Month: May 2023
Undervalued talent in the NBA playoffs
With the underdog Miami Heat ahead of the Celtics 3-0, and the Denver Nuggets ahead of the Lakers 3-0, it is time to assess a lesson or two.
As for Miami, four of their key players — Gabe Vincent, Max Strus, Caleb Martin and Duncan Robinson — were undrafted altogether. This is not only a lesson in talent spotting, it is a lesson of talent development. Those four players have accounted for about forty percent (ESPN gate) of Miami’s points this season. No one on Miami made the All-Star team in 2023.
How about Denver? Jokic, if he proves durable, could end up as one of the top ten players of all time. He was a second-round draft pick (#41), snagged perceptively by Denver and then given a chance to develop, which took a few years. Only Jokic made the All-Star team this year. KCP, a key player for Denver, was let go by the Lakers two years ago and then the Wizards a year ago. Now he is an essential contributor, most of all against the Lakers. (Who even remembers who Denver gave up to get him?) The second best Denver player, Jamal Murray, was picked #7 in 2016. If Philadelphia had deployed their number one pick on him, instead of Ben Simmons, who basically refused to play, they probably would be winning a title right now.
So the potential gains to being good at talent selection are very real indeed. Not every major contributors starts off as a Lebron James or a Victor Wembanyama.
Monday assorted links
1. Why do many people find slow motion appealing?
2. Canine markets in everything, Austin edition. And the hotel version (NYT).
3. News stripped of all hype and emotion, by AI. And new tool for co-authoring long form articles with AI.
5. Everleigh? Nova? Good to see that “Tyler” is dropping in popularity. Rising and falling baby names.
6. Why you should visit Ravenna.
7. The Straussian that is Magnus Carlsen (WSJ). Thanos!
The Promising Pathway Act
The evident failures of the FDA and CDC during COVID have opened up new opportunities for reform. One of the most interesting is the Promising Pathway Act, sponsored by Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). As Bart Madden and I write, the Act would create a new form of approval, provisional approval.
The Hill: Here’s how the current version of the bill works: A new drug could secure provisional approval for serious or life-threatening health conditions via early-stage clinical investigations indicating that the new drug’s safety and efficacy compare favorably to approved drugs.
Importantly, provisional approval requires establishing patient registries for all such treatments and is not simply a matter of faster approval. Third-party, independent entities would manage these registries, tracking safety and effectiveness.
In order to speed up the use of this new knowledge, the de-identified, disaggregated databases would be accessible to approved researchers, medical professionals for public health research and biopharmaceutical industry researchers. Drug sponsors or the government would fund the registries, and the FDA would submit an annual report to Congress on provisionally approved drugs.
Thus, provisional approval would allow earlier access to not yet approved drugs but would require the creation of a patient registry and database that could be used by anyone to evaluate the drug. An interesting and important idea.
Future markets in everything?
Here is one series of takes on AI in cinema/TV, and where it is going:
4. Viewers getting digitally scanned themselves, and paying extra to have themselves inserted in these custom films. 7/
— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) May 13, 2023
Via Anecdotal.
Islam and human capital in historical Spain
We use a unique dataset on Muslim domination between 711-1492 and literacy in 1860 for about 7500 municipalities to study the long-run impact of Islam on human-capital in historical Spain. Reduced-form estimates show a large and robust negative relationship between length of Muslim rule and literacy. We argue that, contrary to local arrangements set up by Christians, Islamic institutions discouraged the rise of the merchant class, blocking local forms of self-government and thereby persistently hindering demand for education. Indeed, results show that a longer Muslim domination in Spain is negatively related to the share of merchants, whereas neither later episodes of trade nor differences in jurisdictions and different stages of the Reconquista affect our main results. Consistent with our interpretation, panel estimates show that cities under Muslim rule missed-out on the critical juncture to establish self-government institutions.
That is from a new paper by Francesco Cinnirella, Alieza Naghavi, and Giovanni Prarolo, via a loyal MR reader.
