Month: May 2023
The FDA Still Doesn’t Trust Women
The FDA has a long history of antipathy towards personal testing. The FDA has opposed personal pregnancy tests, HIV tests, genetic tests, and COVID tests, as I discussed in my article Testing Freedom. Well, the FDA is at it again:
NYTimes: At a hearing Tuesday to consider whether the Food and Drug Administration should authorize the country’s first over-the-counter birth control pill, a panel of independent medical experts advising the agency was left to reckon with two contradictory analyses of the medication called Opill.
During the eight-hour session, the manufacturer of the pill, HRA Pharma, which is owned by Perrigo, and representatives of many medical organizations and reproductive health specialists said that data strongly supported approval. They said that Opill, approved as a prescription drug 50 years ago, was safe, effective and easy for women of all ages to use appropriately — and that over-the-counter availability was sorely needed to lower the country’s high rate of unintended pregnancies.
In contrast, F.D.A. scientists questioned the reliability of company data that was intended to show that consumers would take the pill at roughly the same time every day and comply with directions to abstain from sex or temporarily use other birth control if they missed a dose. The agency seemed especially concerned about whether women with breast cancer or unexplained vaginal bleeding would correctly choose not to take Opill and whether adolescents and people with limited literacy would use it accurately.
Note carefully: The FDA isn’t worried that women won’t take the pill at the same time every day they are worried that women who get the pill without a prescription won’t take it at the same time every day. I guess in the FDA’s view women need some mansplaining to take birth control or at least some doctorplaining.
Dr. Westhoff suggested that for most women, there is no advantage to a doctor prescribing the pills because doctors don’t typically monitor patient adherence and often only see such patients once a year.
Similarly, I suspect that women with breast cancer will be concerned enough about their health to read the warning, Don’t Take This Pill if You Have Breast Cancer. Who knows, women with breast cancer might even ask their cancer physician or Google or their GP(T) about what foods and drugs to take and which to avoid.
If I didn’t know the FDA’s long history of opposing personal testing, I would think this simply bizarre but not trusting people with their own health decisions is practically in the FDA’s DNA.
New blog on science and economic growth
By economist Jack Leach, here is the blog. Here is a post on the Greek origins of modern science.
The Gender Well-being Gap
Overall, are men or women happier? It is complicated, and it depends on what you mean exactly:
Given recent controversies about the existence of a gender wellbeing gap we revisit the issue estimating gender differences across 55 subjective well-being metrics – 37 positive affect and 18 negative affect – contained in 8 cross-country surveys from 167 countries across the world, two US surveys covering multiple years and a survey for Canada. We find women score more highly than men on all negative affect measures and lower than men on all but three positive affect metrics, confirming a gender wellbeing gap. The gap is apparent across countries and time and is robust to the inclusion of exogenous covariates (age, age squared, time and location fixed effects). It is also robust to conditioning on a wider set of potentially endogenous variables. However, when one examines the three ‘global’ wellbeing metrics – happiness, life satisfaction and Cantril’s Ladder – women are either similar to or ‘happier’ than men. This finding is insensitive to which controls are included and varies little over time. The difference does not seem to arise from measurement or seasonality as the variables are taken from the same surveys and frequently measured in the same way. The concern here though is that this is inconsistent with objective data where men have lower life expectancy and are more likely to die from suicide, drug overdoses and other diseases. This is the true paradox – morbidity doesn’t match mortality by gender. Women say they are less cheerful and calm, more depressed, and lonely, but happier and more satisfied with their lives, than men.
That is from a new NBER working paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson. Those results are broadly consistent with my intuitions and anecdotal observations, noting that men and women probably mean different things when they say they are/are not satisfied with their lives.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Jennifer Roback on the economics of George Orwell (1985).
2. LLMs and national security risks — a good look at some of the actual problems.
4. Mark Zuckerberg Jiu Jitsu. Video here.
5. Did the Chilean constitutional council elections go well?
Private ownership sentences to ponder
Anyone keen to understand how should look at Brookfield Renewable Partners’ recent investment of up to $2 billion in Scout Clean Energy and Standard Solar. B.R.P. is a vehicle of Brookfield Asset Management, a leading global asset management firm, with around $800 billion of assets under management, and it purchased two American developers and owner-operators of wind and solar power-generating facilities. This took place six weeks after President Biden signed the I.R.A. into law.
The I.R.A. will help accelerate the growing private ownership of U.S. infrastructure and, in particular, its concentration among a handful of global asset managers like Brookfield. This is taking the United States into risky territory. The consequences for the public at large, whose well-being depends on the quality and cost of a host of infrastructure-based services, from energy to transportation, are unlikely to be positive.
