Month: November 2021
*Get Back*, I
Everything that gets done runs through Paul. As Adam Minter put it (excellent thread more generally):
Nothing would get done if Paul weren’t there. But it’s a fine line, because he’s irritating. also – Ringo, in my opinion, has deep deep reservoirs of patience. I don’t know how he go through some of those days.
In this “prepping for a no overdubs, pure live performance” setting, the studio doesn’t matter. And control over studio production was how Paul exerted an increasing authority over the Beatles. “Let’s work on this more together” de facto meant “let’s give me, Paul, greater influence over the proceedings.” Yet without his studio expertise as a Williamsonian trump card, Paul has to be more of a pain in the ass to induce effort and focus from the others.
“I’m scared of me being the boss, and I kind of have been for a couple of years,” or something like that, is what Paul says. “I know it’s right, and you know it’s right” comes shortly thereafter (remember this?).
“Whatever it is that will please you, I will do it” responds George. John in turn mutters something about maybe they should improvise the whole thing.
George Martin is rendered irrelevant, due to the studio production being omitted, and mostly he stands around and looks like a guy who used to do ads for bad British cars in the 1960s.
Two highlights are Paul singing a mock version of “Gimme’ Some Truth,” and John singing a mock version of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Doesn’t the film show it was actually George who broke up the Beatles? (Or Ringo in 1968?) Doesn’t the person who leaves first split up the relationship?
What is quiet Yoko thinking the whole time?
And from Dave Bueche:
- It’s surprising to see them digging around for material. You’d think they would have had a lineup of songs before they started the project.
- Twickenham [the studio] seems like a drag. You can tell they don’t love it either. It’s big and cavernous and a few colored lights doesn’t change that.
- There’s a certain sad nostalgia in them playing all the old standards they learned in Germany and Liverpool. Like they know this the end and they’re sort of reliving the beginning one last time.
- Paul is clearly more invested than the others. George seems like he’s trying to just learn the songs, do his bit, same with Ringo. John seems like he’s a good sport, but other than Don’t Let Me Down – he seems to be going through the motions.
- It’s fun seeing them cover Dylan and other contemporaries.
The reviews are all “oh, this shows the Beatles loved working together until the very end.” That’s a pretty superficial read of the material. To me, Get Back is much more about “how the main value adders control small groups in a somewhat tyrannical and mostly efficient manner, and why this isn’t always stable.” Mancur Olson remains underrated.
“All Things Must Pass” just wasn’t that good a song, and it would have been worse as a Beatles song.
Friday assorted links
1. Russian army logistics. And Soviet fact of the day.
3. The police culture that is New Jersey (NYT).
4. “Aligning with Lukianoff and Haidt’s assertions, we found that students’ self-reported prevalence of cognitive distortions positively predicted their endorsement of safetyism-inspired beliefs, the belief that words can harm, and support for the broad use of trigger warnings.” Link here.
5. Kalshi: “Will Omicron make up greater than 1% of U.S. COVID-19 cases by the new year?” And here is another market in a new variant.
India fact of the day
India’s most recent National Family Health Survey, which is conducted every five years by the Health Ministry, was released Wednesday and showed the total fertility rate (TFR) across India dropping to 2.0 in 2019-2021, compared with 2.2 in 2015-2016. A country with a TFR of 2.1, known as the replacement rate, would maintain a stable population over time; a lower TFR means the population would decrease in the absence of other factors, such as immigration…
In cities across India — as in other countries — women are opting for fewer children: The urban fertility rate is 1.6.
And the bias against baby girls is diminishing. Here is the full story. Via Naveen.
Harford on a Carbon Tax
Tim Harford has a good piece on the virtues of a carbon tax:
A friend recently wrote to me agonising over an ethical question. He was pondering a long-haul trip to see his family but was all too aware that the flight would have a huge carbon footprint. Could the journey possibly be justified? I suggested that my friend find out what the carbon footprint was (a tonne of CO2, it turns out) and then imagine a hypothetical carbon tax. Would he still be willing to travel if he had to pay the tax? If not, the trip wasn’t worth it.
