Thursday assorted links
1. Indian caste bias in Silicon Valley.
2. Strong new results on monoclonal antibodies. And further coverage, yet we don’t have enough of them.
4. Vaccine timelines are continuing to slip further out.
5. Smith College boring no reason to watch this one.
6. New variant of the virus has come through Spain, its properties still unknown (FT). Research paper here.
Are Dead People Voting By Mail?
The subtitle of this new paper is “Evidence From Washington State Administrative Records,” and the authors are Jennifer Wu, Chenoa Yorgason, Hanna Folsz, Cassandra Handan-Nader, Andrew Myers, Tobias Nowacki, Daniel M. Thompson, Jesse Yoder, and Andrew B. Hall. Here is the abstract:
A commonly expressed concern about vote-by-mail in the United States is that mail-in ballots are sent to dead people, stolen by bad actors, and counted as fraudulent votes. To evaluate how often this occurs in practice, we study the state of Washington, which sends every registered voter a mail-in ballot. We link counted ballots and administrative death records to estimate the rate at which dead people’s mail-in ballots are improperly counted as valid votes, using birth dates from online obituaries to address false positives. Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state between 2011 and 2018, we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters. Even these few cases may reflect two individuals with the same name and birth date, or clerical errors, rather than fraud. After exploring the robustness of our findings to weaker conditions for matching names, we conclude that it seems extraordinarily rare for dead people’s ballots to be counted as votes in Washington’s universal vote-by-mail system.
No, in other words. And here is a tweet storm on the paper by Andy Hall.
What I’ve been reading
1. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime. Mostly not about climate per se, rather how we are failing at being true materialists: “In a sense, Trump’s election confirms, for the rest of the world, the end of a politics oriented toward an identifiable goal. Trumpian politics is not “post-truth,” it is post-politics — that is, literally, a politics with no object, since it rejects the world that it claims to inhabit.” Mostly interesting, as one expects from Latour, but not exactly in the Anglo-American style either. It also shows a kind of convergence with the ideas of Bruno Macaes, reviewed here by John Gray.
2. Robert Townsend, Distributed Ledgers: Design and Regulation of Financial Infrastructure and Payment Systems. Bitcoin and crypto yes, but the more fundamental concept in this book is…distributed ledgers, which include Thai rice allocation schemes and Mesopotamia circa 4000 B.C. It is highly intelligent and well done, but somehow I think books like this work better when they are more speculative and future-oriented.
3. Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life. So many pages, and perhaps this will not be surpassed soon. Yet it never quite tells you how he got to be so smart, or how his intellectual development proceeded, or even what his smartness consists of. So I can’t say I liked it. By the way, for those of you who don’t know, it seems to me that Stoppard is one of the smartest people and also the most important living playwright, most of all for anyone interested in intellectual history.
4. Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. Lovely visuals, blurb from Pinker, the curves slope upward, get the picture? Let’s hope they’re right! Ultimately I find this kind of exercise less convincing than I used to, instead preferring a broader theory that also accounts for what I perceive to be a growing disorientation. Which brings us to the next title…
5. Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain. How do transhumanism, Elon Musk/Neuralink, the Singularity, Book of Genesis, and Hegel all fit together? There is only one person who could pull off such a book, noting this version is dense and not for the uninitiated. Here is one squib: “Police is closer to civil society than state; it is a kind of representative of state in civil society, but for this very reason it has to be experienced as an external force, not an inner ethical power.” If you take away all the people who quite overrate him, Žižek is in fact remarkably underrated.
Wednesday assorted links
1. GMU tenure-track assistant professor ad.
2. “We find that the fiscal, macroeconomic, and health benefits of rapid SARS-CoV-2 screening testing programs far exceed their costs, with the ratio of economic benefits to costs typically in the range of 4-15 (depending on program details), not counting the monetized value of lives saved.” Link here.
3. Incentive-based approaches to addiction (NYT).
5. Do swordfish stab and murder sharks? (NYT)
The best argument against the Electoral College
Contrary to conventional intellectual wisdom there are not many good ones, but this packs some real force:
Starting from probabilistic simulations of likely presidential election outcomes that are similar to the output from election forecasting models, we calculate the likelihood of disputable, narrow outcomes under the Electoral College. The probability that the Electoral College is decided by 20,000 ballots or fewer in a single, pivotal state is greater than 1-in-10. Although it is possible in principle for either system to generate more risk of a disputable election outcome, in practice the Electoral College today is about 40 times as likely as a National Popular Vote to generate scenarios in which a small number of ballots in a pivotal voting unit determines the Presidency.
And note this, which explains a good deal of the debate and rationalizations — on both sides:
This disputed-election risk is asymmetric across political parties. It is about twice as likely that a Democrat’s (rather than Republican’s) Electoral College victory in a close election could be overturned by a judicial decision affecting less than 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 ballots in a single, pivotal state.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears.
