Ms. Spears’s conservatorship was aware of or had approved the surveillance.
Mr. Vlasov’s account, and his trove of materials, create the most detailed portrait yet of what Ms. Spears’s life has been like under the conservatorship for the past 13 years. Mr. Vlasov said the relentless surveillance operation had helped several people linked to the conservatorship — primarily her father, James P. Spears — control nearly every aspect of her life…
Mr. Vlasov said that Ms. Spears’s phone had been monitored using a clever tech setup: The iCloud account on her phone was mirrored on an iPad and later on an iPod. Mr. Yemini would have Mr. Vlasov encrypt Ms. Spears’s digital communications captured on the iPad and the iPod to send to Mr. Spears and Robin Greenhill, an employee of Tri Star Sports & Entertainment Group, the former business manager for the singer’s estate.
This arrangement allowed them to monitor all text messages, FaceTime calls, notes, browser history and photographs.
Here is the full NYT story by Liz Day. And by the way, there also was extensive surveillance of people in the “Free Britney!” movement, paid for ultimately by Britney herself. Hi guys!
Is “wrestled” the right word here?
The advisers also wrestled with the practicalities of endorsing a booster shot for only Pfizer-BioNTech recipients, when close to half of vaccinated Americans have received Moderna or J. & J. vaccines.
“I just don’t understand how, later this afternoon, we can say to people 65 and older, ‘You’re at risk for severe disease and death, but only half of you can protect yourselves right now,’” said Dr. Sarah Long, a pediatrician and infectious diseases expert at Drexel University College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.
I feel I do understand how, though of course I do not approve. Here is more from the NYT. And for a further multi-cocktail blitz of what I can only call immoral insanity:
Committee members also expressed concern on Thursday that some recommendations — particularly that certain younger Americans be allowed booster shots after an assessment of individual risks — would mean that only the wealthy and educated would gain access to additional shots.
Better that no one get such doses? Maybe so, just read further:
Some experts seemed to suggest on Wednesday that it might be better to hold off on recommending any booster shots until recipients of all three vaccines could qualify for them.
Still a train wreck, the whole thing. At least the CDC head has had the guts to override the vaccine panel. Of course there is no single way to get it right with a few rules, so how about injecting a greater dose of individual choice? Or do they need to make a special rule letting people in vaccine-shy Kentucky get boosters too?
Friday assorted links
1. Cowen’s 17th Law Ho Hum!: “Ancient Footprints Push Back Date of Human Arrival in the Americas.”
2. Hilarious Star Wars commentary and critique.
3. Good review of the new Sally Rooney.
4. Claims about where crypto regulation is headed, probably not about to happen but it remains on tap.
A few observations on my latest podcast with Amia Srinivasan
I am reluctant to do this, as I have never offered ex post commentary on a Conversations with Tyler before. It seems unfair to the guest (who may or may not have comparable platforms), and perhaps it is the guest who deserves the last word? Still, I think I can at least try to clear up a few misunderstandings about the episode, as I see a number of important points at stake here. So here goes, with some trepidation:
1. The number, frequency, and extremity of reactions to the episode, both on Twitter and in the MR comments section, I think shows that women simply have a much, much tougher time in the public sphere. There is a much smaller intellectual and emotional space they are allowed to inhabit comfortably and without condemnation or excess judgment. Had the episode been with a man, and had been comprised of the exact same words, it would not have received nearly the same attention or criticism. But people don’t like women who argue back. I realize that is a kind of cliche, but it is largely true.
In this regard, even if you largely disagree with Amia Srinivasan, you should take the strength of the reaction to the episode as a sign she might have a valid point after all.
And to put it bluntly, if said female guest plausibly can be perceived as attractive, the reaction will be all the more disproportionate.
2. Some listeners are teed off about “disabled individuals” vs. “disabled men.” I’ve committed numerous tongue and memory slips in my time, and they are hardly ever pointed out. Now you might be upset that she insisted I said “men” (when I didn’t), but in fact my interior monologue at the time was something like this: “We all know this is mostly about men. But if I just say “men,” she will react to that word and drive the conversation in a different direction. So I will say “individuals.”” Maybe she gets points for insight?
