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Swedish study will pay people to get vaccinated
Swedish volunteers will be paid £17 each to be immunised in Europe’s largest test of whether small cash incentives can improve vaccine uptake…
The Swedish study, led by Erik Wengstrom, an economics professor at Lund University, uses gentler methods.
Over the next few weeks 8,200 unvaccinated people under the age of 60 will be split into different groups. Some will be given a voucher worth 200 Swedish kronor (£17) that can be used in most shops if they are vaccinated.
The money is a fraction of the sums being discussed in other countries, but Wengstrom said there was evidence from the US that as little as $25 (£18) was enough to persuade people.
He said: “People might have the intention to get vaccinated, but maybe there’s a little bit of hassle involved and something always gets in the way, so a small incentive might help.”
Other participants will be subjected to “nudge” techniques — attempts to influence people’s behaviour by guiding them towards a particular choice.
Some will be given leaflets about the vaccines’ benefits and side effects; others will be asked to think of the best argument to persuade others to have the vaccine. A third group will be told to draw up a list of their loved ones. “That’s basically encouraging them to think about how the vaccination might protect others,” Wengstrom said.
Here is the full London Times story. Here is further information from Sweden.
Sunday assorted links
1. Anecdotal: “But Herring’s refusal to give up his @Tennessee handle, federal prosecutors say, led to a night in which the shocking and confusing sight of police with their guns drawn outside his home caused the computer programmer to suffer a massive heart attack that killed him. His death in Bethpage, Tenn., was triggered by “swatting” — the illegal practice of calling in fake life-threatening emergencies to provoke a heavily-armed response from police.” Bizarre throughout.
2. What would actually happen if a major asteroid were headed toward earth?
3. RNA breakthrough to boost agricultural productivity?
4. Machtverfall — on Merkel’s final term. And here is Tony Barber in today’s FT: “Above all, the floods have exposed weaknesses in Germany’s disaster response systems and opened up a debate about the long years of under-investment in infrastructure under Merkel. They indicate that Germany’s much-admired federal model of government can fail the people if the politicians in charge are complacent or slow to act.” Yes people, I do know that Germany has better bread, streetcars, vacations, whatever. The point remains that German political norms are not working well any more. It is time to wake up to this fact.
5. Why is Japan vaccinating so badly?
6. Do data from books indicate we are becoming more depressed over time?
Mark Zuckerberg and the metaverse
And I actually would go so far as to say that I think that might be one of, if not the biggest technological challenge that our industry will face in the next decade. We tend to really celebrate things that are big, right? But I actually think miniaturizing things and getting a supercomputer to fit into a pair of glasses is actually one of the bigger challenges. But once you have that, so you have those glasses and you have your VR headset, I think that’s going to enable a bunch of really interesting use cases.
So, one is you will be able to, with basically a snap of your fingers, pull up your perfect workstation. So anywhere you go, you can walk into a Starbucks, you can sit down, you can be drinking your coffee and kind of wave your hands and you can have basically as many monitors as you want, all set up, whatever size you want them to be, all preconfigured to the way you had it when you were at your home before. And you can just bring that with you wherever you want.
If you want to talk to someone, you’re working through a problem, instead of just calling them on the phone, they can teleport in, and then they can see all the context that you have. They can see your five monitors, or whatever it is, and the documents or all the windows of code that you have, or a 3D model that you’re working on. And they can stand next to you and interact, and then in a blink they can teleport back to where they were and kind of be in a separate place.
So I think for focus time and individual productivity, I think being able to have your ideal setup, we call this “infinite office.”
Here is the full interview, interesting throughout. Via Fergus McCullough.
Why do they keep the books wrapped in Mexican bookstores?
Yes, wrapped in clear shrink wrap. So you can’t page through them and see what the book might be like. I can think of a few hypotheses:
1. They don’t want you standing in the bookstore reading the thing, rather than buying it. A bit like some U.S. comics news stands in days past. Yet this doesn’t seem so plausible for longer books or most novels.
