Month: September 2021

Why the defenses of Australia do not persuade me

Alex laid out some complaints about Covid policy down under, I have been receiving emails and tweets arguing the following:

1. Australia is choosing a perfectly acceptable point on the liberty vs. safety frontier.

2. The Australian decision to do extreme lockdowns is democratic, and most Australians support it.

And sometimes I see a third point, which as far as I can tell is true:

3. Australia doesn’t have much in the way of ICU excess capacity, so a Covid surge would hit the country especially hard.

I think those responses, however, are missing the point of the critique.  I would stress that if Covid risk has you with your back against the wall and the government is forcing extremely restrictive measures on your citizenry, you should be implementing the following in an urgent manner:

a. Twice a week rapid antigen tests for everyone.  (Plenty of time to prep for this one.)

b. Much stronger incentives to vaccinate people more rapidly, including with the large stock (six million or so?) of AstraZeneca vaccines.  Demand side incentives, supply side incentives, whatever can be done.  Let’s throw the kitchen sink at this one.  But as it stands, I just don’t see the urgency.

c. Mobile monoclonal antibody units, as they are used in Florida (modest progress here).

d. Maybe other emergency measures too?  I’ve been hearing for decades that Australia has such a great health care system so surely they can make lots of progress on these and other fronts?

As far as I can tell from this great distance, Australia is doing none of these.  And, while there is some disquiet about lockdowns, few of its citizens are demanding that they do any of those positive measures.  Not many of its well-known politicians are proposing those ideas either.  (Please feel free to correct me if that is wrong!…but I just don’t see word of it on-line.)

If Australia implemented all of those policies, or even just one of them, they could attain a much better “liberty vs. lives” frontier, no matter where you think the government should end up on that frontier.  They could save lives, and enjoy more liberty.

And that is the great shame and indeed I would say crime.  There seems to be an incredible complacency that people in some parts of the country will put up with the current measures and not demand the government look for more practical measures to boost both liberty and security.

So when you write me and suggest “this is democratic and the people approve,” yes that is exactly the problem.

Are machine guns on the side of the civilized?

From Priya Satia’s recent and interesting Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire:

Evolutionary history likewise advised tolerance in the face of the mass death enabled by the new machine guns, which ended the long technological parity between Europeans and others, making it possible for Europeans to conquer Africa at least.  Robert Routledge’s popular 1876 history of science lifted Adam Smith’s language defending firearms a century earlier to assure those concerned about machine guns’ destructive nature that they favored “the extension and permanence of civilization.”  Their complexity and expense — itself testimony to European genius — ensured that they could be wielded only by “wealthy and intelligent nations.”  But for a notable substitution of “race” for “nation,” he echoed Smith’s language almost verbatim (without citation) in arguing that firearms gave a necessary advantage to “opulent and civilized communities” over “poor and barbarous races,” which were today “everywhere at the mercy of the wealthy and cultivated nations.”

Obviously the same always will be true for nuclear weapons as well, right?

The book, by the way, is especially interesting about how thinking about progress is related to views of imperialism, though note the first 100 pp. are significantly less focused than the rest of the text.

Monday assorted links

1. Alberto Vilar, RIP.

2. Murky, but important, here is an excellent thread from Avichal Garg on Loot.  And from Tandavas.eth.  Pay attention people.  I know it makes your brain hurt, but…”suck it up kid!”

3. Tom Holland podcast with @pmarca on the history of Silicon Valley.

4. Claims about obesity (speculative).

5. Autor’s mistakes in labor economics.

6. Is there adverse selection for taking equity shares in human capital?

7. New Yorker profile of Kathryn Paige Harden too much mood affiliation in our world.

The robot culture that is Singapore

The robot scans its surroundings also for offenses like Illegal hawking, improperly parked bicycles, assembly of more than five people in line with prevailing Covid-19 safety management measures and e-scooters and motorcycles driving on footpaths.

In case a suspicion arises, the robot takes video footage and sends it to a command and control center which feeds the material into a video analytics system programmed to recognise a person’s posture and other visual indicators of “wrongdoing.”

“Educating the public” with pre-recorded messages

Then, the robot blares out a pre-recorded message, for example, “Please do not smoke in prohibited areas such as covered walkways.” The message is meant to “educate the public and deter such behaviours,” according to a release by the project team.

The robotic watchdog is a joint project involving five public Singapore agencies, namely the Home Team Science and Technology Agency, or HTX, the National Environment Agency, the Land Transport Authority, the Singapore Food Agency and the Housing and Development Board. It will go on for a three-week trial phase for now.

During the trial, the robot will be used for education and deterrence, rather than enforcement, the authorities said. The aim is to collect data to improve the analytics system and fine-tune any kinks.

Here is the full story, via Jasper C.

