Category: Uncategorized
Mandated vaccine boosters for the AEA meetings?
Yes, the new AEA regulations will mandate vaccine boosters for attendance at the New Orleans meetings. Not just two jabs but yes boosters, at least one of them.
Like the N-95 (or stronger) mask mandate, this seems off base and possibly harmful to public health as well. Here are a few points:
1. The regulations valorize “booster with an older strain,” and count “infection with a recent strain” for nothing. In fact, the latter is considerably more valuable, most of all to estimate a person’s public safety impact on others. So the regulations simply target the wrong variable.
1b. People who are boosted might even be less likely to have caught the newer strains (presumably the boosters are at least somewhat useful). Thus they are potentially more dangerous to others, not less, being on average immunologically more naive. Ideally you want a batch of attendees who just had Covid two or three months ago.
2. More than three-quarters of Americans have not had a booster to date. Very likely the percentage of potential AEA attendees with boosters stands at a considerably higher level. Still, this is a fairly exclusionary policy, and pretty far from what most Americans consider to be an acceptable regulation.
2b. To be clear, I had my booster right away, even though I expected it would make me sick for two days (it did). I am far from being anti-booster. I am glad I had my booster, but I also understand full well the distinction between “getting a booster at the time was the right decision,” and “we should mandate booster shots today.” They are very different! Don’t just positively mood affiliate with boosters. Think through the actual policies.
3. Blacks are a relatively undervaccinated group, and probably they are less boosted as well. The same may or may not be true for black potential AEA attendees, but it is certainly possible. After all the talk of DEI, and I for one would like to see more inclusion, why are we making inclusion harder? And for no good medical reason.
3b. How about potential attendees from Africa, Latin America, and other regions where boosters are harder to come by? What are their rates of being boosted? Do they all have to fly to America a few days earlier, line up boosters, and hope the ill effects wear off by the time of the meetings? Why are we doing this to them?
3c. Will the same booster requirements be applied to hotel staff and contractors? Somehow I think not. Maybe that is a sign the boosters are not so important for conference well-being after all?
4. Many people are in a position, right now, where they should not boost. Let’s say you had Covid a few months ago, and are wondering if you should get a booster now or soon. I looked into this recently, and found the weight of opinion was that you should wait at least six months for your immune system to process the recent infection. That did not seem to be “settled science,” but rather a series of judgments, admittedly with uncertainty. So now let’s take those people who were not boosted, had a new strain of Covid recently, and want to go to the AEA meetings. (The first two of three there cover a lot of people.) They have to get boosted. And in expected value terms, boosting is bad for them. Did this argument even occur to the decision-makers at the AEA?
5. The AEA mentions nothing about religious or other exceptions to the policy. Maybe there are “under the table” exceptions, but really? Why not spell out the actual policy here, and if there are no exceptions come right out and tell us. And explain why so few other institutions have chosen the “no exceptions” path, and why the AEA should be different. (As a side note, it is not so easy to process exceptions for the subset of the 13,000 possible attendees who want them. Does the AEA have this capacity?)
Again, this is simply a poorly thought out policy, whether for N-95 masks or for boosters. I hope the AEA will discard it as soon as possible. Or how about a simple, open poll of membership, simple yes or not on the current proposal?
How to discover Indian classical music
Versions of that request were repeated a few times, along with a request for a YouTube or Spotify list. Given the visual element, I would say that YouTube >> Spotify. But mostly you are looking to hear world class performers in live concert, there is no substitute for that, most of all for the percussion, but also for the overall sense of energy.
I first heard Indian classical music by stumbling upon the Ravi Shankar section of the Concert for Bangladesh album, at a young age (thirteen or so?). It seemed obvious to me this was better than “Within You, Without You,” but it was a long time before I really would get back to it. Shankar never ended up clicking with me, but definitely he was the introduction.
