Category: Uncategorized
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.
Will the future be decentralized?
That question is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one contrasting excerpt:
When I hear laypersons discuss the future of the internet, the most common question is what kind of company or service is coming next…
When I hear internet entrepreneurs discuss the future, the biggest question is what kind of decentralized service or platform might be next.
And:
Another vertigo-inducing vision of the future can be glimpsed at zora.co. If you are initially baffled — join the club! Think of Zora as like Spotify, except for more than just music, and the creators keep the rights and sell at prices they decide. It attempts to be an open-source ecosystem for building the future of art.
And:
Having grown up in an analog world, I find these ambitious visions both unsurprising and bewildering. On one hand, I have seen the transition of so much activity to the digital world that another major revolution should not shock me. On the other hand, (a possibly atavistic) part of me likes knowing that someone or something is in control, whether it’s a government, a bunch of people in Mountain View, or even just my dean.
Recommended.
From the comments, on the stimulus
Sunday assorted links
1. The regulatory, status quo bias in public health commentary: “Do any of the experts arguing that it’s wrong for Americans to demand access to the AstraZeneca vaccine also advise residents of the UK, EU, and 15 other countries to delay taking it until our FDA grants authorization?”
3. People are fed up with broken vaccine appointment tools — so they’re building their own (Technology Review).
4. NASA prize to make food on the Moon, Mars.
5. The UK put a venture capitalist in charge of its vaccine procurement.
6. Cuba will allow more small business.
7. Ross Douthat on the Romney family plan (NYT).
8. It seems fear of kidnapping is severely limiting mobility in Haiti, even for the non-wealthy (NYT).
What I’ve been reading
1. Honor Moore, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury. An excellent book on “what it was like back then.” Plus the daughter-mother memoir often is neglected by male readers, and this is one place to start. The mother ends up diagnosed with cancer at age fifty, and furthermore her war hero and Bishop husband turns out to be actively bisexual.
2. Zachary Karabell, Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power. A very useful treatment of an undercovered institution, and one spanning many different eras of American history. Lots about early 20th century Nicaragua, plus this is the private investment firm that stayed private.
3. Marie Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. The subtitle is maybe misleading, because this is the book that corrects all the other books with subtitles like “How the Mongols Changed the World.” Yes they were somewhat globalized and also religiously tolerant, but Favereau fills in the rest of the details, and furthermore outlines the concept of “the horde” as a mode of governance. I am hardly an expert in this area, but this seems to be the recommendable book on the Mongols that is both conceptual but at the same time not overly simplified.
4. Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century: The Making of the World’s Greatest City. Is it so terrible to read another book about the world’s greatest city? The emphasis is on London as a city of war, turmoil, and crime, rather than triumphalism. It will be a shame when the English language of that era is no longer intelligible to us without a translation, because currently it is our very closest connection with a fundamentally different worldview.
Claire Lehmann of Quillette fame and others have edited the new Panics and Persecutions: 20 Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age.
Saturday assorted links
1. Suicide rates aren’t really up.
2. Eight (!) different ways to register for a vaccine in Montgomery County, Maryland.
3. Steven Johnson has a new project on the history of life expectancy gains. Book and TV show to follow.
4. When your spinach emails you something is wrong.
Arnold Kling’s Fantasy Intellectual Teams Draft
Here is his explanation, earlier post here, the point is to pick the undervalued people, not to pick your favorites or “the best” per se. In essence you are assembling a “team” of public intellectuals to…I am not sure what. But it might be fun! Here is my advice for picks:
1. Pick people who have had more than one significant job.
1b. Pick people who have had to manage something, broadly defined.
2. Pick religious thinkers.
3. Pick people who keep on getting better. Because indeed they will continue to keep on getting better. That one might sound trivial, but I suspect not so many people follow it.
4. Pick people who do not use the words “Democrat” and “Republican” too often.
5. Pick people who are curious about China.
6. Pick people who experiment with different media and outlets.
7. Pick people who have an interest in seeing through very long-term projects.
8. Don’t pick too many complainers and whiners.
Good luck!
