Category: Uncategorized
Potential yet still thwarted Filipino nurse vaccine barter markets in everything?
The Philippines will let thousands of its health care workers, mostly nurses, take up jobs in Britain and Germany if the two countries agree to donate coronavirus vaccines, a senior official said on Tuesday.
Britain’s health ministry said it was not interested in such a deal and its priority was to use shots domestically, but added it would share surplus vaccine internationally in the future.
The Philippines, which has among Asia’s highest number of coronavirus cases, has relaxed a ban on deploying its health care workers overseas, but still limits the number of medical professionals leaving the country to 5,000 a year.
Alice Visperas, director of the labor ministry’s international affairs bureau, said the Philippines was open to lifting the cap in exchange for vaccines from Britain and Germany, which it would use to inoculate outbound workers and hundreds of thousands of Filipino repatriates.
Here is the full story, via Marvin Vista.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Robin Hanson: Is Status-Seeking A Context-Neglecting-Value?
2. UFO skeptic West has not in fact debunked those videos.
3. More on the new UK science funding agency.
4. Story of Novavax (WSJ). And new efficacy data for Chinese vaccines.
5. Response to Julia Galef and Herbert Simon on the value of travel.
6. “The huge parachute used by NASA’s Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message, thanks to a puzzle lover on the spacecraft team. Systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute. He also included the GPS coordinates for the mission’s headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.” Link here.
7. New radical computer science program in Limerick, Ireland.
Texas utilities should have had more dynamic pricing
But there was also a missed opportunity on the demand side. Texas has retail choice for electricity, but the overwhelming majority of Texas customers face electricity prices that are too static, too inflexible, and don’t respond to market conditions. Economists have been advocating dynamic prices for decades, but adoption has been slow.
Case in point. While wholesale prices in the Texas market climbed last week to $9,000/MWh, the overwhelming majority of electricity customers in Texas continued to pay retail prices close to $120/MWh, barely 1/100th of the true marginal cost.
Not seeing these high prices, Texas consumers had little incentive to conserve. You had a feast or famine — with millions of consumers at an all-you-can-eat buffet — while millions of others faced tragic blackouts and, essentially, an infinite price.
If everyone instead had turned their thermostats to a chilly, but manageable, 65°, this could have really helped the state manage the emergency. As Severin Borenstein pointed out after the California power outages last August, even modest adjustments to the thermostat can save a lot of electricity.
Dynamic pricing allows customers to pay lower prices throughout 99% of the year, in exchange for facing much higher prices when supply is tight. Numerous studies have documented that dynamic pricing yields substantial demand reductions (here, here, here, and here).
You may have read about households who paid enormous electricity bills last week. 29,000 out of Texas’ 11+ million customers buy their electricity from Griddy, a retailer that charges customers wholesale prices for a monthly fee of $9.99/month. This is a very extreme version of dynamic pricing. The evidence shows that you don’t need such extreme price changes to encourage conservation. Moreover, it is straightforward to incorporate hedging into retail contracts to protect customers from these outcomes.
With 28GW of forced outages in Texas last week, it is unlikely that dynamic prices alone could have closed the gap between demand and supply. But dynamic pricing is the fastest and cheapest way to build flexibility into the market, and can play an important role moving forward.
Here is more from Lucas Davis. Via Jonathan Carmel.
“Beeple is an artist”
Beeple is an artist.
He makes digital art—pixels on screens depicting bizarre, hilarious, disturbing, and sometimes grotesque images. He smashes together pop culture, technology, and postapocalyptic terror into blistering commentaries on the way we live. A recent frame depicted Donald Trump wearing a leather mask and stripper’s pasties, taking a whip to the coronavirus bug (title: “Trump Dominating Covid”). On the day Jeff Bezos announced he was kicking himself upstairs, Beeple imagined the Amazon founder as a massive, threatening octopus emerging from the ocean as military helicopters circled above (“Release the Bezos”).
Beeple has 1.8 million Instagram followers. His work has been shown at two Super Bowl halftime shows and at least one Justin Bieber concert, but he has no gallery representation or foothold in the traditional art world.
And yet in December the first extensive auction of his art grossed $3.5 million in a single weekend.
