Month: October 2023

*The Genius of Israel*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.  The authors argue that Israel has higher solidarity and also higher social capital than recent media reports might indicate.  They are thus optimistic about the country, and the subtitle is The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Natoin in a Turbulent World.

I do not go to Israel enough to have a strong opinion on this, but their thesis is consistent with my casual observation, and also with my intuition about negative bias in media.  The book comes out November 7.

That was then, this is now (median voter edition)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said this week that the Biden administration planned to waive 26 environmental, public health and cultural preservation laws in order to fast-track constructing sections of the border wall in South Texas.

…The administration would use funds from a 2019 appropriation designated by Congress to construct the wall, which was spurred by a disaster declaration by the Trump administration…

“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States.”

Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey.  And note that an actual jaguar is crossing the border.

On U.S. life expectancy disparities

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the excellent Dylan Matthews:

Case and Deaton are highlighting a real problem, confirmed by other researchers: Americans with different levels of education die at different rates, and the least-educated Americans have seen their death rates surge in a way that more-educated Americans have not.

But the relevant divide does not seem to be between people who earned a bachelor’s degree — who remain a minority among American adults — and people who didn’t. Other research suggests that the problem is concentrated in specific areas of the US, and between the very least-educated Americans (particularly high school dropouts) and the rest of the country, rather than between college grads and non-grads.

Moreover, the cause of the divergence between high school dropouts and the rest of the country does not seem to be caused by “deaths of despair.” There is no doubt that the opioid epidemic in particular has wrought spectacular damage in the US. But some researchers are finding that stagnating progress against cardiovascular disease is an even bigger contributor to US life expectancy stalling out, and to mortality divides between the most- and least-educated Americans.

A lot of what you read about “deaths of despair” is in fact wrong or misguided.

Speeding Up Pharmaceutical Approvals by Recognizing Other Stringent Regulators

by  Alex Tabarrok in

New Zealand’s ACT party has proposed that New Zealand speed up pharmaceutical approvals by recognizing the decisions of other stringent regulators, an idea I have long promoted .

The average time for Medsafe to consent an application for a high risk medicine is 630 days. For intermediate risk, it is 661 days and for lower risk it is 830 days8. The average time taken just for processing some lower risk categories is 176-210 days. This is an unacceptable length of time, given there other regulatory bodies replicating that exact same work overseas.

ACT says if a drug or medical device has been approved by any two reputable foreign regulatory bodies (such as Australia, United States, United Kingdom), it should be automatically approved in NZ as well within one week unless Medsafe can show extraordinary reason why it shouldn’t be.

This simple change would significantly improve access to medicines that have already been subject to rigorous testing and analysis through other regulatory regimes.

The ACT party is small but it has some seats and surprisingly the much larger National party is proposing a similar rule:

New Zealand’s slow approval process for medicines means Kiwis wait much longer than people in other countries to access potentially life-saving treatments. While it is essential that medicines and other treatments are subject to stringent scrutiny to ensure they are safe, there is no reason why New Zealanders should have to wait for our domestic medicines regulatory body, Medsafe, to conduct its own cumbersome process from scratch, when countries with health systems we trust have already gone through this exercise.
National will:

…• Require Medsafe to implement even faster approvals processes for any medicines for use in New Zealand that have already been approved by at least two regulatory bodies that we currently recognise, including Australia, the EU, Singapore, the UK, Switzerland and the US.

New Zealand, by the way, already has a reciprocity agreement with the United States for food and it’s mutual–the FDA also recognizes New Zealand as a stringent food regulator–so the idea is not unprecedented.

Moreover, all of this comes on the tail of the UK actually adopting the idea via the “reliance procedure” which recognizes the EU as a stringent regulator and guarantees approval in the UK within 67 days for ay drug approved in the EU.

In the United States, even AOC has flirted with the idea, at least for sunscreens!

Thus, the reciprocity or recognition idea is starting to be adopted.

Hat tip: Eric Crampton who has some further comments.

My Conversation with Ada Palmer

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago who studies radical free thought and censorship, composes music, consults on anime and manga, and is the author of the acclaimed Terra Ignota sci-fi series, among many other things.

Tyler sat down with Ada to discuss why living in the Renaissance was worse than living during the Middle Ages, how art protected Florence, why she’s reluctant to travel back in time, which method of doing history is currently the most underrated, whose biography she’ll write, how we know what old Norse music was like, why women scholars helped us understand Viking metaphysics, why Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is an interesting work, what people misunderstand about the inquisition(s), why science fiction doesn’t have higher social and literary status, which hive she would belong to in Terra Ignota, what the new novel she’s writing is about, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer?

