Tuesday assorted links
1. Further evidence for the importance of female role models: “We find that, among high-ability female students, being assigned a female professor leads to substantial increases in the probability of working in a STEM occupation and the probability of receiving a STEM master’s degree.”
2. Which Conversations with Tyler guest is your intellectual doppelgänger? A fun test you can take.
3. “According to the researchers, consumers notice no difference when a quarter of the milk butter in a cake is replaced with larva fat. However, they report an unusual taste when it gets to fifty-fifty and say they would not want to buy the cake.” Link here.
4. Krugman reviews Piketty (NYT).
5. Kevin Drum’s simple theory of DT’s optimism about the coronavirus. And the economics of mandated sick pay. And “Detroit to restore water service to unpaid homes to allow people to wash their hands to avoid coronavirus.“
Solve for the reporting equilibrium?
The district governments of the metropolis that comprises Wuhan — the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China — have announced plans to give cash rewards to local residential areas that have successfully curbed the spread of COVID-19.
The incentive rules stipulate that regions and large facilities, such as rural villages and apartment complexes, will receive up to 500,000 yuan ($72,000) for reporting no new cases of infection. Per the Beijing News (in Chinese), the policies were in line with a high-level initiative launched by the Wuhan municipal government on March 1 that mandates every resident to be thoroughly examined.
Here is more, via Slow Thinker.
What I’ve been reading
1. Nicholas Hewitt, Wicked City: The Many Cultures of Marseille. Every city should have a good book about it, and now Marseille does. I would say you have to already know the city, however, to appreciate this one.
2. Peter Johnson, Quarantined: Life and Death at William Head Station, 1872-1959. British Columbia had a quarantine station that late, and this is its story. Leprosy, smallpox, and meningitis are a few of the drivers of the narrative. It continues to startle me how much pandemics and quarantines are a kind of lost history, though they are extremely prominent in 19th century fiction.
3. Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story. Probably the best history of the company were are going to get, at least for the earlier years of the company. Even the jabs at the company seem perfunctory, for the most part this is quite objective as a treatment.
4. Katie Roiphe, The Power Notebooks. Power, sex, dating, and romance, but surprisingly substantive. Much of it is written in paragraph-long segments, and willing to be politically incorrect. “Rebecca West: “Since men don’t love us nearly as much as we love them that leaves them a lot more spare vitality to be wonderful with.”
5. Sean Masaki Flynn, The Cure That Works: How to have the World’s Best Healthcare — at a Quarter of the Price. A look at how to translate ideas from Singapore’s health care system into the United States. It overreaches, but still a useful overview and analysis.
6. Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, The Siberian City of Science. Imagine the Soviets trying to build a “city of science,” and meeting problem after problem. Yet “Marchuk acknowledged that in a number of fields researchers had contributed to…the speeding up of scientific technological progress. The physicists built synchroton radiation sources with broad applications; the biologists tacked plant and animal husbandry with vigor; the mathematicians, computer specialists, and economists were engaged in modeling and management systems.”
America is historically slow to mobilize, but eventually quite effective
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, and Pearl Harbor, terrorism risk, and the financial crisis stand among the notable examples. Here is one excerpt:
It is no accident that America is so often so slow out of the starting gate. The federal government is large and complex, and the American people do not always elect the most intellectual or science-minded of leaders. Federalism means American politics has many moving parts, and the government tends to work closely with the private sector, heightening coordination problems and slowing response times. For all America’s reputation as the land of laissez-faire, it is in fact highly bureaucratized, with the health-care sector an especially bad offender.
And:
As time passes, the number of discrete decision points in the U.S. system goes from being a drawback to a strength. For instance, it turns out that the University of Washington had been developing an effective testing kit several months ago, for fear that Covid-19 would spread widely. Washington State is now in the testing lead, and virologists there are working very hard to collect and interpret data, setting an example for others. Commercial companies such as Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp are now developing tests as well, with further interest likely to follow. American institutions are some of the most productive and flexible in the world, at least once they are allowed to operate.
America also has one of the strongest traditions of civil society and volunteerism, and those resources too will be mobilized to help fight the coronavirus as appropriate. The Gates Foundation will soon fund free home-testing kits, initially in the Seattle area.
There is much more at the link. Of course it is indeed time we got our act together, starting at the very top but by no means limited to that position.
