Monday assorted links
1. Canada bans mass export of prescription drugs.
2. Andrew Gelman redux. And my earlier Bloomberg column on Heather Boushey.
3. The cheerleaders at least can earn big bucks (NYT). Arbitrage!
4. Update/revision: Wikipedia presents strongly conflicting accounts of the assassination in Iran.
5. Maybe repealing the Corn Laws didn’t really help Britain? Though it did help lower earners, that being offset in the aggregate by terms of trade effects that harmed the wealthy. Here is a related tweet storm.
6. Agnes Callard, impossible to excerpt, definitely recommended (NYT).
Markets in everything, messed up edition
Shawn Graham, a professor of digital humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, uses a convolutional neural network called Inception 3.0, designed by Google, to search the internet for images related to the buying and selling of human bones. The United States and many other countries have laws requiring that human bones held in museum collections be returned to their descendants. But there are also bones being held by people who have skirted these laws. Dr. Graham said he had even seen online videos of people digging up graves to feed this market.
Here is the full NYT story, interesting more generally, via TEKL.
Who Mismanages Student Loans and Why?
From Kimberly Rodgers Cornaggia and Han Xia:
With a license to use individually identifiable information on student loan borrowers, we find that a majority of distressed student borrowers manage their debt sub-optimally and that suboptimal debt management is associated with higher loan delinquency. Cross-sectional analysis indicates that loan (mis)management varies significantly across student gender, ethnicity, and age. We test several potential selection-based explanations for such demographic variation in student loan management, including variation in students’ overconfidence, consumption preferences and discount rates, and aversion to administrative paperwork. Motivated by federal and state allegations against student loan servicers, we also test for the presence of treatment effects. Overall, the empirical evidence supports the conclusion that loan servicers’ differential treatment across borrowers play an important role in student loan outcomes.
Here is a key background fact:
Broadly, subsidized student borrower assistance programs include provisions for loan forbearance, loan deferment, and
income-driven repayment (IDR) options for financially distressed borrowers.
Borrowers should switch to those provisions more than they do, with older students, non-traditional students, males, and non-whites performing less well than others. Here is the link to the paper, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
New appointments?
Mr. Biden will nominate Neera Tanden, the president and chief executive officer of the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank, to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He will nominate Cecilia Rouse, a Princeton University labor economist, to be chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, these people said.
The president-elect plans to choose Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, a former senior international economic adviser during the Obama administration, to serve as Ms. Yellen’s top deputy at the Treasury Department. And he will turn to two campaign economic advisers, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, to serve as members of the CEA alongside Ms. Rouse, the people said.
Here is the WSJ story. And another report:
President-elect Joe Biden is leaning towards naming former senior Obama administration official and current investment executive Brian Deese his top economic adviser in the White House, although pushback from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party could still derail the pick.
Three people close to the situation said Wednesday that Deese, an executive at investment giant BlackRock, is poised to be announced as Biden’s pick for director of the National Economic Council in the White House in the coming days. The decision is not final, however, and Biden could still change his mind, the people cautioned.
I am not informed on these matters, but that is the latest…
Sunday assorted links
1. How well is India doing? (Bloomberg)
2. The world of Cartel TikTok (NYT). The world is not as ruled by “the Woke” as you might think!
3. KFC Rolls Out Self-Driving 5G ‘Chicken Trucks’ in China.
Toward a short history of Operation Warp Speed
This will go down in history as one of science and medical research's greatest achievements. Perhaps the most impressive.
I put together a preliminary timeline of some key milestones to show how several years of work were compressed into months. pic.twitter.com/BPcaZwDFkl— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) November 28, 2020
Link here, do read the whole thread. So which of you is going to write the definitive book on this? That is a serious question.