PALMER: Thomas Aquinas. No, lots and lots of things, but he’s very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period. Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major, major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can’t recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant, brilliant historian of clandestine literature.

But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone.

The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things. So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things. But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.

De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is?

I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work.

Interesting throughout.

Obsolescence Rents

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle of this new NBER working paper is: Teamsters, Truckers, and Impending Innovations.  Here is the abstract:

We consider large, permanent shocks to individual occupations whose arrival date is uncertain. We are motivated by the advent of self-driving trucks, which will dramatically reduce demand for truck drivers. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing obsolescence. We show that workers must be compensated to enter the occupation – receiving what we dub obsolescence rents – with fewer and older workers remaining in the occupation. We investigate the market for teamsters at the dawn of the automotive truck as an á propos parallel to truckers themselves, as self-driving trucks crest the horizon. As widespread adoption of trucks drew nearer, the number of teamsters fell, the occupation became ‘grayer’, and teamster wages rose, as predicted by the model.

That is by Costas Cavounidis, Qingyuan Chai, Kevin Lang, and Raghav Malhotra.

The Labor Market Returns of Being An Artist

by  Tyler Cowen in

The labor market penalty to choosing the arts seems to be rising:

Using individual-level data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) between 2006 and 2021, I study the labor market experiences of artists. First, I find a decline in the relative earnings of artists to non-artists from zero to a 15% disadvantage. After controlling for demographic differences, the decline is sharper, declining from a 15% earnings disadvantage to 30%. That the inclusion of demographic controls raises the earnings gap suggests there is positive selection into the arts. Second, these differences decline in magnitude to 4.4%, but remain statistically significant, after exploiting variation among artists and non-artists in the same industry-year and major occupation. Third, when restricting the set of individuals to those with at least a college degree, those with a fine arts degree also incur an earnings and employment penalty even if they work in the arts. These results highlight the increasing financial precariousness of artists over the past decade.

That is a new paper by Christos Makridis, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  Overall this result makes sense to me.  Success in the arts requires extreme talent of some kind in most (not all) cases.  Those individuals can earn increasingly more in other endeavors.  But if the arts are trapped in a “Malthusian equilibrium,” with intense entry competing down returns because it is fun, artistic earnings may not keep pace.

Will misinformation be an electoral problem?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:

…consider the story that former President Barack Obama was not born in the US. It did not take off because someone forged a copy of an Indonesian birth certificate. Instead, many people approached the issue wanting to believe that Obama was not “a real American,” some dangerous tidbits were thrown their way, and off they went. The release of Obama’s US birth certificate did not convince them they were wrong.

Lies, misunderstandings, instances of self-deception: They have long been in excess supply. Blame China, Russia, social media, regular media, whomever. A potentially gullible person is already flooded with more lies in a single day than he or she can possibly evaluate.

A greater number of falsehoods just won’t matter that much — because the scarce resources are attention and focality on the demand side. How much is someone looking to believe they have been wronged? How much do they resent “the establishment”? What kinds of grudges do they hold, and against whom or what? And how well can they coordinate with others of like mind, thereby forming a kind of misinformation affinity group?

There is much more at the link.

From the comments, on the new Meta smart glasses

by  Tyler Cowen

There is clearly a lot of negative emotional reactivity regarding these glasses going on here, but it’s worth thinking about the implications, both positive and negative.

1. They clearly can be built with current technology. Therefore, assuming they are useful, they will be built.

2. It clearly looks like they provide a much superior hands-free experience for smart phone operation. I see both benefits and issues that could go along with this, but need to note that anything that keeps drivers from fumbling with their phones has potential positive safety implications.

3. They are a potential boon to people with disabilities. The glasses can provide a unified experience that can enable anyone who has difficulty manipulating a computer mouse, phone or other handheld device to get information quickly and efficiently.

4. The same applies to people who are in the early stages of dementia. Given an accompanying personal database of photos of friends and loved ones, the visual prompts from the glasses can help a person with failing memory and mental faculties.

5. The glasses would be similarly useful to people in professions that require them to interact with very large numbers of other people, such as clergymen, managers, politicians and even retail store workers. The ability to rapidly call up names and information about someone that you’ve met only once four years ago is not necessarily a bad thing.

6. I think it inevitable that law enforcement agencies are going to be potentially huge customers of this. For example, given current security trends, I think that the TSA will be buying a boatload of these.

7. The same obviously applies to the military.

It’s going to be interesting.

That is from Phil C.