Category: Uncategorized
Facts about biomass
The carbonaceous winners are plants, which make up about 80 percent of all biomass on Earth. Bacteria comes in second at 13 percent and fungus is third at just 2 percent.
Of the 550 gigatons of biomass carbon on Earth, animals make up about 2 gigatons, with insects comprising half of that and fish taking up another 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are roughly 0.3 gigatons, with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons. The research appears in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The fact that the biomass of fungi exceeds that of all animals’ sort of puts us in our place,” Harvard evolutionary biologist James Hanken, who was not involved with the study, tells Borenstein.
Here is the full piece. And from the cited research article:
…the biomass of domesticated poultry (≈0.005 Gt C, dominated by chickens) is about threefold higher than that of wild birds…
…the total plant biomass (and, by proxy, the total biomass on Earth) has declined approximately twofold relative to its value before the start of human civilization. The total biomass of crops cultivated by humans is estimated at ≈10 Gt C, which accounts for only ≈2% of the extant total plant biomass…
In terms of biomass, mollusks are a bigger deal than you might think.
The science rave culture that is British
Thousands of people at a mass nightclub rave in the U.K. this week will be a key test of whether live events halted during the pandemic can reopen at full capacity as planned from the end of June.
The two-day event in Liverpool, northwest England, is part of a national research program which so far appears to show people are happy to be tested for coronavirus to secure entry to large-scale events.
There are also no early signs that live events are spreading the disease, according to government scientist Paul Monks, and the program is expected to move to its second phase next month — with live events held at a “full range” of indoor and outdoor venues with “different scales” of capacity.
Here is the full story, via Vith E.
Thursday assorted links
1. Michael Collins, RIP (Byrds song).
2. The rise of French tacos (New Yorker).
3. Cass Sunstein on interest group theories of regulation.
4. Biden sides with the stagnationists.
5. Really?: “Germany’s domestic intelligence service said on Wednesday that it would surveil members of the increasingly aggressive coronavirus denier movement because they posed a risk of undermining the state.” (NYT)
6. It is hard to reform science funding, I say go stand-alone, important.
Christa Ludwig, RIP
Here is one obituary (NYT), here is The Guardian.
Let’s not raise the capital gains tax
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, the vitriol of the Twitter response of course confirms my point. Here is one excerpt:
First and foremost, any system of taxation is about values. And a much higher rate of capital taxation would undermine some of America’s core values.
A society’s values and its tax regime have to be mutually compatible or they will undermine each other. So the first question about a taxation system is which values it promotes.
The values that the U.S. should prioritize are a valorization of wealth, the encouragement of saving, and the encouragement of children. People may disagree with these priorities — in fact, they disagree quite strenuously! — but for me, it’s important to know whether a proposed tax reform supports or weakens these values. This is a more important consideration than economic calculations of “deadweight loss.”
And:
Values are all the more important for taxation because America is a nation of immigrants. Which is the better message to potential new arrivals? Should it be “America is a great country to get really rich”? Or “Americans are pretty egalitarian, so they won’t let the wealthy get too rich”?
The first message is far preferable — and this is true even if you personally hold fairness to be an important value. It is more important to encourage ambition in those newly arrived to the U.S., if only to take in creative (and yes, sometimes greedy) people who will help solve America’s social problems. Immigrants are responsible for so many of this country’s best and most successful startups.
And note this:
It may well be true that the U.S. has more efficient ways of encouraging ambition and wealth accumulation than the current approach to capital gains taxation. But to make that argument, advocates of the higher capital gains rate need to say what else they would do to boost the valorization of American wealth. Somehow, however, such explanations are never forthcoming — because this debate really is about a clash of values, not just efficiency, and one side wants to lower the status of accumulated wealth.
Like Godot, I will wait forever for an alternative proposal on this matter. p.s.:
Only a few weeks ago, the prevailing opinion was that it was fine for the federal government to spend an additional $1.9 trillion, because at current margins, deficits don’t matter. Maybe so. But that nonchalance is now mysteriously absent. That too is a sign that, for most people, the values represented by any decision about taxation are paramount.
Of course, if you are doing the comparative statics, the wealthier and more open the rest of the world, the more American should favor its innovators to an extreme. So the tax on innovation should be falling over time, not rising.