Voting Rights, Deindustrialization, and Republican Ascendancy in the South
Here is a new paper from Gavin Wright:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 revolutionized politics in the American South. These changes also had economic consequences, generating gains for white as well as Black southerners. Contrary to the widespread belief that the region turned Republican in direct response to the Civil Rights Revolution, expanded voting rights led to twenty-five years of competitive two-party politics, featuring strong biracial coalitions in the Democratic Party. These coalitions remained competitive in most states until the Republican Revolution of the 1990s. This abrupt rightward shift had many causes, but critical for southern voters were the trade liberalization measures of 1994, specifically NAFTA and the phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement which had protected the textiles and apparel industries for decades. The consequences of Republican state regimes have been severe, including intensified racial polarization, loss of support for public schools and higher education, and harsh policies toward low-income populations.
The last sentence strikes me as misleading and inappropriate (in multiple ways), but still the research is of very real interest. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The reckless British will be approving the Pfizer vaccine by Dec.7
Likely within a few days, here is the FT story, how about it FDA? What is your reason for waiting?
Saturday assorted links
1. Greenstone and Nath on cost-effective carbon abatement.
2. William Bolcom remembers Boulez.
3. Robin Hanson on pandemic spending and prevention; see also my comment #2 in the list.
4. Can the British turn moon dust into oxygen?
5. NHS to trial blood test to detect more than 50 forms of cancer. You know the scientific resurgence of the British (or should I say the English?) is a remarkable and much underreported story. Start with the Anglosphere and mix in a few top universities and the revenue-rich creative cluster of southeast England… There is much we can learn from this episode, and it is more important than say continuing to debate Brexit.
6. The Novavax vaccine. Nita Patel (guess where she is from? Try for the state) gets special praise and “Her all-female crew is an essential part of Novavax’s lab team.”
Misaligned incentives for incarceration in the United States
The incarceration rate has increased substantially in the United States between the 1980s and the 2000s. In this paper, I explore an institutional explanation for this growth: the fact that costs of incarceration are not fully internalized. Typically, prison is paid for at the state level, but county employees (such as judges, prosecutors or probation officers) determine time spent in custody. I exploit a natural experiment that shifted the cost burden of juvenile incarceration from state to counties, keeping overall costs and responsibilities unchanged. This resulted in a stark drop in incarceration, and no increase in arrests, suggesting an over-use of prison when costs are not internalized. The large magnitude of the change suggests that misaligned incentives in criminal justice may be a significant contributor to the current levels of incarceration in the United States.
That is from the opening of a new JPubEc piece by Aurélie Ouss, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Why we should be optimistic about various vaccines
I’ve been a long-time reader of your blog, and I have enjoyed your analyses of how the pandemic could play out in the US.
I saw that you gave some space to Arnold Kling’s pessimistic take on the vaccines. I’m a volunteer in the J&J Phase 3 vaccine trial, and my experience of the trial design makes me more optimistic about the vaccines than even the headline numbers in the so-far announced trials would suggest. I think the trial set-ups particularly for J&J have some biases that would lead to understated effectiveness results:
First, these trials are effectively unblinded. The placebos are saline solution in J&J, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna. Per the Phase 2 results for J&J, >60% of participants had significant side effects, with flu-like symptoms the most common; I believe other vaccine trials had similarly intense side effects. When I got a shot, I was nearly bedridden for 24 hours; it felt as if I had the flu, and the effect was far more pronounced than for any other vaccine I’ve had. If I got the placebo, I need a psychotherapist. Though I plan to remain generally responsible and not take too many incremental risks, given I’m only mostly sure I got a vaccine that is still unproven, I’m sure my assumption that I’ve been vaccinated will influence my behavior, and the behavior of anyone else who has had significant side effects from their injection too.
Second, upcoming trials are likely going to suffer from a “too much COVID effect” on an absolute basis, and relative to prior trials in particular. J&J counts any infection more than 14 days after injection toward its efficacy calculation. If full immunity takes longer (and my understanding is that antibodies build after infections for 3+ weeks in many cases), then there will be people out there getting infected before the vaccine has taken full effect. That wasn’t particularly likely to happen in the summer when there were fewer cases overall. This is particularly going to affect 1-shot vaccines, as other trials have their effectiveness measured only after the second dose (but I could still imagine this dynamic having some impact, if full immunity builds gradually after the second dose).
