Month: September 2022
Masking in Korea
Things have to get a touch anecdotal here, still, try running an experiment in your head. In front of you is a neat cross-section of Korean life: 100 people, touching all demographics. And, in line with those same societal trends, 95 are wearing masks, while five are not.
Can you picture what those five look like? What they sound like? I bet you can!
Chances are, they are either very old men, very old women, young children naive to the virus or youngish men in their late teens/early 20s (also foreigners, but this is slightly cheating). What they definitely are not, are young-to-middle-age women.
A society which balances unachievable financial burdens on its men, against unhealthy beauty standards on its women, the Korean obsession with female appearance has always been problematic.
Even before the pandemic hit the peninsula, it was common enough for young women and girls to wear masks ― blaming allergies, pollution or fine dust; anything for an excuse to hide away for a day or two, and get some temporary relief from all that pressure.
So no doubt the mask mandates originally came as a happy escape for such people. Still, this is no more of a solution to vanity and judgment, than heroin is to physical pain. And in the case of masks, they cannot even be said to ease that underlying agony.
Here is more from Jed Lea-Henry. And yes, in the absence of a mandate, even outside in Seoul most people are masked, over 90 percent I would say.
The evolution of single payer health insurance
This is one of the big underreported stories these days, namely that single payer systems are working far less well than they used to, including during the pandemic but not only. Eventually the blame will shift and will be put on something like “austerity,” whereas the deeper understanding was that those systems were bound to end up understaffed and undercapitalized all along. In any case, here is the latest from Sweden, circa summer 2022:
In 2000, around 100,000 Swedes had private health insurance. Today, there are seven times as many, in a country of 10 million people. In 60% of cases, the insurance is paid for by the employer. According to the Swedish insurers’ organization Svensk Försäkring, the rate can vary from 300 to 600 crowns on average per month. For those dealing with health problems, the advantages are quicker consultations and avoiding long waiting lines.
And that is from Le Monde, not the Heritage Foundation. The Canadian, British, and New Zealand systems are all in crisis too. But that narrative is not exactly tailor-made for today’s media environment…
Tuesday assorted links
1. China fact of the day — what if China stops buying Treasuries?
2. “A few fire ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them close together, and they act more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. They can form rafts to survive flash floods, arrange themselves into towers, and you can even pour them from a teapot like a fluid.” Link here.
3. Donald Kohn on Sumner and ngdp targeting. And Sumner’s response.
4. Is 20 quadrillion the correct number of ants? The optimal number of ants?
5. Supply curves slope upward.
6. Niger projection of the day (FT): “On current trends, Niger’s population is on course to nearly triple from about 24mn in 2020 to a projected 68mn in 2050, according to the UN Development Programme’s latest forecast. If that projection proves correct, Niger’s population will have grown 25 times in the century to 2050, a period over which the global population will have risen a relatively modest fourfold.”
Cognitive ability predicts economic extremism
Conservative economic attitudes have been theorized as symptoms of low cognitive ability. Studies suggest the opposite, linking more conservative views weakly to higher, not lower, cognitive ability, but with very large between-study variability. Here, we propose and replicate a new model linking cognitive ability not to liberal or conservative economics, but to economic extremism: How far individuals deviate from prevailing centrist views. Two large pre-registered studies in the UK (N = 700 & 700) and the British Cohort Study dataset (N = 11,563) replicated the predicted association of intelligence with economic deviance (β = 0.4 to 0.12). These findings were robust and expand the role of cognitive ability from tracking the economic consensus to influencing support for (relatively) extremist views. They suggest opportunities to understand the generation and mainstreaming of radical fringe social attitudes.
That is from a new paper by Chien-An Lin and Timothy C. Bates. I would frame it a little differently! For one thing, the extreme views are sufficiently complex that perhaps the smarter people are more likely to pick them up and understand them, whether those views are correct or not.
Via Michelle Dawson.
Who are the odious figures?
Tyler: But even that phrase, odious figures, I’m made uncomfortable by. Like okay, you can cite Hitler. Hitler’s odious. I think we make ourselves stupider. I like to ask this question: does this person favor price controls on prescription drugs? Well, they might, they might not. To me, that’s a terrible view that will kill many thousands of people, maybe more. But I don’t think of those people as odious. I think, they’re wrong about something. If someone’s called odious, I’ll just ask myself, well, are their views worse than the views of someone who wants price controls on prescription drugs? [laughter] Like, who’s odious? I know there’s the Hitler thing, and Godwin’s law, but we have got to mostly move past that, and just focus on the ideas and being more analytical.
That is from my podcast dialogue with Richard Hanania from a few weeks ago. Don’t forget that Columbia researcher Frank Lichtenberg calculates the average pharmaceutical expenditure per life-year saved (globally) at $2,837. Let’s spend more on this one! And in multiple ways. In the meantime, don’t be so obsessed with what other people think and write — focus on the issues themselves.