Sunday assorted links
2. Scott Sumner and Bob Lucas. And climate change and the Lucas Critique.
3. Dhabas serving U.S. Punjabi truck drivers.
4. Ezra Klein on why coin minting and the like, in response to the debt ceiling, are terrible ideas (NYT). Ezra is right, and a lot of the other commentary on this issue is simply not very well thought out churlishness.
5. Paul Simon update (Times of London, yes you should subscribe very cheap for U.S. readers).
6. More on Turkey from The New Left Review. And Acemoglu on the election.
The Politics of Academic Research
We develop a novel measure of political slant in research to examine whether political ideology influences the content and use of academic research. Our measure examines the frequency of citations from think tanks with different political ideologies and allows us to examine both the supply and demand for research. We find that research in Economics and Political Science displays a liberal slant, while Finance and Accounting research exhibits a conservative slant, and these differences cannot be accounted for by variations in research topics. We also find that the ideological slant of researchers is positively correlated with that of their Ph.D. institution and research conducted outside universities appears to cater more to the political party of the current President. Finally, political donations data confirms that the ideological slant we measure based on think tank citations aligns with the political values of researchers. Our findings have important implications for the structure of research funding.
Here is the full article by Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner.
Jonathan Swift/Gulliver/Laputa optimal taxation
I heard a very warm debate between two professors, about the most commodious and effectual ways and means of raising money, without grieving the subject. The first affirmed, “the justest method would be, to lay a certain tax upon vices and folly; and the sum fixed upon every man to be rated, after the fairest manner, by a jury of his neighbours.” The second was of an opinion directly contrary; “to tax those qualities of body and mind, for which men chiefly value themselves; the rate to be more or less, according to the degrees of excelling; the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own breast.” The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the other sex, and the assessments, according to the number and nature of the favours they have received; for which, they are allowed to be their own vouchers. Wit, valour, and politeness, were likewise proposed to be largely taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person’s giving his own word for the quantum of what he possessed. But as to honour, justice, wisdom, and learning, they should not be taxed at all; because they are qualifications of so singular a kind, that no man will either allow them in his neighbour or value them in himself.
The women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in dressing, wherein they had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by their own judgment. But constancy, chastity, good sense, and good nature, were not rated, because they would not bear the charge of collecting.
First Pigou taxes on vice, then taxes on inherited rents, and finally no tax on ideas, knowledge, or wisdom. That is from part III, chapter six.
Is software eating Japan? (from my email)
I came across a great series of posts by Richard Katz about Japan and information technology. It shows that software has not eaten Japan (for now?).
Some interesting facts:– “by 2025, 60% of Japan’s large companies will be operating core systems that are more than 20 years old. Would anyone today use a 2005 PC?”
– ” It is worth noting that the OECD shows Japan suffering an actual drop in output per employee in ICT business services from 2005 through 2021, its ICT productivity having peaked out in 1999. By contrast, Korea’s productivity grew 41% in the same period”
– “Among high school boys, Japan ranks number one in using the Internet to search for information on a particular topic several times a day, and Japan’s girls come in second among OECD girls. Japanese boys also rank number one in single-player online games. On the other hand, these boys score at, or near, the bottom on other activities, such as multi-player online games or uploading their own content”.
– In an OECD study, Japan is third from the bottom when it comes to the share of students ” who foresee having a career, not just in ICT, but in any area of science or engineering” [that was quite shocking to me, to be honest. Positively shocking, on the other hand, was that Portugal leads the pack]
– “What’s even more remarkable is that Japan’s top performers on the math and science tests come in dead last in the share who foresee themselves working in science or engineering”.
– Maybe this provides a bit of an explanation: ” In 2021, the average annual income of a Japanese ICT staffer was just ¥4.38 million ($34,466), down 4% from 2019. That was 2% below the median salary in Japan, whereas in the US and China, ICT salaries are 8-10% above the median.”
sources: https://richardkatz.substack.com/p/2025-digital-cliff-part-i
https://richardkatz.substack.com/p/metis-2025-digital-cliff-part-ii
That is all from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski.
