Month: June 2023
*Goodbye Eastern Europe*
The author is Jacob Mikanowski and the subtitle is An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Might this be the best overall book on how Eastern Europe ended up so different (but not entirely different) from Western Europe? I’ll be doing a CWT with him later this fall (hold your suggestions for now, and I’ll hold further commentary as well), but though I would flag this book for you in the meantime. I hope it gets some good publicity as the release date is approaching.
*Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter*
Ian Mortimer is the author of this excellent book, here was one of my favorite bits:
It may seem preposterous today to describe a 5 mph increase in the maximum land speed as revolutionary. It sounds like someone pointing to a hillock and calling it a mountain. But it was revolutionary, for a number of reasons. Like a one-degree rise in average global temperature, it represents a huge change. This is because it is not a one-off event but a permanent doubling of the maximum potential speed. By 1600 the fastest riders could cover 150 miles in a day and individual letters carried by teams of riders could travel at speeds of up to 200 miles per day. This significantly reduced the time it took to inform the government about the goings-on in the realm. If the Scots attacked Berwick when the king was at Winchester, and the news came south at 40 miles per day, as it is likely to have done in the eleventh century, it would have taken nine days to arrive. After the king had deliberated what to do, if only for a day, the response would have travelled back at the same speed — so the north of the kingdom would have been without royal instructions for almost three weeks. If, however, the post could carry the news at 200 miles per day, the king and his advisers could decide on a response in less than two days. After a day’s discussion, the king’s instructions would have been back in the Berwick area less than five days after the danger had arisen — two weeks faster than in the eleventh century.
It is hard to exaggerate the political and social implications of such a change. The rapid delivery of information allowed a king far greater control over his realm…The rise in travelling speeds subtle shifted the balance of power away from territorial lords and towards central government.
The speed of information thus created a demand for more information.
That meant, among other things, more spies. And there was this:
Looked at simply as a statistic, an increase in speed of 5 mph is not very impressive. In terms of the cultural horizons explored in this book, however, it is profoundly important. Imagine the rings spreading out from where you are now — the first ring marking the limit of how far you can travel in one day, with a further ring beyond it marketing two days, and then a yet further ring marking three days. Now imagine all those moving further and further outwards, each one twice as far…you haven’t just doubled or trebled the area you could cover in one, two or three days, you’ve increased it exponentially…With the collective horizon also increasing exponentially, you can see how a doubling of the distances people could travel in a day had a huge impact on the nation’s understanding of itself and what was going on within and beyond its borders.
Interesting throughout, this one will make the year’s “best of non-fiction” list. You can buy it here.
Virtue signaling on Twitter
We study whether tweets about racial justice predict the offline behaviors of nearly 20,000 US academics. In an audit study, academics that tweet about racial justice discriminate more in favor of minority students than academics that do not tweet about racial justice. Racial justice tweets are more predictive of race-related political tweets than political contributions, suggesting that visibility increases informativeness. In contrast, the informativeness of tweets is lower during periods of high social pressure to tweet about racial justice. Finally, most graduate students mispredict informativeness, more often underestimating than overestimating, reducing the welfare benefits of social media.
Here is the paper by Deivis Angeli, Matt Lowe, and The Village Team.
Saturday assorted links
Free Formatting For All on First Submission!
Many years ago I was incredulous when my wife told me she had to format a paper to meet a journal’s guidelines before it was accepted! Who could favor such a dumb policy? In economics, the rule is you make your paper look good but you don’t have to fulfill all the journal’s guidelines until after the paper is accepted. Sensible!
A paper just published in BMC Medicine estimates that this obtrusive norm costs researchers in biomedical journals alone some $230 million a year in wasted time. That’s consistent with an earlier study which estimated that over a billion dollars worth of time was wasted reformatting papers in all scientific fields. Quoting from that earlier study:
Our data show that nearly 91% of authors spend greater than four hours and 65% spend over eight hours on reformatting adjustments before publication…Among the time-consuming processes involved are adjusting manuscript structure (e.g. altering abstract formats), changing figure formats, and complying with word counts that vary significantly depending on the journal. Beyond revising the manuscript itself, authors often have to adjust to specific journal and publisher online requirements (such as re-inputting data for all authors’ email, office addresses, and disclosures). Most authors reported spending “a great deal” of time on this reformatting task. Reformatting for these types of requirements reportedly caused three month or more delay in the publication of nearly one fifth of articles and one to three month delays for over a third of articles.
