Month: January 2022

Why Does the CDC Do This?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday advised Americans to avoid travel to Canada, citing “very high” levels of the coronavirus.

Canada was placed under a Level 4 travel health notice — the highest category…“Because of the current situation in Canada, even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading Covid-19 variants,” the C.D.C. said.

It’s very strange. It’s as if the CDC are on auto pilot and even after two years can’t recognize that the United States may not be the safest place in the world. But why announce to everyone that they can’t compare risks? Why throw away so much credibility?

The political polarization of U.S. firms

by  Tyler Cowen in

Executive teams in U.S. firms are becoming increasingly partisan, leading to a political polarization of corporate America. We establish this new fact using political affiliations from voter registration records for top executives of S&P 1500 firms between 2008 and 2018. The rise in partisanship is explained by both an increasing share of Republican executives and increased sorting by partisan executives into firms with like-minded individuals. Further, we find that within a given firm-year, executives whose political views do not match those of the team’s majority have a higher probability of leaving the firm. The increase in partisanship is taking place despite executive teams becoming more diverse in terms of gender and race.

That is from a new paper by Vyacheslav Fos, Elisabeth Kempf, and Margarita Tsoutsoura.

Do all left-leaning institutions need to unionize?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Columbia University, with its sizable endowment, is a relatively well-capitalized entity. Still, it’s appropriate to ask what problem is solved by a graduate student union. The main difficulty for these students seems to be a lack of jobs when they graduate, and a pay hike might crowd the field further, with unwelcome consequences for the job market. And in the long run, the university could simply cut back on its initial financial aid offerings. The point is, it is hard for graduate student unions to bargain effectively across many of the most relevant dimensions of their student and work experience.

In the meantime, all of these unions are introducing additional veto points into the workplace, sometimes slowing response times. If you run the business and plan to make a big change in how it operates, you might feel — either contractually or tactically — that you need to check with the union first. And if you are a Democrat and a pragmatist, you might prefer a more effective but less unionized DNC, which after all is a major promoter of unionization for the U.S. economy as a whole.

What would a less hypocritical version of a Republican organization look like? Should everyone be given equity shares, or should there be bonuses for star performers? Whatever the answer may be, it probably won’t be debated much in public, as Republicans tend to be more circumspect about such matters. That’s a danger for Republicans, who may find it harder to live up to their principles if no one is calling them to account.

The Democrats, in contrast, tend to stage noisy debates — most of which, sooner or later, seem to settle in the same direction. That’s not a healthy norm of discourse, either.

Recommended.

Japan facts of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Compared with the previous year, the survey showed a drop in the number of people who wanted to work and study abroad, work with foreigners in Japan and learn foreign languages. Most notably the percentage of those who wanted to “use English for a job” declined from its 2020 peak by 10.6 points to 38 per cent.

And:

…the support for the ruling Liberal Democratic party among young people was higher than in other generations. That, said Junji Nakagawa, a professor at Chuo Gakuin University, reflected a view among 20-year-olds that the political landscape was unlikely to ever change.

Here is more from the FT, in part focusing on demographics, sobering throughout.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The economics of taxi tipping.

2. Best Chris Blattman non-fiction reads of last year.

3. Penelope Fitzgerald at age 58.

4. Austin Vernon on why nuclear power is stagnant.

5. In a Gallup survey, Americans seem to be reading fewer books.

6. “Across Congress Members, emotionality is higher for Democrats, for women, for ethnic/religious minorities, for the opposition party, and for members with ideologically extreme roll-call voting records.“

Where are the Variant Specific Boosters?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I wasn’t shocked at the failures of the CDC and the FDA. I am shocked that our government still can’t get its act together in the third year of the pandemic. Consider how lucky, yes lucky, we have been. Here’s Eric Topol:

…the original vaccines were targeted to the Wuhan ancestral strain’s spike protein from 2019. The spike protein, no less the rest of the original SARS-CoV-2 structure, is almost unrecognizable now in the form of the Omicron strain (see antigenic drift from prior post). While there’s naturally been much focus on the extraordinary number of mutations in the receptor binding domain and the rest of the spike protein, over 50 mutations are spread out throughout Omicron, making the prior major variants of concern (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) lightweights with respect to changes in structure that are not just linear or uni-dimensional. Each mutation can interact with others (epistasis); any mutation or combination of mutations has the potential to change the 3D structure of the virus. In this sense, Omicron is an overwhelming reboot of the ancestral strain.