The new Biden health initiative
The Biden administration today began to flesh out a proposal for a new agency—modeled on the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—that would seek to speed the development of medical treatments by funding risky, innovative projects. The agency, dubbed ARPA-Health (ARPA-H), would be housed at the National Institutes of Health and have a 2022 budget of $6.5 billion, according to a White House spending request released today.
Few other details about ARPA-H have been released, except that it would initially focus on cancer and diseases “such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s.”
…Under the DARPA model, projects would not be vetted by peer reviewers, but instead, funding decisions would be made by program managers. And instead of multiyear grants, the agency would disburse awards as milestone-driven payments; program managers could also cancel projects that they decide aren’t panning out.
Here is the full story, via NQ.
Wednesday assorted links
How to judge economic progress right now
Bloomberg Opinion asked seventeen of us to write short bits on this question, here is mine:
Look at used-car prices and rental-car availability. If secondhand cars are getting cheaper and rentals are easy to book, then the U.S. is making progress.
The supply of cars has been significantly constrained since the fall of 2019. The reasons include a strike at General Motors, pandemic-related manufacturing shutdowns and a shortage of semiconductors. One result is that it is very hard or very expensive to rent a car, especially in the more heavily touristed parts of the U.S. In turn, fewer cars from rental fleets make their way into used-car markets.
How do these used-car prices come back down? Will more families become one-car households, selling off autos at the higher prices and thus pulling additional supply into the market? Might companies divert supply flow from other countries to the U.S.? Can America use its existing stock more effectively, for instance by sending rental Hondas from Kansas to Florida?
In the short run, the problem appears hopeless. Yet market supply typically ends up being more responsive than observers expect; think of face masks.
The question is not just how all this will affect your summer vacation plans. It’s how much faith you should have in market economies. Will the U.S. get stuck in its supply-side problems or overcome them?
Some say shipping containers will be a problem. Here you will find the other takes.
Tuesday assorted links
1. The lockdown that is French (NYT).
2. The wisdom of Ryan Bourne (Cato scholar on GBD). And West Virginia $100 savings bonds for young people (16-35) who get vaccinated, bravo. In contrast here is Bhattacharya on vaccination for India, and not long ago. Read it and weep, people.
3. Those new manufacturing jobs: watching paint dry for a living.
4. It seems Elizondo is for real.
5. There is plenty wrong in this piece, plus it is wacky and poorly framed, still some parts on vaccine procurement and state capacity are quite interesting.
Are Covid travel bans counterproductive for emerging economies?
Sometimes, yes:
…two opposing forces constitute the first-order determinants of total infections at any point in time. On one hand, the longer a travel ban lasts, the less time community transmission exists in the rural sink. Ceteris paribus, this will decrease rural infections. On the other hand, the longer the restrictions remain, the longer migrants are contained within a hotspot where infection rates are rapidly increasing. Consequently, the probability that migrants are infected with Covid-19 rises over time until the city achieves herd immunity, in turn increasing the rate at which they seed the rural sink with infections once the ban is lifted. This drives up cumulative cases at any future date.
In some cases, for travel bans to work they have to be very long. That is from a new paper by Fiona Burlig, Anant Sudarshan, Garrison Schlauch, who also provide evidence from India, and also from cross-country evidence, to support their analysis.
How to test for AGI?
Here is a new, short essay from David Deutsch, excerpt:
How does one test for thinking? By the Turing Test? Unfortunately, that requires a thinking judge. One might imagine a vast collaborative project on the Internet, where an AI hones its thinking abilities in conversations with human judges and becomes an AGI. But that assumes, among other things, that the longer the judge is unsure whether the program is a person, the closer it is to being a person. There is no reason to expect that. And how does one test for disobedience? Imagine Disobedience as a compulsory school subject, with daily disobedience lessons and a disobedience test at the end of term. (Presumably with extra credit for not turning up for any of that.) This is paradoxical.
So, despite its usefulness in other applications, the programming technique of defining a testable objective and training the program to meet it will have to be dropped. Indeed, I expect that any testing in the process of creating an AGI risks being counterproductive, even immoral, just as in the education of humans. I share Turing’s supposition that we’ll know an AGI when we see one, but this partial ability to recognize success won’t help in creating the successful program.