It’s all very depressing. If we can’t get rid of unproductive paper reformatting standards–which benefit no one–how can we expect to tackle monumental tasks that require navigating complex tradeoffs such as resolving global climate change or making the tax code more just and efficient?
Yet perhaps there is hope. The BMC Medicine paper was covered in Nature and the authors have started a petition to change the reformatting norm. Do your part. Sign the petition! Free formatting for all on first submission!
Kenya facts of the day
The total fertility rate for 2019 was 3.4 births which marks a drop of about one birth from 4.8 births in 2009.
But here is the more interesting part:
The gap between the highest and lowest TFR continues to increase – which is lowest at 2.5 children in Nairobi and 8 children per woman in Mandera County.
Here is the full story. Here is Wikipedia on Mandera County. Here is another story: “The risk of dying in childbirth in Mandera, Kenya’s forgotten north-eastern region, is higher than anywhere else in the world.”
Why mediocre gdp growth and a strong labor market?
That is the topic of my latest Blooomberg column. This exercise is speculative, but here is my tentative resolution:
Workers have been undergoing a serious crisis of morale since the pandemic — and they really are doing less. So businesses, in turn, have to hire more of them just to keep pace.
Does this hypothesis fit with these economic signals? With inflation still in the range of 5%, slow economic growth cannot be due to insufficient aggregate demand. More likely, it is due to supply-side and productivity considerations. The biggest natural disaster of the last half decade has been Covid, which damages not capital but labor — whether workers’ health or their morale…
Could part of the explanation be the broader adoption of the work-from-home option? I know there are studies that say WFH increases productivity, but even the author of one of the more widely cited papers says that more research is necessary and that a lot depends on how well the arrangement is organized. Meanwhile, America is experiencing a mental health crisis, arguably made worse by both Covid stress and the accompanying lockdowns.
The productivity question is even more puzzling. If worker productivity is low, why keep on hiring? The key may be to look not at total productivity, but at productivity per hour — and not per reported hour, but per hour actually worked.
I concede that there exists no measure of productivity per hour actually worked. (The official number, which is not doing great either, measures productivity per reported hour.) But if the average office worker only puts in say two to three hours a day — and it is not implausible — then there is a lot of slack in the worker’s day, especially if they are WFH.
So consider this thought experiment as a possible explanation: You are a manager and have noticed that new hires tend to be more enthusiastic and hard-working than current employees. Under this theory — and that’s all it is — you decide to hire more contract workers for well-defined, short-run tasks. Meanwhile, you redouble your efforts to bring workers back into the office.
Viewed through an economic lens, it is puzzling why there aren’t more gains from trade. That is, workers agree to put in more effort, and employers agree to pay them more. That is a trend which should be expected — but WFH makes monitoring difficult.
Note this same pattern of mediocre output growth and labor scarcity is evident in many other economies, including Germany and Czechia, as discussed in the column.
The nuclear polity that is Georgia
The first new nuclear reactor built in the United States in more than 40 years is now up and running in Waynesboro, Georgia. After more than a decade of construction and spiraling costs, Plant Vogtle Unit Three, the first of two new reactors at the site, started producing power at its full capacity in May. It’s expected to come online this month after a final round of tests.
The completion of the new reactors is a major milestone not just for the long-delayed project but for nuclear energy in the United States. The new units at Plant Vogtle were the first nuclear construction approved in decades and are the country’s only new reactors in progress.
Here is the full story. Better than nothing, but not entirely encouraging either. Elsewhere, transmission builds (non-nuclear) are declining…
Friday assorted links
1. Davis Kedrosky defends Jared Diamond, a good piece.
2. Is “war-related” a “factor” in financial market returns?
3. Global inequality in well-being has decreased along many dimensions.
4. Overview of the new ARPA-H.
5. “WWSS?” Or, “What would Singapore say?” You don’t have to agree, but the question is usually worth asking. Here is Singapore on LLMs. And if you don’t already know it — I covered it years ago — here is one of my favorite videos, namely Singapore Complaints Choir.
Economics, Hayek, and Large Language Models
Here is my Hayek lecture at LSE, from earlier in this week:
Emergent Ventures winners, 26th cohort
Winston Iskandar, 16, Manhattan Beach, CA, an app for children’s literacy and general career development. Winston also has had his piano debut at Carnegie Hall.
ComplyAI, Dheekshita Kumar and Neha Gaonkar, Chicago and NYC, to build an AI service to speed the process of permit application at local and state governments.
Avi Schiffman and InternetActivism, “leading the digital front of humanitarianism.” Avi is a repeat winner.
