First world problems
Soon there may be non-stop 19 hour flights from New York to Sydney, Australia:
On long-haul flights, cabin lights are typically dimmed about two hours after take-off and turned back up about two hours before landing, said Sveta Postnova, a senior lecturer in neurophysics and brain dynamics at the University of Sydney. Depending on the destination, that practice can make jet lag worse, she noted.
One of the test [19 hour] flights from New York will follow the normal pattern. But on the other flight, lights will stay on for about six or seven hours after departure. Researchers will compare passenger data from the two flights to determine whether the lighting change affected jet lag. Meal service will be aligned with the lighting, Ms. Postnova said.
Light plays a key role in regulating sleep, but “recently we are learning that meals, exercise and other environmental factors also affect our body clock,” Ms. Postnova said. A big unknown for air travel is how to schedule lighting, meals and exercise to minimize jet lag.
Here is the WSJ article. My preference is for them to keep the lights on, and the windows open, for much longer than is currently the case. Eyemasks are cheap and underused.
Also, it may be my imagination, but anecdotally I observe that screen viewing has (additionally) replaced reading to an extraordinary extent even in just the last five years. True?
Friday assorted links
1. A pianist’s tips on how to practice (“avoid flow.”)
2. New results on the sheepskin effect.
3. “Federal fraud indictment: KU professor secretly worked for Chinese university.”
4. “Fidel Castro’s crocodile bites man at aquarium party.”
5. On turning 40 with an ancient heart.
6. Eric Weinstein podcast with Timur Kuran.
Latitude
Are there systematic trends around the world in levels of creativity, aggressiveness, life satisfaction, individualism, trust, and suicidality? This article suggests a new field, latitudinal psychology, that delineates differences in such culturally shared features along northern and southern rather than eastern and western locations. In addition to geographical, ecological, and other explanations, we offer three metric foundations of latitudinal variations: replicability (latitudinal gradient repeatability across hemispheres), reversibility (north-south gradient reversal near the equator), and gradient strength (degree of replicability and reversibility). We show that aggressiveness decreases whereas creativity, life satisfaction, and individualism increase as one moves closer to either the North or South Pole. We also discuss the replicability, reversibility, and gradient strength of (a) temperatures and rainfall as remote predictors and (b) pathogen prevalence, national wealth, population density, and income inequality as more proximate predictors of latitudinal gradients in human functioning. Preliminary analyses suggest that cultural and psychological diversity often need to be partially understood in terms of latitudinal variations in integrated exposure to climate-induced demands and wealth-based resources. We conclude with broader implications, emphasizing the importance of north-south replications in samples that are not from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies.
Here is the article, via several MR readers.
Starbucks monetary policy
Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer’s wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App.* It amounts to ~6% of all of the company’s liabilities.
This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn’t pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.
Starbucks isn’t the only firm to get free lending from its customers. So does PayPal. That’s right, customers who hold PayPal balances are effectively acting as PayPal’s creditors. Customer loans to PayPal currently amount to over $20 billion. Like Starbucks, PayPal doesn’t pay its customers a shred of interest. But Starbucks’s gig is way better than PayPal’s. PayPal is required to store customer’s funds in a segregated account at a bank, or invest them in government bonds (see tweet below). So unfortunately for PayPal, it earns a paltry amount of interest on the funds that customers have lent it.
Here is more from JP Koning.
Those new (old) service sector jobs: personal book curator
From the unusual products flogged on health and wellbeing site Goop to her one-of-a-kind beauty habits, Gwyneth Paltrow never fails to surprise us. Case in point: she once hired a ‘personal book curator’.
Back in 2001, the former actress decided to redesign her Los Angeles home and realised that to complete the gram-worthy look, she needed a good five to six hundred books to fill the empty shelves.
So what does a Hollywood star do when their personal novel collection doesn’t quite make the necessary requirements? They call in a celebrity-approved book curator of course.
The 46-year-old asked longtime friend, Thatcher Wine, a long-time book collector and the founder of Juniper Books, to complete the task. But with A-list clientele including the likes of Laura Dern and Shonda Rhimes, he was certainly no stranger to the job in hand.
And this is indeed an art:
Over in the dining room, Wine made sure to organise the books in a more minimal fashion in keeping with a “rigid colour palette of black, white, and grey since it was less of a space where one might hang out and read”.