Here is the full Esquire article, do check out the accompanying images. The reproduced image is for sale here for one dollar. Here is the home page of Beeple. Here are more images.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Thwarted markets in everything: “Indianapolis Colts WR Michael Pittman Jr. says he won’t give up No. 11 to Carson Wentz.”
2. Siddhartha Mukherjee on heterogeneities in relative pandemic performance, revisiting a now-neglected topic (New Yorker).
3. North Dakota legislative house passes an anti-mask mandate bill.
4. Experiencing the Spanish flu lowered social trust. And more than 200 monoliths now.
5. Is Robert Gordon emerging from his previous stagnationist position?
6. Will/should the U.S. create a “strategic monkey reserve”? (NYT)
7. Spotify is going hi fi in selected markets. Civilization has returned (I hope).
Cool, green Britannia
Over the summer of 2020, as coronavirus cases fell and life in Britain felt briefly normal, something very abnormal was happening to the country’s electricity supply. No coal was burned to generate any portion of it for a period of more than two months, something that had not happened since 1882. Britain’s four remaining coal-burning power plants are zombies, all but dead. Within a couple of years they will be closed and Britain will probably never burn coal for electricity again.
The elimination of power stations that burn coal has helped Britain cut its carbon emissions faster than any other rich country since 1990 (see charts). They are down by 44%, according to data collected by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) during a period when the economy grew by two-thirds. Germany’s emissions, in contrast, are down by 29%; coal is still burned to generate some 24% of its electricity. Britain has made cuts to its emissions 1.8 times larger than the EU average since 1990. In America, emissions over the same period are up slightly.
Here is the full article from The Economist. I’ll say it again, whether it is AI, the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine, the speed of the current vaccination program, this switch to greener energy, the reemergence of Oxbridge, the new Dominic Cummings-inspired DARPA-like science funding plan, or London being the world’s best city — current Great Britain remains grossly underrated.
The new world of digital art on the blockchain
In the 10 years since Chris Torres created Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, the meme has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times.
On Thursday, he put a one-of-a-kind version of it up for sale on Foundation, a website for buying and selling digital goods. In the final hour of the auction, there was a bidding war. Nyan Cat was sold to a user identified only by a cryptocurrency wallet number. The price? Roughly $580,000.
Mr. Torres was left breathless. “I feel like I’ve opened the floodgates,” he said in an interview on Friday.
The sale was a new high point in a fast-growing market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media called NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens.” The buyers are usually not acquiring copyrights, trademarks or even the sole ownership of whatever it is they purchase. They’re buying bragging rights and the knowledge that their copy is the “authentic” one.
Other digital tokens recently sold include a clip of LeBron James blocking a shot in a Lakers basketball game that went for $100,000 in January and a Twitter post by Mark Cuban, the investor and Dallas Mavericks owner, that went for $952. This month, the actress Lindsay Lohan sold an image of her face for over $17,000 and, in a nod to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, declared, “I believe in a world which is financially decentralized.” It was quickly resold for $57,000.
Blockchains of course are being used to designate which copy is the authentic one. Is it such a big step from photography to this? Here is more from Erin Griffith at the NYT.
Addendum: The next step presumably is to introduce some price discrimination. Yes, there can be a “most authentic” original copy. But after that, how about some intermediate categories? “Well, this is the almost-original copy, defined on the “brother blockchain” here is another, somewhat closed related copy, defined on the “cousin blockchain,”” just as Japanese prints had different editions, etc.
Monday assorted links
1. When it came to actual human affairs, John Rawls was in fact a mediocre, ordinary thinker at best. Yes TJ is a deep and wonderful book. But when he wrote on anything concrete, would it today even make the better half of Twitter?
2. Call for papers on Smith and Hume. And Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull writes a guide to Indian food.
3. How some Texans ended up with huge electricity bills. And was deregulation at fault? (NYT) And a good thread on what happened.
4. Are Canadians covering up their Covid cases out of shame? (NYT)
5. My Bloomberg column on the four basic truths of macroeconomics.
My days as a teenage chess teacher
I’ve already blogged my earlier job working in the supermarket, so I thought I would add a few remarks on my very first job as chess teacher, which I did at ages 14-15.
