Category: Uncategorized
Elon on SNL
He started by declaring that he speaks in a monotone and “has Asperger’s,” was funny and self-assured during the rest of the introduction, brought his mom on stage, and later played a variety of roles, including murderer, awkward guy at a party, a Mario character (Wario), and an Icelandic TV producer. He played a financial analyst repeatedly asked to explain “What is Dogecoin?” (Dogecoin was down significantly during the evening). The final skit was a gold-mining motif, something like “why are we panning for this gold when we can just invent our own currency?” Elon’s plan was to dig a tunnel to get at the bad guys. I enjoyed his line: “And I like self-driving horses, which are just…horses.”
He was funnier than any of the professional comedians.
Is there anything in American business history even vaguely comparable to this event?
Saturday assorted links
1. Furman and Powell on labor markets. And monopsony oops.
4. Jean Monnet, guerrilla bureaucrat.
6. “Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined.” Note however that data standards may not be uniform! Still…
New results on Work from Home
Emphasis is added by TC:
Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company, we compare productivity before and during the work from home [WFH] period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors. These findings suggest that communication and coordination costs increased substantially during WFH, and constituted an important source of the decline in productivity. Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children.
That is from a new paper by Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth.
*Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment*
That is the new and very interesting book by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein. Think of “noise” as the new major problem rather than bias. Here is one excerpt:
…we presented our findings to the senior managers of an asset management firm, prompting them to run their own exploratory noise audit. they asked forty-two experienced investors in the firm to estimate the fair value of a stock (the price at which investors would be indifferent to buying or selling). The investors based their analysis on a one-page description of the business; the data included ismplified profits and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements for the past three years and projections for the next two. median noise, measured in the same way as in the insurance company, was 41%. Such large differences among investors in the same firm, using the same valuation methods, cannot be good news.
I will be covering this book more soon, you can pre-order it here. And here Tim Harford does FT lunch with Kahneman, self-recommending.
Friday assorted links
1. “Unlike some of these contests, the winner isn’t chosen at random. Instead, “your level of enthusiasm for watching home improvement shows will be a strong factor in the selection process,” according to the contest website.” Link here.
2. Inequality amongst children.
4. Which incentives for vaccines are most effective for which groups? (NYT)
5. Magnus Carlsen edition: That was then, and this is now (link fixed).
Thursday assorted links
1. Robin Hanson reasons it out.
2. New estimate is 905,000 U.S. deaths from the pandemic so far, 6.9 million worldwide.
4. Derek Lowe on breaking vaccine patents.
5. “Three dollar store chains will make up almost half of all the new stores opening up in the United States this year…” Update: Ryan Decker says nope!
The New Era of Unconditional Convergence
Here is a new paper by Dev Patel Justin Sandefur, and Arvind Subramanian:
The central fact that has motivated the empirics of economic growthnamely unconditional divergenceis no longer true and has not been so for decades. Across a range of data sources, poorer countries have in fact been catching up with richer ones, albeit slowly, since the mid-1990s. This new era of convergence does not stem primarily from growth moderation in the rich world but rather from accelerating growth in the developing world, which has simultaneously become remarkably less volatile and more persistent. Debates about a middle-income trap also appear anachronistic: middleincome countries have exhibited higher growth rates than all others since the mid-1980s.
Here is the entire paper. My general conclusion is that no particular model of convergence, or lack thereof, is correct, and it simply all depends on the historical period.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Additional problems with central bank digital currencies.
2. Nicholas Wade on where Covid-19 really came from. And commentary from Elad. Original link is updated here.
3. Police vaccination rates are low.
4. “Travel agencies in Thailand are selling coronavirus “vaccine tours” to the United States, as some wealthy Thais grow impatient awaiting mass inoculations that are still a month away amid the country’s biggest outbreak so far.” Link here.
My podcast with GMU president Gregory Washington
Here is the link, it was very good rapport I thought, I enjoyed doing this very much.
My Conversation with Daniel Carpenter, on regulation and also the FDA
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, I found it a very substantive and also illuminating episode. Carpenter is very, very smart and also very well-informed historically. Here is part of the summary:
Daniel Carpenter is one of the world’s leading experts on regulation and the foremost expert on the US Food and Drug Administration. A professor of Government at Harvard University, he’s conducted extensive research on regulation and government organizations, as well as on the development of political institutions in the United States. His latest book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, details the crucial role petitions played in expanding the franchise and shaping modern America.
Here is an excerpt from the non-FDA section, much of which focuses on (non-FDA) regulation:
COWEN: What kinds of records should the Postal Service keep about itself?
CARPENTER: [laughs] Great question. There’s a whole set of things that they don’t since the Griswold decision and since the First Amendment decisions. They don’t keep as much records of what goes through the mail. They can’t prohibit things like pornography, contraception.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “itself.” I would start with the idea that basic privacy restrictions, which governed the postal system as much through norm as by law in the 19th century and early 20th century, should govern the system.