Upon closer inspection, heavyweight coffee table books take price of place with shelves dedicated to artists including Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali and Leonardo Da Vinci.
Here is the full story, here is the interview with Thatcher Wine. Via Ted Gioia.
Would a payroll tax cut help avoid a recession?
Right now, probably not. Here is an excerpt from my latest Bloomberg column:
The inclination in American politics is to cut the payroll tax on the worker side, not the employer side. That is the opposite of what should be done.
In a recession, the usual problem is that too many people are seeking too few jobs. The reluctance lies on the side of the employer, not the worker. So cutting the taxes paid by the worker won’t help much. In contrast, cutting the taxes paid by the employer might at least boost the demand for workers and thus stimulate employment.
In the long run, according to economic theory, it does not matter whether you cut payroll taxes for workers or employers; eventually wages will adjust so that the true, tax-adjusted set of wage offers ends up the same. But for the purposes of fighting a near-term recession, it matters very much whose taxes are cut.
Do read the whole thing. Do note, however, that I am not currently expecting a recession, I just don’t see enough pointers in that direction, and furthermore most of the time recessions do not happen.
Thursday assorted links
1. Leela Chess Zero. And the latest in computer chess. And podcast with Ken Regan. And Shelby Lyman passes away (NYT).
3. Not a mistake, but touch football is now requiring helmets (NYT).
4. Cinematic markets in everything for Canadian service dogs.
5. “Teacher-designed practice was perceived as less relevant to improving performance on the violin than practice alone. Further, amount of teacher-designed practice did not account for more variance in performance than amount of practice alone.” Link here.
The bullish case for ride-sharing services
In a survey by AARP last year, only 29 percent of those over 50 had used ride-hailing apps. Two-thirds said they weren’t likely to do so in the coming year, citing in part concerns about safety and privacy.
I don’t think today’s young will lose the capacity to use ride-sharing services as they age. In the meantime, there is this:
So Lyft and Uber and others are contracting with third parties, bypassing the need for older riders to use apps or to have smartphones at all.
They’re joining forces with health care systems, for instance. In the past 18 months, more than 1,000 — including MedStar, in the Washington area, and the Boston Medical Center — have signed on with Uber Health for “nonemergency medical transportation,” the company said.
Case managers and social workers can use Uber or Lyft to ferry patients to or from clinics and offices, reducing missed appointments.
Here is the full NYT story by Paula Span.
The nature of pessimism
Pessimists are happy dreamers. They make the world in their own image and so always manage to feel at home.
That is from Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.
What I’ve been reading
1. Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World. A good, short “give it to your high school kid” book on why socialism is not an entirely ideal way to arrange society.
2. Ben Lewis, The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting. I felt I knew this story already, but nonetheless found interesting information and conceptual analysis on virtually every page. And while the author is agnostic and balanced, the text upped my opinion of the “likely Leonardo weighted expected value” component from about 0.1 to maybe 0.25? Yet so much fuss about a painting that resurfaced in 1907 — model that… And don’t forget: “None of the great art historians and connoisseurs who saw it before 1958 identified it as a Leonardo.” Recommended.
3. Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Björkman, The Nordic Secret: A European story of beauty and freedom. There should be many more books about why the Nordics are special, and this is one of them. The central notion here is “secular Bildung” as a means of elevating society and cooperative relations. Uneven in its structure of exposition, but definitely interesting in parts and the importance of the question makes this better than most of the other books you might be likely to read. Just don’t expect 100% polish.
4. David Cahan, Helmholtz: A Life in Science. At 768 pp., I only read about half of this one. Nonetheless I read the better half, and it is one of the more useful treatments of 19th century German science. I hadn’t realized the strong connections with Siemens and Roentgen, for instance, and one clear lesson is that German science of that time had some pretty healthy institutions outside of the formal university system.
Crypto to make your head spin
We analyze a two-country economy with complete markets, featuring two national currencies as well as a global (crypto)currency. If the global currency is used in both countries, the national nominal interest rates must be equal and the exchange rate between the national currencies is a risk- adjusted martingale. We call this result Crypto-Enforced Monetary Policy Synchronization (CEMPS). Deviating from interest equality risks approaching the zero lower bound or the abandonment of the national currency. If the global currency is backed by interest-bearing assets, additional and tight restrictions on monetary policy arise. Thus, the classic Impossible Trinity becomes even less reconcilable.
