J.D. Vance was selected
You can comment on that here…
Good news on Covid and your brain
Results: All six cognitive tests, measured before January 1, 2020, are significant predictors of infection status during the pandemic. The two subjective cognition measures show no significant association with infection. We replicate earlier cross-sectional findings of a negative association between COVID-19 infection and subsequent cognition. However, once accounting for baseline cognition, no significant associations are found for either the tests or the subjective measures. For three of the six cognitive tests the effects change signs.
Conclusions and relevance: We find no evidence for a negative association between COVID-19 infection and subsequent measures of cognitive functioning. The associations found in earlier studies may at least partly reflect reverse causation.
That is from a new research paper by Bas Weerman, et.al. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Monday assorted links
1. Janet Yellen and her dining abroad (NYT).
2. Simulation arguments, a research paper in philosophy.
4. “Canada remains the only G-7 country with higher [carbon] emissions than in 1990.” (WSJ)
5. “Ukraine’s population will crash to a mere 15mn people by 2100.”
6. The new and growing “divorce divide” in American politics.
What I’ve been reading
1. Kimmo Rentola, How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War. An excellent book, especially good on linking the Winter War with the fighting of 1944 and also the postwar settlments. Winner of the Lauri Jäntti prize, who would have thought otherwise?
2. Sjeng Scheijen, Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935. My biggest learning from this volume was simply how important Vladimir Tatlin was as a leader of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s. He might have mattered as much as Malevich? It is worth buying and reading a book for an insight such as that. Here is a short video of a good Tatlin exhibit from Basel, twelve years ago. The book also offered this sentence: “The affinity between the anarchists and the futurists is not so surprising.”
As a follow-up, I’ve also been reading Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution, also very good.
3. Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann. What is it like to be an unusual woman writer, with unusual proclivities, and have to build up or rebuild your work life in the countryside? There is now a whole book on this topic. Does it really mean you have to write down a complete inventory of all household possessions? (apparently) Beautifully written, very British, will frustrate those who seek generalization but recommended nonetheless.
4. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings, edited by Emiliano Bugatti. Mostly a picture book, this one convinced me I need to visit Treviso, Italy. The Brion Tomb is nearby, not to mention the Canova museum, both designed by Scarpa. He also showed that first-rate architecture never quite ended in Venice proper. I hadn’t known that Scarpa’s earliest works date as far back as the mid-1930s, and that he died by falling down a flight of stairs.
5. Céline, War. A newly unearthed novel by a great classic author is rare to come by, but here we have one. The text is not fully intact, but enough is there for reading to be a sufficiently integrated experience. It is in fact one of the best novels on the horrors of war, and now is not such a bad time to revisit that theme.
I enjoyed Susan Tomes, Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives, but it is too skimpy on the moderns. No coverage of Uchida or Ursula Oppens or Angela Hewitt?
Jack Weatherford, Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China is a good follow-up to his earlier work.
In my pile is Anthony Gregory, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State.
Why isn’t there an economics of animal welfare field?
On Friday I was keynote speaker at a quite good Brown University conference on this topic. I, like some of the other people there, wondered why animal welfare does not have its own economics journal, own association, own JEL code, and own mini-field, much as cultural economics or defense economics developed several decades ago. How about its own blog or Twitter feed? You might even say there is a theorem of sorts: if an economics subfield can exist, it will. And so I think this subfield is indeed on the way. Perhaps it needs one or two name-recognized economists to publish a paper on the topic in a top five journal? Whoever writes such a breakthrough piece will be cited for a long time to come, even if many of those citations will not be in top-tier journals. Will that person be you?
I do understand there is plenty about animal welfare in ag econ journals and departments, but somehow the way the world is tiered that just doesn’t count. Yes that is unfair, but the point remains that this subfield remains an underexploited intellectual profit opportunity.
Addendum: Here is a new piece by Cass Sunstein.
Sunday assorted links
1. Interview with Robert Putnam (NYT).
2. Julia La Roche podcasts with me. “Can AI fix our debt problem?”
3. Why is synthetic blood so expensive?
5. Bill Viola, RIP.
Thinking about the Roman Empire
The full title of the piece is “Identification and measurement of intensive economic growth in a Roman imperial province,” by Scott G. Ortman et.al. Here is the abstract:
A key question in economic history is the degree to which preindustrial economies could generate sustained increases in per capita productivity. Previous studies suggest that, in many preindustrial contexts, growth was primarily a consequence of agglomeration. Here, we examine evidence for three different socioeconomic rates that are available from the archaeological record for Roman Britain. We find that all three measures show increasing returns to scale with settlement population, with a common elasticity that is consistent with the expectation from settlement scaling theory. We also identify a pattern of increase in baseline rates, similar to that observed in contemporary societies, suggesting that this economy did generate modest levels of per capita productivity growth over a four-century period. Last, we suggest that the observed growth is attributable to changes in transportation costs and to institutions and technologies related to socioeconomic interchange. These findings reinforce the view that differences between ancient and contemporary economies are more a matter of degree than kind.
Thereby pondered! Via Alexander Le Roy.
