Category: Uncategorized
The new economics of higher education
That is my new Bloomberg column, written for a special feature and thus 2x the normal length. Here is one excerpt:
The decisions of American families also will choke off out-of-state tuition revenue. Note that about three-quarters of America’s higher education sector, by enrollment, is state schools. The out-of-state tuition rate is the real cash cow of American higher education, and sometimes it can approach three times the in-state rate. Schools’ reliance on out-of-state revenue is going to take a big hit, as it was premised on a degree of individual geographic mobility that simply does not exist right now and may not be restored anytime soon.
I suspect many parents will, whether it is rational or not, prefer to keep their children closer to home.
The most vulnerable state schools will be those in underpopulated states and far from population centers. The University of Vermont, with about three-quarters out-of-state students, ought to worry…
Another problem will be the plummeting enrollment of foreign students, who typically are paying out-of-state tuition rates…
The University of Rochester, with about 27% foreign students, will find this adjustment especially difficult.
There is much more at the link, recommended. One theme is that upper tier schools will stay in business, but by relaxing admissions standards and by cannibalizing students from lower-tier schools (I am curious to see how those students do in their newly found “promotions”).
p.s. Average is Over
p.p.s. “free college” is a really bad idea, worse than before. State schools cannot at the moment survive the complete loss of tuition revenue.
Monday assorted links
1. Photos from Belarus, interesting in their own right but all the more so now.
2. More comments on the models.
3. The lockdown culture that is Ontario: “19-year-old charged after Mercedes clocked doing 308 km/h.”
4. Two million chickens to be killed because there aren’t enough workers to kill them.
5. Covid-19 has largely spared the baseball world (model this).
6. An argument that all will be well soon enough. Not my view, but happy to pass along this perspective from Lars Christensen.
Charles Town, West Virginia
It is only about 70 minutes drive from Fairfax, VA, and yet so few go and visit — why might that be? This town is full of charm, old buildings, Civil War history, and there is a plaque to Martin R. Delany in the town center.
West Virginia is in the process of reopening (note the obscenity), but barber shops require appointments and take only one person at a time. The restaurants seem to be doing curbside only, as in Virginia, and what would you want to eat there anyway? Population density in town is low, and it feels quite safe to walk around because you don’t have to switch sides of the street to avoid people. You just have to walk at a constant pace.
In one store they will sell you toilet paper and masks. But the guy takes his mask off to sell you the masks, because he feels he needs to explain and justify the prices for the masks.
The gdp per capita of West Virginia is, surprisingly to many people, equal to about that of France. Charles Town is by no means run down, and either the center of town or the outskirts appear to be somewhat wealthier than most parts of Western Europe.
Here are eleven classic dishes you might try in West Virginia.
And there is still an opera house in town, and it was staging Sondheim’s Into the Woods until Covid came along.
What sports I’ve been watching
Game 2, Celtics vs. Bulls, 1986, the one where Michael Jordan scored 63 points. Watching it over a number of days on the exercise bike, I was struck by the following:
1. The Chicago Bulls, to a remarkable degree, decided to run their offense through Orlando Woolridge, and not for the better.
2. The camera did not follow MJ around obsessively, nor do the announcers seem to realize how great he will become — this was his second season, and he spent much of it injured and not playing. And he was not yet able to make his teammates better (see #1).
3. One announcer remarks that Charles Oakley is not big and strong enough to play center. Admittedly Robert Parrish was taller, but Oakley was one of the strongest men ever to play in the NBA.
4. The game comes across as remarkably slow, and the Celtics as molasses slow and bad at defense. A swarming contemporary defense would shut down Kevin McHale. Ainge and Dennis Johnson are heralded as one of the best backcourts ever, but I believe Damian Lillard or a few other current peers would cut them to ribbons. Note that the Celtics were 40-1 at home that season, still a record, so they were a remarkable team for their time.
5. Michael Jordan scores most of his points on shots — the long 2 — that coaches strongly discourage players from taking these days because of their low expected value.
6. Few of them look good taking a three-pointer.
7. MJ aside, Bill Walton is the one who comes across as the world-class player on the court, despite his age of 33, a long history of foot and other injuries, and limited mobility.
8. 63 points is a lot, but the Bulls lost the game and Jordan was far from his later peak. It is nonetheless striking how much better was his conditioning than that of any other player on the court, and that is why he was able to score so much in the fourth quarter and take over the game.
Sunday assorted links
1. Where have all the briskets gone? A good lesson in supply chain economics. And China to slap big tariffs on Australian barley exports.
2. Scarlett Strong on the updated source code.
3. Falling as a feature of Covid-19.
4. Dithering: a new podcast by Ben Thompson and John Gruber.
5. WHO conditionally backs the notion of Human Challenge Trials for vaccines.
6. Hockey analytics guy contributes to Covid-19 modeling.
7. Toward a theory of how and why UFOs would reveal themselves.
8. How much would you pay for this distanced (Dutch) meal?
9. “Citations for traveling faster than 100 mph have been numerous in recent days.”
