Category: Uncategorized
Saturday assorted links
1. Alex Ross on Tarkovsky (New Yorker).
2. On the Facebook Supreme Court (New Yorker). A very good piece.
4. Do the states need the $350 billion that Biden is proposing in aid? (No)
5. Summers vs. Krugman debate on the Biden stimulus.
6. Shooting luck matters more in the NBA than ever before. Are there broader lessons in here about how optimized systems behave?
7. Alas the great Svetozar Pejovich has passed away.
Cybercrime and Punishment
Ye Hong and William Neilson have solved for the equilibrium:
This paper models cybercrime by adding an active victim to the seminal Becker model of crime. The victim invests in security that may protect her from a cybercrime and, if the cybercrime is thwarted, generate evidence that can be used for prosecution. Successful crimes leave insufficient evidence for apprehension and conviction and, thus, cannot be punished. Results show that increased penalties for cybercriminals lead them to exert more effort and make cybercrimes more likely to succeed. Above a threshold they also lead victims to invest less in security. It may be impossible to deter cybercriminals by punishing them. Deterrence is possible, but not necessarily optimal, through punishing victims, such as data controllers or processors that fail to protect their networks.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Vaccine access toolkit
In order to break down the information barrier, I partnered with my local faith community to set up a vaccine outreach program. We have a dedicated vaccine information email address and a website consolidating information about vaccine eligibility, sites, and benefits. We call community members who don’t have email, offer personal assistance making appointments and connecting to ride services, and provide information about best practices for riding safely in a car with masks and open windows. After vaccine appointments, we check in to see how they are feeling, make sure their second dose is scheduled, and offer to drop off comfort foods. One recipient replied, “It makes this daunting time just a little easier knowing there is someone out there to guide one through this process. My technology skills are minimal!”
By Margaret Scharle, for Oregon. We need much more of this.
Friday assorted links
1. Ezra Klein on California (NYT), right on the mark.
2. Interview with Michael Mina, too much common sense for it ever to be heeded.
3. Developing versatile vaccine platforms.
4. The Biden Administration hesitates to name an FDA head.
5. Pigs can play video games with their snouts.
6. Father of Britney Spears must share conservatorship.
8. Military officials were unaware of danger to Pence’s nuclear football during the riots.
What should I ask Shadi Bartsch?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, most of all about her forthcoming and very good translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. She is a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, and here is Wikipedia:
Bartsch has contributed to classical scholarship in the areas of the literature and culture of Julio-Claudian Rome, the ancient novel, Roman stoicism, and the classical tradition.
She is an expert on Lucan, Persius, Seneca, and other writers of the time, most of all the age of Nero, and she is now working on a book on the reception of the classical authors amongst the Chinese intelligentsia. Here is Shadi on Twitter.
So what should I ask her?
How much do we value Covid safety?
The grand experiment of blocking the middle seat on airplanes has proved what we have known all along about air travel: More people care about a cheap fare than comfort, or even pandemic safety.
Delta announced on Monday that it was extending its middle-seat block for one more month, to the end of April. Delta, the last U.S. airline to block all middle seats in coach, will consider further extensions based on Covid-19 transmission and vaccination rates.
So far, Delta thinks it’s earning goodwill and confidence with customers, particularly business travelers, who aren’t traveling now but will come back. Some who’ve flown during the pandemic have been willing to pay Delta more for more space onboard. Most have been price-sensitive leisure travelers willing to sit shoulder-to-shoulder for cheap fares—on airlines not blocking middle seats…
The bottom line for Delta during the pandemic has been bigger losses than rival airlines selling all their seats. Delta was the most profitable U.S. airline in the final six months of 2019. That flipped during the pandemic. In the last six months of 2020, Delta had the biggest losses, with a net loss of more than $6 billion, greater than United and Southwest combined.
Mr. Lentsch says Delta can’t keep blocking middle seats forever.
Here is more from the WSJ. I do get there is an externality here, so people are not paying enough for those more spacious Delta seats, as they do not take their higher risk to others into sufficient account. Still, a lot of the risk here is private, and I feel the public health community in the United States has not been willing to look such data in the face squarely enough. Is the public policy problem about minimizing “lives lost,” or maximizing “welfare,” or giving people “what they want”? Or some combination of those? Who exactly has been good at thinking through those trade-offs?
Have the pandemic population flows been into the relatively strict Vermont and California, or to the relatively open Florida and Texas?
To what extent is the real externality a kind of degradation of the public sphere, and the spread of stress and mental health problems, rather than the health of others per se?