Jarett Cameron Dewbury, Ontario, and Cambridge MA, General career support, AI and biomedicine, including for the study of environmental enteric dysfunction. Here is his Twitter.
Ian Cheshire, Wallingford, Pennsylvania, high school sophomore, general career support, tech, start-ups, and also income-sharing agreements.
Beyzamur Arican Dinc, psychology Ph.D student at UCSB, regulation of emotional dyads in relationships and marriages, from Istanbul.
Ariana Pineda, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern. To attend a biology conference in Prospera, Honduras.
Satvik Agnihotri, high school, NYC area, to visit the Bay Area for a summer, study logistics, and general career development.
Michael Loftus, Ann Arbor, for a neuro tech hacker house, connected to Myelin Group.
Keir Bradwell, Cambridge, UK, Political Thought and Intellectual History Masters student, to visit the U.S. to study Mancur Olson and Judith Shklar, and also to visit GMU.
Vaneeza Moosa, Ontario, incoming at University of Calgary, “Developing new therapies for malignant pleural mesothelioma using epigenetic regulators to enhance tumor growth and anti-tumor immunity with radiation therapy.”
Ashley Mehra, Yale Law School, background in classics, general career development and for eventual start-up plans.
An important project not yet ready to be announced, United Kingdom.
Jennifer Tsai, Waterloo, Ontario and Geneva (temporarily), molecular and computational neuroscience, to study in Gregoire Courtine’s lab.
Asher Parker Sartori, Belmont, Massachusetts, working with Nina Khera (previous EV winner), summer meet-up/conference for young bio people in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Nima Pourjafar, 17, starting this fall at Waterloo, Ontario. For general career development, interested in apps, programming, economics, solutions to social problems.
Karina, 17, sophomore in high school, neuroscience, optics, and light, Bellevue, Washington.
Sana Raisfirooz, Ontario, to study bioelectronics at Berkeley.
James Hill-Khurana (left off an earlier 2022 list by mistake), Waterloo, Ontario, “A new development environment for digital (chip) design, and accompanying machine learning models.”
Ukraine winners
Tetiana Shafran, Kyiv, piano, try this video or here are more. I was very impressed.
Volodymyr Lapin, London, Ukraine, general career development in venture capital for Ukraine.
The illusion of moral decline
From a new Nature article by Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert:
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support, and social influence.
Here is the full paper, thanks to whomever sent me this. You are no worse than the people who used to send me things (at least I hope).
Thursday assorted links
Air Pollution Redux
New York City today has the worst air quality in the world, so now seems like a good time for a quick redux on air pollution. Essentially, everything we have learned in the last couple of decades points to the conclusion that air pollution is worse than we thought. Air pollution increases cancer and heart disease and those are just the more obvious effects. We now also now know that it reduces IQ and impedes physical and cognitive performance on a wide variety of tasks. Air pollution is especially bad for infants, who may have life-long impacts as well as the young and the elderly. I’m not especially worried about the wildfires but the orange skies ought to make the costs of pollution more salient. As Tyler noted, one reason air pollution doesn’t get the attention that it deserves is that it’s invisible and the costs are cumulative:
Air pollution causes many deaths. But it is rare to see or read about a person dying directly from air pollution. Lung cancer and cardiac disease are frequently cited as causes of death, even though they may stem from air pollution.
That’s the bad news. The good news, hidden inside the bad news, is that the costs of air pollution on productivity are so high that there are plausible ways of reducing some air pollution and increasing health and wealth, especially in high pollution countries but likely also in the United States with well-targeted policies.
For evidence on the above, you can see some of the posts below. Tyler and I have been posting about air pollution for a long time. Tyler first said air pollution was an underrated problem in 2005 and it was still underrated in 2021!
- Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible
- Air Pollution Reduces IQ, A Lot
- Air Pollution Kills
- David Wallace-Wells with a good overview.
- A good overview of the non-health impacts of pollution.
The price discrimination culture that is Finland
A businessman in Finland has been slapped with a hefty €121,000, or $129,400, fine for speeding in a country where tickets are calculated based on income, a local paper Nya Åland reported.
Anders Wiklöf, the chairman of Wiklöf Holding AB, was driving at 82km/h, or 51mph, when he entered a zone where the speed limit was 50km/h, or 31mph, per Nya Åland.
“I had just started to slow down, but I guess it didn’t happen fast enough,” Wiklöf told Nya Åland. “I really regret the matter.”
In Finland, speeding fines are linked to the offender’s salary and the speed at which they were going when they committed the offense.
Here is the full story. Via Anecdotal.