Will tech companies be allowed to secede from Nevada?
I don’t pretend to know what this really means, but here is the report:
Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday.
The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services.
The measure to further economic development with the “alternative form of local government” has not yet been introduced in the Legislature.
Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address delivered Jan. 19. The plan would bring in new businesses at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies” without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that previously helped Nevada attract companies like Tesla Inc.
Sisolak named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in an area east of Reno after the legislation has passed…
The Governor’s Office of Economic Development would oversee applications for the zones, which would be limited to companies working in specific business areas including blockchain, autonomous technology, the Internet of Things, robotics, artificial intelligence, wireless, biometrics and renewable resource technology.
Zone requirements would include applicants owning at least 78 square miles (202 square kilometers) of undeveloped, uninhabited land within a single county but separate from any city, town or tax increment area. Companies would have at least $250 million and plans to invest an additional $1 billion in their zones over 10 years.
The zones would initially operate with the oversight of their location counties, but would eventually take over county duties and become independent governmental bodies.
The zones would have three-member supervisor boards with the same powers as county commissioners. The businesses would maintain significant control over board membership.
Here is the full article. I will keep you posted if anything comes of this. Addendum: Here is a legislative analysis of the bill, at some point these zones simply become counties? The underlying reality still is not clear to me.
And here is a different article: Joe Lonsdale Wants to Build a new Tech City Near Austin and a Tunnel Transportation System to Develop an Even Bigger Tech Hub.
Friday assorted links
1. Daron Acemoglu on Melissa Dell.
2. Jonathan Parker: “Economists who think the end of this recession will look like the last one aren’t looking at the data. Household balance sheets, state finances, income, all in better shape than pre-COVID & we haven’t even fixed the cause of recession.”
3. Samuel Hammond and Robert Orr make the case for a child allowance.
4. New and excellent visualizations about just how good each vaccine is, including with consideration of variants. And in defense of the Russian and Chinese vaccines (NYT).
5. Dan Wang podcast on China’s tech ascendancy.
6. The absence of hysteresis in U.S. economic data.
7. “If the Warriors sign a COVID-recovered player immediately, he could play this weekend.” Shorter quarantine.
Danish minimum wage data (it ain’t monopsony)
This paper estimates the long-run impact of youth minimum wages on youth employment by exploiting a large discontinuity in Danish minimum wage rules at age 18 and using monthly payroll records for the Danish population. We show theoretically how the discontinuity in the minimum wage may be exploited to estimate the casual effect of a change in the minimum wage of youth on their employment. On average, the hourly wage rate jumps up by 40 percent when individuals turn eighteen years old. Employment (extensive margin) falls by 33 percent and total labor input (extensive and intensive margin) decreases by around 45 percent, leaving the aggregate wage payment nearly unchanged. Data on flows into and out of employment show that the drop in employment is driven almost entirely by job loss when individuals turn 18 years old. We estimate that the relevant elasticity for evaluating the effect on youth employment of changes in their minimum wage is about -0.8.
Here is the paper by Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Daniel Reck, and Peer Ebbesen Skov. For Mississippi it might be worse.
I’ll suggest a general methodological approach here. I think that for Mississippi the chances for this kind of outcome are at least 0.8. Maybe for many of the richer states it would be 0.4? Based on those probabilities, I don’t want to do it, even if you think it is “more likely” that in most areas a higher minimum wage won’t destroy many jobs. What probabilities would be offered by those who defend a minimum wage hike?
Via Bob B.
Why don’t Americans take the law seriously any more?
Why do so many Americans today have such an unusual relationship with the law? Has the relative isolation of the pandemic made people more susceptible to crowd enthusiasms, and thus less respectful of authority? Or is it that their daily interactions with the internet are so frequent and intense that their emotions are governed by some new set of principles, and the law feels like a distant memory? Might some recent leaders have been setting bad examples when it comes to respecting the law?
2020 was also a year in which the U.S. murder rate rose significantly — by more than 50% in many cities — and reckless driving was much more common.