Worth a ponder.
Thursday assorted links
1. Is China waiting on vaccinations until it can make everyone happy at once?
2. Will India ban crypto altogether?
3. First shot considerably reducing risk in Israel, paper here.
4. Has semiglutide solved much of the weight loss problem? That would truly end the great stagnation.
5. Some good results for toczilizumab against Covid.
6. Cowen’s 17th law: almost all things have origins earlier than you thought, including Covid-19 (WSJ).
7. Fiscal stimulus around the world.
8. Scott Sumner on the The Great Forgetting.
Good and important links today, self-recommended.
What are the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years?
We argue that the most important statistical ideas of the past half century are: counterfactual causal inference, bootstrapping and simulation-based inference, overparameterized models and regularization, multilevel models, generic computation algorithms, adaptive decision analysis, robust inference, and exploratory data analysis. We discuss common features of these ideas, how they relate to modern computing and big data, and how they might be developed and extended in future decades. The goal of this article is to provoke thought and discussion regarding the larger themes of research in statistics and data science.
Full employment and the output gap
I’ve never accepted the standard story about “being at full employment” vs. “having unemployed resources” around, though often I write in that framework for reasons of intelligibility. That said, I do not reject this story in ways that make current debate participants very happy, or would create the potential for a policy free lunch.
I take a finance perspective on the output gap. If you are at what others call “full employment,” you can indeed do better, or at least try to do better. Start 300 companies that aim to be the next Stripe, Facebook, SpaceX — whatever. In the short run, you will create jobs, people at jobs will work harder, and so on. Employment, output, and also tax revenue will rise. You can pat yourself on the back and say you were not at full employment.
The thing is, you have accepted a higher level of risk. Many of those companies are likely to fail. And since they were started by humans consuming a broadly common set of cultural and media inputs, those risks will to some extent be correlated as well. Of course it might pay off big time as well.
You can always move “beyond full employment” by accepting more risk. Alternatively, you could deploy some common sense and suggest that no single point on the risk-return frontier corresponds to “full employment.”
And should you be happy about moving beyond full employment? Was the ex ante level of risk too low, too high, or just right? Depends! Even if you think ordinary Americans are too complacent, it does not follow the same is true for the marginal entrepreneurs.
In this setting, failure does not have to mean the gambles were bad ex ante, nor does success validate the initial fervor, as maybe everyone just got lucky.
Addendum: Don’t get too encouraged by what I am saying. The Lucas Supply curve is still pretty weak, as we have known for decades (only on Twitter is this not known). Bad nominal shocks do destroy jobs, but as time passes there is still no reason to think that “mere inflation” does more than a small amount to bring them back. No matter where you are on this risk-return curve.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “SARS-CoV-2 infection is effectively treated and prevented by EIDD-2801” (a Fast Grants project, has potential). And a nanobodies approach with promise, also Fast Grants.
2. My talk to Interintellect Salon on Malthus and the Malthusian trilemma, I liked it and the group.
3. Is the coelacanth overrated?
4. Papers on Smith, Hume, liberalism, and esotericism.
5. California state government now running a $25 billion surplus. How much more aid do they need again?
6. ” After controlling for demographic characteristics, we found no differences in subjective well-being between childfree individuals and parents, not-yet-parents, or childless individuals.” Also no difference in observed personality traits.
My Conversation with Brian Armstrong
He is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is part of the CWTeam summary:
Brian joined Tyler to discuss how he prevents Coinbase from being run by its lawyers, the value of having a mission statement, what a world with many more crypto billionaires would look like, why the volatility of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is more feature than bug, the potential for scalability in Ethereum 2.0, his best guess on the real identity of Satoshi, the biggest obstacle facing new charter cities, the meta rules he’d institute for new Martian colony, the importance of bridging the gap between academics and entrepreneurs, the future of crypto regulation, the benefits of stablecoin for the unbanked, his strongest and weakest interpersonal skill, what he hopes to learn from composing electronic music, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Recently, you cited an estimate that if bitcoin were priced at $200,000, that about half the world’s billionaires would be from crypto. How is that world different? What does it look like? How does it feel different from the world we have?
ARMSTRONG: That’s a big question. I guess the most honest answer is, I don’t know for sure. One thought I’ve had, though, is that if there are more people who generate a lot of wealth with crypto — which I think is already happening, and it will probably keep happening. Most of the people who bought crypto early on — they’re believers in the power of technology to change the world. They’re interested in the ethos of crypto in many cases, and I suspect that they would allocate their capital towards more things in that vein.