Claims emailed to me, probably true claims at that
Un-convinceable people are frustrating to talk to.
But being around only convinceable people, you just end up at the average belief.
Having a diverse variety of unconvinceable people to sample from (and move away from when it gets to be too much), and a group of convinceable people with whom to hash out the ideas and find the best versions, seems like the ideal.
I think I gravitate too much to the convinceable, finding the nonconvinceable too annoying except in very small doses.
Model this mental illness movie
And:
Box office results fit the story as well. Here is the full paper by Shaan Kamal, et.al. Via Michelle Dawson.
The Great Chinese Inequality Turnaround (?)
From Ravi Kanbur, Yue Wang, and Xiaobo Zhang:
This paper argues that after a quarter century of sharp and sustained increase, Chinese inequality is now plateauing and, according to some measures, even declining. A number of papers have been harbingers of this conclusion, but this paper consolidates the literature indicating a turnaround, and provides empirical foundations for it. The argument is made using a range of data sources and a range of measures and perspectives on inequality. The evolution of inequality is further examined through decomposition by income source and population subgroup. Some preliminary explanations are provided for these trends in terms of shifts in policy and the structural transformation of the Chinese economy. We relate the turnaround to two classic phenomena in the development economics literature—the Lewis turning point and the Kuznets turning point. The plateauing is not yet a full blown decline, and there are short term variations. But the narrative on Chinese inequality now needs to accommodate the possibility of a turnaround in inequality, and to focus on the reasons for this turnaround.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Something about a billionaire, the Coase theorem, and Gilligan’s Island. Or better yet with photos. I believe Paul Samuelson mentioned this case in one of his articles.
2. Thread on how to value a vaccine.
3. These “oddest book titles” don’t seem that odd to me. C’mon people, you can do better than that.
4. New results suggesting the virus did evolve to become more contagious.
5. Why are the Blue states faring worse economically?
6. “The University of California, Berkeley, on Monday both revealed and renounced its long-standing Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund, according to the Los Angeles Times. ..There is no evidence that Berkeley used the money for eugenic research, he said, but rather for a genetic counseling training program, among other uses.” Link here.
David Henderson needs a reboot
David is repeatedly writing critiques of my writings on Covid-19. (Google to them if you wish, they are so off base and misrepresentative I don’t think they deserve a link, and furthermore I find it almost impossible to track down EconLog archives under their new system.) Virtually all of his points revolve around simple or it seems even willful misunderstandings. For instance, David wrote:
But he’s willing to sacrifice the well-being of 50 million school-age children. Remember his casual “It just doesn’t seem worth it” remark about allowing kids to go back to school. He handles the tradeoff by not mentioning it.
Here is what I wrote:
…the value of reopening schools. It is an inarguable point, and Sweden seems to have made it work. But schools cannot and should not be reopened unconditionally. Amid high levels of Covid-19, a successful reopening very often will require social distancing, masks and a good system for testing and tracing. It would be better to focus on what needs to be done to make school reopenings work. Reopened schools in Israel, for instance, seem to have contributed to a significant second wave of Covid-19.
And my remark about “It just doesn’t seem worth it”, cited by David as me dismissing school reopenings? Here is what I actually wrote:
Indoor restaurant dining and drinking, for example, is probably not a good idea in most parts of the U.S. right now.
Yes, many of the Covid cases spread by such activity would be among the lower-risk young, rather than the higher-risk elderly. Still, practically speaking, given America’s current response capabilities, those cases will further paralyze schools and workplaces and entertainment venues. It just doesn’t seem worth it.
I am worried about reopening indoor bars and restaurants because I want to keep schools (and other venues) open. At my own school, GMU, I very much argued for keeping it open, which indeed we have done with success but also with great effort. My whole point is one about trade-offs.
I’ve also linked regularly to evidence that school reopenings are often possible and desirable, but still there is a right and wrong way to do it and they are not in every case a good idea. It is not just up to the policy analyst, you also have to keep the teachers and various other parties on board, whether you like that reality or not.
One issue here is that likely more students would end up in functioning schools under a Tyler Cowen regime than under a David Henderson regime. David’s sum of recommendations would, in practice, if we were to trace through their full consequences, lead to more schools being shut and more teachers refusing to show up. And more deaths and panic and overflowing medical facilities. Now that’s a trade-off.
I could point to numerous misunderstandings in David’s recent posts, pretty much in every paragraph. (I also think he is quite wrong on substance, allying himself with a few eccentric thinkers that hardly anyone agrees with, and who have not acquitted themselves well in debate, or made good predictions as of late, but that is another matter for a different time. He should pay greater heed to say Scott Gottlieb, who knows what he is talking about.)