Gaming is coming to get us

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, the first part concerns culture, but here is the section on government regulation:

The self-contained nature of games also means they will be breaking down government regulation. Plenty of trading already takes place in games — involving currencies, markets, prices and contracts. Game creators and players set and enforce the rules, and it is harder for government regulators to play a central role.

The lesson is clear: If you wish to create a new economic institution, put it inside a game. Or how about an app that gamifies share trading? Do you wish to experiment with a new kind of stock exchange or security outside the purview of traditional government regulation? Try the world of gaming, perhaps combined with crypto, and eventually your “game” just might influence events in the real world.

To date the regulators have tried to be strict. It is currently difficult to build fully realized new worlds without creating something that is legally defined as an unregistered security. Those regulations don’t receive a lot of attention from the mainstream media, but they are rapidly becoming some of the most significant and restrictive rules on the books.

At the same time, regulators are already falling behind. Just as gaming has outraced the world of culture, so will gaming outrace U.S. regulatory capabilities, for a variety of reasons: encryption, the use of cryptocurrency, the difficulties of policing virtual realities, varying rules in foreign jurisdictions and, not incidentally, a lack of expertise among U.S. regulators. (At least the Chinese government’s attempt to restrict youth gaming to three hours a week, while foolhardy, reflects a perceptive cultural conservatism.)

Both the culture-weakening and the regulation-weakening features of games follow from their one basic characteristic: They are self-contained worlds. Until now, human institutions and structures have depended on relatively open and overlapping networks of ideas. Gaming is carving up and privatizing those spaces. This shift is the big trend that hardly anyone — outside of gaming and crypto — is noticing.

If the much-heralded “metaverse” ever arrives, gaming will swallow many more institutions, or create countervailing versions of them. Whether or not you belong to the world of gaming, it is coming for your worlds. I hope you are ready.

And the piece has a good footnote on how gaming relates to postmodernism.

Sunday assorted links

1. David Autor on the labor shortage (NYT).

2. Lawrence H. White corrects the record on Hayek.

3. China fact of the day: “…of all countries looked at by the IMF, in 2000 China had the most decentralized government as measured by the percentage of spending that is local.”  NB: Better link is this one.

4. A fourth dose for Israel?

5. The culture that is Serbia?  And Straussian Beatles Man We Was Lonely.

6. CDC once again not heeding the science, not even the medical science (much less expected value maximization).  And yet further obvious, rookie screw-ups.  And where are those Delta-specific boosters?

7. Ross Douthat on the American Empire (NYT).

Is there a value of application thoroughness?

Ultimately, hiring outsiders is always going to be fraught. But I think Katsenelson was on to something with a ploy he used a few years ago to recruit an analyst. Determined to find someone who really cared about investment research, not just money, he devised a tediously time-consuming job advert. It asked candidates to list all the books they had read in the past 12 months; talk about the three books — and two people — who had influenced them most; provide a stock idea analysis and write a cover letter to say why not hiring them would be a massive mistake.

About 50 applications came in, only a dozen of which answered each question. But the successful candidate is still with the firm and for Katsenelson, “it worked out great”. This tactic won’t suit every company, or every job. But I bet it does better than the average algorithm.

Here is more from Pilita Clark from the FT.

“Conspicuous corruption”

People can exhibit their status by the consumption of particular goods or experiential purchases; this is known as “conspicuous consumption”; the practice is widespread and explains the market characteristics of a whole class of goods, Veblen goods, demand for which increase in tandem with their price. The value of such positional goods lies in their distribution among the population—the rarer they are, the more desirable they become. At the same time, higher income, often associated with higher status, has been studied in its relation to unethical behavior. Here we present research that shows how a particular Veblen good, illicit behavior, and wealth, combine to produce the display of illegality as a status symbol. We gathered evidence at a large, country-level, scale of a particular form of consumption of an illictly acquired good for status purposes. We show that in Greece, a developed middle-income country, where authorities cannot issue custom vanity license plates, people acquire distinguishing plate numbers that act as vanity plate surrogates. We found that such license plates are more common in cars with bigger engines and in luxury brands, and are therefore associated with higher value vehicles. This cannot be explained under the lawful procedures for allocating license plates and must therefore be the result of illegal activities, such as graft. This suggests a pattern of “conspicuous corruption”, where individuals break the law and use their gains as status symbols, knowing that the symbols hint at rule-breaking, as long as the unlawful practice cannot be incontestably established.

Here is the link by Panos Louridas and Diomidis Spinellis, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Those new service sector jobs China markets in everything

At 40 years old, Zheng says she’s tired of searching for the perfect man. So she’s decided to hire one instead.

Whenever she feels like some male company, the divorcée heads to a café in central Shanghai named The Promised Land. There, she spends hours being pampered by a handsome young server, who fetches her drinks, watches movies with her, and listens attentively to her anecdotes.