Omicron is very different from the Wuhan ancestral strain and it’s only a matter of luck that the vaccines continue to work and that Omicron is likely less severe than Delta. Don’t tell me that viruses evolve to be less severe over time–that isn’t correct in theory or practice. The most one might say is that a very deadly virus may be difficult to transmit but that only closes off a small part of the evolutionary design-space. There is plenty of room for transmission and lethality to both increase. So the vaccines continue to work well. We got lucky. But for how long will our luck last? Do we really have to wait for a more transmissible, more deadly, more vaccine escaping variant before we act?

Where are the variant-specific boosters? The FDA has said they would approve them quickly, without new efficacy trials so I don’t think the problem is primarily regulatory. Why not catch-up to the virus and maybe even get a jump ahead with pan-coronavirus vaccines?

More generally, in our February 2021 paper in Science my co-authors and I argued that we were still leaving trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk by not investing in more vaccine capacity. I am sorry to say that we were right. Why the failure to invest more broadly?

Mostly I blame American lethargy. After 9/11 the country was angry and united and we had troops in Afghanistan within a matter of weeks and we had taken over the country in a matter of months. For better or worse, we acted quickly and with resolve. Yet, when the virus was killing at 9/11 levels every day the public never reached the same level of anger or resolve. Even now Congress has spent trillions on unemployment insurance, business protection, money for schools and stimulus but has not passed the American Pandemic Preparedness Plan, a pretty decent, mostly science-based investment plan.

80,000 hours ranks research and investment against Global Catastrophic Biologic Risk (GCBR) as among the most pressing and yet tractable problems to work on and yet they estimate that quality-adjusted only about a billion dollars is being spent on these risks. Moreover, COVID doesn’t even count as a GCBR, i.e. 80000 hours at least recognizes that things could be much worse.

I understand that future people don’t vote but even so I expected a little bit more foresight.

My Holberg Prize talk honoring Cass Sunstein

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is from 2018, I hadn’t know it was put on-line this last summer.  The title is about threats to democracy, but much of the actual 24-minute talk is about Cass.  Cass won the Holberg Prize that year, and I was asked to be one of the honoring speakers at the ceremony.  Here goes:

The fish and chips in Bergen was excellent.

And for this pointer I thank Clara B. Jones.

Noah Smith Substack interviews me

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the interview.  Here is one excerpt:

N.S.: So how would you generally describe the zeitgeist of the moment, if you had to give a simple summary? What do you think are a couple of most important trends in culture and thought right now? My impression has been that we’re sort of in a replay of the 70s — a period of exhaustion after several years of intense social unrest, where people are looking around for new cultural and economic paradigms to replace the ones we just smashed. But maybe I’ve just been reading too many Rick Perlstein books?

T.C.: I view the 1970s as a materialistic time, sexually highly charged, and America running into some significant real resource constraints, at least initially stemming from high oil prices. Mainstream culture was often fairly crass — just look at disco, or the ascendancy of mainstream network television. The current time I see as quite different. Sexually, we are withdrawing. Society is more feminized. America has far more immigrants. And we are obsessed with the virtual and with make-believe, to a degree the 1970s could not have imagined. Bruno Macaes is one author who is really on the right track here, with his emphasis on how America is building virtual and indeed often “unreal” fantasies.

I think today the variance of weirdness is increasing. Conformists can conform like never before, due say to social media and the Girardian desire to mimic others. But unusual people can connect with other unusual people, and make each other much weirder and more “niche.” For instance, every possible variant of political views seems to be “out there” these days, and perhaps that is not entirely reassuring. A higher variance for weirdness probably encourages creativity. But is it a positive development on net? We are going to find out.

Recommended throughout, and of course do subscribe to Noah’s Substack.

Australian sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

The world number one player was questioned for over seven hours about his paperwork and who had approved medical exemption permission for his arrival in Australia.

Here is the link.  Supposedly the star won his case.  But another source relates:

However, Australia’s immigration minister has said he is “currently considering the matter” and the process of suspending Djokovic’s visa is “ongoing”.

