Month: January 2022
Chess sentences to ponder
Using a recent sample of super-elite chess games, the present paper shows that males are substantially quicker to quit when dominated by a female than by a male. In contrast, female players’ behaviour differs little as a function of the gender of opponents.
Here is the paper, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How to elect Republicans
In New York, racial minorities are automatically eligible for scarce COVID-19 therapeutics, regardless of age or underlying conditions. In Utah, “Latinx ethnicity” counts for more points than “congestive heart failure” in a patient’s “COVID-19 risk score”—the state’s framework for allocating monoclonal antibodies. And in Minnesota, health officials have devised their own “ethical framework” that prioritizes black 18-year-olds over white 64-year-olds—even though the latter are at much higher risk of severe disease.
These schemes have sparked widespread condemnation of the state governments implementing them. But the idea to use race to determine drug eligibility wasn’t hatched in local health departments; it came directly from the federal Food and Drug Administration.
Here is the full story, I am very willing to issue a correction if it turns out anything posted from this is wrong.
How decentralized really are blockchains?
At this point, there are basically two companies. Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain. In fact, even when you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to Infura!
These client APIs are not using anything to verify blockchain state or the authenticity of responses. The results aren’t even signed. An app like Autonomous Art says “hey what’s the output of this view function on this smart contract,” Alchemy or Infura responds with a JSON blob that says “this is the output,” and the app renders it.
This was surprising to me. So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification. It also doesn’t seem like the best privacy situation. Imagine if every time you interacted with a website in Chrome, your request first went to Google before being routed to the destination and back. That’s the situation with ethereum today. All write traffic is obviously already public on the blockchain, but these companies also have visibility into almost all read requests from almost all users in almost all dApps.
Here is the full essay by Moxie, interesting throughout. And more generally:
One thing that has always felt strange to me about the cryptocurrency world is the lack of attention to the client/server interface. When people talk about blockchains, they talk about distributed trust, leaderless consensus, and all the mechanics of how that works, but often gloss over the reality that clients ultimately can’t participate in those mechanics. All the network diagrams are of servers, the trust model is between servers, everything is about servers. Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.
Recommended. Via Nabeel.
The incentives matter culture that is Quebecois
First-dose vaccinations quadruple in Quebec ahead of restrictions at liquor and cannabis stores
Maybe that works!
Via Paul G.
Saturday assorted links
1. Engineering milestones for 2022?
2. All of this happened in greater China this week.
3. “…changes in the return to human capital caused by shifts in the supply and demand for educated and skilled labor have played a crucial role in the rise in income inequality since the 1970s – rising corporate concentration and employer market power (monopsony) do not appear to be a key culprit.” Link here.
4. “Meet the man who runs a moist towelette museum out of a planetarium.”
5. Met Opera sings through Omicron (NYT).
6. German trade surplus trending down since 2017. Are there still people out there who think this is good news? Remember the bizarre obsession over this issue? Never reason from a trade surplus!
The background level of stress
That is a physiological or biological concept, or it may appear in the other sciences. It rarely plays a direct role in economics, though I think it is important for understanding regime shifts.
I take any estimate of NAIRU, or indeed many other “steady-state” economic variables, as relative to a particular background level of stress. In a pandemic, of course, that level of stress may be quite high, and to be clear much of that may stem from the policy response, not just the pandemic itself.
To be sure, I do not see the 2022 level of American stress as “permanent.” But neither do I hold the 1998 or 2018 backgrounds levels of stress to be “permanent” or “natural” either. If anything, those lower levels may be the historical outliers.
I think a great deal about what the forthcoming level of background stress will be, but I am quite uncertain about any prediction. I do know I read a great number of people who either treat it as absurdly high (e.g., the climate doomsayers), or who are implicitly sure it will be quite low.
I believe this concept of background stress, if nothing else, helps you to see what a lot of apparently reasonable predictions can end up being proven wrong.
Reader request on Herbert von Karajan
From his NYT obit: “But Mr. Karajan was always more than a mere conductor: he was a man of enormous energy and careerist determination, and he managed at his peak, in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, to tower over European musical life as no one had done before or is likely to do again. His nickname at the time was ”the general music director of Europe,” leading the Berlin Philharmonic, La Scala in Milan, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.”
Is this true? How was he able to do this?
A few observations:
1. In that time the central European classical music canon was far more dominant than it is today (later this month the NSO is doing Beethoven with William Grant Still, for instance). That made the dominance of a few figures such as von Karajan and Klemperer, who specialized in that repertoire, far more possible. In America, Germanic culture was more influential as well.