If the U.S. is ever going to get back to normal, we need to understand this problem. It’s not just about breaking the law. It’s that so many Americans don’t even seem to notice that the law applies to them, too.
Yes the column has riffs on various recent episodes of brazen, poorly thought out law-breaking — did you have to put that Capitol selfie on-line? That was then, this is now:
During the era of civil disobedience, Americans marched for civil rights or to protest the Vietnam War. Sometimes they broke the law deliberately, but there was a finely honed sense of the various lines. If your goal was to be arrested, you knew how to achieve it without being locked away for years. There were guides for how to behave and get arrested, and many arrests were orchestrated.
Martin Luther King Jr. was not shocked when he ended up in Birmingham jail, where he composed his famous letter. Getting arrested was a sign of status with other members of the movement, and multiple arrests meant that you understood the lines well enough to be spending most of your time out in the world, ready to get arrested yet again.
So what happened?
The anti-science presidency?
…recent Congressional Budget Office estimates suggest that with the already enacted $900 billion package — but without any new stimulus — the gap between actual and potential output will decline from about $50 billion a month at the beginning of the year to $20 billion a month at its end. The proposed stimulus will total in the neighborhood of $150 billion a month, even before consideration of any follow-on measures. That is at least three times the size of the output shortfall.
In other words, whereas the Obama stimulus was about half as large as the output shortfall, the proposed Biden stimulus is three times as large as the projected shortfall…
Looking at incremental deficits relative to GDP gaps is only one way of assessing the scale of a fiscal program. Another is to look at family income losses and compare them to benefit increases and tax credits. Wage and salary incomes are now running about $30 billion a month below pre-covid-19 forecasts, and this gap will likely decline during 2021. Yet increased benefit payments and tax credits in 2021 with proposed stimulus measures would total about $150 billion — a ratio of 5 to 1. The ratio is likely even greater for low-income individuals and families, given the targeting of stimulus measures…
If the stimulus proposal is enacted, Congress will have committed 15 percent of GDP with essentially no increase in public investment to address these challenges. After resolving the coronavirus crisis, how will political and economic space be found for the public investments that should be the nation’s highest priority?
Here is more from L. Summers. And just wondering — what is it you all think the multiplier is these days? Asking for a friend.
Thursday assorted links
1. One of these people is an abysmal reasoner. Kudos to you if you can avoid those more general fallacies across a broader range of settings.
3. James Brown concert Paris 1968, starts a bit slow keeps on getting better.
4. Thwarted markets in everything: “Smuggler found with nearly 1,000 cacti and succulents strapped to her body.” New Zealand, of course.
5. New Senate bill would punish Big Tech for not snitching, and would attempt to monitor communications.
6. The more successful vaccinating states are keeping it simple. I wonder if above-average use of digital technology correlates with the more negative results.
7. “We need to think about the real world of ZMP, not the imaginary world of neoclassical equilibrium.”
8. Minnesota budget forecast is for $641 million surplus. And Pearlstein tells the truth about the stimulus.
The anti-science presidency? (“don’t show your work!”)
President Joe Biden has moved swiftly to rev up the regulatory state by weakening oversight and effectively ending a reality-based assessment of the costs and benefits of federal regulation.
It may have gone largely unnoticed amid a flurry of executive orders Biden has signed since taking office less than two weeks ago, but a January 20 memo from the White House to the “heads of executive departments and agencies” outlines a regulatory framework that will empower federal bureaucrats to count unquantifiable “benefits” when weighing the potential impact of new regulations.
Specifically, Biden instructed those officials to revamp their regulatory review processes to “promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations.” The memo also states that the new regime “serves as a tool to affirmatively promote regulations.”
Here is more from Eric Boehm at Reason, via Scott Sumner.
The people were grumpy yesterday!
That is from Brad F., and from B.B.:
And from Moral Panic:
To be clear, no one is arguing for doing nothing, or questioning the value of automatic stabilizers. Most of all, it is to the credit of Summers that we are debating this at all.