#chessdrama splat
Chess.com, which has alleged many more instances of on-line cheating, is the fat lady that will sing (or not). It strikes me as highly unlikely that they simply would have made up the existence of their further charges, especially since they claim to have produced a report and sent it to Niemann. (You don’t have to think the report is correct, but I am betting it exists.) In the meantime, chess.com did the right thing by sending their report to Niemann first, as they claim, rather than releasing it to the general public. This way Niemann has a chance to rebut or defuse the allegations.
Note that Niemann, for all of his various denials, has not, to the best of my knowledge, denied that the chess.com report exists. Nor do I see any direct evidence or statement that he will be providing a rebuttal.
In the meantime, I don’t think Carlsen is obliged to produce his own report. I don’t understand why so many in the chess world or on Twitter are urging him to do this. There may be libel issues in play as well, but arguably he is waiting for the chess.com report to come out, in addition to any possible rebuttal or lack thereof. That is the information channel already in play, so to speak.
If a player has cheated repeatedly in on-line chess, should we let that same player participate in top-tier over-the-board tournaments? To me the answer is an obvious no, and presumably Carlsen agrees. Even if over-the-board cheating is very difficult or impossible to pull off, major distractions are created by the player’s history. Or that same player might prove untrustworthy in other regards.
So the key elements here are the chess.com report and any possible Niemann rebuttal. I am waiting for those. Magnus is patient, and I am patient too. The current state of imperfect information will not last forever.
Monday assorted links
1. New book by Natasha Lance Rogoff, Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia.
2. Newfoundland gannets diving for fish.
3. “Those who are unable to be vaccinated or boosted for health or religious reasons should contact [email protected] for information about an exemption.” AEA adds vaccine exemptions.
4. Why are contracts hard to read? And New Zealand tries to eliminate jargon from legislation (WSJ).
5. Do old people enjoy spending money less?
Taxing Mechanical Engineers and Subsidizing Drama Majors
In The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think I argued that the Biden student loan plan would incentivize students to take on more debt and incentivize schools to raise tuition with most of the increased costs being passed on to taxpayers through generous income based repayment plans. Adam Looney at Brookings takes a deep dive into the IDR plan and concludes that it’s even worse than I thought. Here are some of Looney’s key points:
- As recently as 2017, CBO projected that student loan borrowers would, on average, repay close to $1.11 per dollar they borrowed (including interest). Borrowing was often perceived to be the least favorable way to pay for college. But under the administration’s IDR proposal (and other regulatory changes), undergraduate borrowers who enroll in the plan might be expected to pay approximately $0.50 for each $1 borrowed—and some can reliably expect to pay zero. As a result, borrowing will be the best way to pay for college. If there’s a chance you’ll not need to repay all of the loan—and it’s likely that a majority of undergraduate students will be in that boat—it will be a financial no-brainer to take out the maximum student loan.
- The data shows that roughly half of Americans with some college experience but not a BA would qualify for zero payments under the proposal, as would about 25% of BA graduates. However, the vast majority of students (including more than 80% of BA recipients) would qualify for reduced payments.
- [A] lot of student debt represents borrowing for living expenses, and thus a sizable share of the value of loans forgiven under the IDR proposal will be for such expenses…A graduate student at Columbia University can borrow $30,827 each year for living expenses, personal expenses, and other costs above and beyond how much they borrow for tuition. A significant number of those graduates can expect those borrowed amounts to be forgiven. That means that the federal government will pay twice as much to subsidize the rent of a Columbia graduate student than it will for a low-income individual under the Section 8 housing voucher program…
Looney agrees that the incentive to increase tuition will apply to some graduate and professional programs but he thinks there is less room to increase tuition at undergraduate programs because borrowing is capped (currently! AT) at fairly low rates. But he offers an even more plausible but disheartening scenario that takes us in exactly the wrong direction.
Because the IDR subsidy is based primarily on post-college earnings, programs that leave students without a degree or that don’t lead to a good job will get a larger subsidy. Students at good schools and high-return programs will be asked to repay their loans nearly in full. Want a free ride to college? You can have one, but only if you study cosmetology, liberal arts, or drama, preferably at a for-profit school. Want to be a nurse, an engineer, or major in computer science or math? You’ll have to pay full price (especially at the best programs in each field). This is a problem because most student outcomes—both bad and good—are highly predictable based on the quality, value, completion rate, and post-graduation earnings of the program attended. IDR can work if designed well, but this IDR imposed on the current U.S. system of higher education means programs and institutions with the worst outcomes and highest debts will accrue the largest subsidies.