As a young teen I also loved the Byrds song “Eight Miles High,” with its opening riff taken from John Coltrane’s “India.” Not exactly Indian classical music, but a clue there was much more to discover, and again I took this very seriously. The raga bits on the Byrds 5D album intrigued me more than the lugubrious Harrison tunes.
I recall my high friend friend (and composer) Eric Lyon insisting to me that Carnatic classic music was better than American jazz improvisation. I didn’t follow him at the time, but I always took Eric’s opinions very seriously, and so I filed this away mentally for later reexamination.
I also recall Thomas Schelling telling me that his son decided to become a professional Indian classical musician (in fact he ended up as more of a poet and translator). I had the vague sense this was something quite admirable to do. So the data points were piling up.
Years passed, and I spent most of my time listening to traditional Western classical music, and with fantastic aesthetic returns.
Still, I grew restless to learn more, and kept on returning to musics I did not understand very well. My best and most common entry point was simply to listen to a lot of other musics that are (were?) somewhat atypical to Western ears, whether it be atonal music, guitar drone music, or Arabic microtonal tunes. Nonetheless progress was slow.
In the 1990s, I started going to lots of world music concerts in the DC area, often at University of Maryland or GWU. These years were a kind of golden age for world music (a terrible term, btw) in the U.S., as post 9/11 visa restrictions were not yet around.
Twice I heard L. Subramaniam play Indian classical violin. Wow! My head was spinning, and from there on out I was determined to hear as many Indian classical concerts as possible. Maybe his melodic lines are not the very deepest, but he was a remarkably exciting performer. A whole new world was opened up to me. I also heard Shakti, with Zakir Hussein and John McLaughlin, play at GWU. That was fusion yes, but it owed more to Indian classical traditions than anything else. To this day it remains one of the three or four best concerts I’ve ever seen.
The Ali Akbar Khan Signature Series CDs made increasing sense to me, and I grew to love them and many others. I did go back to Shankar, but decided he was, all along, far from the top of the heap. Maybe a great marketer, though.
S. Balachandar on the veena was another early discovery, via Fanfare.
Later in the 1990s I read Frederick Turner write that Indian classical music was one of humanity’s greatest spiritual and aesthetic achievements, and around the same time I chatted a bit with Turner too. I had never quite heard anyone claim that before, but instinctively I realized I very much agreed with him. I decided that I believed that too.
Shikha Dalmia helped me out with some recommendations as well, and she was the first one to mention to me the Indian classical music festival in what is now called Chennai. For many years I wanted to go.
Then followed more years of listening. On my first India trips, I carried back a large number of $2 CDs, high variance but many of them excellent, such as Kishori Amonkar. I bought as much as I could plausibly carry back home.
About eight years ago, I took daughter Yana to the Chennai Indian classical music festival held every December. We saw a number of incredible performers, most notably the great U. Srinivas (mandolin!), before his demise. I can recommend this experience to you all, and I plan on going again.
So what is the lesson of all this? My path was so inefficient and roundabout! You can avoid all of that, just read this blog post and be there…voila!
But that doesn’t quite work either.
A further Saturday link
1. An AEA Covid response by Joshua Gans. He comes up with just one conference with a proper mask mandate, albeit a weaker and more subjective one than what the AEA is proposing. Even my hospital doesn’t do the same. He cites Comic Con San Diego, but subsequent, more recent Comic Con events don’t seem to have the mask mandate any more. So maybe that isn’t such a good example.
Gans can’t cite any policy from any government either, except for one Australian government regulatory conference in Brisbane. At some point “the CCP” may occur to him as another answer.
But I welcome the publicity, even if he does describe my post as “whining.” (“Pissed off” would be a more accurate read.) I don’t think the AEA policy can survive the light of day, so the more people who attack my view the better. Gans also does not consider that almost any individual can be safe enough with a sufficiently good mask — internalize the externalities yourself! Gans should try a trip to Copenhagen or Zurich, two highly irresponsible cities that refuse to take care of their citizens, apparently.