Indian work from home data
The Covid-19 pandemic forced firms globally to shift workforces to working from home [WFH]. Firms are now struggling to implement a return to working from the office [WFO], as employees enjoy the significant benefits of WFH for their work-life balance. Therefore many firms are adopting a hybrid model in which employees work partly from the office and partly from home. We use unique and detailed data from an Indian IT services firm which contains a precise measure of innovation activity of over 48,000 employees in these three work environments. Our key outcomes are the quantity and quality of ideas submitted by employees. Based on an event study design, the quantity of ideas did not change during the WFH period as compared to WFO, but the quality of ideas suffered. During the later hybrid period, the quantity of submitted ideas fell. In the hybrid phase innovation suffered particularly in teams which were not well coordinated in terms of when they worked at the office or from home. Our findings suggest that remote and hybrid work modes may inhibit collaboration and innovation.
(Link and citation of paper corrected.) Here is the full piece from Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth.
The ten best books since 2000?
Here is the NYT list of the 100 best books of the new millennium. The NYT did enlist me as a voter, and here were my choices. Note these were off the top of my head, without much thought, and in no particular order. The defining category was when they appeared in English, not in the original language. It is no accident that all my choices are fiction:
Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel García Márquez
To the End of the Land, David Grossman
Pachinko, Min Lee
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu
Solenoid, Mircea Cartarescu
My Brilliant Friend (and the entire quadrology), Elena Ferrante
Submission, Michel Houellebecq
My Struggle, volumes 1 and 2, Karl Knausgaard
If you want to comment on events, comments are open…
Yes they are.
Poland’s PPP income is likely to exceed that of Japan by 2026.
Here is the link.
Saturday assorted links
1. Review of Hannah’s Children.
2. Lookism with Hadza and Tsimane hunters. And lookism for scars and palsies.
3. Those new service sector jobs: banter merchant for a Scottish hotel.
4. Angry birds are fighting drones that patrol for sharks on NYC beaches. It’s the oystercatchers!
5. AI finding copper for itself (NYT).
6. Edward A. Tenenbaum and the Deutschmark: How an American Jew Became the Father of Germany’s Postwar Economic Revival.
7. John van Reenen to lead economic advisory council to boost UK growth.
8. It’s happening.
What should I ask Tobi Lütke?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia:
Tobias “Tobi” Lütke (born 1981) MSC is a German/Canadian entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, an e-commerce company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He has been part of the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created open source libraries such as Active Merchant
Born in Koblenz, and he is on the board of directors of Coinbase. So what should I ask him?
How to feed the Olympics, a problem in procurement
It’s a daunting task to feed 15,000 people no matter what, but if food is fuel, the chefs feeding the athletes at Olympic Village are somewhat responsible for how these athletes perform. Events management and catering group Sodexo Live takes that responsibility seriously. What results is an incredible feat of logistics, combining sustainable sourcing, diversity of options, and ensuring all athlete’s nutritional needs are met by some combination of the 500 dishes that will be served.
But it’s not just baseline nutritional needs that need to be met — athletes are coming from all over the world, with their own culinary traditions. The Olympics are supposed to be a place of cultural exchange, and this extends to the food. Sodexo Live has brought on partner chefs Amandine Chaignot, Akrame Benallal, and Alexandra Mazzia to serve dishes like quinoa muesli, chickpea pommade, and gnocchi in chicken sauce to showcase modern French cuisine. Other chefs on the team are charged with creating everything athletes will need to eat, both before and after the competition.
And:
One of the funny parts that we’ve learned is that we think they’re all athletes and in their physical prime, so distance doesn’t matter. But actually it does, because our dining hall is extremely large, it’s over 220 meters long and 24 meters wide. Walking from one side to the other takes five minutes. And these competitors, they’re not going to go that far, they’re going to really ensure the minimum steps so they don’t spend too much energy. Nobody expected that.
And:
Bananas are an athlete’s favorite thing. We anticipate getting two or three million bananas. At peak time there will be 15,000 people living in one place. So that means per day, at peak time, we’re going to go up to 40,000 meals. At the end of the entire journey, it’s over 1.2 million meals. I was working on quantifying the volume of coffee, how to produce it. And then someone said, “Can we get the coffee grinds back to us to use as a fertilizer?” So what’s the volume of grinds we’ll produce? I’’s 20 tons of coffee, so that means it’ll be 40 tons of coffee residue. But all of this is going to be used to grow mushrooms.
Finally:
Americans have been extremely vocal about what they want. They were more picky and sensitive about having a lot of gluten-free items, and a more vegetable-based diet.
The piece and interview is by Jaya Saxena, the reproduced answers are from Estelle Lamont. Here is the entire piece, via the ever-excellent The Browser.
The class gap in academic career progression
There is a new and excellent paper by Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez on this topic:
Unlike gender or race, class is rarely a focus of research or DEI efforts in elite US occupations. Should it be? In this paper, we document a large class gap in career progression in one labor market: US tenure-track academia. Using parental education to proxy for socioeconomic background, we compare career outcomes of people who got their PhDs in the same institution and field (excluding those with PhD parents). First-generation college graduates are 13% less likely to end up tenured at an R1, and are on average tenured at institutions ranked 9% lower, than their PhD classmates with a parent with a (non-PhD) graduate degree. We explore three sets of mechanisms: (1) research productivity, (2) networks, and (3) preferences. Research productivity can explain less than a third of the class gap, and preferences explain almost none. Our analyses of coauthor characteristics suggest networks likely play a role. Finally, examining PhDs who work in industry we find a class gap in pay and in managerial responsibilities which widens over the career. This means a class gap in career progression exists in other US occupations beyond academia.
Here is a first-rate tweet storm by Stansbury on the paper. Via Aidan Finley.