A common belief about both the I.R.A. and 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, President Biden’s other key legislation for infrastructure investment, is that they represent a renewal of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal infrastructure programs of the 1930s. This is wrong. The signature feature of the New Deal was public ownership: Even as private firms carried out many of the tens of thousands of construction projects, almost all of the new infrastructure was funded and owned publicly. These were public works. Public ownership of major infrastructure has been an American mainstay ever since…
So it would be truer to say that in political-economic terms, Mr. Biden, far from assuming Roosevelt’s mantle, has actually been dismantling the Rooseveltian legacy. The upshot will be a wholesale transformation of the national landscape of infrastructure ownership and associated service delivery.
That is from Brett Christophers (NYT), who is disapproving. For an alternative view, see this WSJ Op-Ed by Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch.
Lessons from the COVID War
In preparation for a National Covid Commission a group of scholars directed by Philip Zelikow (director of the 9/11 Commission) began interviewing people and organizing task forces (I was an interviewee). The Covid Commission didn’t happen, a fact that illustrates part of the problem:
The policy agenda of both major American political parties appear mostly undisturbed by this pandemic. There is no momentum to fix the system….The Covid war revealed a collective national incompetence in governance….One common denominator stands out to us that spans the political spectrum. Leaders have drifted into treating this pandemic as if it were an unavoidable national catastrophe.
The results of this early investigation, however, are summarized in Lessons from the COVID WAR. Overall, a good book, not as pointed or data driven as I might have liked (see my talk for a more pointed overview), but I am in large agreement with the conclusions and it does contain some clarifying tidbits such as this one on the Obama playbook.
Innumerable speeches, books, and articles have stated that the Obama administration gave the incoming Trump administration a “playbook” on how to confront a pandemic and that this playbook was ignored. The Obama administration did indeed prepare and leave behind the “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”
But this playbook did not actually diagram any plays. There was no “how.” It did not explain what to do…when it came to the job of how to contain a pandemic that was headed for the United States in January 2020, the playbook was a blank page.
I also appreciated that Lessons has some some unheralded success stories from the state and local level. You may recall Tyler and I blogging repeatedly in 2020 about the advantages of pooled tests. Eventually pooled testing was approved but I haven’t seen data on how widely pooling was adopted or the effective increase in testing capacity that was produced. Lessons, however, offers an anecdote:
In San Antonio, a local charitable foundation paired with a blood bank to create a central Covid PCR testing lab (antigen tests were not yet readily available) that could combine samples (pooling) for efficiency and cost reduction, but also determine which individual in a pool was positive. Importantly, results were available within about twelve hours. That meant results were available before the start of school the new day.
The program helped San Antonio get kids back into the schools.
More generally, it’s striking that US schools were closed for far longer than French, German or Italian schools. See data at right on the number of weeks that “schools were closed, or party closed, to in-person instruction because of the pandemic (from Feb. 2020-March 2022)”. (South Korea, it should be noted, had some of the most advanced online education systems in the world.)
One general point made in Lessons that I wholeheartedly agree with this is that the school closures and many of the other controversial aspects of the pandemic response such as the lockdowns and mask mandates “were really symptoms of the deep problem. Without a more surgical toolkit, only blunt instruments were left.” With better testing, biomedical surveillance of the virus and honest communication we could have done better with much less intrusive and costly policies.
Addendum: See my previous reviews of Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread, Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, Slavitt’s Preventable and Abutaleb and Paletta’s Nightmare Scenario.
Addendum 2: A typo in Lessons had France closing schools for 2 weeks instead of 12 weeks. Corrected.
Generative AI and firm values
What are the effects of recent advances in Generative AI on the value of firms? Our study offers a quantitative answer to this question for U.S. publicly traded companies based on the exposures of their workforce to Generative AI. Our novel firm-level measure of workforce exposure to Generative AI is validated by data from earnings calls, and has intuitive relationships with firm and industry-level characteristics. Using Artificial Minus Human portfolios that are long firms with higher exposures and short firms with lower exposures, we show that higher-exposure firms earned excess returns that are 0.4% higher on a daily basis than returns of firms with lower exposures following the release of ChatGPT. Although this release was generally received by investors as good news for more exposed firms, there is wide variation across and within industries, consistent with the substantive disruptive potential of Generative AI technologies.
A significant effect, here is the new NBER working paper from Andrea L. Eisfeldt, Gregor Schubert, and Miao Ben Zhang.
Data on diversity, equity, and inclusion
Beware the unobserved heterogeneity, but here goes:
This paper measures diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) using proprietary data on survey responses used to compile the Best Companies to Work For list. We identify 13 of the 58 questions as being related to DEI, and aggregate the responses to form our DEI measure. This variable has low correlation with gender and ethnic diversity in the boardroom, in senior management, and within the workforce, suggesting that DEI captures additional dimensions missing from traditional measures of demographic diversity. DEI is also unrelated to general workplace policies and practices, suggesting that DEI cannot be improved by generic initiatives. However, DEI is higher in small growth firms and firms with high financial strength. DEI is associated with higher future accounting performance across a range of measures, higher future earnings surprises, and higher valuation ratios, but demographic diversity is not. DEI perceptions among professional workers, such as R&D employees, are significantly correlated with the number and quality of patents. However, DEI exhibits no link with future stock returns.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Alex Edmans, Caroline Flammer, and Simon Glossner.