Saturday assorted links
1. Higher intergenerational mobility for African Christians than Muslims, demographically adjusted.
2. The oldest plans to scale of humanmade mega-structures.
3. An LLM trained on the Dark Web. (Remember when you all were complaining about how “Woke” some of the current products are?)
4. Henry Oliver on Edmonds on Parfit.
5. “Here we report the discovery of a temperate Earth-sized planet orbiting the cool M6 dwarf LP 791-18.”
6. Why do people listen to sad songs? (NYT) And Girardian orcas.
Ezra Klein and Jean Twenge on teen mental health
They did an NYT podcast, here is the transcript, here is the podcast itself. Excerpt:
EZRA KLEIN: Violent crime actually gets at why I wanted to ask this before we got into smartphones, because I’m much more familiar with the debate over crime than I am over the debate over suicide trend lines. And the thing that has always striking to me, and I think really underplayed in our national discourse over crime, is that we don’t really understand it, that if you go into the ’80s and the ’90s, you see crime goes way, way up in the 70s, way, way up in all kinds of different jurisdictions, more or less all at the same time.
And then it begins going way, way down in all kinds of different places all at the same time. So you have stories that people know, like there’s New York with Rudy Giuliani and broken windows policing and stop and frisk. But it also goes down in all these places that didn’t do what New York City did. It’s so widespread, both the rise and the fall, that you end up having researchers trying to think of even broader explanations, like whether or not lead and the amount of lead in young kids’ bloodstreams — and thus, the effect on their executive function when they got older, maybe that’s the causal mechanism.
And it made me wonder if there isn’t a chance that suicide and teen mental health is like that, that it has this kind of all the way up, all the way down in all places, and we don’t really understand why pattern to it.
Do read/listen to the whole thing, interesting throughout.
*The Fall of the Turkish Model*
The author is Cihan Tuğal, and the subtitle is How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism, though the book is more concretely a comparison across Egypt and Tunisia as well, with frequent remarks on Iran. Here is one excerpt:
This led to what Kevan Harris has called the ‘subcontractor state’: an economy which is neither centralized under a governmental authority not privatized and liberalized. The subcontractor state has decentralized its social and economic roles without liberalizing the economy or even straightforwardly privatizing the state-owned enterprises. As a result, the peculiar third sector of the Iranian economy has expanded in rather complicated and unpredictable ways. Rather than leading to liberalization privatization under revolutionary corporatism intensified and twisted the significance of organization such as the bonyads…Privatization under the populist-conservative Ahmedinejad exploited the ambiguities of the tripartite division of the economy…’Privatization’ entailed the sale of public assets not to private companies but to nongovernmental public enterprises (such as pension funds, the bonyads and military contractors).
This book is one useful background source for the current electoral process in Turkey.
Corporate Ownership and Firm Performance: Evidence from Fertility Clinics
Corporate investors are often credited with boosting target firm performance but criticized for prioritizing profits over consumer well-being. This tension is particularly evident in the healthcare sector, where information frictions contribute to underinvestment in quality. This paper finds that corporate ownership can improve healthcare outcomes in a setting where patients have access to service pricing and quality information – the market for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). After acquisition by a fertility chain, clinic volume increases by 28.2%, and IVF success rates increase by 13.6%. Fertility chains also implement changes that enhance quality, benefit underperforming clinics, and expand the IVF market.
That is from a new paper by Amber La Forgia and Julia Bodner. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How to use GPT-4 plus web browsing
I like:
What are three prominent stories about the economy of Nairobi, appearing in Kenyan newspapers in May of 2023?
…and then keep on going…much better than trying to read Kenyan newspapers.
Friday assorted links
1. 1950-2020, what predicts U.S. urban density?
2. Will AI want to self-improve?
4. Ross against marijuana legalilization (NYT).
5. Rasheed Griffith on Caribbean dollarization.
6. “One of the most common mistakes in American politics today is to suppose that rival groups pose an “existential threat” when they, in fact, do not.” David Corey’s critique of the New Right.