2. They want the books to look nicer and less grimy.
3. How about price discrimination?
Imagine there are two classes of readers. The first is poorer, and only buys books when he or she knows the book is truly desired. Harry Potter might be an example of such a book. You want to read what everyone else is reading, to talk about it at school, and you don’t need to scrutinize p.78 so closely before deciding to purchase.
The second class of buyer is wealthier and usually will be buying (and reading) more books, indeed for those people book-buying is a significant habit. That buyer wants to be on top of current trends, wants to have read whichever book is “best” that year amongst the trendy set, and so on. If book quality is uncertain, such individuals will end up paying a de facto, quality-adjusted higher per unit price per book. If you can’t sample the books in advance, you will end up buying some lemons, and you can’t just pick out the cherries.
Wrapped books thus extract more surplus from the second class of buyer and do not much discourage the first class. The general point is related to the economic analysis of bundling and also block-booking — you have to buy a whole bunch of items to get the things you want.
I wonder if they would mind if I removed the wrapping to take a look before purchasing? Maybe the store employees would be indifferent, but how about the retail outlet CEO? The publisher? The author? Model this!
Or maybe that is just the way they do things.
Saturday assorted links
1. New Kalshi prediction markets in beta form.
2. The Austin Vernon blog. Or better link here.
3. The game theory of the infrastructure bill.
4. Should doctors be on first name terms? And U.S. rules that Bezos and Branson are not “astronauts.”
5. Using lottery winner results to predict that effects of UBI.
6. Interview in Spanish about Covid issues. And this far into the pandemic and the CDC still is systematically failing us.
Why current American politics is less screwed up than you think
There is no better way to show this point than to look at Germany, which has highly reasonable political dialogue and at least in the center German politics is not so ideological. And there is indeed a center! Furthermore, politicians address their voters like adults and offer reasonable reasons for the policies they are proposing.
But in terms of discovery and resolution there is a significant downside:
What’s more, coalitions that used to be unthinkable, such as between the Christian Democrats and the Greens, are now the norm in many states — and may well be the only option after September’s elections. Parties, understandably, are reluctant to forcefully campaign against one another. Why make an enemy of a future friend?
Here is the full piece by Anna Sauerbrey. For all its reasonableness, German politics has been a major failure point over the last twenty (?) years. The country has a mediocre infrastructure, mediocre primary education system, it is far behind the curve on tech, it is unwilling to pay to defend itself and meet NATO standards, its foreign policy is partly captured by Russia, it is moving away from nuclear power, it responded poorly to the recent floods, it was slow to line up vaccines and relied on awful EU procurement policies, among numerous other failings. It has enough wealth and accumulated cultural and social capital to withstand these failings, but it has consistently underperformed for some while now. Matters rarely get settled in an innovative direction and they are masters of complacency and can-kicking. But at least the major parties do not criticize each other too much.
I would in fact much prefer the policy landscape of the United States, where the two parties are hardly afraid to attack each other, often in the most ridiculous of terms. Just keep this comparison in mind the next time you despair over the course — and aesthetics — of U.S. politics.
Why has the Indian diaspora been so successful?
Dwarkesh writes to me:
Why do you think the Indian diaspora has been so successful? Just selection of the best immigrants from a large pool of candidates or something else too?
Yes, there are plenty of Indians, and surely that matters, but I see several others factors at work:
1. The Indian diaspora itself is large, estimated at 18 million and the single largest diaspora in the world.
2. A significant portion of the better-educated Indians are hooked into English-language networks early on, including through the internet. The value of this connection has been rising due to the rising value of the internet itself. That is a big reason to be bullish on the Indian diaspora.
3. India has been growing rapidly enough so that people understand the nature and value of progress, yet the country remains poor enough that further progress seems urgent.
4. Many Indian parents seem intent on expecting a great deal from their children. The value of this cannot be overemphasized. This effect seems to be stronger in India than in say Indonesia.
5. There is especially positive selection for Indians coming to America. You can’t just run across a border, instead many of the ways of getting here involve some specialization in education and also technical abilities. Virtually all migrated in legal manners, and here is some interesting data on how the various cohorts of Indians arriving in America differed by wave.