Monday assorted links
Anne Enright is honest about books
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
I was a book-a-day child, a pretentious teenager. I read hugely in my 20s and 30s — all the good stuff, nothing very odd or esoteric. As I started getting published, I read my contemporaries in a way that was not entirely pure. Then, after I had children, I stopped. It is possible more books were written than read by me, in the years when they were small. I don’t think I am a recreational reader. I am always looking for something and I am not sure what it is. These days, I am increasingly restless. I throw books aside. I blame the internet. I blame the chair. I yearn for books not published yesterday or next week. I stick to nonfiction. And then suddenly, I can’t leave a book out of my hand. This happened most recently with “Where Reasons End,” by Yiyun Li.
Here is the full interview (NYT).
The importance of maternal education, up to a point
…we show that rank mobility increases as the percentage of mothers with a high school diploma increases. We find weaker evidence that mobility increases with the percentage of mothers with a university degree.
That is from a new paper by Marie Connolly, Catherine Haeck, and Jean-William P. Lalibert.
A simple proposal for boosting health care workers
One recent report suggests that 10% of the doctors in northern Italy are infected with coronavirus. No matter what the exact figure, that is clearly a problem. In response, Italy is opting for at least two reforms. First, health care workers who are retired are being lured back to work:
Italy on Saturday began recruiting retired doctors as part of urgent efforts to bolster the healthcare system with 20,000 additional staff to fight the escalating viral epidemic.
Second, the government is giving accelerated treatment to those studying for health care jobs:
In addition, nursing students who were due to take their final exams next month are now expected to graduate in the coming days so they can be immediately put to work
The United States should consider measures in the same direction.
Will the coronavirus and the poor response doom Trump’s reelection chances?
Ross Douthat wonders maybe so (NYT), Arnold Kling says probably not:
Closing the border is his signature issue, and the Democrats have staked out a position as the “resistance” to that. I know that they think they can benefit from this crisis, but I would be surprised if they do.
My earlier Feb.3rd Bloomberg column suggested it would help Trump. I won’t repeat the core claims of my column (some summarized here), but I am still sticking with that earlier call for a few reasons:
1. Few Americans will know/understand that some foreign governments did a better job than we did, and indeed that is already the case in many other policy areas. “Foreign country did this better than us” is never an argument that works in American politics.
2. The literature on political business cycles suggests that absolute performance is not what matters, but rather whether the economy is gaining momentum. So if the coronavirus situation is improving in the months leading up to November, Trump will receive some credit for that, no matter how poor the initial response. And I think that plausibly will be the case. Even if you believe in a second winter wave, it may take longer to materialize.
3. The literature on disaster spending suggests politicians are rewarded electorally for their response to disasters, not for preparation. Enough of the American public still is oblivious to this issue that a major Trump action still could be marketed as timely and indeed pro-active.
4. For my hypothesis to be true, Trump at some point needs to make a “big push” kind of response, but I consider that highly likely, even if the push is ill-considered in its details.
Sunday assorted links
1. Stuart Whatley reviews Stubborn Attachments.
2. Ungated version of my growth-raters vs. base-raters column.
4. 2009 study: “”Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending.”
5. Chinese birth rates coming in lower than expected.
6. How to get money to people fast (it isn’t the bridges).
My avian flu blog days
Circa 2004 or so, it seemed to me that America was grossly underprepared for a possible pandemic. I started reading up on the topic, and I produced a very basic, simple Mercatus policy paper on avian flu. For obvious reasons, much of it is out of date and some of the recommendations have been adopted, but here is the first part of the Executive Summary:
1. The single most important thing we can do for a pandemic—whether avian flu or not—is to have well-prepared local health care systems. We should prepare for pandemics in ways that are politically sustainable and remain useful even if an avian flu pandemic does not occur.
2. Prepare social norms and emergency procedures which would limit or delay the spread of a pandemic. Regular hand washing, and other beneficial public customs, may save more lives than a Tamiflu stockpile.
3. Decentralize our supplies of anti-virals and treat timely distribution as more important than simply creating a stockpile.
4. Institute prizes for effective vaccines and relax liability laws for vaccine makers. Our government has been discouraging what it should be encouraging.
5. Respect intellectual property by buying the relevant drugs and vaccines at fair prices. Confiscating property rights would reduce the incentive for innovation the next time around.
6. Make economic preparations to ensure the continuity of food and power supplies. The relevant “choke points” may include the check clearing system and the use of mass transit to deliver food supply workers to their jobs.
7. Realize that the federal government will be largely powerless in the worst stages of a pandemic and make appropriate local plans.
8. Encourage the formation of prediction markets in an avian flu pandemic. This will give us a better idea of the probability of widespread human-to-human transmission.
9. Provide incentives for Asian countries to improve their surveillance. Tie foreign aid to the receipt of useful information about the progress of avian flu.