Anyway, hope this is of some interest. I found it encouraging to conclude that study bias could understate, not overstate, the effectiveness of vaccines.
That is from my email, identity of the author is redacted.
Friday assorted links
1. The EU drug regulator also does not have its act together. The Japanese, with vaccines, are being more cautious yet.
2. DuPont and Biden (WSJ).
3. “Sweden has reported 397 Covid deaths in the past nine days, more than either Norway or Finland — each with about half the population — have announced during the entire pandemic. Such figures led the normally cautious and measured state broadcaster SVT to declare that Sweden’s strategy looked increasingly like “a failure”.” FT link. And: “Remarkably, there were fewer (2.6) deaths/100K per day from *all causes* in SD [South Dakota] in Nov 2019 than are dying each day now just from COVID.”
4. Ed Lazear obituary (NYT). It is sad how they had to add in a “he had some left-wing views too,” so the readers have the liberty to feel sad about him dying. I would call that an underperformance of an obituary.
5. Rolf. Which kinds of political views are correlated with which kinds of academic priorities?
6. “There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where the most conventional-minded people are confident that they’re independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry they might not be independent-minded enough.” Paul Graham.
7. Stripe and carbon removal (Atlantic).
SCOTUS, houses of worship, and the pandemic
The Supreme Court has sided with religious institutions (NYT) against some of the pandemic restrictions of state and local governments:
The opinion said the state had treated secular businesses more favorably than houses of worship.
“The list of ‘essential’ businesses includes things such as acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, garages, as well as many whose services are not limited to those that can be regarded as essential, such as all plants manufacturing chemicals and microelectronics and all transportation facilities,” the opinion said.
Here is also WaPo coverage. And:
“We may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “Things never go well when we do.”
While I am not myself religious, I regard religious services as essential parts of our society and also in the longer run for our economy (birth rates, if nothing else). More generally, I am struck by how many intelligent people no longer seem to attach much weight to religious liberty, by no means starting with the various anti-Church moves during the Obama administration, but certainly emphasized there. (Even centrist Democrats are often clueless about the traumatic effects here, one of the biggest gaps in their understanding of American politics.) So I am happy to see push back in the opposite direction, siding with the rights of religious institutions. On top of all other considerations, those institutions are also (usually) bastions of non-Woke sentiments, which makes protecting them all the more important.
You will note that the decision does not strike down all restrictions on church services, but rather rejects a particular set of restrictions, leaving many broader issues open (to varying degrees for the different justices, if I understand correctly).
You might think “this decision is killing people,” but I wonder if that is true on net. If you do believe various pandemic restrictions are the way forward at this point (only modestly in my view), you will want to restrict more than just churches. If religious people see that the rights of churches will be protected to some reasonable degree, they might be more willing to support other restrictions. So even if you are very pro-restriction, I hardly view this decision as an obvious consequentialist disaster. We are not banning Thanksgiving travel either, right?
And if we do not turn government and also federal funds and tax exemptions into a battering ram against religious autonomy, we will reap a lot of other practical, life and death benefits from that decision over time, including a healthier American discourse.
That all said, if I were running a church likely I would cancel all in-person services beyond very limited numbers.
Addendum: If in 2016 you vowed to “respect Trump voters,” supporting this decision would be one good place to start. It might do a good deal to limit polarization and improve the other decisions we make.
Bryan Caplan on the cost of Covid
Here is Bryan’s post, here is one bit:
Taking quality of life into account, how many life-years has the reaction to COVID destroyed?…
Upshot: The total cost of all COVID prevention has very likely exceeded the total benefit of all COVID prevention.