Smile markets in everything, Japanese demasking edition
Thirty-seven people, including the elderly, took a smiling lesson to prepare for taking off their masks in public following three years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The instruction was held in the Akabane district in Tokyo’s Kita Ward on May 7, the day before the reclassification of COVID-19 to a less-severe category that includes the seasonal flu.
“With mask wearing having become the norm, people have had fewer opportunities to smile, and more and more people have developed a complex about it,” said Keiko Kawano, 49, the smile trainer who served as the instructor for the lesson.
“Moving and relaxing the facial muscles is the key to making a good smile,” she said.
Participants used hand mirrors to check their smiles.
Here is the full story, via John McLennan. Note that the Japanese mask requirement was dropped only in March.
Monday assorted links
1. Midjourney does historic battles.
2. On horseback among the eagle hunters in Mongolia (NYT). Excellent story and photos.
3. “Without any mandate, Texas will generate 40% of its energy from renewables in 2023.”
4. Do journalists have more freedom than do professors? (Ross, NYT)
The Public Choice Outreach Conference
There are just a few spots left! Tell your students. Apply now!
The rising tide of housing quality
This study analyzes patterns of housing consumption and expenditures among social safety net recipients since 1985. For safety net recipients, including Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and cash welfare (AFDC/TANF), monthly housing expenditures have risen from $692 to $1,341. However, these increased expenditures partially reflect housing quantity improvements, including more square footage, more rooms, and larger lot sizes. The data also show a marked improvement in housing quality, such as fewer sagging roofs, broken appliances, rodents, and peeling paint. The housing quality for social safety net recipients improved across 35 indicators. These quality improvements equate to a 35 to 44 percent increase in housing consumption and suggest that a typical safety net recipient in 2021 experiences housing consumption equivalent to the average national household in 1985. Though relative housing consumption has remained similar for safety net recipients, this “rising tide” of housing quality may have additional benefits for the health and well being of families and children living in better housing.
That is from a new paper by Erik Hembre, J. Michael Collins, and Samuel Wylde. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Who are the real AI experts?
That is the topic of my 2x as long as usual Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It almost goes without saying that there are different kinds of expertise. National security specialists, for example, confront dangerous risks to America all the time, and they have to develop a synthetic understanding of how to respond. How many of them have resigned from the establishment to become AI Cassandras? I haven’t seen a flood of protests, and these are people who have studied how destructive actions can amplify through a broader social and economic order. Perhaps they are used to the idea that serious risks are always with us.
And here is more:
When it comes to AI, as with many issues, people’s views are usually based on their priors, if only because they have nowhere else to turn. So I will declare mine: decentralized social systems are fairly robust; the world has survived some major technological upheavals in the past; national rivalries will always be with us (thus the need to outrace China); and intellectuals can too easily talk themselves into pending doom.
All of this leads me to the belief that the best way to create safety is by building and addressing problems along the way, sometimes even in a hurried fashion, rather than by having abstract discussions on the internet.
So I am relatively sympathetic to AI progress. I am skeptical of arguments that, if applied consistently, also would have hobbled the development of the printing press or electricity.
I also believe that intelligence is by no means the dominant factor in social affairs, and that it is multidimensional to an extreme. So even very impressive AIs probably will not possess all the requisite skills for destroying or enslaving us. We also tend to anthropomorphize non-sentient entities and to attribute hostile intent where none is present.
Many AI critics, unsurprisingly, don’t share my priors. They see coordination across future AIs as relatively simple; risk-aversion and fragility as paramount; and potentially competing intelligences as dangerous to humans. They deemphasize competition among nations, such as with China, and they have a more positive view of what AI regulation might accomplish. Some are extreme rationalists, valuing the idea of pure intelligence, and thus they see the future of AI as more threatening than I do.
So who exactly are the experts in debating which set of priors are more realistic or useful?
Recommended!
Sunday assorted links
Reverse ATMs
I won’t do a double indent, here goes:
“As stores and restaurants attempt to go cashless, they’re installing “reverse ATMs” that dispense stored-value cards in exchange for greenbacks.
Why it matters: More businesses are eschewing cash — a trend accelerated by the pandemic — but states and cities are passing laws banning them from doing so, in deference to people who don’t have bank accounts or credit cards.
- Handling cash is also a hassle for retailers, with problems including theft and constant runs to the bank.
Driving the news: Reverse ATMs — also known as cash-to-card kiosks — are quickly being installed in all manner of venues that want to go cashless without flouting the law or turning away the “unbanked,” who represent 4.5% of Americans, per the FDIC.”
Here is the story, with further interesting detail, via Anecdotal.