You could almost have this — I don’t know if you’d call it a renaissance or a golden age or something, of people who are technology believers. They want to see a better future coming from science and technology, and they’re going to use their capital for good in that direction. That could be one outcome.
There is much more at the link, interesting throughout.
The ascendancy of Clubhouse
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
If you don’t already know, Clubhouse is a year-old social media service consisting of virtual “rooms” where people can talk to each other — by voice. That may not sound impressive, but many users swear by it, seeing it as a communications platform that could help restore peaceful discourse and civility rather than exacerbate tensions. I think of Clubhouse, which I joined last summer, as somewhere between talk radio and a dinner party.
Back in the 20th century, famed communications theorist Walter J. Ong suggested that oral cultures are more aggregative, more redundant, more conservative, and more openly questioning and dialogic. Given the social turmoil and polarization that the U.S. is going through, that all sounds pretty good.
To me, a lot of Clubhouse sounds like elders chatting around a traditional campfire, with many of the younger people listening in (noting that “elder” here is defined more by status than by age). Extra points go to those who are genuine, engaging and good at thinking out loud and leading a group. There is a subtle but definite set of hierarchies, though to the benefit of the conversation.
And:
One of the great strengths of Clubhouse is its celebrity-friendliness. If you are a major tech executive, why not speak in a Clubhouse session rather than to a journalist? The assembled crowd will spread your message, and can vouch for what you said and its context. It would not surprise me if Clubhouse soon becomes the major conduit for news about tech and tech executives, perhaps for Hollywood stars too. The one group that seems most out of place on Clubhouse are the journalists, who possess no special status and are discouraged.
There is much more at the link.
Tuesday assorted links
1. How adenovirus vaccines are made.
2. Third issue of Works in Progress.
4. Cass Sunstein to work on immigration law for the DHS in the Biden administration.
5. Interview with the excellent Youyang Gu (Emergent Ventures winner, btw).
6. Why are Covid cases falling so sharply in so many countries? (I had to click through twice to read the whole thread.)
7. Do looks matter for an academic career in economics? Yes, and a lot. Lookism of course remains the great vice, and arguably it is worst among many of those who fight against other “isms.”
Who first noticed the tech was ready for human genome sequencing? (that was then, this is now)
Perkin Elmer’s last purchase had been a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company called PerSeptive Biosystems, a protein-analysis enterprise started by Lebanese-born wunderkind Noubar Afeyan seven years earlier, when the ink was still wet on his Ph.D. from MIT. Afeyan had sold his company to Perkin Elmer for almost $400 million. The deal had yet to be finalized, and formally speaking Afeyan wasn’t yet a Perkin Elmer employee. But he was at the meeting in Foster City, too. Like Lipe and Barrett, he shared White’s vision of “moving up the food chain” and getting into the genetic information business. But like them, he didn’t really have a clear idea how that was to be done.
It was Afeyan, the newcomer, who first said the words. The head of the multicapillary-machine production team was winding up a presentation on the instrument’s design and capacity. There were twenty-odd people around the table, discussing such matters as pricing, costs, and marketing strategy. This was the first time Afeyan had heard that the project even existed. He was taking some notes and idly doing some calculations. “You know, with enough of these machines, we could sequence the whole human genome,” he remarked. A few people chuckled at the notion, and the discussion returned to serious topics. But now Hunkapiller was hunched over his yellow pad, scribbling. After a minute he looked up. “He’s right,” he said. “Who’s right?” asked White. “Noubar. With two hundred machines, we could sequence the human genome in three years.” Most people in the room hardly knew Noubar Afeyan, but they knew Michael Hunkapiller. He would not interrupt a serious discussion except for something even more serious.
That is from James Shreeve’s The Genome War, here is more detail from the NYT in 1999, and for the pointer I thank Patrick Collison. Of course that is the same Afeyan Noubar who co-founded Moderna and now chairs it, here is my earlier CWT with him.
Monday assorted links
1. NYT tech coverage still a train wreck. And reporters using aliases to stalk non-criminal subjects? Isn’t that against NYT rules?
2. Scott Sumner on the Romney child plan.
3. Update on South African strain, vaccines, and confidence intervals.
5. “The average EV increases overall household load by 2.9 kilowatt-hours per day, less than half the amount assumed by state regulators. Our results imply that EVs travel 5,300 miles per year, under half of the US fleet average. This raises questions about transportation electrification for climate policy.” Link here.