I don’t agree with Bryan’s numbers, but the more important point is one of logic. The higher the costs of reaction to Covid, the stronger the case for subsidizing vaccines, therapeutics, and other corrective measures. Would you accept this Bryan? You have numerous posts about risk overreaction, but not one (if I recall correctly) calling for such subsidies. Furthermore we just did some of those subsidies, through Operation Warp Speed, and they worked and they will fix the relevant incentives and lead to a resumption of normal life. So the “subsidies will prove counterproductive” argument doesn’t seem strong here. The subsidies are the (much) quicker path back to what you desire.
A second question is whether moral suasion — “don’t overreact to Covid!” — is likely to prove effective. As I’ve already linked to, risk explains mobility reductions far more than do lockdown policies. Or consider Sweden, which had a relatively non-panicky Covid messaging, no matter what you think of their substantive policies. Sweden didn’t do any better on the gdp front, and the country had pretty typical adverse mobility reactions. (NB: These are the data that you don’t see the “overreaction” critics engage with — at all. And there is more where this came from.)
How about Brazil? While they did some local lockdowns, they have a denialist president, a weak overall response, and a population used to a high degree of risk. The country still saw a gdp plunge and lots of collateral damage. You might ponder this graph, causality is tricky and the “at what margin” question is trickier yet, but it certainly does not support what Bryan is claiming about the relevant trade-offs.
I keep on hearing this point again and again, about overreaction. What kinds of reaction are you expecting or viewing as feasible and attainable? If overreacting is indeed a public bad, why think you can talk people down out of it? How much do you think you can talk them out of it? What if someone suggested that we try to talk people out of their irrational voting patterns, as analyzed by Bryan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter? How sanguine would he be about that enterprise? I believe he instead stressed changes in relative prices.
And this is the huge flaw behind so much of the discourse about the “costs of lockdowns” — they can cite the stupidity of closing the parks in March, yes, but they don’t and indeed can’t tell you how most of those costs were to be avoided, given how the public reacts to risk.
If we instead look to the relevant changes in relative prices, that means subsidies for vaccines and tests, most of all through advance market commitments, but not only. And a full-scale commitment to implementing testing and masks and therapeutics.
The more you push home points about overreaction, the more you ought to favor these subsidies. Libertarians out there, do you? This chicken has come home to roost, so please fess up and give the right answer here. Do you favor these subsidies, not just murmured into your closet at night but in plain black and white for the world to read? Moral suasion against risk overreaction is a red herring, fine enough for cutting back on one part of the problem by maybe a few percentage points, but serving mainly to distract from the very real economic questions at hand and the need to admit that one’s libertarian ideology doesn’t fit around this problem as nicely as one might wish.
This was a thing, yes it was, that was then, this is now
Initially founded in 1962, the Anti-Digit Dialing League quickly became the premiere sensible dialing association organization in the United States of America. Nearly 60 years later, the problems this country’s phone network faces are direr than ever. While we continue to espouse the use of 2L+5N dialing over all-number calling whenever possible, our primary aim today is to publicly oppose the proliferation of 10-digit dialing, which is fast becoming a public nuisance and dialing nightmare for ordinary people everywhere in this country.
Circa 1962-64 (those were the days), here is the web site. Web site? Wait, it still is a thing!:
Although 771 is scheduled to be overlaid on D.C.’s 202 area code in 2021, forcing residents of our nation’s capitol to dial 10 digits forevermore, the A.D.D.L. objected to the use of an overlay as a matter of principle. According to NANPA, splits are unlawful when the majority of the area code is in the same rate center (as is D.C.) (see pg. 12 of Sept. 1 Community Hearing Transcript). That doesn’t mean overlays are inevitable in other areas, though. Overlays continue to remain a public nuisance, and although splits have not been commonplace since 2006, we will continue to urge the use of splits over overlays whenever possible, because splits better serve the public interest, a finding which is well supported by empirical data.
Don’t let them tell you money illusion is not a problem. Via Anecdotal.