Month: July 2022
Cali bleg
Your advice is much appreciated, thank you!
Thursday assorted links
Quantitative Political Science Research is Greatly Underpowered
We analyze the statistical power of political science research by collating over 16,000 hypothesis tests from about 2,000 articles. Even with generous assumptions, the median analysis has about 10% power, and only about 1 in 10 tests have at least 80% power to detect the consensus effects reported in the literature. There is also substantial heterogeneity in tests across research areas, with some being characterized by high-power but most having very low power. To contextualize our findings, we survey political methodologists to assess their expectations about power levels. Most methodologists greatly overestimate the statistical power of political science research.
My excellent Conversation with Matthew Ball
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Ball joined Tyler to discuss the eventual widespan transition of the population to the metaverse, the exciting implications of this interconnected network of 3D worlds for education, how the metaverse will improve dating and its impacts on sex, the happiness and career satisfaction of professional gamers, his predictions for Tyler’s most frequent uses of the metaverse, his favorite type of entrepreneur, why he has thousands of tabs open on his computer at any given moment, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As I read your book, The Metaverse, which again, I’ll recommend highly, I have the impression you’re pretty optimistic about interoperability within the metaverse and an ultimate lack of market power. Now, if I look around the internet — I mean, most obviously, the Apple Store but also a lot of gaming platforms — you see 30 percent fees, or something in that neighborhood, all over the place. Will the metaverse have the equivalent of a 30 percent fee? Or is it a truly competitive market where everything gets competed down to marginal cost?
BALL: I think neither/nor. I wouldn’t say that market power diffuses. There’s currently this ethos, especially in the Web3 community, that decentralization needs to win and that decentralization can win.
It’s a question of where on the spectrum are we? The early internet was obviously held back by heavy decentralization. This is one of the reasons why AOL was, for so many people, the primary onboarding experience. It was easy, cohesive, visual, vertically integrated down to the software, the browser experience, and so forth. But we believe that the last 15 years has been too centralized.
At the end of the day, no matter how decentralized the underlying protocols of the metaverse are, no matter how popular blockchains are, there are multiple forms of centralization. Habit is powerful. Brand is powerful — the associated trust, intellectual property, the fundamental feedback loops of revenue and scale that drive better product investment for more engineers.
So I struggle to imagine the future isn’t some form of today, a handful of varyingly horizontal-vertical software and hardware-based platforms that have disproportionate share and even more influence. But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be as powerful as today.
The 30 percent fee is definitely going to come by the wayside. We see this in the EU, whose legislation dropped yesterday. I have absolute certainty that that is going to go away. The question is the timeline. A lawyer joked yesterday, Apple is going to fight the EU until the heat death of the universe, and that’s probably likely. But Apple will find other ways to control and extract, as is their profit motive.
COWEN: Where is the most likely place for that partial market power or centralization to show up? Is it in the IP rights, in the payment system, the hardware provider, a cross-platform engine, somewhere else? What’s the most likely choke point?
BALL: There seem to be two different answers to that. Number one is software distribution. This is your classic discovery and distribution of virtual experiences. Steam does that. Roblox does that. Google does that, frankly, the search engine. That gateway to virtual experiences typically affords you the opportunity to be the dominant identity system, the dominant payment system, and so on and so forth.
The other option is hardware. We can think of the metaverse as a persistent network of experiences, but as with the internet, it may exist literally and in abstraction, but you can only access it through a device. Those device operators have an ever-growing network of APIs, experiences, technologies, technical requirements, and controls through which they can shape it.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
Landlordism returns to Ireland but why?
No political party ever ran for election on the promise to bring back the landlords. None of our leaders ever said that the problem with late 20th century Ireland was that too few people were paying rent.
And yet, this shift back towards landlordism didn’t happen by accident. It has been engineered by the State and partly paid for by the taxpayer.
It is the State that created and shaped this change. It pays all or most of the rent to landlords for 113,000 households. Between 2001 and 2020 governments have spent €12.5 billion to support the private rental market.
The consequent shift is a remarkable exercise in social engineering. Renting has been made more and more “normal” for each succeeding generation.
A recent ESRI report tells us that fewer than 20 per cent of Irish people born in the 1950s or 1960s lived in rented accommodation in their mid-thirties. For those born in the 1970s this rises to just over 30 per cent. For those born in the 1980s it’s over 40 per cent.
These figures are, naturally, mirrored on the other side by a dramatic decline in home ownership among young people. In 2004, 60 per cent of those aged 25-44 owned their own homes. By 2015 that had halved to 30 per cent.
The fiscal angle to the Ukraine war is undercovered
Ukraine’s budget crisis has become acute because of a slump in tax revenues and customs duties since the invasion began almost five months ago together with higher war spending.
A halt to grain and steel exports has deprived Kyiv of foreign currency earnings. Ukraine is being forced to burn through its foreign exchange reserves at an accelerating pace, as the central bank purchases government bonds to plug its financing gap.
…The finance ministry said its assessment of the gap was still $5bn a month but even that was way more than western capitals had so far provided.