That is a new paper from Pierpaolo Benigno, Linda Schilling, Harald Uhlig.
Wednesday assorted links
Warsaw notes
I recommend a trip here. Imagine a European country with (roughly) a four percent growth rate and the streets full of young people. Dining out here is much better than it was in Milan, and cheaper too (eat in the serious Polish place on the left side of the food hall, Hala Kozyski, and get gelato afterwards). What seems to be the city’s second best hotel is less than half the price it would be in Western Europe. For better or worse, e-scooters and bike lanes are everywhere. The city has a lively concert life, even in August.
There aren’t many traditional tourist sites. Construction workers will look at you funny if you visit the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the memorial plaque isn’t exactly prominent. The city’s much-heralded Jewish Museum is as much a critique of the Jews during medieval times as anything else. I don’t consider those sites as focal for the Warsaw population as a whole, but the official side of life here has not exactly taken the German tack of ongoing apologies. It is now against the law to suggest that Poles were complicit in the Holocaust (now only a fine, the threat of imprisonment was removed).
These days the 1953 Stalin building downtown looks quite beautiful. Cross the river to see more of Warsaw’s residential districts, such as the Praga district, and stop by to see the architecture — both new and old — near the Neon Museum.
“Poland issued more first-time residence permits to non-EU citizens than any other EU nation in 2017, with 86% of them going to Ukrainians, in the latest available European migration statistics. Those Ukrainians accounted for 18.7% of all newcomers to the entire EU.” (WSJ link here).
Poland is a country where nationalism doesn’t seem to be going away. In fact, there seems to be a kind of intertemporal substitution into a new nationalism, a secure nationalism, finally safe from the bullying of larger neighbors. Polish flags are everywhere. So many Poles, even secular ones, view the Catholic Church as the central institution of Western civilization, and indeed they have a concept of Western civilization as having a central institution (though a minus for gay rights).
The country is not on the verge of becoming a “Western liberal’s dream,” at least not in terms of mood or rhetoric. Yet actual life here is fairly liberal, and is more prosperous every day. 2019 has been the best year in Polish history, ever, and you feel it palpably.
Do not be surprised if more and more of Western Europe sees Polish nationalism as a model to be copied.
A countercultural take on China
That is what I serve up in my Bloomberg column, note it is a reminder more than a modal prediction. Here is one excerpt:
Is the rest of the world getting China wrong yet again? Maybe the country is not doomed to live out unending top-down rule. What is history, after all, but the realization of the wills of countless unpredictable human beings.
Past mistakes about China are too numerous to mention.
A list then follows. And:
But has China suddenly become so predictable? Are events there now no longer contingent on the exercise of human will? Modern China is one of the most unusual and surprising societies humankind has created. There are no good models for it, nor are there data from comparable historical situations.
There is, unfortunately, a tendency for Westerners to impose superficial narratives on China and the Chinese, often based on scant observation.
To close:
For myself, I don’t have a coherent story about how the Chinese might move to greater liberty in the next 10 to 15 years. But I do think the actions of the current regime can be read as signs of vulnerability rather than entrenchment. Taiwan and Hong Kong, despite its current crisis, remain strong examples of the benefits of liberalization. Meanwhile, the notion of the internet — even with censorship — as a liberalizing force has been too quickly dismissed, especially in an America that has fallen out of love with Big Tech.
Which leads to a reality even deeper than China’s unpredictability: people’s continuing capacity to respond to current events and shape their futures for the better. As you listen, watch and read about China, keep in mind this essential human quality.
There is much more at the link.
The polity that is Poland
A new law that comes into effect in Poland this week will scrap income tax for roughly 2 million young workers.
It’s an attempt by the government to stop the dramatic brain drain Poland has experienced since it joined the European Union 15 years ago.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the tax exemption will bring new opportunities for young people “so they match those available in the West.” Poles under the age of 26 who earn less than 85,528 Polish zloty ($22,547) a year will be exempt from the country’s 18% income tax starting August 1. The allowance is generous, considering the average Polish salary stands at just below 60,000 zloty ($15,700) a year.
The government said 2 million people will qualify for the benefit.
Here is the full story. There are also baby bounties in Poland, and policies seem to be increasingly youth-oriented. You can see this on the streets of Warsaw, which have more non-tourist young people than just about any other major city in Europe.