10. Reform the World Health Organization and give it greater autonomy from its government funders.
And also from later on:
4. We should not expect to choke off a pandemic in its country of origin. Once a pandemic has started abroad, we should shut schools and many public places immediately.
5. We should not obsess over avian flu at the expense of other medical issues. The next pandemic or public health crisis could come from any number of sources. By focusing on local preparedness and decentralized responses, this plan is robust to surprise and will also prove useful for responding to terrorism or natural catastrophes.
Still relevant today. For a while I also wrote an avian flu blog with Silviu Dochia, archived here.
Saturday assorted links
1. The economics of Mount Everest.
2. Some unpleasant pandemic arithmetic.
3. Where did I put my phone again? (with a pelican cameo, watch the video)
4. Are NBA coaches using their new call challenge privileges rationally? (WSJ) Also WSJ is the 24k kitchen knife. Both pieces are quite interesting.
Facts about Starbucks against free bathrooms charge them all
In May 2018, in response to protests, Starbucks changed its policies nationwide to allow anybody to sit in their stores and use the bathroom without making a purchase. Using a large panel of anonymized cellphone location data, we estimate that the policy led to a 7.3% decline in store attendance at Starbucks locations relative to other nearby coffee shops and restaurants. This decline cannot be calculated from Starbucks’ public disclosures, which lack the comparison group of other coffee shops. The decline in visits is around 84% larger for stores located near homeless shelters. The policy also affected the intensive margin of demand: remaining customers spent 4.1% less time in Starbucks relative to nearby coffee shops after the policy enactment. Wealthier customers reduced their visits more, but black and white customers were equally deterred. The policy led to fewer citations for public urination near Starbucks locations, but had no effect on other similar public order crimes. These results show the difficulties of companies attempting to provide public goods, as potential customers are crowded out by non-paying members of the public.
That is from a new paper by Umit Gurun, Jordan Nickerson, and David H. Solomon. Can there be any doubt about the excellence of Kevin Lewis?
Tim Ferriss did a podcast with me
Mostly he interviews me, the final segment is me interviewing him, the best part in my view. And they sent me this:
Thank you so much for being on the podcast! It was such a great interview. I just released it.Please see links below:Show notes on Tim’s blog: https://tim.blog/2020/03/05/tyler-cowen/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9XzpOTHSmX/
*The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life*
That is the new forthcoming book by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton, which will prove one of the best and most important works of the last few years. Imagine following one thousand or so Dunedin New Zealanders for decades of their lives, up through age 38, and recording extensive data, and then doing the same for one thousand or so British twins through age 20, and 1500 American children, in fifteen different locales, up through age 15. Just imagine what you would learn!
You merely have to buy this book. In the meantime, let me give you just a few of the results.
The traits of being “undercontrolled” or “inhibited,” as a toddler are the traits most likely to persist up through age eighteen. The undercontrolled tend to end up as danger-seeking or impulsive. Those same individuals were most likely to have gambling disorders at age 32. Girls with an undercontrolled temperament, however, ran into much less later danger than did the boys, including for gambling.
“Social and economic wealth accumulated by the fourth decade of life also proved to be related to childhood self-control.” And yes that is with controls, including for childhood social class.
Being formally diagnosed with ADHD in childhood was statistically unrelated to being so diagnosed later in adult life. It did, however, predict elevated levels of “hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity” later in adulthoood. I suspect that all reflects more poorly on the diagnoses than on the concept. By the way, decades later three-quarters of parents did not even remember their children receiving ADHD diagnoses, or exhibiting symptoms of ADHD (!).
Parenting styles are intergenerationally transmitted for mothers but not for fathers.
For one case the authors were able to measure for DNA and still they found that parenting styles affected the development of the children (p.104).
As for the effects of day care, it seems what matters for the mother-child relationship is the quantity of time spent by the mother taking care of the child, not the quality (p.166). For the intellectual development of the child, however, quality time matters not the quantity. By age four and a half, however, the children who spent more time in day care were more disobedient and aggressive. At least on average, those problems persist through the teen years. The good news is that quality of family environment growing up still matters more than day care.
But yet there is so much more! I have only scratched the surface of this fascinating book. I will not here betray the results on the effects of neighborhoods on children, for instance, among numerous other topics and questions. Or how about bullying? Early and persistent marijuana use? (Uh-oh) And what do we know about polygenic scores and career success? What can we learn about epigenetics by considering differential victimization of twins? What in youth predicts later telomere erosion?
I would describe the writing style as “clear and factual, but not entertaining.”
You can pre-order it here, one of the books of the year and maybe more, recommended of course.