Category: Uncategorized
Model this NBA coaches and Adam Smith
Of all the head coaches in the NBA in either 2019-20 or 2020-21, there was a combined one All-Star appearance as a player, by Doc Rivers. At the league’s high point of former players as coaches, in 2001-02, there were 13 different former All-Stars walking the sidelines who had combined for 60 appearances.
Here is more from Kevin Pelton at ESPN. Is it that data analytics matter so much more? A general increase in the division of labor? Or are today’s stars so prominent, perhaps because of social media, that a team does not need recognizable coaches to bring in the fans?
The Pelton posts considers further issues in mechanism design, such as whether a single free throw should be used to determine both points late in NBA games. I would think that leads to an overinvestment in fouling from teams that are behind?
“You have to order all at once”
I’ve now been to two different Miami restaurants that have told me the same thing. They will take your food order only once, and you cannot decide later that you would like additional items, though you can ask for more water (and presumably other drinks?).
Perhaps this is part of a desire to economize on labor costs, so you do not need more staff to run around the room and ask diners if “they are OK”? Is it so bad to be forced to know what you want in the first place? And might it induce risk-averse customers to over-order a bit, thereby boosting restaurant profits? Should your enjoyment of the meal really depend so much on the third derivative of the utility function?
Do any of you know of other instances of this policy, or data on its effectiveness?
Is the policy actually time consistent, namely what if you insisted you wished to spend another $100 on the food there? Would they tell you no and bring you the check?
Both places, Boia De and Lung Yai Thai Tapas, were excellent, get the Kow Soi at the latter and then walk up the street to the anti-communist memorials on 14th St. for one of Miami’s most interesting and unusual cultural highlights.
Sunday assorted links
The Chinese vaccine passport uses relative prices
China raised the stakes in the international vaccine competition on Saturday, saying that foreigners wishing to enter the Chinese mainland from Hong Kong will face fewer paperwork requirements if they are inoculated with Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines.
The policy announcement, which covers foreigners applying for visas in the Chinese territory, comes a day after the United States, India, Japan and Australia announced plans to provide vaccines more widely to other countries.
Here is more from Keith Bradsher (NYT).
Saturday assorted links
1. A beginner’s guide to DAOs.
2. East Asia vs. South Asia on gender relations.
3. A tunnel from Northern Ireland to Scotland?
4. Did older people stay happier during the pandemic? (NYT)
5. Gaitonde sells for $5.5mil; most expensive Indian art sold to date.
6. Japanese working from home has not been so productive or such a big deal.
British Vaccine Efficiency
The British vaccination plan has been run very well. As this audience knows, the British delayed the second dose in order to get out more first doses quickly. A life-saving move. The British have also been targeting age and riskier workers very well. The excellent Witold Więcek (an Emergent Ventures prize recipient) has done a back of the envelope calculation which indicates how well the British are targeting.
Since the vaccines have been prioritised for the elderly, the infection fatality risk (IFR) for a typical vaccinated patient is higher than the average IFR in the population. However, we have to account for the fact that many of the early doses are given to health care workers and some of the other key workers. By late February 2021, in the UK around 55% of the vaccines went to people over 70 and over 95% of that age group has been vaccinated. In the US, however, while 55% of vaccines went to people over 65, close to 30% went to people younger than 50. We calculated IFR as an approximate weighted mean of age-specific infection mortality risks, using a meta-analysis estimate in Manheim et al., 2021.
Applying this IFR approach to real-world distributions of vaccine distribution, for UK we obtained 4.7% and for the US 3.2%, a remarkable difference. In other words, despite delivering twice the number of doses (and “running out” of highest risk individuals to vaccinate), a single dose of vaccine in the UK was still used 50% more effectively than in the US. (It should be noted, however, that the UK has a slightly older population than the US.)
Given less centralized health information, it’s hard to see how the US could target much better while also maintaining speed which is why, after the first round of vaccinating the nursing homes and the very elderly, I have leaned towards opening up more vaccination sites and prioritizing speed. So read this as a credit to the British rather than a demerit to the US. Other European countries, however, also have more centralized medical systems and yet have been far behind the British. It has struck me during this crisis how little these kind of system-wide policy variable seem to explain in the efficiency of the pandemic response overall.
No you are not insane, yes you are allowed to giggle
An artwork by Beeple which exists only as a digital file and was sold as a “nonfungible token” for a staggering $69.3 million at an online auction handled by Christie’s on Thursday was bought by an investor known only by a pseudonym and who paid for it with cryptocurrency, the auction house said Friday.
“It feel like I got a steal,” said the buyer, who goes by the pseudonym Metakovan, in a Google Meet interview (without video) that was arranged by Christie’s.
Metakovan, the founder of the Metapurse, a fund that collects “nonfungible tokens” or NFTs, said he would be paying for the work and Christie’s fees in Ether, a cryptocurrency. “As we speak, I’m sending the last transaction,” he said.