As for some of the rest of you, there is no analytic inconsistency in favoring much weaker Covid regulations over time. As more people vaccinate, more people have caught Covid, more people have access to good privatized masks, and as we develop remedies such as Paxlovid, restrictions should in general become far more lax. If you don’t understand that, you never understood the case for Covid regulation in the first place.
Saturday assorted links
3. Economist John Friedman on education and mobility (NYT).
4. Arcadia, a new group house in Berkeley.
5. Why is China so obsessed with food security?
6. The wisdom of John Arnold, on student loans: “Interestingly, the government student loan program originally guaranteed only 80% of principal. In 1976 it was increased to 100% plus interest, thereby eliminating any shared risk and creating the moral hazard that exists today.”
Friday assorted links
Shruti Rajagopalan talks talent with Daniel Gross and Tyler
A Conversation, a special bonus episode, taped in San Francisco in front of a live audience, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is one bit:
RAJAGOPALAN: …Daniel, if you’re looking for talent in investing or finance, how does that look different from the talent in the start-up world?
GROSS: In the start-up world? What makes a good investor is very different from what makes a good founder. If you were to make a scatterplot of it, some of the attributes are completely diametrically opposed. For example, I think very good investors are the right degree of optimistic but also realistic, whereas founders are too optimistic, which they should be.
At the end of the day, start-ups are a very funny activity when you think about it from a probability standpoint. Most companies fail. Almost all companies fail, and yet, people seem to be seemingly doing this activity over and over. They’re jumping off the cliff over and over again. You look over the cliff, and everyone who jumped off of the cliff is just on the ground dead, but people keep on jumping off the cliff. Founders are almost too optimistic.
When you’re evaluating a business, especially at later and later stages, I think optimism can be your enemy. Often, you see when a lot of founders later on in life — and I’m such a person — who started a business, sold it, and became an investor, you actually have to be able to wear very different kinds of psychometric hats. One of them is this continuum of realism and optimism. I’d probably say that’s the starkest difference between what makes a good start-up investor and a good founder. There are probably many others, but that’s the main thing that you look for.
I later have a monologue on chocolate ice cream, but overall Shruti steals the show. Recommended.
From the comments, from Susan Dynarski on debt forgiveness
Here is the link, to my post on the educational returns to the marginal student. Please go back and read that for the context on Dynarski’s statement.
And from an email from David J. Deming, Harvard researcher in the area:
Sue is right that community college attendance is more common for students below the threshold in the Zimmerman paper. But many of them also attend no college at all. Table 4 shows that making the GPA cutoff increases years of 4 year college attendance by 0.46 and decreases years of community college attendance by 0.17. This implies that there is an increase in total college attendance – so the counterfactual is a mix of 2-year college and no college.
On the substance of the comment “do these people need debt forgiveness”? I’d say that ex ante they do not, but maybe some should receive it ex post. The Zimmerman estimate captures ex ante returns. Debt forgiveness is ex post. FIU’s grad rate was around 50% at that time, so the average return of 22% includes graduates and dropouts together. Ex post returns could be 44% for graduates and zero for dropouts.
Your idea of limiting debt forgiveness to dropouts was great. I wish that had been on the table. We’d worry about moral hazard if it became a forward-looking policy, but the Biden policy was probably not foreseeable in advance.
I would have also liked to see debt forgiveness focused on institutions rather than students. Forgive debt obtained at low-quality for-profit colleges. I would actually guess that college quality is a better predictor of lifetime wealth than current income. A person making $50k as a working adult 2 years after dropping out of University of Phoenix surely has lower expected lifetime wealth than a person who graduated from Harvard a few years ago and is making $50k in a public sector job.
My view is that decent returns to the marginal student still create problems for the Dynarski debt forgiveness argument. Overall the private returns to education are good. You can pack some of the problems into specific subgroups, but to the extent you do that the case for more debt relief targeting — much more targeting — rises rather steeply and rapidly.