Looney does a back of the envelope calculation and estimates that typical graduates in Mechanical Engineering will on average get a 0% subsidy but graduates in Music will get a 96% subsidy, in Drama a 99% subsidy and Masseuses a 100% subsidy on average. This of course is exactly the wrong approach. If we are going to subsidize, we should subsidize degrees with plausible positive spillovers not masseues.
The problem is not just the subsidy but the encouragement this gives to create low-value programs:
- …institutions will have an incentive to create valueless programs and aggressively recruit students into those programs with promises they will be free under an IDR plan….The fact that a student can take a loan for living expenses (or even enroll in a program for purposes of taking out such a loan) makes the loan program easy to abuse. Some borrowers will use the loan system as an ATM, taking out student loans knowing they’ll qualify for forgiveness, and receiving the proceeds in cash, expecting not to repay the loan….I suspect that such abuses will be facilitated by predatory institutions.
Overall, the student loan program, as currently written, is looking to be one of the most costly, inefficient and unwise government programs of the 21st century. As I said in my first post, “fixing” the program is likely to drive ever more increasing intervention into higher education much as has happened with health care. My guess is that no one really thought this albatross through.
Nigeria facts of the day
On the supply side, dollar revenues from oil have plummeted because of massive theft, pushing down official daily production of crude to 1.1mn barrels, far below Nigeria’s Opec quota of 1.8mn b/d. Angola has now usurped Nigeria as Africa’s biggest oil producer.
Nigeria’s petrol subsidy, under which its car owners enjoy among the cheapest fuel in the world ($0.40/litre), means the federal government receives less revenue. The higher the oil price, the bigger the gap between the real and the subsidised price and the higher the bill for the government. Nigeria will spend an estimated $9.6bn on petroleum subsidies this year, about 2 per cent of gross domestic product and almost 10 times the budgeted amount.
Here is more from the FT, in other words Nigeria is failing to benefit from much higher oil prices.
Will the British government remain stubbornly attached to this idea?
That’s why, when people talk about this as an ideological government, they are more right than they know. The ideology is growth, driven by supply-side reform of the economy. Kwarteng dispensed with Tom Scholar, his chief civil servant, and set a new 2.5 per cent growth target because he believes the Treasury has become too focused, over a period of decades, on sharing out the cake rather than increasing its size.
The moment that really signalled a new approach came when Truss was interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg the day before her victory was announced. She was confronted with a chart showing that her proposed national insurance cuts would predominantly advantage the rich. She didn’t blink. “What I am about is growing the economy,” she said. “And growing the economy benefits everyone.”
This might sound obvious. But in a political context, it is revolutionary.
…Growth, in short, is a moral issue. One of the reasons that it is so easy to over-regulate, to refuse planning permission, to stifle entrepreneurialism, is that it seems like a victimless crime. But impeding growth punishes not just our future selves, but everyone else around us.
Here is more (gated) from Robert Colville at the Times of London.
What should I ask Reza Aslan?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is Wikipedia:
Reza Aslan (Persian: رضا اصلان, IPA: [ˈɾezɒː æsˈlɒːn]; born May 3, 1972) is an Iranian-American scholar of sociology of religion, writer, and television host. A convert to evangelical Christianity from Shia Islam as a youth, Aslan eventually reverted to Islam but continued to write about Christianity. He has written four books on religion: No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and God: A Human History.
And he has a new book coming, namely An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville. So what should I ask him?
Sunday assorted links
*Magnificent Rebels*
The author is the excellent Andrea Wulf and the subtitle is The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. The focus is on the German group of thinkers who worked together in or near Jena, including the Schlegels, Novalis, Schiller, Goethe and Schelling, with a later cameo from Hegel. This is one of my favorite books of the year, but note it focuses mostly on their personal stories and not so much on their ideas. Perfect for me, but not the ideal introduction for every reader. And their ideas are hard to explain! Their emphasis on imagination and subjectivity has been so absorbed into the modern world it can be hard to grasp their revolutionary nature at the time. Context is that which is scarce. Recommended nonetheless.
Interview markets in everything
Some job candidates are hiring proxies to sit in job interviews for them — and even paying up to $150 an hour for one.
In a recent Insider investigation into the “bait-and-switch” job interview that’s becoming increasingly trendy, one “professional” job interview proxy, who uses a website to book clients and keeps a Google Driver folder of past video interviews, said he charges clients $150 an hour.
The proxy was approached by Aamil Karimi, who works at cybersecurity firm Optiv as a principal intelligence analyst. Karimi, who posed as a job seeker to talk to the proxy, told Insider’s Rob Price that the “bait-and-switch” trend has been on the rise because of more work-from-home jobs and overseas hiring.
The “bait-and-switch” interview works like this: a job candidate hires someone else to pretend to be them in a job interview in hopes they will secure the job. When the job starts, the person who hired the proxy is the one to show up for work.
Here is the full story. Let someone else say what your open browser tabs are! For the pointer I thank the excellent Samir Varma.