Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday assorted links
2. Soumaya Keynes and Janan Ganesh, both FT columnists, have been on a roll lately. Here is one by Janan, here are the recent ones by Soumaya.
3. Translating Latin demonology manuals with GPT-4 and Claude.
The Labor Market Returns of Being An Artist
The labor market penalty to choosing the arts seems to be rising:
Using individual-level data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) between 2006 and 2021, I study the labor market experiences of artists. First, I find a decline in the relative earnings of artists to non-artists from zero to a 15% disadvantage. After controlling for demographic differences, the decline is sharper, declining from a 15% earnings disadvantage to 30%. That the inclusion of demographic controls raises the earnings gap suggests there is positive selection into the arts. Second, these differences decline in magnitude to 4.4%, but remain statistically significant, after exploiting variation among artists and non-artists in the same industry-year and major occupation. Third, when restricting the set of individuals to those with at least a college degree, those with a fine arts degree also incur an earnings and employment penalty even if they work in the arts. These results highlight the increasing financial precariousness of artists over the past decade.
That is a new paper by Christos Makridis, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Overall this result makes sense to me. Success in the arts requires extreme talent of some kind in most (not all) cases. Those individuals can earn increasingly more in other endeavors. But if the arts are trapped in a “Malthusian equilibrium,” with intense entry competing down returns because it is fun, artistic earnings may not keep pace.
Will misinformation be an electoral problem?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
…consider the story that former President Barack Obama was not born in the US. It did not take off because someone forged a copy of an Indonesian birth certificate. Instead, many people approached the issue wanting to believe that Obama was not “a real American,” some dangerous tidbits were thrown their way, and off they went. The release of Obama’s US birth certificate did not convince them they were wrong.
Lies, misunderstandings, instances of self-deception: They have long been in excess supply. Blame China, Russia, social media, regular media, whomever. A potentially gullible person is already flooded with more lies in a single day than he or she can possibly evaluate.
A greater number of falsehoods just won’t matter that much — because the scarce resources are attention and focality on the demand side. How much is someone looking to believe they have been wronged? How much do they resent “the establishment”? What kinds of grudges do they hold, and against whom or what? And how well can they coordinate with others of like mind, thereby forming a kind of misinformation affinity group?
There is much more at the link.
From the comments, on the new Meta smart glasses
Tuesday assorted links
1. On Stripe Press and homage to the printed book.
2. Scott Sumner movie reviews. The very best links you will get here, if you are worthy of them that is.
3. NYT review of the new Michael Lewis book.
From the comments, on OWS and PEPFAR
There is somewhat of an intellectual void in Republican leadership over the past 20 years. Occasionally that void creates space for a uniquely good idea that doesn’t align too well with ideology. When the Democrats are in charge, there are plenty of mainstream Democratic ideas to fill up the agenda, so nothing too unusual happens.
The low ideological alignment also explains why these ideas are underrated later, because they have no deep well of partisans to promote their successes.
That is from Kevin.
*The Creator* (movie review with spoilers)
This movie was deeper and more philosophical than I was expecting. Imagine a Buddhism that decides the AIs represent the true renunciation of desire, and thus embody the Buddhist ideal. Globally, the AIs ally themselves with the Buddhist nations, now unified under a “Republic of New Asia” banner. Mostly it looks like Vietnam (water buffalo), until snow-capped mountains are needed near the end.
The Buddhists considers the AIs to be kinder than humans. America, however, tries to destroy them all, as part of a misguided quest to bomb the proverbial data centers.
You will find visual quotations from A.I., Robocop, Terminator II, Kundun, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Firestarter, Westworld, Lost in Space, the Abraham story from Genesis, and more. The special effects were good, and surprisingly understated compared to the usual excess. Scientific consistency, however, you will not find.
In this movie it is Eliezer and the Americans who are the bad guys. I was surprised to see Hollywood make that move.
