Falling prices prediction bleg
Over the next six to nine months, which things in the American economy will see falling nominal prices?
Don’t count goods and services for which the current price is de facto infinity, such as a cruise or a twenty-block of seats at an NBA game.
What are your predictions? And what is your underlying model for that sector of the economy?
Will used car prices be falling by then?
At a dinner table discussion, one person I know picked “the price of TV streaming services” (falling viewing time plus excess capacity?), but this was much disputed.
Newark fact of the day
Newark Police officers did not fire a single shot during the calendar year 2020, and the city didn’t pay a single dime to settle police brutality cases. That’s never happened, at least in the city’s modern history.
At the same time, crime is dropping, and police recovered almost 500 illegal guns from the street during the year.
Here is the longer story.
Yascha Mounk interviews me for his podcast
I give him a hard time about populism, he gives me a hard time about complacency. We cover politics and geopolitics as well. Here is the link.
Garett Jones sentences to ponder
UCSD’s Valerie Ramey, advisor to CBO and member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, notes the puzzling result reported by multiple researchers: *More* infrastructure spending predicts *no change or a decline* in jobs:
…Have wonks widely discussed the finding that U.S. infrastructure spending appears to have no positive short-term effect on jobs?
Here is the link, including to research by Valerie Ramey.
Saturday assorted links
1. At #6 and #7 you can read AIER on vaccines. C’mon people, this particular debate is over.
2. Long Covid is real. And U.S. excess deaths in 2020 more elevated in relative terms than during the 1918 pandemic (NYT). And “BREAKING: Israel reports no new coronavirus deaths for second day in a row.”
3. Highly effective software to help you find a vaccine, vaccinatethestates.com.
4. Wyoming will recognize DAOs as a new form of LLC.
5. The fiscal polity that is Illinois: “Winners of lottery jackpots of $25,000 or more have been denied payment by the lottery commission until the state balances the budget.”
6. “Ontario Parks cracking down on people reselling camping bookings for profit.“
Periodicals to know about
There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
That is from David Brooks (NYT).
The petty narcissism of small vaccine differences
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
My survey of the cultural vaccine landscape in the U.S. includes the four major vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
Pfizer, distributed by one of the largest U.S. pharmaceutical firms, is the establishment vaccine. Since it initially had a significant “cold chain” requirement, it was given out at established institutions such as big hospitals and public-health centers with large freezers. It is plentiful, highly effective and largely uncontroversial.
Moderna — the very name suggests something new — is the intellectual vaccine. The company had no product or major revenue source until the vaccine itself, so it is harder to link Moderna to “Big Pharma,” which gives it a kind of anti-establishment vibe. Note also that the last three letters of Moderna are “rna,” referring to the mRNA technology that makes the vaccine work. It is the vaccine for people in the know.
Moderna was also, for a while anyway, the American vaccine. It was available primarily in the U.S. at a time when Pfizer was being handed out liberally in the U.K. and Israel. As a recipient of two Moderna doses myself, I feel just a wee bit special for this reason. You had to be an American to get my vaccine. Yes, the European Union had also approved it, but it failed to procure it in a timely manner. So the availability of Moderna reflects the greater wealth and efficiency of the U.S.
Then there are the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines…
And:
To the extent vaccines turn into markers for a cultural club, vaccine hesitancy may persist.
It might be better, all things considered, if vaccines were viewed more like paper clips — that is, a useful and even necessary product entirely shorn of cultural significance. Few people refuse to deploy paper clips in order to “own the libs” or because they do not trust the establishment. They are just a way to hold two pieces of paper together.
To be clear, the primary blame here lies with those who hesitate to get vaccinated. But behind big mistakes are many small ones — and we vaccinated Americans, with our all-too-human tendency to create hierarchies for everything, are surely contributing to the mess.
Recommended!
Do career disruptions matter for the top five percent?
How resilient are high-skilled, white collar workers? We exploit a uniquely comprehensive dataset of individual-level resumes of bank employees and the setting of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to estimate the effect of an unanticipated shock on the career paths of mobile and high skilled labor. We find evidence of short-term effects that largely dissipate over the course of the decade and that touch only the senior-most employees. We match each employee of Lehman Brothers in January 2008 to the most similar employees at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and UBS based on job positions, skills, education, and demographics. By 2019, the former Lehman Brothers employees are 2% more likely to have experienced at least a six-months-long break from reported employment and 3% more likely to have left the financial services industry. However, these effects concentrate among the senior individuals such as vice presidents and managing directors and are absent for junior employees such as analysts and associates. Furthermore, in terms of subsequent career growth, junior employees of Lehman Brothers fare no worse than their counterparts at the other banks. Analysts and associates employed at Lehman Brothers in January 2008 have equal or greater likelihoods of achieving senior roles such as managing director in existing enterprises by January 2019 and are more likely to found their own businesses.
That is from a new paper by Anastassia Fedyk and James Hodson. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
2. A funny kind of Taiwanese marriage arbitrage.
3. Solve for the lovely biscuit equilibrium.
4. Oxford malaria vaccine looking good in (small) Burkina Faso trial.
5. Ranked-choice voting for the New York mayor (NYT).
6. Greece reopens to American tourists.
7. EU proposing to regulate the use of Bayesian estimation. What’s the chance of that actually happening?
From the comments, Zaua on capital gains tax hikes
Canada (oil sands) fact of the day
Between Mr. Trudeau’s election in 2015 and 2019, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by 1 percent, despite decreases in other rich nations during the same period, according to government data released last week. In fact, Canada is the only Group of 7 country whose emissions have risen since the Paris climate agreement was signed six years ago.
Here is more from the NYT.
What are the limits of economies of scope?
Amazon is launching its first high-tech hair salon, as the online retailer makes a surprise move into the beauty sector.
The salon, in Spitalfields, east London, will have an augmented-reality mirror showing clients different colours and styles before treatments.
The venue will also have magazines loaded on to tablets, for browsing.
Traditional services including cuts, blow-dries and colour treatments will also be available.
Here is the full story, via Michelle Dawson.
Is this really better than borrowing?
Or how about a VAT?
President Joe Biden will propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6%, which, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for investors could be as high as 43.4%, according to people familiar with the proposal.
The plan would boost the capital gains rate to 39.6% for those earning $1 million or more, an increase from the current base rate of 20%, the people said on the condition of anonymity because the plan is not yet public. A 3.8% tax on investment income that funds Obamacare would be kept in place, pushing the tax rate on returns on financial assets higher than the top rate on wage and salary income, they said.
Here is the full story from Bloomberg. Given state rates, that means over 50% in New York and California — is that what the science recommends?
Thursday assorted links
Africa fact of the day
More than 1.7 million doses of the world’s first malaria vaccine have been administered in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, benefitting more than 650,000 children!
Here is more.
Here is the link.