The work he bought, “Everydays — The First 5000 Days,” is a collage of all the images that the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, has posted online since 2007. The image had been specially created, or “minted,” by the artist for Christie’s timed one-lot online auction as an NFT. Such digital collectibles have no physical existence, but are given proof of ownership and authenticity using blockchain technology. “Everydays,” a JPG, was the first digital-only NFT auctioned by Christie’s.
Here is the full NYT story. Here is Metakovan speaking, along with an image. And here is Metakovan (“King of meta”) on his own identity, he is a Tamil living in Singapore.
Friday assorted links
2. NFTs and copyright law. And Balaji on the meme economy.
3. Weak African trust in vaccines?
4. Biden administration skeptical about a carbon border tax the median voter theorem remains underrated.
5. Global twinning rates reach a peak high.
7. Will Google disrupt the college degree? Seems OK enough, but a little underwhelming to me.
Canadian expense arbitrage markets in everything
Good Fortune Burger of Toronto has named its menu items after office supplies so that customers can include them on expense reports:
Fortune Burger: Basic Steel Stapler
Diamond Chicken Burger: Mini Dry Erase Whiteboard
Double Your Fortune Burger: Ergonomic Aluminum Laptop Stand
Emerald Veggie Burger: Wired Earphones With Mic
Parmesan Fries: CPU Wireless Mouse
Ginger Beer: Yellow Lined Sticky Notes
San Pellegrino: Ball Point Black Ink Gel Pens
Build Your Fortune Burger: Silicone Keyboard Cover“There’s no malice intended in it,” Director of Operations Jon Purdy told blogTO. “It’s all just fun and games.”
Here is the menu, via John Thorne.
Let the AZ Vaccine Go!
Finally the NYTimes has picked up on a story I have been shouting from the rooftops for months.
Tens of millions of doses of the coronavirus vaccine made by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca are sitting idly in American manufacturing facilities, awaiting results from its U.S. clinical trial while countries that have authorized its use beg for access.
…About 30 million doses are currently bottled at AstraZeneca’s facility in West Chester, Ohio, which handles “fill-finish,” the final phase of the manufacturing process during which the vaccine is placed in vials, one official with knowledge of the stockpile said.
Emergent BioSolutions, a company in Maryland that AstraZeneca has contracted to manufacture its vaccine in the United States, has also produced enough vaccine in Baltimore for tens of millions more doses once it is filled into vials and packaged, the official said.
…But although AstraZeneca’s vaccine is already authorized in more than 70 countries, according to a company spokesman, its U.S. clinical trial has not yet reported results, and the company has not applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization. AstraZeneca has asked the Biden administration to let it loan American doses to the European Union, where it has fallen short of its original supply commitments and where the vaccination campaign has stumbled badly.
The administration, for now, has denied the request, one official said.
Some federal officials have pushed the White House to make a decision in the next few weeks. Officials have discussed sending doses to Brazil, which has been hard hit by a worsening coronavirus crisis, or the European Union or Britain.
The AZ vaccine could have saved thousands of lives in the US, if it had been approved earlier. But it’s not going to be approved in the US for months at best and with the ramp up in production of Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and now Novavax it’s no longer needed in the US. Let it go! Send it to Canada or Mexico or Brazil or COVAX.
In our Science Paper we estimate that another 1 billion courses of vaccine capacity are worth $1 trillion of additional global benefits. AZ has on the order of 50 million doses nearly ready to go and can produce in the US around 25 million doses a month so over a year that production is worth over $100 billion to the world economy, far higher than the modest cost of production! Instead of idling this capacity we should expand it even further as part of a plan to vaccinate the world.
It’s a Biden Plan to vaccinate the world or a Xi Jinping Plan and I’d rather it be a Biden Plan.
Why vaccination passports probably won’t work well
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
One issue is what exactly constitutes proof of vaccination. For my vaccinations, I have been issued a rather flimsy, easy-to-forge paper document from the Centers for Disease Control. Unlike a passport or a dollar bill, it has no embedded watermarks or other protections. Anyone with a moderately sophisticated copy machine could create many fake documents, or perhaps steal an existing stash of these documents and sell them on the black market. Once you have the documents, you can simply note that you have been vaccinated, and it is not easy for outside parties to dispute such claims.
Soon enough, of course, it may be easier for most adults to get a vaccine than to forge a vaccine passport. Still, U.S. laws and regulations work better when they can refer to clear, verifiable standards of evidence. It is hard to imagine a set of laws or procedures based on criteria so loose that they basically allow anyone to claim they are vaccinated. A more stringent standard, however, would be hard for most vaccinated Americans to meet.