My advice raises the question of what this carbon tax should be. At a carbon tax of £5 per tonne of CO2 — plenty of carbon global emissions are taxed at less than that — the extra tax on that one-tonne return flight would be trivial. At a more serious £50, it would be noticeable but perhaps not decisive. (The emissions trading systems in the EU and the UK until recently implied a carbon price of around £50 per tonne of CO2; the UK price has since leapt. US Democrats are pondering their own carbon tax.) If the carbon tax were a deep-green £500 per tonne of CO2, my friend would have to be missing his family more than most of us ever do.
I realise it is quixotic to advise checking one’s personal consumption decisions against a completely hypothetical tax, but it gets to the core of what a carbon tax is for. It isn’t just an incentive to change behaviour; it’s a source of information about which behaviour we most urgently need to change.
Exactly right. Or as Tyler and I say in Modern Principles, a price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive. Put a price on carbon and every actor in the system will be incentivized to follow the signal and reduce carbon use in ways that no one can predict or plan.
Tim concludes:
…A carbon tax changes that by making the climate impact as real a cost as any other. It sends a signal along all those supply chains, nudging every decision towards the lower-carbon alternative. A shopper may decide that a carbon-taxed T-shirt is too costly, but meanwhile the textile factory is looking to save on electricity, while the electricity supplier is switching to solar. Every part of the value chain becomes greener.
The Covid pandemic is not taking the very best of turns
This was emailed to me, but I am not doing a double indent…in any case I fear the person might be right…
“The prevailing sentiment is that the COVID pandemic is close to over. The vaccines are of course miraculous but we are not currently on a good trajectory.
- It is increasingly clear that two shots plus a booster of our current vaccines are the least one needs to have effective medium-term protection. Almost nowhere (least of all the US) is on track to reach this kind of coverage. The messaging in the US remains mistaken, where the CDC to this day recommends boosters only for those aged 50 and older. More broadly, the institutional confusion around boosters shows that the adults are not yet in charge.
- Even though Delta arose in the spring, we are still vaccinating (and boosting) people with the original Wuhan strain. This is insane, and probably meaningfully less effective, and yet nobody is up in arms about it.
- Severe outbreaks are manifestly possible even in exceptionally vaccinated populations, especially when booster uptake is low. See: Singapore, Gibraltar, Ireland. One should assume that almost every part of the US will see significant waves before COVID “ends”, whatever that turns out to mean. Note that just 60% of the US population is vaccinated today with two doses.
- There is early suggestive evidence from Israel that boosters may wane.
- Waning aside, it’s clear that breakthrough infections in boosted individuals are not uncommon. While the vast majority of those infections are not severe, this does mean that there will still be plenty of mutagenesis.
- It’s unclear that longitudinal cross-immunity is strong. Getting COVID is not enough to confer long-term protection. We probably can’t just “get this over with”, even if we are willing to tolerate a large number of one-time deaths.
- The currently-breaking news about the South African Nu strain shows that arguments about how the spike protein is running out of mutation search space are almost certainly wrong.
- While the fog of war is thick right now, the early data on Nu suggests that it may be a big deal. Even if it’s not, however, it has been obvious since we got the vaccines that vaccine escape is a concern. You can debate whether the probability of a vaccine escaping variant is 20% or 80%, but in any case we need effective contingency plans in place. If we fail to respond effectively to Nu, that will be a considerably greater institutional failure than anything that happened at the outset of the pandemic. We’ve had almost two years since the first COVID case and one year from the vaccine approvals to prepare. So I ask: what is the plan for the vaccine-escaping variant?
On current trends, it looks like we will probably need one of two things to effectively end the pandemic: (1) very effective COVID therapeutics (paxlovid, molnupiravir, and fluvoxamine all being candidates but my guess is that none is a silver bullet) or (2) pan-coronavirus vaccines (with broader protection than what is currently available).
