Offense vs. defense in the current NBA
…I do have to grudgingly admit the evidence seems to suggest that defense has become less important during this unusual regular season.
One way to look at this is the spread in ratings on both ends of the court. The standard deviation of teams’ defensive ratings relative to league average is the lowest it’s been since the 1984-85 season, while the standard deviation in offensive ratings is the second highest we’ve seen since 2007-08. That’s one way of showing that offense is not just winning the battle with defense but also controlling it.
Another way to show that is the correlation between a team’s defensive rating and its overall win percentage (.546). That’s the lowest it’s been since 1985-86. Meanwhile, there’s a far stronger correlation between a team’s offensive rating and its win percentage (.848). In general, offense tends to relate better to winning games than defense in the NBA. Typically, the two figures are much closer together than we see now.
That is Kevin Pelton, there is further discussion at the ESPN link. Good news for the Wizards! It also means you can’t trust your usual intuitions about who might be most likely to win the NBA title this time around.
Elon on SNL
He started by declaring that he speaks in a monotone and “has Asperger’s,” was funny and self-assured during the rest of the introduction, brought his mom on stage, and later played a variety of roles, including murderer, awkward guy at a party, a Mario character (Wario), and an Icelandic TV producer. He played a financial analyst repeatedly asked to explain “What is Dogecoin?” (Dogecoin was down significantly during the evening). The final skit was a gold-mining motif, something like “why are we panning for this gold when we can just invent our own currency?” Elon’s plan was to dig a tunnel to get at the bad guys. I enjoyed his line: “And I like self-driving horses, which are just…horses.”
He was funnier than any of the professional comedians.
Is there anything in American business history even vaguely comparable to this event?
From the comments, on restaurant labor and UI
Saturday assorted links
1. Furman and Powell on labor markets. And monopsony oops.
4. Jean Monnet, guerrilla bureaucrat.
6. “Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined.” Note however that data standards may not be uniform! Still…
New results on Work from Home
Emphasis is added by TC:
Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company, we compare productivity before and during the work from home [WFH] period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors. These findings suggest that communication and coordination costs increased substantially during WFH, and constituted an important source of the decline in productivity. Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children.
That is from a new paper by Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth.
*Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment*
That is the new and very interesting book by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein. Think of “noise” as the new major problem rather than bias. Here is one excerpt:
…we presented our findings to the senior managers of an asset management firm, prompting them to run their own exploratory noise audit. they asked forty-two experienced investors in the firm to estimate the fair value of a stock (the price at which investors would be indifferent to buying or selling). The investors based their analysis on a one-page description of the business; the data included ismplified profits and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements for the past three years and projections for the next two. median noise, measured in the same way as in the insurance company, was 41%. Such large differences among investors in the same firm, using the same valuation methods, cannot be good news.
I will be covering this book more soon, you can pre-order it here. And here Tim Harford does FT lunch with Kahneman, self-recommending.
The excellent Tim Sackett on the labor shortage
I’m a daily reader of your stuff and I just love the sharing you do. Thank you! I’m a blogger and analyst in the HR and Talent Acquisition space and speak to CHROs and Org Executives every day and over the past 90 days or so there has been a giant disconnect between something I frequently see Economists saying in the media verse what is reality in the job market. I was hoping you guys could tackle this subject in a future post!
Specifically, around this idea that extended Unemployment Insurance and the extra federal government stimulus being given out to unemployed workers having only a “marginal” effect on the amount of available workers. A great example of this – https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-are-unemployed-why-cant-companies-find-workers-11620302440
Economists claim that these policies have little impact to availability of workers, but CHROs at every size company, every industry, in all markets are begging for workers right now, and every one of them I speak to complain that they have workers telling them they won’t come back until they have to because they can make as much, or more, or even slightly less, but don’t have to work because of these additional benefits.
Why the giant disconnects between what Economists believe about UI verse what the reality is on the ground for organizations trying to hire? Also, I’ll give you UI/Stimulus isn’t the only factor driving difficult hiring. We have a ton of older workers leaving the workforce for retirement, which is giving us this step-up kind of hiring, where younger workers are skipping traditional entry level jobs and getting opportunities up the job food chain, we have GenZ who doesn’t want to work some dirty, crappy $12/hr job, so we see fewer GenZ in the labor force than previous generations at the same age, fear of Covid, etc. I still believe, especially in the $12-22/hr job market, UI plays a significant impact to worker availability currently.
File under #TheGreatForgetting. Noah fortunately remembers.
Friday assorted links
1. “Unlike some of these contests, the winner isn’t chosen at random. Instead, “your level of enthusiasm for watching home improvement shows will be a strong factor in the selection process,” according to the contest website.” Link here.
2. Inequality amongst children.
4. Which incentives for vaccines are most effective for which groups? (NYT)
5. Magnus Carlsen edition: That was then, and this is now (link fixed).
Four “dark horse” stories for 2021
From my Bloomberg column, here is one of them:
A possible Chinese move against Taiwan has received a lot of attention, but a Russian union with Belarus could be a greater danger. Belarus might even agree to such a proposition, so it would be hard for NATO or the U.S. to decry it as a coercive invasion. Yet such a Russian expansion could upend political stability in Europe.