2. There was overall less conducting talent around at the time. Yes, I know the beloved status of your few favorites from back then, and their unique styles, but conductor #30 today, in terms of quality, is far better than before. Today it is harder for anyone to stand out.
3. The authoritarian and possibly abusive management style of von Karajan was far more acceptable back then. Without that style, he could not have honed such a unique sound.
4. Back then conductors actually could sell classical LPs and bring in revenue. This helped enable many of von Karajan’s projects, including costly operas and symphonic cycles. Whether he would have done as well on YouTube, or other more contemporary media, is very much an open question, but probably not. He was very much a “whole package” sort of musical star.
4b. Radio really mattered too. His distant and forbidding but legendary personal style worked well in that medium, and the “always forward impetus whiplash” sonics cut through the poor sound quality.
5. I grew up with von Karajan’s recordings in so many parts of the repertoire, but how many really have held up? His Bruckner’s 8th and Mahler’s 9th are incredible. His Cosi is amazing, though too rigidly controlled for my taste. His Verdi Aida. A big thumbs up to his Mozart #40 and #41. But the Wagner I don’t listen to any more. Never loved his Beethoven cycle. Rarely is he the conductor in my favorite concerti performances, as he tended to blunt the styles of his accompanying soloists. Would I ever prefer him for Haydn, or for French music? No. Definitely some Strauss (the conductor most suited to him?), or perhaps his Tristan? I feel I could get 85% of his value with maybe five recordings? In a way that is quite impressive, but it does put matters in perspective.
6. He was a Nazi, and perhaps that would go over differently today.
7. In short, that was then, this is now.
What Adam Smith thought of large, shareholder-owned companies
The only trades which it seems possible for a joint stock company to carry on successfully, without an exclusive privilege, are those, of which all the operations are capable of being reduced to what is called a routine, or to such a uniformity of method as admits of little or no variation. Of this kind is, first, the banking trade; secondly, the trade of insurance from fire, and from sea risk and capture in time of war; thirdly, the trade of making and maintaining a navigable cut or canal; and, fourthly, the similar trade of bringing water for the supply of a great city.
Of course that is from Wealth of Nations. Always worried about agency problems and incentives, Smith saw them in large, capitalist firms as well.
Friday assorted links
1. Claims about crypto (and black Americans).
2. New publication of essays by the late Jerry Ellig. Ungated.
3. Alvin Rabushka’s work, on-line and ungated.
4. The Institute for Replication, a new project.
5. “The analyses find that India’s cumulative COVID deaths by September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported officially.” More than three million people.
6. David Brooks on how to defend democracy (NYT).
Today’s labor market report
Unemployment is at 3.9%, and can’t get much better. In the new report just 199,000 jobs were added. Job growth is slowing and that is a pre-omicron phenomenon. Labor force participation has not been so low since 1977. The great economic myth of the last thirteen or so years is that you can get the labor market to pre-Covid Trump administration levels and keep it there just by having enough “aggregate demand.” I am all for sufficient aggregate demand, to be clear, but I don’t overrate it either.
People are starting to rethink what is going on. All coherent stories have to involve…the supply side of the labor market. Which is precisely what the orthodoxy had been telling you to ignore. Average is Over.
Elite Capture of Foreign Aid
Not surprising but not good and not good for support for foreign aid. Still we report it all at MR.
Do elites capture foreign aid? This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management but not in other financial centers. The estimates are not confounded by contemporaneous shocks—such as civil conflicts, natural disasters, and financial crises—and are robust to instrumenting using predetermined aid commitments. The implied leakage rate is around 7.5% at the sample mean and tends to increase with the ratio of aid to GDP. The findings are consistent with aid capture in the most aid-dependent countries.
Jørgen Juel Andersen, Niels Johannesen and Bob Rijkers, forthcoming in the JPE.
How do geologists think?
From Dinwar, in the comments:
As for what it means to think like a geologist….it’s complicated. There definitely is a particular way of thinking unique to geologists. I’m convinced that it’s something you’re either born with or not; training just finishes what you started. Engineers and geologists think VERY differently, in nearly incompatible ways, which is fun because we work together all the time.
The main thing is, geologists think in terms of the context of deep time. We view everything from the perspective of millions of years, minimum. When a geologist looks at a stream they see the depositional zones, the erosional zones, the flood plane–and they are thinking both how the local geology affected it and how the stream will look in five million years. (As an aside, you get really strange looks when you discuss this with your eight-year-old son at a park.) And I do mean EVERYTHING. I remember drinking some loose-leaf tea once, adding the tea to the cup then the water, and realizing as the leaves settled that the high surface-area-to-volume ratio combined with cell damage from desiccation made them get water-logged very quickly, allowing for certain flood deposits to form. I’d always been curious about that.