The sessions cost over 400 yuan ($60) each time, but Zheng says they’re worth every cent.

“The butlers respect me and care about my feelings,” she tells Sixth Tone. “Even if you have a boyfriend, he might not be this sweet, right?”

…The outlets have found success by tapping into the frustrations of Chinese women, many of whom feel society remains far too patriarchal…

Wang Qian, a 24-year-old student, is a regular visitor to the café. She tells Sixth Tone she enjoys the feeling of empowerment she gets from spending time there.

According to Wang, many of the men she meets in normal life are pu xin nan — a term popularized by the female comedian Yang Li that roughly translates as “men who are so average, yet so confident.” The butlers, however, are considerate and never mansplain anything to her, she says…

The butler feels he has to be flawless to progress at The Promised Land. The café imposes a rigid hierarchy. Butlers are divided into three levels: entry, advanced, and celebrity — with each priced differently. To spur competition, the managers hang a board on the wall displaying the number of tips each server has received.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout.

Two brutal tests — can you pass them?

We all give people “tests” when we meet them, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.  Here are two of mine:

1. The chess test.  When I played chess in my youth, I would commonly analyze games with other players.  You would then rapidly learn just how much and how quickly the other player could figure out the position and see imaginative variations.  Some players maybe had equal or even inferior results to mine (I had a good work ethic and took no drugs), but it was obvious they were greater talents at analysis.  Top chess players who worked with Bobby Fischer also attest that in this regard he was tops, not just “another great player.”  That was true even before he was good enough and steady enough to become world champion.

When talking ideas with people, the same issue surfaces — just how quickly and how imaginatively do they grasp what is going on?  You should put aside whatever they have or have not accomplished.  How much do they have this Bobby Fischer-like capacity to analyze?  No matter what their recent results have been (remember how Efim Geller used to kick Fischer’s butt in actual games?).

2. The art test.  Take a person’s favorite genres of art, music, whatever.  But something outside of their work lives.  Maybe it can even be sports.  How deeply do they understand the said subject matter?  At what kind of level can they talk about it or enjoy it or maybe even practice it?

Remember in Hamlet, how Hamlet puts on a play right before the King’s eyes, to see how the King reacts to “art”?

Here we are testing for sensibility more than any kind of rigorous analysis, though the analysis test may kick in as well.  Just how deep is the person’s deepest sensibility?

If you are investing in talent, you probably would prefer someone really good at one of these tests over someone who is “pretty good” at both of them.

3. All other tests.

Now, people can be very successful while failing both “the chess test” and “the art test.”  In fact, most successful people fail both of these tests.  Still, their kinds of success will be circumscribed.  They are more likely to be hard-working, super-sharp, and accomplished, perhaps charismatic as well, while lacking depth and imaginative faculty in their work.

Nonetheless they will be super-focused on being successful.

I call this the success test.

Now if someone can pass the chess test, the art test, and the success test with flying colors…there are such people!

And if the person doesn’t pass any of those tests, they still might be just fine, but there will be a definite upper cap on their performance.

Our anti-science science advisors, yet again

Top federal health officials have told the White House to scale back a plan to offer coronavirus booster shots to the general public later this month, saying that regulators need more time to collect and review all the necessary data, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned the White House on Thursday that their agencies may be able to determine in the coming weeks whether to recommend boosters only for recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — and possibly just some of them to start.

Here is more from the NYT.  I’ll say it again simply: they refuse to apply scientific reasoning under the heading of expected value theory.  I should note, however, that if they recommend it all be sent to Brazil I will agree, but even that decision they should be able to reach within the end of business day.

USA fact of the day retail theft and resale is rising

The Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail, a trade association, which Mr. Dugan heads, estimates that organized retail theft accounts for around $45 billion in annual losses for retailers these days, up from $30 billion a decade ago. At CVS, reported thefts have ballooned 30% since the pandemic began…

“The digital world has become a pretty easy way to move this product,” Home Depot Chairman and CEO Craig Menear told investors in December 2019, becoming one of the first executives to highlight organized retail crime. “It is literally millions and millions of dollars of multiple retailers’ goods.”

Here is the full WSJ story, interesting throughout.

Friday assorted links

1. Capybara population ‘wreaking havoc’ in wealthy community in Argentina.

2. Scott Sumner on his new book.

3. New boxed set covers the Beach Boys last creative period (NYT).

4. David Brooks (albeit with other purposes in mind) expresses why I am skeptical about the possibility of ems (NYT).

5. AMA with Vitalik, the lead question is from Elon, I am in there too, as is Alex and many others you might know (only the people he follows on Twitter were allowed to ask).  Definitely recommended.