*The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone*
An excellent book by Brian Merchant. Two neat things I learned that I hadn’t known before. First, when you are typing the software guesses which letters might be coming next and gives you extra latitude in hitting those keys. (I believe this oddly makes the QWERTY keyboard efficient once again, also.) Second, there are non-disclosure agreements for reading a possible non-disclosure agreement to sign (or not). You have to sign one of those before you even get to see the non-disclosure agreement for the work at hand, in other words if you don’t sign the NDA you can’t even report on how much secrecy they were demanding from you. Apple used those.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Interview with me in French, on complacency.
3. Current famine in Africa could be the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.
4. “Last year, expenditures on chemical plants alone accounted for half of all capital investment in U.S. manufacturing, up from less than 20% in 2009…” (WSJ)
*Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America*
That is a forthcoming volume edited by Cass Sunstein. The contributors include Cass, myself, Timur Kuran, Duncan Watts, Martha Minow, Bruce Ackerman, Jack Goldsmith, Geoffrey Stone, and Noah Feldman, among others. Self-recommending, if anything ever was…
My essay, by the way, says no, it cannot happen here. Counterintuitively, American government is too bureaucratized and too feminized to be captured and turned toward old-style fascism. I encourage you to pre-order.
Shenyang notes
You don’t see many luxury goods shops, as the region has been deindustrializing since the 1990s. There are modernist 1920s cement buildings scattered in some of the old central parts of the city, but nowhere is it attractive. There is a nine-hour Chinese movie about the city falling on hard economic times, with its three segments called “Rust,” “Remnants,” and “Rails.”
If you travel a lot, you should not restrict yourself to “nice” places, which are more likely to disappoint.
Many of the city’s faces seem to have Korean, Japanese, or Turkic elements, befitting the location and the history.
The main sight is the Manchu imperial palace, a smaller, more accessible, and more atmospheric version of Beijing’s Forbidden City, but with hints of 17th century Manchurian and Tibetan styles. This city ruled China in the early years of the Qing Dynasty, before the torch was passed to Beijing.
Embedded in Marshal Zhang’s Mansion is the best museum of money and currency I have seen; the Marshal was a heroic leader in the war against Japan, but later made “a wrong choice” and spent much of his 100-year life under house arrest.
The two major tombs in the city have little to offer except long walks on flat plains leading essentially nowhere.
For food the city shines, even by Chinese standards. Laobian Dumpling serves what are perhaps the best dumplings I have had, and Xin Fen Tian is the place for fine regional specialties. The city’s cuisine blends meat-heavy, dumpling-related Manchu dishes, rich and earthy casseroles, stews, and mushrooms, and finally Shandong-inspired seafood styles, stemming from the proximity to the coast. The quality of the local fruit is high, blueberries and cherries included, and the nuts are famous throughout China.
Here is Wikipedia on the Soviet-Sino conflict of 1929, in which Shenyang (then Mukden) played a significant role. The Mukden incident of 1931 was used to provoke/excuse the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Nowadays, Shenyang is a major stop on the North Korean refugee route to Laos (China returns them to NK, but some other countries will send them to SK).
Hardly any non-Chinese tourists come here, and that seems unlikely to change. Yet this is a rich corner of history and cuisine, a former leader of Asian industrialization, a major seat of historic conflict, a crossroads of cultures, and now a mostly forgotten piece of turf. What more could a boy want?
If Shenyang stays sleepy, the world will remain safe!
Do plants minimize surprise?
Calvo and Friston came up with this:
In this article we account for the way plants respond to salient features of their environment under the free-energy principle for biological systems. Biological self-organization amounts to the minimization of surprise over time. We posit that any self-organizing system must embody a generative model whose predictions ensure that (expected) free energy is minimized through action. Plants respond in a fast, and yet coordinated manner, to environmental contingencies. They pro-actively sample their local environment to elicit information with an adaptive value. Our main thesis is that plant behaviour takes place by way of a process (active inference) that predicts the environmental sources of sensory stimulation. This principle, we argue, endows plants with a form of perception that underwrites purposeful, anticipatory behaviour. The aim of the article is to assess the prospects of a radical predictive processing story that would follow naturally from the free-energy principle for biological systems; an approach that may ultimately bear upon our understanding of life and cognition more broadly.
I suspect it is speculative, but it is always interesting to see how economics-related ideas sometimes shape biology, and vice versa.
Here is the paper, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Monday assorted links
Do Americans spend more money on the health care of the poor than the rich?
From Twitter I see this statistic:
Ratio of mean health care spending in richest quintile to mean health care spending in poorest quintile
For the United States, as reported, that ratio is 0.884 for ages 25-64, and for 65 and up the ratio has two varying estimates, from 0.87 to 0.9.
If I am understanding the numbers and presentation correctly, that indicates more health care spending on the poorest quintile than the wealthiest quintile (for below 25 however the ratio is 1.3, namely more spending on the wealthy).