Thursday assorted links
1. Short breaks from surgery seem to improve surgeon performance.
2. How much do the French earn?
4. A big quantitative analysis of MR posts, including a complete list of guest bloggers, analysis of when the posts go up, and a treatment of whether daylight savings time matters. Can you guess who was our last guest blogger? The piece also covers where I link to the most.
5. The man who married a hologram in Japan can no longer communicate with his virtual wife.
6. Free short on-line course on economics of innovation and science, with top people.
The Returns to College Admission for Academically Marginal Students
I combine a regression discontinuity design with rich data on academic and labor market outcomes for a large sample of Florida students to estimate the returns to college admission for academically marginal students. Students with grades just above a threshold for admissions eligibility at a large public university in Florida are much more likely to attend any university than below-threshold students. The marginal admission yields earnings gains of 22% between 8 and 14 years after high school completion. These gains outstrip the costs of college attendance, and they are largest for male students and free-lunch recipients.
Here is the Journal of Labor Economics piece by Seth D. Zimmerman. So is the non-statistically-summarized account of Susan Dynarski painting too negative a picture?
And do those people need debt forgiveness to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars? Write down your social welfare function!
This piece by David J. Deming surveys the broader literature, and with broadly concordant results.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Dan Klein on whether classical liberalism is anti-democratic.
2. France uses AI to find hidden swimming pools and then tax them.
3. Chris’s dating info/profile (29, male hetero, wants kids, nerdy).
4. Book of Vitalik’s writings is coming out.
The temporary popularity of Caplanian views on higher education
Bryan Caplan as you know argues that even the private return to higher education isn’t what it usually is cracked up to be, especially since large numbers of individuals do not finish with a four-year degree. Susan Dynarski (tenured at Harvard education, but an economist), writing in the NYT, seems to have started flirting with this view:
…a majority of people holding student debt have moderate incomes and low balances. Many have no degree, having dropped out of a public college or for-profit vocational school after a few semesters. They carry little debt, but they also do not get the benefit of a college degree to help them pay off that debt.
Defaults and financial distress are concentrated among the millions of students who drop out without a degree. The financial prospects for college dropouts are poor; they earn little more than do workers with no college education. Dropouts account for much of the increase in financial distress among student borrowers since the Great Recession.
And dropout is not at all rare. A bit less than half of college students don’t earn a bachelor’s degree. Some people earn a shorter, two-year associate degree. But more than a quarter of those who start college hoping to earn a degree drop out with no credential. A full 30 percent of first-generation freshmen drop out of four-year colleges within three years. That’s three times the dropout rate of students whose parents graduated from college.
I’ve seen modest variants on those numbers, but the general picture is broadly accepted. Now here is Dynarski’s Congressional testimony from last summer:
College is a Great Investment
A college education is a great investment. Over a lifetime, a person with a bachelor’s degree will earn, on average, a million dollars more than a less-educated worker. Even with record-high tuition prices, a BA pays for itself several times over.
She is quite clear in the former NYT piece that she has changed her mind, so there is no “gotcha” here. But clearly her views are evolving in Bryan’s direction.
In terms of policy, Dynarski notes that more than a quarter drop out of college with no credential. Shouldn’t we restrict loan forgiveness to them? Doesn’t that at least deserve discussion? Or should we just go ahead and grant forgiveness to those with the “great” returns as well? Her change of mind concerns the higher-than-expected problems of the non-finishers, not that she has seen new and inferior income numbers for the successes. (In fact since the numbers for the average return haven’t changed, being more pessimistic about the losers has to mean being a bit more optimistic about the successes. That should make us all the more interested in targeting the forgiveness.)
Why are we not allowed to know what percentage of the forgiveness beneficiaries fall into the “didn’t finish” category? What should we infer from the reality that no one is reporting that statistic? Is that good news or bad news for the policy?
What does Dynarski think is the marginal return from trying to finish college? Are they really so positive for the marginal student? What is the chance of the marginal student finishing? The cited figures are averages, presumably for the marginal student the chance of finishing is much worse. Presumably she is pessimistic about the nature of the college deal for the marginal student?