10. Millie Small, RIP (music video).
11. To be clear, I am not against this kind of article (NYT). “Sweatpants and Caviar,” but in the paper edition it is called “A Chance to Think About Composing that Opera.” Still, we can learn a bit from doing a small amount of modeling of how it came about.
12. A sad take, no matter which side you trust, our regulatory state is failing us.
13. “Ethics of controlled human infection to study COVID-19.” That is what you might call “an establishment piece.” On one hand, it is nice to see them not reject the idea, though they cannot agree on monetary compensation for exposure. I wonder how they feel about fishing boats?
HHS turned down a big opportunity to make a lot of masks early
Another HHS official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There is a process for putting out contracts. It wasn’t as fast as anyone wanted it to be.”
The masks still are not being made, and this would be in Texas. I’ll say it yet again: our regulatory state is failing us in this matter. Here is a bit more:
From his end, Bowen [the mask maker] said his proposal seemed to be going nowhere. “No one at HHS ever did get back to me in a substantive way,” Bowen said.
The senior U.S. official said Bowen’s idea was considered, but funding could not easily be obtained without diverting it from other projects.
While we are on the topic of diverting funding, surely we would all agree that the NSF funding for the social sciences all should — for at least two years — be diverted to biomedical research? I wonder how many economists are willing to tweet that policy recommendation.
RIP, Little Richard
Hat tip: Stephen Landry.
Saturday assorted links
1. How to ration access to scarce, reopening resources.
2. Will Australia do best? And America’s coronavirus report card (my Bloomberg column). And the correct Dan Wang link from yesterday (Bloomberg).
3. Derek Lowe on antibody approaches.
5. Yemeni Jew music video. And quelites: Mexico’s wild greens.
6. A thread threading threads on heterogeneous super-spreaders. Best update on this discussion I have seen lately.
7. A social distancing picnic blanket. And in Newfoundland and Labrador: the double bubble.
Coronavirus sports markets in everything, multiple simulations edition
For $20, fans of German soccer club Borussia can have a cut-out of themselves placed in the stands at BORUSSIA-PARK. According to the club, over 12,000 cut-outs have been ordered and 4,500 have already been put in place.
Here is the tweet and photo.
And some sports bettors are betting on simulated sporting events. (Again, I’ve never understood gambling — why not save up your risk-taking for positive-sum activities? Is negative-sum gambling a kind of personality management game to remind yourself loss is real and to keep down your risk-taking in other areas?)
Via Samir Varma and Cory Waters.
Limiting liability for a resumption of business activity
I have a short Mercatus policy brief on that topic, co-authored with Trace Mitchell. Excerpt:
Risk from reopening cannot fall to zero, but investments in safety by employers can bring real gains in many cases. Ideally, a plan should both minimize risk and encourage employers’ safety investments. In essence, policymakers should (1) limit liability in the short term to cases of recklessness, (2) use direct regulation to prohibit some obviously risky options, and (3) create and fund a COVID-19 compensation program while capping liability for covered entities.
To understand how this combination of options might work in practice, consider the simple example of the restaurant. Many states are allowing partial reopenings of restaurants, albeit with social distancing, which might comprise outdoor seating, limited seating within the restaurant, or both. Yet some practices that would be very dangerous in the current situation, such as open buffets, have been made illegal per se. This arrangement takes some of the highest-risk problems off the table, and for the better. It is also appropriate for regulation to mandate soap-and-water washing facilities for workers in all restaurants, to provide another example of a sensible regulation.
It is still necessary, however, for these businesses to have stronger liability protection, so that restaurants may proceed with greater certainty, and also solvency. While the number of future COVID-19 transmissions in restaurants is unlikely to be zero, restaurants can only do so much to limit risk, vulnerable individuals still can opt to stay away and indeed are likely to do so, and tracing particular cases to particular restaurants is very difficult. For all of those reasons, we do not expect the traditional liability system to perform well in the case of restaurants, and we wish to limit its applicability, while of course keeping other safeguards in place. In essence, our proposal takes that commonsense approach to restaurants and applies it to the economy more broadly.
I would stress that nursing homes require a fully separate treatment. Here is a related Marc Thiessen piece. Here is Ross Marchand on state-level experimentation with liability.
Alexander Wendt on why we should take UFOs seriously
He has more than just the usual hand-wringing, here is one excerpt:
Sean Illing
…What’s the Occam’s razor explanation for these UFO sightings?
Alexander Wendt
To me, the Occam’s razor explanation is ETs.
Here is another:
Sean Illing
If some of these UFOs are the products of alien life, why haven’t they made their presence more explicit? If they wanted to remain undetected, they could, and yet they continually expose themselves in these semi-clandestine ways. Why?
Alexander Wendt
That’s a very good question. Because you’re right, I think if they wanted to be completely secretive, they could. If they wanted to come out in the open, they could do that, too. My guess is that they have had a lot of experience with this in the past with civilizations at our stage. And they probably know that if they land on the White House lawn, there’ll be chaos and social breakdown. People will start shooting at them.
So I think what they’re doing is trying to get us used to the idea that they’re here with the hopes that we’ll figure it out ourselves, that we’ll go beyond the taboo and do the science. And then maybe we can absorb the knowledge that we’re not alone and our society won’t implode when we finally do have contact. That’s my theory, but who knows, right?