It’s a crime if I were to walk past your mailbox and open your letter. I’m committing a federal crime, but there were also norms that seals were not to be broken, things like that. I do think whichever way the Postal Service goes — and it’s quite possible that you could imagine an electronic platform for the US postal system — I think basic privacy restrictions have to be guaranteed.
Actually, in some respects, I think we need to know a fair amount about what postal workers do without, say, calling for Amazon tracking. But if we think that postal workers are misplacing ballots or not providing birth control pills or something like that, then we should probably have some way of picking up on that kind of nefarious behavior.
In the FDA section I got mad at him, the first (but not last?) time that has happened in a CWT, do read or listen to the whole section, the two of us really had at it! Here is a tiny sliver from it:
COWEN: But shouldn’t there be a button within the FDA that can be pushed, where the FDA goes into a kind of wartime mode?
I don’t want to misrepresent Carpenter by an ill-chosen excerpt, so please do digest his full set of replies. Recommended.
Are women making progress in academic economics?
Here is a new paper by Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn:
This study uses data from Academic Analytics to examine gender differences in promotion to associate professor in economics. We found that women in economics were 15% less likely to be promoted to associate professor after controlling for cumulative publications, citations, grants and grant dollars. In contrast, we found no significant gender differences in promotion in other fields including biomedical science, physical science, political science, mathematics and statistics, and engineering. We separated the sample by the research intensity of institutions and found suggestive evidence that these results were being driven by less research-intensive institutions.
What is the best model for understanding this result? The “ol’ boys’ network” matters more at lower-tier institutions? Something else? There doesn’t seem to be a gender tenure penalty at higher-ranked research institutions.
How would actual alien spacecraft influence asset prices?
Primarily as an exercise, I thought about that question for a while, and here is part of my answer in a Bloomberg column:
If you know you are being watched, what exactly do you wish to buy more of? I would bet on defense stocks to rise, whether or not there is much we can do to defend ourselves against this alien presence.
Of course investors could not be sure that these alien drone probes will merely observe us forever. They might be observing with the purpose of rendering judgment. If they are offended by our militaristic tendencies, the quality of our TV shows and our inability to adopt the cosmopolitan values of “Star Trek” over the next 30 years, maybe they will zap us into oblivion. But that kind of systematic risk is hard to insure against. After such an act of obliteration, neither gold nor Bitcoin will do you any good.
My main prediction is that alien UFOs will be bullish for the dollar. The U.S. government seems most closely connected to the UFO phenomenon, for whatever reason. (Maybe its pilots fly more sallies and record better data?) In any case, if alien UFOs become more likely, an informational advantage would accrue to the federal government. And the dollar already has a tradition as a safe haven currency…
Most of us would get used to the idea of alien presence without quite believing in it. As The New Yorker makes clear, many Americans believed in alien-origin UFOs after World War II, as did many American policymakers. It might have spurred greater interest in the space program and science fiction, but it didn’t affect most aspects of American life, nor did it seem to drive markets.
Never underestimate the capacity of markets, like humans, to adapt. Just as many of the strangest parts of our lives can come to seem normal, so Wall Street can find a way to do business with just about anybody — aliens included.
I do full, literally mean everything stated in the column. But the piece also has (at least) two esoteric meanings — can you guess what they are?
Tuesday assorted links
1. The Chinese feminist eugenicist movement: just how well do those two views fit together?
2. How good is oxygen intervention for India and Indians?
5. Douthat on whether Trump made everything progressive (NYT).
Who is the best-known, non-political American married couple?
With Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing, and Kanye and Kim doing the same, America now has a paucity of very well-known married couples, at least outside of politics, where Barack and Michelle Obama reign supreme.
Who is the Lucy and Desi of our time? The George Burns and Gracie Allen? The Sonny and Cher?
George and Amal Clooney are in the running, but is she so well known to most Americans? Could they tell you her name from scratch, or cite what she is known for?
Kurt Cobain has passed away, as has Kobe Bryant, Larry and Laurie David split some time ago, and John and Yoko and Paul and Linda (an honorary American couple, for media purposes) are distant memories. Movie stars barely still exist these days.
Perhaps Elon Musk will marry Grimes, who is a musical star of some renown.
Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn have been married for 24 years, and they are pretty well known.
Harry and Meghan maybe are becoming an American couple, at least for media purposes?
Who else?
The rise of research teams in economics
Solo authorship represented 80 percent of economics papers in 1960 and 65 percent in 1990, but then solo-authorship fell out of the majority in 2005 and represents only 26 percent of economics papers today (as measured by the right-hand axis). To put it another way, in 1950, there were 1.2 authors per economics paper. Average team size reached 2.0 for the first time in 2010. By 2018, team size averaged 2.7 (as shown on the left-hand axis). The jump in average team size in economics papers over the last ten years is greater than the jump over the prior half-century.
Here is more from Benjamin F. Jones. For higher impact papers, the trend is even more striking.