3. If I challenge a guest directly, it is typically a sign of intellectual respect for said guest or person (just ask Bryan Caplan, though perhaps by this point he has suffered too much?). And if the guest comes back at me forcefully, I usually (and consistently) take that as a sign of respect. If I don’t seem frustrated, it is because I am not.
4. If a guest challenges my questions (or indeed anyone’s questions) for having sexist premises, I don’t consider this an illegitimate response. I may or may not agree, but I don’t think it should upset me (or you). I think a lot of people’s questions have for instance highly statist or collectivist premises (and should not). I may or may not be right, but surely that too is a response deserving of consideration, should I decide to raise it.
5. To be fully forthright, if you wish to hear my “negative take” on her responses, I don’t think she was very good at handling empirical evidence in the context of a discussion, and furthermore this is a major shortcoming. I find this to be common amongst philosophers, if I may be allowed to continue my moment of condescension. I also had the feeling she is not challenged sufficiently often with said evidence, and that may partly be the fault of Oxford. This is exactly the point where I feel bad/uncertain offering ex post commentary on the episode, but still leaving off this opinion would not be offering my honest assessment of what happened.
6. I have studied her work carefully, including reading her doctoral dissertation and some undergraduate work, and I then and still now fully believe she will be one of the more important philosophers over the next few decades. As I mentioned before, super-impressive in terms of combining intellect, depth, breadth, determination, and relevance, plus has the all-important “willing to put oneself out there.” And if you don’t trust me as talent-spotter, dare I point out that Oxford University has a not too shabby history choosing and developing philosophical talent? But to return a bit to boasting, I think my relatively strong ability to differentiate emotional response from the talent judgment is in fact one reason to trust my talent judgments.
7. You have to learn to learn from people who bother, annoy, or frustrate you. If you do, they will not in fact bother, annoy, or frustrate you. One central point under consideration is her view that even today in the Western or also Nordic countries, the treatment of women (among other groups) could plausibly be much, much better, and with general emancipatory effects for many other groups as well. You may or may not agree, but is that such a crazy question to ponder and think through? No.
So I thought it was a good episode. I would gladly do another one with her someday, and I hope the feeling is mutual.
The Hanson Grabby Aliens Model
Robin is more inclined to draw big conclusions from absences than I am but this is a cool video on the Grabby Aliens Model. And here is the Robin Hanson, Daniel Martin, Calvin McCarter, Jonathan Paulson paper forthcoming in Astrophysical Journal.
What is *the best* time zone for global work and Zoom?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and my answer is Ireland and the UK (Portugal too). Excerpt:
West Coast meetings are trickier. But if you don’t take any past 2 p.m., they’re still manageable. Keep in mind that a lot of technology types start their day at 7 a.m. or earlier, precisely because they are trying to more closely match East Coast hours. So the nominal time difference might be eight hours, but due to work norms you get about an hour and a half of that back, leading to what is in effect a six-and-a-half-hour time difference between your Cotswolds chateau and that conference room in Seattle.
And:
I, for one, prefer to be working in the British time zone, even though most of my commitments are on U.S. East Coast time. For one thing, I have mornings largely to myself. Emails have accumulated while I slept, but there is little pressure to answer most of them right away. Americans on the East Coast are sleeping; if they’re on the West Coast, they will soon be preparing for bed.
Call it an illusion if you wish. But sitting in Dublin with my computer, it feels like I am several hours ahead of everybody else. By the time the email and meeting onslaughts arrive, I’ve already gotten a lot done.
And if you believe in “money illusion,” you might not like that half hour trick they pull in India. As a side note, you might wish to consider the times global chess tournaments are held (often starting 10 or 11 a.m. EST), or for that matter when pre-written MR posts pop up in the morning, namely between midnight and three a.m. EST. You will again see a lot of catering to what I view as “the dominant time zone,” that of London.