Another thing to remember is that geologists by definition are polymaths. You can’t be a third-rate geologist unless you have a deep understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, fluid dynamics, engineering, astronomy, and a host of other fields. Geology is what you get when those fields overlap. I learned as much about brachiopod anatomy from a structural geologist as I did from any paleontologist, and my minerology class started with “Here’s the nuclear physics of stellar evolution.” We’re expected to know drilling and surveying and cartography and…well, pretty much anything that could possibly affect dirt.
Ultimately, since we are dealing with historical sciences, we are detectives. We examine clues, make hypotheses, and look for evidence to support or refute them (for a fantastic discussion of this find the paper “Strong Inference”–that’s held as an ideal for geologic thinking). Like any scientist we look for subtle things, things that have a bearing on our particular field of study. I’m convinced, for example, that the soil in one area I work in has two distinct layers: a loose, fluffy depositional layer of clay, and a more firm layer of clay derived from the limestone bedrock dissolving. This is due to subtle variations in firmness, moisture content, color, whether or not limestone pieces are in the material, etc.–stuff that most people don’t notice. It’s no special ability on my part–my mother notices things about the weave of cloth that are invisible to me, because she makes the stuff. It’s all training. But the desire to look for it? That’s personality.
Field geologists are even worse–we do all that, only in conditions that would make any sane person run screaming. We’re expected to be athletes, MacGyver, scientists, managers, and Les Stroud all rolled into one. On bad days we add combat medic to the list. Hiking on a broken leg isn’t considered an unreasonable expectation (bear in mind I’m talking about the geologists–my safety manager would be VERY cranky to hear about someone doing that!). People who do this sort of thing routinely view the world in slightly different ways from most ordinary people. Most geologists go through a course called Field Camp, which is an introduction to field work. Walk into any geology department that has this and you can tell who’s gone through the class and who hasn’t.
Thursday assorted links
1. Does Covid make things smell worse? (WSJ) And should you care?
2. You can pre-order the forthcoming Brad DeLong book.
3. More on Fed trading (NYT).
Are Princeton and Yale imprisoning their students?
That is the question I ask in my latest Bloomberg column, as Princeton won’t let you leave Mercer County and Yale won’t let you go into town. Here is the closing bit:
I doubt these policies will significantly limit the spread of Covid. But my objection is more fundamental: They put universities in the untenable position of both panicking about Covid and treating Covid as trivial. Given the purpose of a university as an educational leader, a university that is hypocritical and rhetorically corrupt is failing outright.
The restrictions also show these universities as content to treat their students much worse than their faculty and staff — a faculty and staff that is typically older and thus more at risk for Covid. The liberty of Yale students to visit a local bookshop or grocer is less important than freedom of movement for faculty and administrators.
Imagine the reaction if a professor or a dean told a student: “I will go out and about and do largely as I please. But you have to stay on campus, so you do not infect me.” It would be considered outrageous, and rightly so.
Right now some of America’s top universities are essentially sending that message — in the process telling the world that they are not morally serious. They should not be surprised, then, when the world starts believing them.
Those places seem screwed up to me.
On the Responsibility of Universities to their Students
Emily Oster in The Atlantic:
Many universities have announced a pivot to remote learning for at least part of January, among them UCLA, Columbia, Duke, Yale, Stanford, and Michigan State. The list goes on.
This move—in response to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant—feels like a return to March 2020, when virtually all U.S. universities closed for in-person learning, sending students home for spring break and telling them not to come back. At that point, keeping students away from campus was reasonable. Now, however, this decision is a mistake. It reflects an outmoded level of caution. And it represents a failure of universities to protect their students’ interests.
I agree. Despite being a big fan of online education there is a big difference between online classes developed over many years with substantial funding, like MRU’s classes, and throwing professors into teaching over zoom. College is supposed to be fun. Meeting people is part of the education. Online is great but not for everything.
I would add three points to the those that Oster makes. First, this is where the students are anyway. I gave a talk at UVA recently and everyone was masked according to policy. After the the talk we went to the Corner where the bars and restaurants were packed with unmasked revelers. Mask mandates are pandemic theatre and inconsistent with how much of the country let alone most students are already living. Similarly, going remote is also pandemic theatre and not likely to appreciably reduce interactions in the community at-large.
Second, the elasticity of substitution. It made sense to change behavior substantially when the vaccines were coming. But the vaccines have been here for some time, they are great, they work. So get vaccinated, be thankful, and get back to life.
Finally these arguments apply with at least as much strength if not more to the public schools. Furthermore, we have spent billions of dollars on pandemic preparations for the public schools. Why did we spend that money if not to open the schools?
Basta!