I had three regular students, two adults (about 50 and late 20s) and one a younger chess prodigy himself, maybe 10 or 11, plus some other occasional students. I would have had more students if they (or the parents) did not have to pick me up and drive me to the lesson site. By the way, at that time no one thought it was strange that relative strangers would simply come and pick me up in their cars and take me away.
From this job, I learned a few things rather quickly:
1. At the time a 14-year-old paid chess teacher seemed odd. But if you just did something, the world might accept it. Make other people tell you no, don’t do that preemptively yourself.
2. Chess teaching isn’t mainly about chess. A chess teacher has to have a certain mystique above all, while at the same time being approachable. Even at 14 this is possible. Your students are hiring you at least as much for your mystique as for the content of your lessons.
3. Not everyone taking chess lessons wanted to be a better chess player. For some, taking the lesson was a substitute for hard work on chess, not a complement to it. The lesson for them was a fun social experience, and it kept the game of chess salient in their minds. They became “the kind of person who takes chess lessons.” I understood this well at the time. Some of the students wanted to show you their chess games, so that someone else would be sharing in their triumphs and tragedies. That is an OK enough way to proceed with a chess lesson, but often the students were more interested in “showing” than in listening and learning and hearing the hard truths about their play.
4. Students are too interested in asking your opinion of particular openings. At lower-tier amateur levels of chess, the opening just doesn’t matter that much, provided you don’t get into an untenable position too quickly. Nonetheless openings are a fun thing to learn about, and discussing openings can give people the illusion of learning something important, if only because you can share opening moves with the top players and thereby affiliate with them.
5. What I really had to teach was methods for hard work to improve your game consistently over time. That might include for instance annotating a game or position “blind,” and then comparing your work to the published analysis of a world-class player, a’ la Alexander Kotov’s Think Like a Grandmaster. I did try to teach that, but the demand for this service was not always so high.
6. The younger chess prodigy I taught was quite bright and also likable. But he had no real interest in improving his chess game. Instead, hanging out with me was more fun for him than either doing homework or watching TV, and I suspect his parents understood that. In any case, early on I was thinking keenly about talent and the determinants of ultimate success, and obsessiveness seemed quite important. All of the really good chess players had it, and without it you couldn’t get far above expert level.
7. I don’t remember exactly how much I was paid, but it felt like a lot of money at the time. But when I stopped playing chess, I also stopped giving chess lessons. I felt I had learned — and earned — from it what I could.
Sunday assorted links
1. Rohit Krishnan reviews Stubborn Attachments.
3. Israel-Syria barter markets in everything prisoners for vaccines (NYT).
4. “Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, posited that while Caligula might have been assassinated because he was a monster, it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated.” (NYT) How much do we really know about the ancient world anyway?
5. Good news on the South African strain.
6. Gelassenheit.
The equitization of human labor, Fernando Tatis Jr. edition
Fernando Tatís Jr. was 18 years old, just a low-level prospect from the Dominican Republic trying to work his way up in the San Diego Padres farm system, when he made a financial deal that would impact his entire baseball career. And it wasn’t with the Padres.
Tatís signed a contract with Big League Advance, an unusual investment fund that pays minor-league players money up front in exchange for a share of their future MLB earnings.
Tatís, now 22 and widely viewed as one of the sport’s best young stars, today knows what those earnings will be. He agreed to a record-setting 14-year contract with the Padres on Wednesday night worth an eye-popping $340 million, the third-highest total in MLB history.
His new contract also creates a significant obligation for Tatís: to pay a sizable chunk of his new bounty—perhaps close to $30 million—to Big League Advance.
Here is the full WSJ piece, via Rick Pildes.
Should unemployment benefits be taxed?
A number of people on Twitter were mocking this earlier idea of Martin Feldstein’s, now a policy since 1986. But of course unemployment benefits should be taxed at the federal level. If your income that year was low, you won’t pay any tax anyway. As of 2018, about 44 percent of American households paid no federal income tax in any case, so that is covering quite a few of the lower earners.
if you are in the taxable range, in your choices you should be comparing taxable income to taxable unemployment benefits, otherwise there is a distortion in your labor supply decision. If need be, raise the level of unemployment benefits. No, that isn’t a wash, because different individuals and households face different possible rates of marginal taxation. The higher earners (at least potentially the higher earners) should face a higher tax on their unemployment benefits than the lower earners will. So it is in fact a “progressive” policy.