Now I know how these discussions run. Suddenly there is plenty of talk about how we should make it easier for people to finish, perhaps by offering more aid. As someone who teaches at a non-elite state university, I do understand what is going on with students who need to drop out to take care of family, and so on. Still, in the meantime should we be encouraging more marginal students to try their hand at college?
Yes or no?
That question runs against the prevailing mood affiliation and good luck trying to get a straight answer. In the meantime, the world is taking an ever-so-temporary foray into the views of Bryan Caplan. Let’s see how long it stays there.
Tuesday assorted links
1. An RCT restricting social media use. Never underrate the null hypothesis!
2. Indians guessing facts about America.
3. Emotional support alligator.
4. Real YIMBY progress in California.
5. “Nearly a quarter of tenure-track faculty have a parent with a PhD…”
India forecast of the day
India is likely to be the fastest-growing Asian economy in the Asian region in 2022-23, according to analysts at Morgan Stanley, who expect the expect India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth to average 7 per cent during this period – the strongest among the largest economies – and contributing 28 per cent and 22 per cent to Asian and global growth, respectively. The Indian economy, they said, is set for its best run in over a decade, as pent-up demand is being unleashed.
Here is further detail. How many other countries can expect to average even five percent growth over the next decade? Bangladesh? A few of the smaller nations in West Africa? Who else? Possibly Indonesia? It is hard not to be (relatively) optimistic about India, economically speaking at least.
The wisdom of Garett Jones
Of course this Bloomberg column was inspired by Garett’s work, not to mention Paleo-Caplanianism! Here is one excerpt, with the focus being on the annoying tendency to label various policies “anti-democratic”:
The danger is that “stuff I agree with” will increasingly be labeled as “democratic,” while anything someone opposes will be called “anti-democratic.” Democracy thus comes to be seen as a way to enact a series of personal preferences rather than a (mostly) beneficial impersonal mechanism for making collective decisions…
It is also harmful to call the Dobbs decision anti-democratic when what you’re really arguing for is greater involvement by the federal government in abortion policy — a defensible view. No one says the Swiss government is “anti-democratic” because it puts so many decisions (for better or worse) into the hands of the cantons. And pointing out that many US state governments are not as democratic as you might prefer does not overturn this logic.
It would be more honest, and more accurate, simply to note that court put the decision into the hands of (imperfectly) democratic state governments, and that you disagree with the decisions of those governments.
By conflating “what’s right” with “what’s democratic,” you may end up fooling yourself about the popularity of your own views. If you attribute the failure of your views to prevail to “non-democratic” or “anti-democratic” forces, you might conclude the world simply needs more majoritarianism, more referenda, more voting.
Those may or may not be correct conclusions. But they should be judged empirically, rather than following from people’s idiosyncratic terminology about what they mean by “democracy” — and, by extension, “anti-democratic.”
I am worried about some of the increasing polarization on this issue. If you are on “the Left,” and you think various social and policy trends are so immoral, how is it exactly that you avoid becoming yourself “anti-democratic”? Even though at the same time you are cursing everything you don’t like as “anti-democratic” too?
The Distributional Effects of Student Loan Forgiveness
Even worse than you thought:
We study the distributional consequences of student debt forgiveness in present value terms, accounting for differences in repayment behavior across the earnings distribution. Full or partial forgiveness is regressive because high earners took larger loans, but also because, for low earners, balances greatly overstate present values. Consequently, forgiveness would benefit the top decile as much as the bottom three deciles combined. Blacks and Hispanics would also benefit substantially less than balances suggest. Enrolling households who would benefit from income-driven repayment is the least expensive and most progressive policy we consider.
That is from a working paper by Sylvaine Catherine and Constantine Yanellis. It is sad that such material even needs to be posted. I hope you are not taken in by Dube-ous ideas to the contrary!