6. More speculatively, I see a kind of conceptual emphasis and also a mental flexibility resulting from India’s past as a mixing ground for many cultures. Perhaps some of this comes from the nature of Hinduism as well, even for non-Hindu Indians (just as American Jews are somewhat “Protestant”). Indians who move into leadership roles in U.S. companies seem to do quite well making a very significant cultural leap. I cannot think of any other emerging economy where the same is true to a comparable extent. In any case, the intellectual capital embedded in Indian culture is immense.
7. Those Indians who leave seem to retain strong ties to the home country, which in turn helps others with their subsequent upward mobility, whether in India or abroad. In contrast, Russians who leave Russia seem to cut their ties to a higher degree.
8. I feel one of the hypotheses should involve caste, but I don’t have a ready claim at hand.
Here is the take of Stephen Manallack. Here is Times of India. (And by the way, here is Shruti’s piece on India’s 1991 reforms, not irrelevant to the diaspora.)
What else?
Friday assorted links
2. Daniel Drezner on how to address your professor. And related ideas from Michael Strain. And here you can find a list of British titles, hilarious.
4. “In the encounters, which lasted 52 and 79 minutes, the chimpanzees formed coalitions and attacked the gorillas.” The gorillas did not win.
5. Some Indian street food vendors are richer than you might think.
6. The new DeepMind proteins advance (NYT). And Technology Review coverage.
*The Morning Star*, by Karl Knausgaard
Yes, it is the real Knausgaard again, writing under lockdown and delivering a nearly 700-pp. novel that does indeed sound like Knausgaard but is not (strictly) autobiographical.
Here is a Swedish review, excerpt:
I read mostly the novel as an entertaining study of non-reflective life, an exploration of how a secularized society chooses to refrain from considering what does not fit the common explanatory models provided by our various sciences….
Here is a Kirkus review:
A sui generis metaphysical yarn, engrossing in its particulars if broadly rambling.
I would say it is not as viscerally satisfying as the best parts of My Struggle, but about half of it is quite good, the pace is fairly quick, and I had no trouble wanting to finish the book. Some surprises come at the end, and KK is increasingly a “religious thinker” in my sense of that term.
Two more parts will be written, and those will clear up all of the remaining mysteries.
Claims about the art world (and other things)
Unsurprisingly, [Marc] Spiegler rejects the notion that an increased digital presence could undermine the necessity for the art world to fly to [Basel] Switzerland. “Having content available ahead of time builds momentum and increases, rather than diminishes, people’s desire to come.”
Comparing the fair to a music concert, Spiegler says: “The more live sets a DJ has online, the better attended their shows are. It hypes people up. The fairs are fun, people like seeing each other, they’re not going to stop wanting that.” Indeed for many, Art Basel 2021 will mark the welcome return to a once packed social calendar on the art world circuit, filled with invaluable in-person exchanges. Here’s hoping for a rager.
That is from Kabir Jhala at The Art Newspaper. It does seem the Basel Art Fair will be held in person this September.
Do honorifics pass a market test?
Following on my discussion from the other day, it is worth thinking about whether new institutions or sectors work very hard to set up a lot of honorific titles. So many of our standard honorifics come from quite old sectors, such as the military or religion or the nobility. Are the new sectors seeking to copy those practices?
The world of gaming is quite new, and I do not think it does much to award generalized honorific titles per se, noting that naming competition winners as victors is a fundamentally different practice.
The world of tech is (mostly) pretty new, and it too does not rely much on titles. Stock options are more important! Of course you might call someone “employee #37,” but do they go around referring to “Programmer Smith”? Yes Smith deserves “respect,” but somehow they don’t take it in that direction.
If honorific titles are so wonderful, why do most new institutions seem to be honorific-shy? Surely a lot of the benefit from such honorific titles ought to be internal to the organization.
(As an aside, I think of women as being treated much better in think tanks and research centers than in academia, and in relative terms having superior opportunities. And yet there are no formal honorific titles such as “Professor” in the former institutions. I am not suggesting causality here, but still it seems that the more informal systems are hardly a train wreck for women as a whole.)