Marty was right, as indeed he was about many things. Here is a good CRS overview of the issue. Here is Marty’s (partially gated) 1974 piece on the issue. This is exactly the kind of issue Twitter is ill-suited to considering.
Saturday assorted links
1. Do birth subsidies lead to more babies? (NYT)
2. Heartland visas will be part of the Biden immigration bill.
3. U-Roy has passed away (NYT).
4. Both The Dig (1939 British archaeology and sexual restraint) and Minari (Korean immigrant family farming in Arkansas) are excellent movies and show that “old school” substantive cinema is alive and well. Given the number (and quality?) of delayed releases, this will be quite a year for moviegoing. At some point. Nomadland, however, did not thrill me. It is ultimately a movie for either critics who wish to condescend or viewers who wish to see another portrait of alienated middle America, at this point a dull and overdone topic. Good negative Richard Brody review here (New Yorker).
5. A 3D map of all the buildings in the Netherlands, colored by their age.
6. High-interest lending and pawn shop activity are both falling.
Medical ethics? (model this)
Steven Joffe, MD, MPH, a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said he doesn’t believe clinicians “should be lowering our standards of evidence because we’re in a pandemic.”
Link here. That sentence is a good litmus test for whether you think clearly about trade-offs, statistical and speed trade-offs included, procedures vs. final ends of value (e.g., human lives), and how obsessed you are with mood affiliation (can you see through his question-begging invocation of “lowering our standards”?). It is stunning to me that a top researcher at an Ivy League school literally cannot think properly about his subject area at all, and furthermore has no compunction admitting this publicly. As Alex wrote just earlier today: “Waiting for more data isn’t “science,” it’s sometimes an excuse for an unscientific status-quo bias.”
To be clear, we should run more and better RCT trials of Ivermectin, the topic at hand for Joffe (and in fact Fast Grants is helping to fund exactly that). But of course the “let’s go ahead and actually do this” decision should be different in a pandemic, just as the “just how much of a hurry are we in here anyway?” calculus should differ as well. I do not know enough to judge whether Ivermectin should be in hospital treatment protocols, as it is in many countries, but I do not condemn this simply on the grounds of it representing a “lower standard.” It might instead reflect a “higher standard” of concern for human lives, and you will note the drug is not considered harmful as it is being administered.
If you apply the standards of Joffe’s earlier work, we should not be proceeding with these RCTs, including presumably vaccine RCTs, until we have assured that all of the participants truly understand the difference between “research” and “treatment” as part of the informed consent protocols. No “therapeutic misconception” should be allowed. Really?
If the pandemic has changed my mind about anything, it is the nature of expertise.
Profile of Youyang Gu, data scientist
In mid-April, while he was living with his parents in Santa Clara, Calif., Gu spent a week building his own Covid death predictor and a website to display the morbid information. Before long, his model started producing more accurate results than those cooked up by institutions with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and decades of experience.
“His model was the only one that seemed sane,” says Jeremy Howard, a renowned data expert and research scientist at the University of San Francisco. “The other models were shown to be nonsense time and again, and yet there was no introspection from the people publishing the forecasts or the journalists reporting on them. Peoples’ lives were depending on these things, and Youyang was the one person actually looking at the data and doing it properly.”
The forecasting model that Gu built was, in some ways, simple. He had first considered examining the relationship among Covid tests, hospitalizations, and other factors but found that such data was being reported inconsistently by states and the federal government. The most reliable figures appeared to be the daily death counts. “Other models used more data sources, but I decided to rely on past deaths to predict future deaths,” Gu says. “Having that as the only input helped filter the signal from the noise.”
The novel, sophisticated twist of Gu’s model came from his use of machine learning algorithms to hone his figures.
Here is the full Bloomberg piece by Ashlee Vance, I am especially pleased because Youyang was an Emergent Ventures winner. Here is Youyang Gu on Twitter.