In the meantime, David is failing the ideological Turing test badly and repeatedly.
Addendum: David’s Russian vaccine post does not misunderstand me, but I don’t think it shows a very full grasp of the issue. I very much favor regulatory reciprocity for pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and more, but I strongly believe adding Russia to the reciprocal list would “poison the well” and doom the whole idea. In the meantime, they are not nearly as far along for a major vaccine rollout as they claim, so probably we are not missing out on very much, even if the quality were fine. The slightest problem with the vaccine would be blown out of proportion, most of all with DT as president and Russian conspiracy theories circulating. If your goal is to nudge and push the FDA to move more quickly across the board, starting them off with the approval of a Russian vaccine is bad tactics and is risking the entire apple cart. Maybe try for Mother England first? So I think David here is quite wrong, and applying market liberalization ideas in a knee-jerk rather than a sophisticated fashion. He called the post “Tyler Cowen’s shocking post on the Russian vaccine,” but I wonder who he thinks is really supposed to be shocked by that one. If you read David’s comment on his own post you will see he is genuinely unable to imagine that such an argument as I present above might exist.
New addendum: Note that one of the earlier comments was under the name of David Henderson but was not in fact by him, read here. And a response by the real DRH here.
Soon they will seek to cancel the rooftops
Based on a simple and intuitive point, the title of the paper is: “How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality?”, and the answer is something you hardly ever hear acknowledged:
When facing shifts in the income distribution like those observed in the US, a utilitarian planner chooses higher progressivity in response to larger residual inequality but lower progressivity in response to widening skill price dispersion reflecting technical change. Overall, optimal progressivity is approximately unchanged between 1980 and 2016. We document that the progressivity of the actual US tax and transfer system has similarly changed little since 1980, in line with the model prescription.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Jonathan Heathcote, Kjetil Storesletten, and Giovanni L. Violante.
The biggest cost of the trade war — less access to Chinese vaccines
The current portfolio is multinational, including investments in Pfizer, Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. Ideally, there should be at least one Chinese vaccine included, but there is not.
Obviously, given the rhetoric of the current administration, using a Chinese vaccine would be politically difficult. You can’t call it “the Chinese virus” and then tell Americans they ought to take a Chinese vaccine. So the Trump administration has made no serious effort to make a vaccine-sharing deal with China.
And:
The matter is hardly settled, but at the very least the Chinese vaccines are not dropping out of contention.
Note that a year’s worth of partial protection still could go a long way. Recommended.
How to conduct clinical trials while releasing a vaccine
There are many ways to conduct clinical trials while releasing a vaccine—indeed, we can make the clinical trials better by randomizing a phased release. Suppose we decide health care and transit workers should be vaccinated first. No problem–offer the workers the vaccine, put the SSNs of those who wants the vaccine into a hat like draft numbers, vaccine a randomly chosen sub-sample, monitor everyone.This is the well known lottery technique for measuring causal effects often used in the school choice literature. If we use this technique we can greatly increase sample sizes and as we study each wave we will gather more confidence in the data. We won’t have enough vaccine in November to vaccinate everyone or probably even all health care and transit workers so a lottery is an ethically fair as well as statistically useful way to distributed the vaccine. We can also randomize across cities and regions.
That is from a recent post by Alex Tabarrok, on the blog Marginal Revolution, and there is more at the link. Of course I don’t have to tell you what Alex’s brother thinks of all this.
Addendum: Anup Malani notes:
BTW, those worried about ethics here should note that most product markets, even many dangerous ones (including non-FDA regulated medical care) use the population testing approach. Drugs are the exception. Elsewhere handle risk via exclusively via ex post tort liability.
So please don’t offer some kind of passive, under-argued Twitter comment on how unacceptably unethical it is — do some analysis and empirics on the trade-offs! And read up on surgical procedures while you are at it.
Monday assorted links
1. Data on the oldest companies in the world. Often small, and related to food and/or hospitality. Often Japanese.
4. While America has been dithering, good (but not surprising) news on AstraZeneca. The vaccine may come to UK hospitals by November.
5. a16z podcast on textiles, with Virginia Postrel and Sonal Chokshi.
Redistribution!
Depressive symptoms increased from before to during COVID-19 and life satisfaction decreased. Individuals with higher education experienced a greater increase in depressive symptoms and a greater decrease in life satisfaction from before to during COVID-19 in comparison to those with lower education. Supplemental analysis illustrates that income had a curvilinear relationship with changes in well-being, such that individuals at the highest levels of income experienced a greater decrease in life satisfaction from before to during COVID-19 than individuals with lower levels of income.
Here is the full research paper, by Connie R. Wanberg et.al., with other interesting results including on causal mechanisms. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.