Here is the full piece, interesting and intelligent throughout.
Friday assorted links
1, “New York acted as Grand Central Station for this virus…” (NYT)
2. An “economics of epidemiology” paper incorporating Lucas-like mechanisms.
3. Who is at most risk from Covid? A new study based on very good NHS data.
4. Further new data on transmission. And useful overview of how Covid-19 “works.” Maybe it seems a little late in the game to be reading this kind of short survey piece, but it is actually the best one I’ve seen and it is quite up to date, recommended.
6. Sidewalk Labs abandons Google smart city plans. And new coronavirus calypso (video and music).
7. Why are coronavirus survivors banned from the military? How can that possibly make sense?
8. After reopening, people from neighboring states have been flocking to Georgia.
9. John Carmack defends the Imperial College code. Correction: that was Carmack on IHME, here is Carmack on Imperial College code.
10. Epidemiological model from some data scientists at Stripe (but not a Stripe product). Do you have any comments or suggestions for improvements for them?
11. Alex discussing vaccines on the Dan Proft show. And Dan Wang on America can’t build any more (Bloomberg).
Why is child abuse not opposed more passionately on the Right
From an email from Paul Foster:
From my perch, there are two primary reasons the right doesn’t more passionately oppose child abuse. The first has to do with parents’ rights. The general conservative view of the child welfare system is of a group of liberal ladies who think they know better than parents and who are especially skeptical of religious parenting, especially conservative Christian parenting. (The NYT op-ed opposing home schooling was an almost-too-perfect totem in that regard.) As a result, while many on the right will say “sure, flat-out abuse is bad,” they’ll assume that “abuse” will be defined eventually to include homeschooling, imparting religious views (especially on traditional gender roles), and the like. The early 20th-century attempt to eradicate the German language and culture through the public schools is often pointed to, as is (at least among the hipper conservatives (I swear we exist!)) that one Simpsons episode where a social worker gives demerits to Marge and Homer’s household for “toilet paper hung in improper overhand fashion.”
The second reason–and this is probably true for both the right and the left–is that you can’t even think of a solution by reasoning from your political views. “Adults shouldn’t beat kids” is universally accepted, but your views on taxes or your reading of Ayn Rand or that latest anti-Pelosi meme doesn’t give you anything helpful in actually stopping adults from beating kids. Without a political solution, it tends to fall by the political wayside.
Here are my previous recent posts on related questions concerning child abuse.
America’s reopening will depend on trust
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic brought serious economic damage for thinly capitalized face-to-face retailers, such as small family-owned restaurants. But many of those same institutions will lead the recovery — that is, if they have built up trust among their patrons. If they ask me to sit outside to eat my meal, I will trust that their kitchen procedures are “clean enough,” because I believe that the boss is watching [there I am referring to two of my favorite local places].
It is also worth asking whom I do not trust. When it comes to providing a fully clean and safe store, I do not trust most of the big-box retailers. I trust them just fine in ordinary times, but no single manager can oversee the entire cleaning and disinfectant operation. And can they monitor Covid-19 in the air? If they tell me that “all possible precautions have been taken,” I might believe their words, but I won’t believe that is enough.
And:
The NBA is wondering if it can resurrect its playoffs at a dedicated location with television coverage but no audience in the stands. So far the teams are hesitant, in part because they are afraid of public resentment if the league’s millionaire players have access to Covid-19 tests while the general public does not.
The reality is that if the NBA announced it was buying up a lot of tests, it would boost the supply of tests. That could provide testing with valuable positive publicity, with the NBA serving as a role model for what other businesses might do. Yet the NBA does not yet trust its fans to see things in such a positive light, and so reopening is delayed. There might be some danger to playoffs games without fans, but surely less than in, say, collegiate or professional football, where injuries and concussions are built into the very nature of the competition.
Which are the businesses that you really trust in matters pandemic?
Thursday assorted links
1. Tips for slowing livestock growth due to plant closures.
3. Florian Schneider has passed away.
4. Source code for the Imperial College model. And Sue Denim is very upset about the quality of that source code. Another reader with a strong technical background wrote me equally critical remarks. Are there further opinions on this?
5. Sujatha Gidla on her experience with Covid-19 (NYT), and here is my earlier CWT with her, one of my favorite episodes.
6. A new real-time journal COVID Economics.
7. Tankersley interviews Hassett and covers the brouhaha (NYT).
8. Effective Altruist forum ranks Fast Grants as one of their top two projects.
10. Jerry Seinfeld on success.
11. “A county in Washington State dealing with a coronavirus outbreak has identified a confounding new source of spread: “Covid-19 parties” organized so that people can deliberately mingle with an infected person in the hope of getting their own illness out of the way.” (NYT link) I wonder what they play for the music.
12. How are the social sciences evolving? Less rational choice, for one thing.
13. Why are meatpacking plants hit so hard? Holds true for numerous countries — is it the deliberate circulation of cool air?
14. Emily Oster and Galit Alter have a new Covid public health information site.