It isn’t over yet.
P.S. Has any U.S. health body recommended the clinical use of fluvoxamine (an already-approved drug), or has the FDA given any guidance as to when it might approve paxlovid? If not, can they outline their reasoning? 1,600 Americans died of COVID on Nov 24.”
Nu, a variant of real concern
Here is the Eric Topol thread. Do read it. Here is the scary graph, based on preliminary data. Here is Bloom Lab. Here is a layperson’s take from the Times of London:
When was the variant first discovered?
South African authorities raised the alarm at 2pm on Tuesday of this week, when they found samples with a significant number of worrying mutations.The samples dated from tests taken on November 14 and 16. On Wednesday, even as scientists were analysing the genome, other samples were found in Botswana and China, originating from travellers from South Africa.
Why were scientists initially concerned by this variant?
The spike protein is the tool a virus uses to enter cells, and the part of it our vaccines are trained to spot. This variant had 32 mutations in the spike — meaning it would look different to our immune system and behave differently when attacking a body. As a virologist at Imperial College put it, it was a “horrific spike profile”.Why has worry increased over the course of the week?
When geneticists and virologists looked at the mutations they realised there was a high likelihood they could increase its transmissibility or help it evade immunity. But these concerns were still theoretical. However, today South African scientists spotted a quirk in the testing regimen. PCR tests look for three genes in the coronavirus and amplify them. If, however, the virus was this variant they were only able to amplify two.In the province of Gauteng, where the proportion of tests coming back positive has rocketed to one in three, they found the proportion in which only two genes were amplified has also rocketed.
What does this mean?
There are three options. It is still possible — though unlikely — this is chance, with the variant’s apparently increased spread relating to an unusual cluster. If it does have a genuine advantage, then it is either better able to spread or better able to infect people who have prior immunity — either from vaccination or infection. Or, it is both.
This might come to nothing, but it is definitely a matter of concern. One more general point is that even if Nu is a non-event, it seems to show that the space for possible significant mutations is largely than we had thought.
Thanksgiving assorted links
1. Why do frozen turkeys explode when deep fried?
2. “Former South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan has died at age 90. This means all living former South Korean Presidents are currently in jail.” Tweet link here.
3. David Wallace-Wells on the tragedy of regular ol’ air pollution.
4. The case against the Trump-Biden tariffs (NYT).
5. New dating terms.
6. Walmart “cancels” children’s toy that swears and sings in Polish about doing cocaine.
7. Georgia politician stands by giant topiary chicken that got him ousted as mayor.
Give Thanks to the Green Revolution
It’s well known that the Green Revolution dramatically increased crop yields. In a new paper, Gollin, Hansen and Wingender use a general equilibrium model to show that the effects were even more far reaching. For a given acre, the Green Revolution raised the yields of some crops by 44% between 1965 and 2010. But the total effect was even larger because higher yields incentivized farmers to substitute away from lower-yield crops into higher yield crops. Moreover, higher yields meant that less farm labor was required which shifted populations into manufacturing. When one takes into account all of these knock-on effects the authors find substantial effects on GDP. Indeed, the authors estimate that if the Green Revolution had never happened GDP per capita in the developing world would be half of its current level.
More realistically, if the Green Revolution had been delayed by ten years incomes in the developing world would be 17% lower today. In terms of cumulative GDP what this means is that the investments which made the Green Revolution possible were responsible for some US $83 trillion in benefits.
Somewhat surprisingly, the Green Revolution simultaneously prevented many people from starving but also reduced total population because of reduced fertility. The Green Revolution also meant that less land was used for farming not more.
As Tyler argues in Stubborn Attachments (see also this video) growth is a moral imperative. A ten year delay in the Green Revolution could easily have happened. Indeed, it is happening now.
What should I ask Russ Roberts?
I will be doing a podcast with him, specifically focusing on his decision to emigrate to Israel. Here are the suggestions that Russ solicited from Twitter. We will release the episode both on EconTalk and on CWT.