Resentment people, resentment.  And why are the politicians doing so much speaking, rather than say the public health authorities?  I am a fan, however, of Judge Kelly (FT):

Kelly said that Djokovic had been granted a medical exemption and had filled out the necessary paperwork to enter Australia. “The point I am somewhat agitated about is what more could this man have done?” the judge told the court. He also questioned whether Djokovic had adequate time to consult his lawyers and agent after being told he would be deported.

I might even watch some of the tourney.

Debate: The Ethics of Tuberculosis Challenge Trials

by  Alex Tabarrok in

On Wed. Jan 12 there will be a live online debate on the bioethics question, If wild type tuberculosis challenge studies would be useful, would they be ethical to conduct? The debate will feature debaters from the The Rikers Debate Project:

  • Jerusalem Demsas, Policy Writer at Vox.com
  • Kaamilya Finley, Senior One Team Ambassador, Deloitte & Rikers Debate Project Fellow
  • Charles Hopkins, President, National Action Network – PG County, Maryland & Rikers Debate Project Fellow
  • Brian Patrick, Activist, Artist, & Rikers Debate Project Fellow

and will be judged by a panel of experts, policy makers and interested parties including myself:

  • Gabriel Bankman-Fried, Director, Guarding Against Pandemics
  • Camilla Broderick, Community Navigator for Midtown Community Court & Rikers Debate Project Fellow
  • Ann M. Ginsberg, Deputy Director, TB Vaccines Global Health
  • Phil Krause, Former Deputy Director, FDA/CBER/OVRR
  • Jake Liang, Chief of Liver Diseases Branch & Deputy Director of Translational Research, NIDDK, NIH
  • Larissa MacFarquhar, Staff Writer, The New Yorker
  • Matt Memoli, Director, Clinical Studies Unit, IRP’s Laboratory of Infectious Disease, NIAID
  • Jerry Sadoff, Head of Early Development, Crucell Vaccine Institute, Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson
  • Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics, George Mason University
  • Nikki Teran, Senior Biosecurity Fellow, The Institute for Progress
  • Matthew Yglesias, Founder, Slow Boring

Should be fun. Admission is free and you can register for attendance here.

Kevin Grier reviews MMT

by  Tyler Cowen in

Now readers may wonder, has the government really hit the MMT highway? Am I mischaracterizing Kelton’s views? Is our current mess really an indictment of MMT?

Well, here is an article/interview with Kelton from back in June 2021 with the awesome headline, “Stephanie Kelton: Biden has Adopted MMT.” The article leads with this: “President Biden’s proposed $6 trillion budget will not be fully paid for with tax increases or other spending cuts. It will increase the deficit, according to Stephanie Kelton, and that constitutes an implicit if not explicit adoption of the principles of modern monetary theory (MMT).”

In June, inflation was already elevated. You may wonder what Kelton had to say about it, since in MMT inflation is evidence of overspending. Well, wonder no more dear reader: “Inflation is evidence of too big a deficit, Kelton said. But inflation does not mean that there is too big a deficit; it can be due to “excessive demand pressures.” That is what is happening, according to Kelton, with temporary shortages of goods like computer chips and lumber that will soon self-correct.”

Here is the full review.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Michael S. Nieberg, When France Fell: the Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance.  It is difficult to find WWII material that is both interesting and fresh, but this book qualifies.  It is a look at how America processed the fall of France in 1940, and suddenly realized the whole thing was for real and that dangers to the homeland were not trivial.

2. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999.  I fear this book will become increasingly relevant, as it is a good introduction to what appear to be a number of growing hotspots.  The 1569 Lublin Union created a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  How did that matter, how was it the ethnic issues in that region never were settled, and have we recreated a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth today?  This book is good on all those questions and more.

3. John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.  An excellent book, I have more to say about it and also Stewart’s life, but you’ll have to wait for my CWT with Stewart himself.  Stewart himself seems to like it, and he praised how the author’s archival research corrected many of his own faulty memories.

Edmond Smith, Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire.  There are some good recent books on the East India Company, this useful work looks at the phenomenon more generally.  The Muscovy Company was chartered in 1555, and survived until 1917, at which point it was turned into a “charity.”  Also of relevance for recent charter city discussions.

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in Her Time is a comprehensive study of its chosen topic.  It doesn’t focus on the conceptual issues of liberalism that I care most about, but it is nonetheless by far the most detailed study out there.  Translated from the German.

Also new is David Autor, David A. Mindell, and Elisabeth B. Reynolds, The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines.