Category: Uncategorized
Monday assorted links
1. Coronavirus protective shield markets in everything.
2. Does election forecasting itself lower turnout?
3. Ebola spread less under the local chiefs.
4. How much of world gdp has the coronavirus reduced?
5. Dreher interviews Douthat on decadence and different forms of pessimism.
6. Lots of younger Filipino crew members on Diamond Princess also infected.
A coronavirus conundrum, on the percentage of asymptomatic cases
New reports suggest that the coronavirus has been spreading in Washington state for at least six weeks, infecting hundreds or maybe more. At the same time, other reports suggest a high “R0 value,” sometimes 3 or more, reflecting that the coronavirus is highly contagious and it spreads very quickly.
It is then possible to have hundreds of cases in Washington state if most cases are asymptomatic, or with only slight symptoms. Yet when we look at the experiences of the coronavirus cruise ships, it seems a reasonable number of cases have symptoms of distress. For instance, on the Diamond Princess six people died and only about half are listed as having the virus but asymptomatic (see the previous link on the rhs). So many others seem to have reported being sick or requiring treatment.
So what gives? I see a few options, none of them obviously convincing:
1. People on the cruise ship were hit especially hard.
2. Significantly different strains of the virus are circulating (all of the sequence that has been done seems to run counter to this).
3. Washington state local public health infrastructure has in fact been overwhelmed as of late, we just thought it was all a very bad flu season.
4. Many of the people on the cruise ship who showed symptoms “thought they were supposed to” but were not actually so sick.
5. Most of the detected cases on the cruise ship in fact were asymptomatic, but the media has been misreporting the extent of actual illness among the passengers.
Any other suggestions? It is quite likely the cruise ship people are older than usual, but will that make up for the entire difference? People, what do you think is going on here?
Please restrict your comments to attempting to resolve this particular issue, as you can put your more general coronavirus observations on other posts.
Why have stock markets been falling so much?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, note first of all that the virus is a kind of referendum on global response capabilities, and so far we have been failing (with Singapore as a possible exception). Here is another bit:
…investors now have a better sense of what other investors think about risk. Before Covid-19, investors did not have much direct information about what other investors thought about the robustness of the global economy. Their expectations were not seriously being tested.
When a new shock to the system comes along, however, everyone gets to observe everyone else’s selling behavior. And investors have learned that the faith of their fellow investors is not as strong as they had thought. That raises the risk premium on holding stocks, and in turn causes share prices to fall more. Given how much this pandemic is a truly new event, and that the process of trading itself generates information about the forecasts of other investors, price volatility can be expected to continue.
And this:
The stock market is scared by the fact that it took so long for the stock market to be scared.
Developing…
Sunday assorted links
Öffentlichebibliotheksumbaurenovierungssammlungsbeschränkungsangst
My neologism for: The act of seeing a public library under renovation/expansion, and rightfully fearing that upon reopening the book collection will be smaller rather than larger.
This time it is Mary Riley Styles Library in Falls Church City.
Emergent Ventures winners, seventh cohort
Nicholas Whitaker of Brown, general career development grant in the area of Progress Studies.
Coleman Hughes, travel and career development grant.
Michael T. Foster, career development grant to study machine learning to predict which politicians will succeed and advance their careers.
Evan Horowitz, to start the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts, to impose greater rationality on policy discussions at the state level.
John Strider, a Progress Studies grant on how to reinvent the integrated corporate research lab.
Dryden Brown, to help build institutions and a financial center in Ghana, through his company Bluebook Cities.
Adaobi Adibe, to restructure credentialing, and build infrastructure for a more meritocratic world, helping workers create property rights in the evaluation of their own talent.
Shrirang Karandikar, and here (corrected link), to support an Indian project to get the kits to measure and understand local pollution.
Jassi Pannu, medical student at Stanford, to study best policy responses to pandemics.
Vasco Queirós, for his work on a Twitter browser app for superior threading and on-line communication.