So what should I ask him? Keep in mind this is the Conversation with Russ I want to have…
Model this Apple pricing decision
Apple has one new product that’s already so back-ordered it won’t arrive in time for Christmas. It’s a polishing cloth. Priced at $19.
Unveiled in October after Apple showed off its new line of gadgets, the soft, light gray square is made of “nonabrasive material” and embossed with Apple’s logo. During tests, the rag worked like other microfiber cloths that list for less than half that price. So…why $19?
As it happens, Apple’s pricing strategy rarely allows accessories to fall below that threshold. The 6.3-inch swatch of fabric sits beside 17 other Apple-branded items on the company’s website—a mélange of charging cables, dongles and adapters—each priced at $19. Some, such as the wired earbuds and charging adapter, were once included with new iPhones.
Those $19 Apple items—together with the Apple Watch, AirPods and other small gadgets—are part of the company’s growing Wearables, Home and Accessories category, which had more than $8 billion in revenue in the quarter that ended in October.
Almost every Apple price ends in the number “9.” Would it matter if we all carried around $30 bills? There is further discussion in this Galvin Brown WSJ piece.
Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Tyler Cowen on complementarity and gratitude
One fan with a helpful perspective on the Wizards is Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at nearby George Mason University. He says that even he was surprised they were able to move Wall and then Westbrook’s contracts so effectively. But what’s more interesting to him about the Wizards these days is what’s happening on the court. “They have quite a few players who are ‘good enough’ shooters,” Cowen said in an email. “When everyone on the floor is a ‘good enough’ shooter, the good enough shooters are better than you might think.”
This is a useful way of thinking about the entire team. In a league where the ultimate goal is greatness, the Wizards are showing the power of pretty good. It’s the sort of progress that precedes success.
“Their ceiling still might be pretty low,” Cowen said. “But for the time being, we can enjoy the ride.”
Carlsen vs. Nepo
Here is my Bloomberg column on that topic:
He [Carlsen] recently opined that he is lucky to be facing Nepo rather than two other potential challengers, Fabio Caruana or Ding Liren. That’s the kind of trash talk most sports competitors frown upon for fear of motivating opponents.
Carlsen also has been engaging in online marathons of “bullet chess,” exactly the kind of attention-disrupting, energy-draining stunt contenders are supposed to avoid. In a bullet game, each player has only one minute for all the moves. The pace is so rapid the games are hard to watch, much less play. Carlsen also made a recent appearance in Dortmund, Germany, in part to pose for a photo with a Norwegian soccer player. Nepo, in contrast, claims to have done an “insane amount of work” for the event.
Will the fast thinking of bullet chess help Carlsen see more moves during the much slower time controls of the match with Nepo? (A championship game can easily last four hours or more.) Or maybe the bullet success will intimidate Nepo?
Carlsen also is making it clear that for him, chess is a business proposition. His parents set up a company in his name when he was 16, and the commercial empire since has expanded. Carlsen has worked as a fashion model, endorsed an online sports betting site, and worked with a Norwegian water company. He sponsors a leading chess app and has organized his own series of online chess tournaments, played with more rapid time controls, during the pandemic. Those events arguably have attracted more attention than any of the mainstream tournaments.
Carlsen is probably at the point where even a loss in the match would barely affect his income stream, and that is a dangerous motivational place to be…
Nepo is considered a super-talented but inconsistent player, one who does not bounce back well from adversity. But if he stays focused he could pose a formidable challenge. He was never expected to be a challenger in the first place, so he may feel he has little to lose and, in accord with his naturally aggressive style, he can take all the chances he wants. Carlsen is considered the superior player, perhaps the greatest ever, and remains a heavy favorite with the sports betting sites.
I am picking Carlsen to win. And on the future of chess:
Carlsen has argued that the mainstream matches of classical chess are too slow and yield too many draws. He would prefer a time limit of around 25 minutes per game per player to become the default. Why shouldn’t the world of chess switch over to a system that spectators seem to prefer?