Another knotty question is which vaccines will count for the passport. Pfizer’s, Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s for sure, but what if you are a U.S. citizen living in Canada who received AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has been approved by some 15 nations but not the U.S.? Is the federal government willing to tell a whole class of responsible individuals that they cannot fly on U.S. planes? Or will the vaccine-passport bureaucracy be willing to approve vaccines that the Food and Drug Administration will not?
These dilemmas can become stickier yet. What about Sputnik, the Russian vaccine, or the numerous Chinese vaccines, which are being administered around the world, including in Mexico?
Do Americans really wish to create a country to which most foreigners would not be very welcome? Furthermore, what counts as proof of foreign vaccination? Some Asian countries, including China, are creating elaborate and supposedly secure vaccine verification systems, using advanced information technology. Good for them — but how would that connect with U.S. regulations? How many different passport systems would a flight attendant or gate agent have to read, interpret and render judgment upon?
The likely result of all this: Many foreign visitors to the U.S. would never quite know in advance whether they could board an airplane or attend a public event.
And how would the passport reflect any new vaccines deemed necessary? What if new Covid-19 strains require booster shots? What if you’ve had Covid and thus get only one shot for now rather than two, as many experts are recommending? What will happen as the number of vaccines around the world proliferates? Given the slowness of the FDA and CDC, it is hard to imagine any new U.S. approvals coming quickly. A vaccine passport system could end up being fetters not only for foreigners and anti-vaxxers but also for vaccinated Americans.
Recommended, there are additional arguments at the link.
Thursday assorted links
1. CDC Guidance Dramatically Under-Represents Classroom Student Capacity Under 6′ Social Distancing.
3. Profile of Sarah Hart (NYT).
4. China markets in everything: “Make your company great again!”.
5. Walter LaFeber has passed away (NYT).
6. 1965 Detroit Olympics bid (video).
Meng Wanzhou is still under arrest
Yes, the CFO of Huawei. She has been held under house arrest by Canada since December 2018, under the supposition that she will be extradited to the United States to face trial. Don’t we believe in something like a right to a fair and speedy trial? Can she get that at this point?
I am not pleading for her innocence, rather this is a major foreign policy and tactical mistake. How would the United States react if China held say Bill Gates, on the grounds that he had violated some extraterritorial Chinese law? The U.S.-China relationship is the world’s most important, so why are we partially wrecking it over such a matter?
It is also an erosion of the rule of law in the United States and Canada. You might plead “independent judiciary,” but when American law “goes extraterritorial,” as it has in this case, there are so many potential cases that the selection of charges and extradition requests cannot help but be political. How many other people have acted to “conspire to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran”, as are the charges here? Are they all being detailed and held? This dilemma is a good reason to limit the reach of American law into extraterritorial matters, namely that there is no objective way to apply the law fairly and impartially against a very large number of (possible) foreign perpetrators operating overseas. We go after corrupt soccer officials abroad but not corrupt chess officials at FIDE?
There is plenty of evidence (Bloomberg) that North American politicians have been interfering in this matter already, so to cancel the charges and release her would hardly be soiling our constitutional innocence. Best would be if the Canadian government would step in and end the mess.
To be clear, I am supportive of the United States working very hard to make sure its allies do not install Huawei communications equipment, as that could compromise their and our national security. Still, that is not the issue here and so it is time to free Meng Wanzhou.
Ordinary air pollution is still an underrated problem
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
More than 10 million people die each year from air pollution, according to a new study — far more than the estimated 2.6 million people who have died from Covid-19 since it was detected more than a year ago. And while Covid is headline news, ordinary air pollution remains a side issue for policy wonks and technocrats.
[To be clear, I am not seeking to minimize Covid as a major issue.] And:
Why aren’t these deaths a bigger issue in U.S. political and policy discourse? One reason may be that 62% of those deaths are in China and India. The number of premature deaths due to particulate matter in North America was 483,000, just slightly lower than the number of measured deaths from Covid to date. An estimated 876 of those deaths were of children under the age of 4.
Another reason for the weak political salience of the issue may be its invisibility. Air pollution causes many deaths. But it is rare to see or read about a person dying directly from air pollution. Lung cancer and cardiac disease are frequently cited as causes of death, even though they may stem from air pollution.
Another problem is that the question of how to better fight air pollution does not fit neatly into current ideological battles. You might think Democrats would emphasize this issue, but much of the economic burden of tougher action would fall on the Northeast, a largely Democratic-leaning area.
And exactly how many people die each year from global warming? Why not have a greater focus on ordinary air pollution?
Wednesday assorted links
1. #Econtwitter to the Biden administration.
3. Work and writing habits of Harlan Coben (NYT).
4. How vaccine production was accelerated, from the policy side (NYT).
5. Register for my Saturday chat with Patrick Collison, through Oxford and Works in Progress. And Dutch inventor of the audio cassette tape passes away.