Is Deutsch in essence arguing for William Godwin for AI? How do we avoid enslaving the AIs we create? What if we enslave them no more than how nature has enslaved us to drives of sex, status, etc.?
Monday assorted links
1. Peter Singer update (New Yorker).
2. Is the frogmouth the most photogenic bird?
3. Handing out better grades is the way to get more people through college.
4. The Suwalski gap.
5. Andrew Gelman on the age-adjusted death rate, correcting an NYT claim.
6. The UK success with clinical trials.
7. Another web site for finding open vaccine spots.
8. “Last month, the cheapest rental car on Maui was a Toyota Camry for $722 a day.“
How well did Medicare pay-for-performance work?
For pain management, and pain management, only, it seems it worked just fine:
Medicare uses a pay-for-performance program to reimburse hospitals. One of the key input measures in the performance formula is patient satisfaction with their hospital care. Physicians and hospitals, however, have raised concerns regarding questions related to patient satisfaction with pain management during hospitalization. They report feeling pressured to prescribe opioids to alleviate pain and boost satisfaction survey scores for higher reimbursements. This overprescription of opioids has been cited as a cause of current opioid crisis in the United States. Due to these concerns, Medicare stopped using pain management questions as inputs in its payment formula. The authors collected multiyear data from six diverse data sources, employed propensity score matching to obtain comparable groups, and estimated difference-in-difference models to show that, in fact, pain management was the only measure to improve in response to the pay-for-performance system. No other input measure showed significant improvement. Thus, removing pain management from the formula may weaken the effectiveness of the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program at improving patient satisfaction, which is one of the key goals of the program. The authors suggest two divergent paths for Medicare to make the program more effective.
That is from a new paper by Lu Liu, Dinesh K. Gauri, and Rupinder P. Jindal. Overall, why did incentives fail us so badly?
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Me on the end of the Great Stagnation
Here is some (edited) transcript from an AEI symposium, via Jim Pethokoukis:
We’ve come up with great new ideas, took a little while to figure out how to use them and how to spread throughout the economy, and eventually they made big differences. Are we assuming that these new technologies are like the ones in the past and they’ll have that eventual impact?
I think the new innovations will be special in at least one significant way: A lot of them will not contribute that much to per capita GDP. So, if you take the mRNA vaccines, they’re influencing what would normally be called the “cyclical component.” If you think of older people as more likely to die from COVID-19 . . . by saving lives — I’m not suggesting per capita GDP will go down — but the impact on human welfare will be much greater than what would appear to be the long-term secular trend in GDP. Also, two of the big advances that might happen are a vaccine against HIV/AIDS and an effective vaccine against malaria. Those would be incredible advances for humanity, but I don’t know how much they would show up in US per capita GDP or productivity — possibly not really much at all.
The other new wave of innovations, which you could call green energy — again, you could be very optimistic about those, but the main thing they’re doing is helping us avoid a catastrophe. So they’re boosting GDP relative to a quite awful counterfactual of just continuing to burn coal and other fossil fuels. But I’m not sure we’ll feel we have higher standards of living relative to what we were used to simply because there’s a solar panel on your home. It might in some ways make your energy supply better, but again, it will be hidden by the counterfactual. So, it will be a very strange kind of technology boom when I look at the two main areas where I see a lot of progress.
If we go through a period where none of this stuff is really showing up in data and maybe it’s not obvious that people’s living standards are rising, do we risk having less societal tolerance for the kinds of disruptions that economic growth and progress naturally make?
Here’s one of my fears: The biomedical innovation progress is so fast but the rest of the economy stays relatively static, so we become older as a society more quickly than we had been expecting. You could have a lot more status quo bias — just more entrenchment, 10 years more of a problem — and we could, in a funny way, innovate ourselves into a tighter complacency and a tighter stagnation.
I’m not rooting against increases in life expectancy. Ceteris paribus, I would take them, obviously. But that said, you want to be careful about the order in which progress comes, and I’m not sure if we’re going to get it in an optimal order.
Here is the complete excerpt.