Maradona Plays Minimax
This paper tests the theory of mixed strategy equilibrium using Maradona’s penalty kicks during his lifetime professional career. The results are remarkably consistent with equilibrium play in every respect: (i) Maradona’s scoring probabilities are statistically identical across strategies; (ii) His choices are serially independent. These results show that Maradona’s behavior is consistent with Nash’s predictions, specifically with both implications of von Neumann’s Minimax Theorem.
*Peace, Poverty and Betrayal*
The author is Roderick Matthews, and the subtitle is A New History of British India. This book has been highly controversial for its supposed “whitewashing” of British rule in India, but so far I find it insightful and indeed revelatory. It is to date my favorite book this year, most of all conceptual but also remarkably well-informed historically. Here is one excerpt:
Ultimately, we should condemn [British] colonialism not because it was self-glorifying and arrogant, but because it was small-minded and fearful.
Colonial rule was undoubtedly heavily responsible for the fact that India remainder both poor and backward — but the high Rah hid a subtler hypocrisy, in the way that Indian landlords, for a muddle of humanitarian and political reasons, were denied the scope that their British counterparts had allowed themselves. British landowners drove their tenants off the land and adopted new methods of husbandry to increase profitability, which allowed them to create the agricultural surplus that stimulated the industrial revolution, and provided Britain with a float of national wealth to pay for colonial adventures. Rural India remained overmanned and underproductive.
This short charge sheet differs from the extensive accusations made by modern left-leaning historians, who recognize economic exploitation but choose instead to emphasize cultural issues, especially the bureaucratization of Indian society and the introduction of capitalist norms. This is hardly fair, because the progressive middle classes in India would have done broadly the same things if they could. Almost nothing of the imperial administrative agenda was undone in independent India. However, it is true that the modernization process was rushed and defective. It was too self-interested, and the guiding hands were not indigenous. Something similar might have emerged, but with a more Indian face. We cannot know.
I will be covering this book more, but so far strongly recommended. It is no accident that the author, while an experienced Indian historian, is not an academic.
Texas Covid and school reopenings
Mostly I think American schools have been closed for way too long, but I am typically wary when I read “dogmatic” cases for universal school reopenings, especially when those reopenings are not done under the proper circumstances, namely good data and plenty of testing, or low case levels. Here is one new piece that sheds some new light on the topic:
This paper examines the effect of fall 2020 school reopenings in Texas on county-level COVID-19 cases and fatalities. Previous evidence suggests that schools can be reopened safely if community spread is low and public health guidelines are followed. However, in Texas, reopenings often occurred alongside high community spread and at near capacity, making it difficult to meet social distancing recommendations. Using event-study models and handcollected instruction modality and start dates for all school districts, we find robust evidence that reopening Texas schools gradually but substantially accelerated the community spread of COVID-19. Results from our preferred specification imply that school reopenings led to at least 43,000 additional COVID-19 cases and 800 additional fatalities within the first two months. We then use SafeGraph mobility data to provide evidence that spillovers to adults’ behaviors contributed to these large effects. Median time spent outside the home on a typical weekday increased substantially in neighborhoods with large numbers of school-age children, suggesting a return to in-person work or increased outside-of-home leisure activities among parents.
That is a new NBER working paper by Charles J. Courtemanche, Anh H. Le, Aaron Yelowitz, and Ron Zimmer. In other words, having the kids at home kept the adults tied down and less mobile. Of course, even with this result, there is still a case for reopening the schools, but I am happy to see some of the trade-offs recognized.
How to build *actually* inclusive companies
How to do build *actually* inclusive companies.
– Dump credentialism.
– Seek talents online wherever they are.
– Build remote, async, international.
That is from Tim Soret, via Balaji.
Andy Weir’s *Project Hail Mary*
It is very good, in the problem-solving mode of The Martian, you can buy it here. I can’t say more without giving away spoilers, though that means the book is full of suspense from the first moment on. Here is my earlier 2017 Conversation with Andy Weir.
Network Structure in Small Groups and Survival in Disasters
I wonder if this kind of result might apply to more than just disasters:
People in disaster and emergency situations (e.g., building fires) tend to adhere to the social obligations and expectations that are embedded in their preexisting roles and relationships. Accordingly, people survive or perish in groups—specifically, alongside those to whom they were connected before the situation emerged. This article uses social network analysis to expand on this collective behavior account. Specifically, we consider structural heterogeneity with respect to the internal configurations of social ties that compose small groups facing these situations together. Some groups are composed of cohesive subsets of members who can split off from each other during evacuation without violating their group’s internal role-based expectations. We argue that groups that possess this “breakaway” structure can respond to emergencies more flexibly. We explore this using data from the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire of 1977, which killed 165 people. Our data include 303 groups (“parties”) that consisted of 746 people who were present in the dining room where most of the fatalities occurred. Fatality rates were significantly lower in groups that were internally structured such that they could split up in different ways during the escape while still maintaining their strongest social bonds.
That is from Benjamin Cornwell and Jing-Mao Ho, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Sunday assorted links
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).
And Slocum chimes in:
Here is the link to the comments.