If Russia and Belarus became a single political unit, there would be only a thin band of land, called the Suwalki Gap, connecting the Baltics to the rest of the European Union. Unfortunately, that same piece of territory would stand in the way of the new, larger Russia connecting with the now-cut off Russian region of Kaliningrad. Over the long term, could the Baltics maintain their independence? If not, the European Union would show it is entirely a toothless entity, unable to guarantee the sovereignty of its members.
Even if there were no formal political union between Russia and Belarus, the territorial continuity and integrity of the EU could soon be up for grabs. The EU has more at stake in an independent Belarus than it likes to admit.
You will find three more undervalued possible news stories at the link.
Does performance pay increase alcohol and drug use?
I would like to see this replicated, but the result is interesting nonetheless:
Using US panel data on young workers, we demonstrate that those who receive performance pay are more likely to consume alcohol and illicit drugs. Recognizing that this likely reflects worker sorting, we first control for risk, ability, and personality proxies. We further mitigate sorting concerns by introducing worker fixed effects, worker-employer match fixed effects, and worker-employer-occupation match fixed effects. Finally, we present fixed effect IV estimates. All of these estimates continue to indicate a greater likelihood of substance use when a worker receives performance pay. The results support conjectures that stress and effort increase with performance pay and that alcohol and drug use is a coping mechanism for workers.
By Benjamin Arta, Colin P. Green, and John S. Heywood, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Should the CIA be putting out “Woke” ads?
I am fine with the idea, for reasons I outlined in my latest Bloomberg column:
If you wanted to dilute wokeness, and limit its appeal to young radicals, what could be better than a CIA endorsement? I, for one, would like to make wokeness decidedly uncool — and if this video can recruit some new talent to the CIA at the same time, what’s not to like?
If you are a passionate young person, deeply concerned with social justice, you will be looking for causes rejected by the Establishment and embraced by a cool, in-the-know vanguard. Think of Marlon Brando’s line in “The Wild One,” when he is asked what he is rebelling against: “Whadda you got?”
The CIA, which just recently rebranded itself, just went a long way toward making wokeness feel ordinary and anodyne. Wokeness isn’t going to disappear, so the sooner wokeness becomes like the Unitarian Church — broadly admired but commanding only a modicum of passion and commitment — the better.
For similar reasons, those skeptical of wokeness should not be overly worried about so many American businesses embracing the concept, at least rhetorically. Some left-wing radicals might even consider the notion of woke and inclusive CIA assassins to be sinister, just as they fear that international conglomerates will neuter wokeness by embracing it.
Have you ever been walking through a department store and heard the Muzak version of John Lennon’s “Imagine”? Do you know the line: “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can”? Maybe hearing the accompanying melody, perhaps while browsing the men’s wear section, made you think that Karl Marx had taken over the world. Or maybe — if you’re like me — your reaction was that John Lennon had found his place in history, and that both capitalism and conservatism were more robust than he had imagined.
Recommended, there are some subtle points in the longer exposition.
Thursday assorted links
1. Robin Hanson reasons it out.
2. New estimate is 905,000 U.S. deaths from the pandemic so far, 6.9 million worldwide.
4. Derek Lowe on breaking vaccine patents.
5. “Three dollar store chains will make up almost half of all the new stores opening up in the United States this year…” Update: Ryan Decker says nope!
The New Era of Unconditional Convergence
Here is a new paper by Dev Patel Justin Sandefur, and Arvind Subramanian:
The central fact that has motivated the empirics of economic growthnamely unconditional divergenceis no longer true and has not been so for decades. Across a range of data sources, poorer countries have in fact been catching up with richer ones, albeit slowly, since the mid-1990s. This new era of convergence does not stem primarily from growth moderation in the rich world but rather from accelerating growth in the developing world, which has simultaneously become remarkably less volatile and more persistent. Debates about a middle-income trap also appear anachronistic: middleincome countries have exhibited higher growth rates than all others since the mid-1980s.
Here is the entire paper. My general conclusion is that no particular model of convergence, or lack thereof, is correct, and it simply all depends on the historical period.
How to beat Paul Graham and put him in his place
Paul writes me:
I remember you wrote an article about the intersection of cryptocurrency and philanthropy, so if you haven’t heard about it yet you’d probably be interested in the new “Save Thousands of Lives” NFT being sold by a nonprofit we funded.
They run programs in India to teach new moms to take care of their babies at home. They’re amazingly effective (not surprising since they’re using the most powerful force in the world as leverage) and have the lowest cost per life saved of any nonprofit I know: $1235. And that is conservatively estimated; in reality it’s even lower.
You can read about it here: http://paulgraham.com/nft.html
I’d really appreciate it if you could help publicize this project. I bid the reserve price, but I really want to get into a bidding war with a cryptobillionaire, because the higher the price goes, the more lives get saved.
OK people, now you know how to beat Paul Graham…
Wednesday assorted links
1. Additional problems with central bank digital currencies.
2. Nicholas Wade on where Covid-19 really came from. And commentary from Elad. Original link is updated here.
3. Police vaccination rates are low.
4. “Travel agencies in Thailand are selling coronavirus “vaccine tours” to the United States, as some wealthy Thais grow impatient awaiting mass inoculations that are still a month away amid the country’s biggest outbreak so far.” Link here.
And Slocum chimes in:
Here is the link to the comments.