From the director of Rogue One, a good sign of course, and the soundtrack is by Hans Zimmer. This movie is not perfect, but I am very glad I saw it. The U.S. reviews for it are unreliable, the BBC did OK, Vulture too.
Monday assorted links
1. Overview of Robert Putnam. Interesting piece.
2. Okie-dokie.
3. And (same source) thwarted markets in everything?
4. The Joseph Walker podcast with Katalin Karikó. Redux.
5. “Harvard ranked 248th out of the 248 schools that were ranked. Not only did Harvard rank last, but FIRE singled us out for special scorn, stating that Harvard’s score was six standard deviations below the average, and more than two standard deviations below the next highest school.” David Deming link here.
PEPFAR has been a great achievement
PEPFAR is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, started by George W. Bush in 2003. Overseen by the State Department, the program provides treatment for HIV-AIDS and derivative maladies (such as tuberculosis) through training, medical infrastructure, support for orphans and vulnerable children, and, most important, antiretroviral drugs.
By some estimates, the program has saved 25 million lives over the last two decades, spending about $90 billion for treatments that many Africans otherwise could not have afforded or gotten access to. Not only has PEPFAR saved African lives (in a very cost-effective way, I might add), it’s also improved the quality of life for many Africans and helped the economies of many African nations. The burnishing of America’s reputation is a bonus.
And this:
What does it mean that two of the most successful policies of the last 20 years have originated with Republican administrations? Or that two of the people most associated with these initiatives — Condoleezza Rice (PEPFAR) and Jared Kushner (OWS) — have never received proper recognition for their efforts? They should, in spite of whatever other objections one might have to their other decisions.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column.
Sentences to ponder, scientific fraud edition
In 2015, a big team of researchers tried to redo 100 psychology studies, and about 60% failed to replicate.
This finding made big waves and headlines, and it’s already been cited nearly 8,000 times.
But the next time someone brings it up, ask them to name as many of the 100 studies as they can. My bet is they top out at zero. I’m basically at zero myself, and I’ve written about that study at length. (I asked a few of my colleagues in case I’m just uniquely stupid, and their answers were: 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, and 3.)
This is really weird. Imagine if someone told you that 60% of your loved ones had died in a plane crash. Your first reaction might be disbelief and horror—“Why were 60% of my loved ones on the same plane? Were they all hanging out without me?”—but then you would want to know who died. Because that really matters! The people you love are not interchangeable! Was it your mom, your best friend, or what? It would be insane to only remember the 60% statistic and then, whenever someone asked you who died in that horrible plane crash, respond, “Hmm, you know, I never really looked into it. Maybe, um, Uncle Fred? Or my friend Clarissa? It was definitely 60% of my loved ones, though, whoever it was.”
So if you hear that 60% of papers in your field don’t replicate, shouldn’t you care a lot about which ones? Why didn’t my colleagues and I immediately open up that paper’s supplement, click on the 100 links, and check whether any of our most beloved findings died? The answer has to be, “We just didn’t think it was an important thing to do.” We heard about the plane crash and we didn’t even bother to check the list of casualties. What a damning indictment of our field!
Here is more from Adam Mastroianni.
Oxford fact of the day, medieval murder edition
The research suggests that Oxford’s student population was by far the most lethally violent social or professional group in any of the three cities.
The team behind the Medieval Murder Maps – a digital resource that plots crime scenes based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ inquests – estimate the per capita homicide rate in Oxford to have been 4-5 times higher than late medieval London or York.
Among Oxford perpetrators with a known background, 75% were identified by the coroner as “clericus”, as were 72% of all Oxford’s homicide victims. During this period, clericus is most likely to refer to a student or member of the early university.
“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” said Prof Manuel Eisner, murder map investigator and Director of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.
“Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”
Yes that is from University of Cambridge, via Anecdotal.
Sunday assorted links
2. Two-minute AI-generated podcast about the jazz music of Sun Ra. From Trellis.
3. Gideon Lewis-Kraus on scientific misconduct (New Yorker). Excellent piece.
4. “State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.” Nate Silver nails it.