…The fiscal strains are showing more broadly. Naftogaz, the state-owned energy company, on Tuesday asked holders of $1.5bn of its bonds to accept a delay in payments as it seeks to preserve cash for purchasing gas. It would amount to the first default by a Ukrainian state entity since the war began.
Here is more from the FT.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Henry Oliver reviews Catherine Rendell on John Donne.
2. New Stanford conference on the economics of animal welfare, with new papers too. Caroline Hoxby has a hand in this.
3. In praise of Tom Tugendhat (NYT).
4. The decline of history as a major.
5. Vitalik on Balaji’s Network States. And Vitalik on the only correct date format.
Yimby and Liberty
Good answer from Matt Yglesias at Slow Boring:
Marcus Seldon: How should the YIMBY movement/urbanists deal with the fact that most Americans say they want to live in a detached single-family home that they own? How do you sell upzoning, walkable neighborhoods, transit-oriented development, and so on to people who largely like (or think they like, at least) the American suburban lifestyle?
MY: Logically, there’s just no contradiction here. It’s clear that there is significant unmet demand to live in New York, Boston, D.C., and San Francisco, and it’s also clear that most people don’t want to live in those cities. Right now, they collectively account for maybe three to four percent of the U.S. population, and in YIMBYtopia, maybe that would go up to five to six percent.
But mostly, the thing I want to sell people on is freedom. It should be legal to build a detached single-family home on any parcel of residentially zoned land in America. But it should also be legal to build a duplex or some rowhouses there. The point of making it legal to build mid-rise apartments isn’t that there’s something incredibly awesome about living in a mid-rise apartment. It’s that in a world of tradeoffs, you might prefer it to an alternative living situation where you have a longer commute or higher expenses.
Yglesias is correct. Yimby is a natural libertarian issue, it’s good for freedom, efficiency and the poor. It’s unfortunate that in recent years there has been some slippage among libertarians to adopt a “conservative” approach to Yimby and immigration by arguing for local and national rights to determine neighborhood and country composition. Sorry, you can twist words all you want, but that isn’t libertarianism it’s collectivism.
The NSF Career Award
From an email from an anonymous correspondent:
Tyler, you may already know this, but I don’t think most people outside of STEM do. The NSF CAREER award (grant) is viewed as a major stepping-stone towards tenure, and there is an expectation that most people will “get one” on their way to tenure at top universities. Yet the requirements are:
1. Write 15 pages, outlining your entire ambitious research agenda for the next 5 years, generally organized as 3 major thrusts with 2-3 paper-sized ideas each.
2. Write 2-3 pages about broader impact, which generally includes broadening participation goals explaining the new undergraduate classes, graduate classes, and extensive community outreach you will engage in.
3. You have about a 20% chance of being awarded this grant, and will hear in 6-9 months (~10% of your tenure clock!)
4. It’s for only $500k, which at most top STEM programs covers about a grad-student per year by the time all the indirect costs are included.
(You may guess that I am writing one right now). The idea that we basically have “prestige” grants that everyone agrees are way too much effort for way too little money blows my mind. And everyone goes along with it!
Other unintended consequences include that you’re effectively forbidden from proposing the same ideas to other funding agencies while the grants is under review, locking you out of other funding sources!
Imagine if I pitched a VC and they said “We’ll get back to you in six months and in the mean time you can’t pitch anyone else, and we’ll only give you enough for one employee for the next five years”. How could anyone do innovation in that kind of environment?!
TC again: Of those it is #4 that I find most astonishing. That is some rate of overhead! Keep in mind that throughout world history the costs of intermediation generally have run at about two percent of wealth. And that is for intermediaries that have to assess the creditworthiness of borrowers, not just send money along.
Are some VC investments predictably bad?
Do institutional investors invest efficiently? To study this question I combine a novel dataset of over 16,000 startups (representing over $9 billion in investments) with machine learning methods to evaluate the decisions of early-stage investors. By comparing investor choices to an algorithm’s predictions, I show that approximately half of the investments were predictably bad—based on information known at the time of investment, the predicted return of the investment was less than readily available outside options. The cost of these poor investments is 1000 basis points, totalling over $900 million in my data. I provide suggestive evidence that over-reliance on the founders’ background is one mechanism underlying these choices. Together the results suggest that high stakes and firm sophistication are not sufficient for efficient use of information in capital allocation decisions.
That is from a new paper by Diag Davenport, via Atta Tarki.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Whose breath are you breathing?