I believe this comes as a surprise to many people, though it is arguably intuitive, since poor people become sick more often, and furthermore sick people are more likely to lose income.
I tracked down the source paper by Eric French and Elaine Kelly (pdf), and it does seem to be true, noting that the numbers exclude long-term care for the elderly. By the way, that piece is full of fascinating, under-reported medical expenditure statistics, for other countries too.
A number of points suggest themselves:
1. You still might feel we are neglecting the health care of the poor, but I am not sure the majority of the American public would react that way, upon hearing these numbers. Usually the poor get less of things, as measured by expenditures, even if they might “need” it more. Health care is an exception to what is otherwise a pretty general rule. I believe it should be such an exception, but to what degree? I see a lot of pretty aggressive intuitions out there, mostly without serious justification or without any presentation of what the stopping point should be.
2. Those numbers don’t prove anything, least of all normatively. Still, they do point my attention in the direction of wondering — yet again — if public health programs are not better than spending more on health care coverage of the poor. Let’s stop or at least limit poor people from getting sick so many more times.
3. That poor people get sick more times, how much of this is a) poor environment including higher stress and exposure to crime, b) genes, c) inability to afford proper preventive care, d) bad decision-making, including diet, lifestyle, and exercise, and e) sickness causing poverty, and f) other factors. I know of plenty of individual papers on these topics, but would it go over well to write an “apportionment” paper doling out the relative responsibilities?
4. How much should our decisions on the best health care policy depend on the answer to #3? How many people are even willing to talk about this right now?
5. Why does the ratio flip so significantly toward the wealthy for younger people? Can we use that fact to make any general inferences about the apportionment outlined in #3? On the surface, it seems to suggest a significant possible role for d) and e), since those might affect children less.
6. What else?
The original pointer was from a retweet by Garett Jones, the tweet from Houston Euler, the Great Firewall is making direct links to them very costly right now.
Sunday assorted links
1. In one study, young children learn how to deceive in ten days.
2. “A new kind of elevator uses linear motors, similar to those in maglev trains and HyperLoop, to whiz its cabins through shafts, and will be able to move people up, down, left, or right.” Link here.
3. New Chinese movie stars Stephon Marbury as Stephon Marbury (NYT). And this: “There is indeed a statue of Marbury in Beijing. “People say it doesn’t look like me,” Marbury said. “But I know it does, because I know the face I made when they made the statue.””
4. Boris Becker is now bankrupt (no Beijing statue).
5. Employees committed to family are more motivated and productive (WSJ).
China supercomputer fact of the day
A new ranking shows that for the second year running, the world’s fastest supercomputer is TaihuLight, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. Capable of performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, it’s almost three times faster than the second-place Tianhe-2. And in third spot this year is a newly upgraded device, called Piz Dain, at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, which recently had its performance boosted by the addition of Nvidia GPUs.
Sadly for America, the upgraded Piz Dain pushes the Department of Energy’s Titan supercomputer, which is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, into fourth spot. Able to make 17.6 quadrillion number crunches per second, Titan is just a fifth as fast as TaihuLight. In its defense, the U.S. still claims five of the top 10 spots, and it is home to 169 of the supercomputers that make up the fastest 500. China, meanwhile, can only claim 160.
Here is the full article.
What I’ve been reading
1. Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel, The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve. I’ve only been reading the title of this one, as it came in the door just before I left for China. But I like it already, and even if this book were nothing more than its title it still would be better than much of what is written on monetary policy.
2. Frédéric Dard, The Executioner Weeps. French noir, full of cheap tricks, suspenseful, fun.
3. Robert Bickers, Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination. A very good book, substantive, readable, and full of information not readily available elsewhere. Yet the title is misleading, as most of the book, including the best parts, covers the first half of the twentieth century and in particular the Western presence and control in China (not quite domination). Later on, the author says plenty about the Cultural Revolution, but doesn’t seem to want to actually condemn it.
4. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Oliver Ready translation. I hadn’t read this one since high school, so thought it was worth another try. I can’t say I find Raskolnikov to be a convincing criminal, or a convincing character at all. Maybe this story is better read as man’s struggle for freedom, and his inability to obtain it, due to the social processing of all his actions, rather than as a novel of crime per se. I liked it, I didn’t love it. If it were published today, it would not receive rave reviews.
5. Slavoy Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. While he is overrated by his trendy partisans, he is underrated by almost everyone else. Might this be his best book? Early Žižek is the best Žižek. We have not escaped from the spectre of the Cartesian self, and what might a truly emancipatory political project have to look like? 2017 is not the worst time to be reading this book. Here is one probably not very helpful review. Usually the best five pages in a Žižek book are very very good, but in this case it is thirty or more.
And I very much enjoyed this sentence and the few pages of exposition that followed: “The notion that best illustrates the necessity of a ‘false’ (‘unilateral’, ‘abstract’) choice in the course of a dialectical process is that of ‘stubborn attachment’: this thoroughly ambiguous notion is operative throughout Hegel’s Phenomenology.”