5. Manufacturing jobs now have below-average wages for the United States.
A new estimate of costs from global warming
The paper, by David J. Winter and Manuela Kiehl, is titled “Long-term Macroeconomic Effects of Shifting Temperature Anomaly Distributions.” I’ve posted a few papers showing results like “5 to 10 percent of global gdp by 2100” (try here and here), and I promised I would pass along further and different estimates. Here is the abstract:
This paper uses panel data on 201 countries from 1960 to 2019 to estimate the long-term macroeconomic effects of shifting temperature anomaly distributions. We find that rising average temperature anomalies from historical norms caused by global warming have negative, non-linear impacts on GDP growth. By additionally accounting for volatility and tail composition of the temperature anomaly distribution across a geospatial grid and across time, our approach is a methodological step towards quantifying the macroeconomic impacts of broader climate change. Projected damages are far greater than estimated in previous studies that have focussed on quantifying the macroeconomic impacts of average temperature levels only. Furthermore, in contrast to these studies which suggest that cooler countries would benefit from global warming, our damage forecasts see all countries face significant losses in productivity growth beyond optimum global warming levels of 0.3°C. Against a counterfactual scenario in which temperatures are held flat at today’s levels, 2 to 2.6°C of warming versus pre-industrial levels by 2050 has the potential to reduce projected global output by 30 to 50%. Warming in the range of 4-5°C by 2100 would lead to economic annihilation, consistent with scientific research on mass extinction thresholds and tipping points.
Now I am not sure I understand this paper correctly, but the authors don’t seem to take mitigation or adjustment into account, which would be far greater for sustained global warming than they would be for periodic, earlier temperature anomalies (Lucas critique!). And I don’t see they have any real empirical argument, from existing data, that “economic annihilation” would occur in some of their scenarios.
So I am skeptical. Nonetheless I promised you all further reports, and here is one of them. At the very least you can see what “moves” are needed to get the projected costs of global warming to go higher than are currently estimated. I would gladly consider more papers in this vein, and this is an important and underdiscussed question, at least from a rational point of view.
Via tekl.
Saturday assorted links
2. New jobs at Open Philanthropy.
3. Paul Krugman on interest rates (NYT). I am not persuaded, but there is a coherent argument here and this is currently one of the most important questions.
4. New results on surging business formation during the pandemic.
5. Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg avatar chat.
The need for hospital price transparency
Greater price transparency doesn’t have to cost much money upfront, as most of what is required is attention. A critical majority of Americans — including doctors, patients, politicians, media and hospital board members — needs to insist on this outcome.
And I do mean insist. Just as, at some point, a critical mass of Americans demanded that the US end the Vietnam War. Otherwise, change is very unlikely to happen.
Some parts of the Affordable Care Act provided for transparent hospital pricing of individual services, and further regulations took effect in 2021. These were steps forward, yet the law has not turned the tide. It does not price packages of services, and it does not make it easy to compare one provider to another.
Recent research shows it is hard to even get a single consistent answer from a single provider. For instance, prices posted online and prices quoted over the telephone do not correlate very closely. For 41% of hospitals, the price difference was 50% or more. Clearly, suppliers aren’t really trying.
And:
What if there were regular news coverage of the comparative transparency and standardization of hospital prices? Or more explicit and accessible quality ratings? Or a prominent non-profit, run by medical professionals, devoted solely to making price and quality more transparent? Employers also could evaluate health insurance companies based on their performance by these criteria, much as they currently use ESG analysis. There could be an index of progress, like those national debt clocks one sometimes sees.
Is it absurd to hope that this topic might regularly trend on social media? What if there were public marches in front of hospitals (they can chant, “How much cash for a heart bypass”)? Who will be the Greta Thunberg of price transparency?
That is all from my latest Bloomberg column.
That is from Phil C.