2. Which sciences did women end up in?
3. Indian farmers streamed fake pro cricket matches to Russian bettors for two weeks.
4. Switzerland moves ahead with underground autonomous cargo delivery.
5. For health reasons, Rebecca Blank will not assume the Northwestern presidency.
6. The apocalypse is upon us: “People Are Ditching Shampoo and Washing Their Hair With Pantry Items” (WSJ).
A Pox on the FDA
Monkeypox isn’t in the same category of risk that COVID was before vaccines but it’s a significant risk, especially in some populations, and it’s a test of how much we have learned. The answer is not bloody much. Here’s James Walsh in NYMag:
As monkeypox cases have ticked up nationwide, the White House and federal agencies have repeatedly assured the public that millions of vaccine doses will be distributed to at-risk populations before the end of the year. Yet since the World Health Organization announced the global monkeypox outbreak in May, only tens of thousands of shots have been administered in the U.S. The slow start is due, at least in part, to the fact that 1.1 million doses have been stored in a Denmark pharmaceutical facility while the Food and Drug Administration has taken almost two months to approve their release here, according to people familiar with the situation. FDA officials only began to inspect the facility last week. The lag time, public-health experts say, is indicative of the federal government’s lackadaisical approach to a growing public-health emergency.
…It’s unclear why the FDA took so long to send inspectors to Denmark. The agency regularly conducted virtual inspections of drug facilities early in the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the agency’s guidance, and public-health activists are demanding answers. “Members of at risk communities are being turned away from monkeypox vaccination because these vaccines are not available in sufficient quantity in the U.S., but instead sitting in freezers in Denmark,” members of the advocacy group PrEP4All and Partners in Health wrote in a letter to federal officials overseeing the outbreak response last week.
Compounding their frustrations was the FDA’s refusal to accept an inspection done last year by its counterpart, the European Medicines Agency, which deemed the company’s facility in compliance with the FDA’s own standards.
“The FDA does not grant reciprocity for EMA authorization of any vaccines, for monkeypox or other diseases,” a spokesperson for the FDA said in a statement.
Is there anyone in the United States who is saying, “I am at risk of Monkeypox and I want the vaccine but I don’t trust the European Medicines Agency to run the inspection. I’d rather wait for the FDA!” I don’t think so. James Krellenstein, an activist on this issue, asks:
“Why were the Europeans able to inspect this plant a year ago, ensuring these doses can be used in Europe and the Biden Administration didn’t do the same,” he added. “The FDA is making a judgment that they’d rather let gay people remain unvaccinated for weeks and weeks and weeks than trust the European certification process.”
Many people want to be vaccinated:
New York City has received just 7,000 doses from the federal government amid the national vaccine shortage. Meanwhile, the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s appointment booking system has failed to keep up with the high demand for the shots — most recently on Wednesday.
…The mounting frustrations left health officials and Mayor Eric Adams on the defensive, pushing back against comparisons to New York’s struggles during the early days of the coronavirus vaccine, which was beset by computer glitches and supply shortages.
This is a classic case for reciprocity. Any drug, vaccine, test or sunscreen (!) approved by a stringent regulatory authority ought to be conditionally approved in the United States.
Addendum: If you are not furious already–and you should be–remember that during COVID the FDA suspended factory inspections around the world creating shortages of life-saving cancer drugs and other pharmaceuticals. As I wrote then “Grocery store workers are working, meat packers are working, hell, bars and restaurants are open in many parts of the country but FDA inspectors aren’t inspecting. It boggles the mind.”
Hat tip: Josh Barro.
Photo Credit: Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.
David Neumark and Peter Shirley on the minimum wage literature
The effects on employment, of course:
Our key conclusions are as follows: (i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults and the less educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.
Here is the full paper, of course Twitter will try to tell you otherwise.
Monday assorted links
1. Irish horror films find mainstream success. “Irish folklore is particularly dark and lends itself to horror,” said the film’s writer and director, Kate Dolan, 31. “Not a lot of happy endings – a lot of people being dragged to their doom.”
2. A proposal for science funding reform.
3. Is Canada’s health care system collapsing?
4. Is Paxlovid resistance just a matter of time?
5. Are gophers farmers? (NYT)
My HBR piece with Atta Tarki and Alexandra Ham
How to streamline the hiring process. Excerpt with the core recommendations:
- Reduce the number of interviewers in your process. If you have more than four or five interviewers, chances are that the costs associated with the additional complexity in your process have exceeded the benefits they produce.
- Be explicit about whose decision it is. Steer your organizational culture away from a consensus-oriented approach. Instead, for each role make it explicit whose decision it is, who else might have veto power, and that other interviewers should not be offended if a candidate is hired despite not getting their approval. And then keep repeating this message until most of your colleagues adapt to this new approach.
- Ask interviewers to use numerical ratings when evaluating candidates. We’ve experienced that doing so helps hiring committees focus on the holistic view rather than on one-off negative comments. Having interviewers submit their ratings before getting input from their colleagues will have the further benefit of reducing the chance of groupthink in your evaluations.
- Remove the “Dr. Deaths” from your hiring committee. Track which interviewers turn down the most candidates, and if they are not better at picking good hires, communicate with them that they will be removed from the hiring committee if they don’t correct their behavior.
- Change your culture to reward those who spot great hires, not penalizing those who end up with an occasional poor performer. You can further do this by emphasizing the difference between good decisions and good outcomes. Sometimes a fully logical bet will result in a poor outcome. If needs be, call out those spreading negativism.
Recommended. Atta Tarki is at ECA Partners, Alexandra Ham is at TalentCompass.co.