Marginal tax rates under the Senate health care bill
To see the problem, consider Brian’s situation. He’s a single adult, age 45, earning $35,000 a year. BCRA (section 102(b)(2)) expects Brian to contribute a little more than 8.3% of that income to purchase a health insurance policy. That’s about $2,911. The federal government would chip in the amount needed to let Brian buy a “median benchmark” policy in his region. That policy won’t be lavish: on average it will pay for 58% of covered expenses, but it might well let Brian avoid bankruptcy if he gets extremely sick. It will also get Brian low, pre-negotiated rates for a lot of medical treatment instead of being subject to astronomical “Chargemaster” prices that hospitals often charge the uninsured. So, if that Bronze policy costs $4,500, Brian would pay $2,911 and the federal government would pay $1,089.
Suppose Brian succeeds at work and gets a $5,000 raise; or suppose Brian gets a part time job to help supplement his income and earns $5,000 more. Now, because his income is $40,000, section 102(b)(2) of BCRA expects Brian to contribute 11.3% of his income to healthcare. Since that’s $4,558, Brian in fact pays for the whole $4,500 policy; the federal government pays nothing. So, although Brian’s raise is $5,000, he pays an extra $1,589 in premiums. His effective marginal tax is almost 32% just from the BCRA alone. When one combines his loss of a subsidy with increased income taxes of $1,488 and an increased payroll tax of $382.50 (double that if Brian’s new job is deemed self-employment), Brian’s gets to keep at most $1,541 of his new $5,000. His effective marginal tax rate is at least 69%. It’s probably even higher if Brian faces state income tax or suffers a phase out of other government income-based benefits.
That is from Seth Chandler. Ross Douthat has a good bottom-line take on the bill.
Let’s thwart China markets in everything
Toothpick crossbow that can shoot iron nails more than 20 metres (65 feet) the latest must-have toy in China https://t.co/z9PkpigjOB pic.twitter.com/duoHeZxoBF
Here is the story, via Mark Thorson.
Saturday assorted links
1. Profile of jazz pianist Craig Taborn (NYT).
2. How to think about work-life balance.
3. Screen shot of less sex for American teenagers (safe for work, indeed too safe).
4. Burton Malkiel now believes in smart Beta.
5. Why don’t people buy electric guitars anymore?
6. Avik Roy defends the Senate health care bill. I do recommend this piece. It does not convince me to support the bill, but it does show how much of the other reporting on this debate is bad, highly selective, and also excessively mood-affiliated.
What is the proper penalty for scientific fraud the culture that is China what would Gary Becker say?
In the past few months, China has announced two new crackdowns on research misconduct — one of which could lead to executions for scientists who doctor their data.
Scientists have been sounding alarms for years about the integrity of research in China. One recent survey estimated that 40 percent of biomedical papers by Chinese scholars were tainted by misconduct. Funding bodies there have in the past announced efforts to crack down on fraud, including clawing back money from scientists who cheat on their grants.
This month, in the wake of a fake peer review scandal that claimed 107 papers by Chinese scholars, the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology proclaimed a “no tolerance” policy for research misconduct — although it’s not clear what that might look like. According to the Financial Times, the ministry said the mass retractions “seriously harmed the international reputation of our country’s scientific research and the dignity of Chinese scientists at large.”
But a prior court decision in the country threatened the equivalent of the nuclear option. In April courts approved a new policy calling for stiff prison sentences for researchers who fabricate data in studies that lead to drug approvals. If the misconduct ends up harming people, then the punishment on the table even includes the death penalty. The move, as Nature explained, groups clinical trial data fraud with counterfeiting so that “if the approved drug causes health problems, it can result in a 10-year prison term or the death penalty, in the case of severe or fatal consequences.”
Here is the story, via the excellent Mark Thorson.
Regulation of Charlatans in High-Skill Professions
That is a new paper by Jonathan Berk and Jules H. van Binsbergen, here is the abstract:
We study a market for a skill that is in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service that they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. We use this model to evaluate the belief that reducing the number of charlatans through regulation increases consumer surplus. We show that this belief is false: both information disclosure as well as setting standards reduces consumer surplus. Although both standards and disclosure drive charlatans out of the market, consumers are worse off because of the resulting reduction in competition amongst producers. Producers, on the other hand, strictly benefit from the regulation, implying that the regulation we observe in these markets likely derives from producer interests. The model provides insights into the parameters that drive the cross-sectional variation in charlatans across professions. Professions with weak trade groups, skills in larger supply, shorter training periods and less informative signals regarding the professional’s skill, are more likely to feature charlatans. We conclude that the number of charlatans in equilibrium is positively related to the value added of that profession to consumers.
How does financial advising fit into this schema? Economic consulting? Blogging?
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.