Clearly, titles do benefit particular individuals, such as those who are currently not receiving enough respect in their jobs. But for larger groups as a whole, does it make sense to double down on the honorifics strategy? In a world where say YouTube stars have more and more influence each year? Where actual performance in most sectors is easy to measure than ever before? Is it really so great to so validate the notion of “having done all your homework”? Honorifics impose lots of costs on the broader group by formalizing hierarchies and making them based on the achievement of arbitrary credentialized plateaus, such as receiving a Ph.D. Would you really want to invest in the group that wanted to move in the honorifics direction? Or would you instead think of them as fighting yesterday’s war of ideas?
Can you think of significant new sectors that are investing in honorific titles? If not, what should you infer from that? You might claim that titles in the military are tried, true, and tested, and you would be right. But at the margin should we have greater or less emphasis on titled honorifics as the world changes moving forward? What are the market data telling us right now?
You already know what I think.
Thursday assorted links
1. The Great Apes also have time inconsistent preferences. And NBC Sports to cover world chess championship.
2. The Norwegian century we were never woke.
3. A case for gdp-linked bonds.
4. Taco-eating job pays surprisingly well.
5. Retroactive public goods funding, partly by Sage Vitalik.
6. Izabella Kaminska on the paradox of DeFi, original paper here.
Malaysia is phasing out Sinovac
Malaysia’s Ministry of Health said yesterday that the country will stop administering the COVID-19 vaccine produced by China’s Sinovac Biotech once its current supplies run out, amid mounting evidence that the vaccines have limited efficacy against the Delta variant that is currently ravaging Southeast Asia.
They will switch mainly to Pfizer. Thailand also will not be relying on Sinovac, and Turkey and UAE are moving in similar directions. Here is the article, via Rich D.
I have a simple question, namely how to solve for the Chinese equilibrium. Are they too supposed to switch away from Chinese vaccines to the Western vaccines? Could the government stand that loss of face?
Seriously people, how is this one supposed to develop? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Wednesday assorted links
2. “An estimated 1.2 million people died from snakebites in India between 2000 and 2019, the equivalent of more than 58,000 a year, according to a recent paper.” Link here.
3. The next wave of Facebook Bulletin writers.
4. Myhrvold says Portland is the best pizza city in the U.S.; I say eastern Connecticut.
5. Mastercard partners with Circle to settle stablecoin payments. Are we seeing “the rails built before our eyes”?
6. UAPx: new non-profit to monitor UFOs.
Why should they call us “professors”?
I’ve long wondered about this, and explore that question in my latest Bloomberg column. I’ve discouraged this for a long time:
…I have insisted that my graduate students call me “Tyler.” My goal has been to encourage them to think of themselves as peer researchers who might someday prove me wrong, rather than viewing me as an authority figure who is handing down truth.
And:
Some of the strongest norms are around the title “Doctor.” Just about everyone calls their physician “Doctor,” though the esteemed profession of lawyer does not receive similar treatment. As a Ph.D.-toting academic, I’ve even had people say to me — correctly — “You’re not a real doctor.”
I fear that by ceding this unique authority status to doctors we are making it easier for them to oversell us medical care, a major problem in the U.S. If your doctor suggests that you need a procedure done, it can be hard to say no, especially if you have been deferring to that person for years through the use of an honorific title. On the upside, perhaps all that deference has encouraged many people to get their vaccinations.
There are some arguments for titles:
Sometimes a title can be used to suggest a subordinate position, such as the use of Nurse. It can be an honorific, but it also places the person below the Doctor. The advantage, however, is one of greater anonymity and remove. A woman in particular might prefer “Nurse Washington” over the use of her real full name, given the potential risk of harassment.
Title issues and gender issues intersect in tricky ways. A title such as doctor or professor can give a woman newfound respect, but perhaps the practice hurts respect for women as a whole, since they are titled at lower rates than men.
What I expect we will see is that “established” women and minorities will insist on title usage all the more, to command respect, and under the guise of societal feminization we will evolve a new set of non-egalitarian hierarchies, presented and marketed to us under egalitarian pretenses. On related ideas, see my earlier post on the first date book walk out meme.