If Carlsen retains his title, he may well lead such a switch, and it would be hard for the chess establishment to resist. If Nepo wins the match, Carlsen might secede from the current system, causing the chess world to splinter.
What we are seeing in the lead-up to this match is this: A healthy chess world is going to be a more diversely organized chess world, with a lot of disagreement over which forms of chess are most important. Twitch streaming and YouTube already have joined the mix. Chess is likely to retain its recent popularity, but in doing so it will fully realize its destiny as the esport it has already become. The good news is that if you don’t like the outcome of the upcoming chess drama, you can find another one to watch the next day.
Recommended.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Dezeen 2021 architecture awards. Guess which countries are winning the most?
2. The power of rank information.
3. New Miyazaki movie coming (NYT).
4. Why does R vary so much in pandemics?
5. Are the logistics of these anti-virals really going to work out?
The anatomy of gender discrimination
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Maybe the men, on average, did have greater ambition and thus promotion potential. One reason could be that women, on average, spend more time at home raising children than men. For very demanding executive jobs, even a small difference in time and travel availability could make a big difference in job performance.
And yet even if that’s the case, there could still be a discrimination problem. Even if women and men differ on average, there is a probability distribution for each group, and those distributions usually will overlap. That is, there will be many women who are willing and able to meet any workplace standard thrown at them, and many men with limited ambition.
If you think men and women are different on average, the unfairness can become all the more severe for the potential top performers. In this context, employers will look at the most talented women and, for reasons of stereotyping, dramatically underestimate their potential, including for leadership positions.
Economic reasoning suggests another subtle effect at play. Promotion to the top involves a series of steps along a career ladder, often many steps. If there is a discrimination “tax” at each step, even if only a small one, those taxes can produce a discouraging effect. It resembles the old problem of the medieval river that has too many tolls on it, levied by too many independent principalities. The net effect can be to make the river too costly to traverse, even if each prince is taking only a small amount.
With a citation to Zaua further below!
Did Milton Friedman support bailouts?
Hugh Rockoff does a 72 pp. deep dive on Milton Friedman on bailouts. This is an excellent paper, as he also considers Friedman’s columns and spoken words over the years and he also fleshes out Friedman’s thoughts on what we now call “shadow banks” (he worried about them). Friedman was willing to accept a fair number of bailouts, here is one excerpt:
In the bailout of Continental Illinois, a case that Friedman thought had been handled well, depositors and other creditors were protected, but shareholders were mostly wiped out and management was replaced. The protection of depositors and other creditors created an advantage for large banks: they could raise funds more easily because they, like Continental Illinois, were “too big to fail.” However, Friedman thought that as long as shareholders and managers were forced to pay dearly when a financial institution was bailed out there would still be an adequate incentive for bank managers to exercise prudence.
More generally:
For Friedman this meant that in the case of financial institutions the benefits of a bailout might outweigh the costs.
And more speculatively:
No one can channel an economist as brilliant and creative as Milton Friedman. Nevertheless, having come this far I will make an attempt. I believe that it would have been consistent with his earlier views for Friedman to have been “reluctant to condemn” the program of bailouts undertaken in 2008, to use the phrase that he used when questioned about the rescue of Long–Term Capital Management. I think he would have recognized that the repos issued by Lehman Brothers and other investment banks were similar to uninsured deposits in commercial banks, thus making possible a destructive panic. In other words, he would have recognized the logic of the contention that 2008 was a “run on repos” and similar to earlier financial panics (Gorton, Laarits, and Metrick 2018). He might have reminded us of the consequences of the failure to provide help for the BoUS in 1930. However, he might well have been critical of the structure of the bailouts, especially with respect to how various classes of stakeholders were treated.
I recall being excoriated in 2009 for suggesting that Friedman would have endorsed some version of the bailouts of that time.
Via the excellent Douglas Irwin. And here is my older CWT with Doug.