Saturday assorted pandemic links
Age and high-growth entrepreneurship
Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. Integrating administrative data on firms, workers, and owners, we study start-ups systematically in the United States and find that successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young. The mean age at founding for the 1-in-1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0. The findings are similar when considering high-technology sectors, entrepreneurial hubs, and successful firm exits. Prior experience in the specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success. These findings strongly reject common hypotheses that emphasize youth as a key trait of successful entrepreneurs.
That is from a newly published AER paper by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda.
Friday assorted links
1. How Cuba manipulates infant mortality and life expectancy statistics.
2. “Drivers of higher cost cars were less likely to yield to pedestrians at a midblock crosswalk.” And: “Of 461 cars, 27.98% yielded to pedestrians. Cars yielded more frequently for females (31.33%) and whites (31.17%) compared to males (24.06%) and non-whites (24.78%). Cost of car was a significant predictor of driver yielding (OR = 0.97; p = 0.0307); odds of yielding decreased 3% per $1000 increase.”
3. New biosciences stuff you can buy on-line.
4. Path-dependence in 18th century jury decisions?
5. Why are women running more and running faster? (NYT) “He also cited the Shalane Flanagan Effect, noting how women, in particular, are pulling one another up to new levels of sub-elite running through communities found both online and in real life.” Quite an interesting thesis.
6. How Chinese bookstores are surviving the coronavirus (awesome photos too).
Contagion Themes
Good post from Nicholas Bagley in 2016 at the Incidental Economist.
Every disease provokes its own unique dread and its own complex public reaction, but themes recurred across outbreaks.
- Governments are typically unprepared, disorganized, and resistant to taking steps necessary to contain infectious diseases, especially in their early phases.
- Local, state, federal, and global governing bodies are apt to point fingers at one another over who’s responsible for taking action. Clear lines of authority are lacking.
- Calibrating the right governmental response is devilishly hard. Do too much and you squander public trust (Swine flu), do too little and people die unnecessarily (AIDS).
- Public officials are reluctant to publicize infections for fear of devastating the economy.
- Doctors rarely have good treatment options. Nursing care is often what’s needed most. Medical professionals of all kinds work themselves to the bone in the face of extraordinary danger.
- In the absence of an effective treatment, the public will reach for unscientific remedies.
- No matter what the route of transmission or the effectiveness of quarantine, there’s a desire to physically separate infected people.
- Victims of the disease are often thought to deserve the affliction, especially when those victims are mainly from marginalized groups.
- We plan, to the extent we plan at all, for the last pandemic. We don’t do enough to plan for the next one.
- Historical memory is short. When diseases fall from the headlines, the public forgets and preparation falters.
Not every one of those themes was present for every disease; the doughboys who died of the Spanish flu, for example, were not thought to deserve their fate. But the themes were persistent enough over time to establish a pattern.
The books we assigned were outstanding. If you want to learn about the intersection of infectious disease, history, and public health, you could do worse than to start with them:
- Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866.
- Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918.
- David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story.
- Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On.
- Thomas Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS.
- David Quammen, Ebola: A Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus.
- Laurie Garrett, Ebola’s Lessons: How the WHO Mishandled the Crisis.
How has my thinking on prizes vs. grants evolved?
Chris, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
I’ve been turning to your insights on prizes vs. grants over the years. Your Google talk from 2007 is without question the best discussion I’ve found of their respective merits…I was wondering if your thinking on prizes vs. grants has evolved, and in particular [TC has added the numbers here]:
1. In the Google talk, you talked about an equilibrium in which there would be a growing ecosystem of big prizes complementing one another. I’m not sure it has turned out this way. Do you agree, and what happened? Did the “failure” of some high profile prizes (e.g. the Google Lunar XPrize) dampen down the enthusiasm?
2. More generally, there seemed to be an expectation in the 2000s and early 2010s that prizes would take off and become a more significant feature of the R&D funding landscape. Again, I don’t think that has really happened. What explains that?
3. Looking specifically at government funding of R&D, do you think there is an equilibrium in which grants can coexist with prizes? Or do grants squeeze out prizes through some form of adverse selection (the best researchers opting for grants over prizes)?
4. How important do you think public choice reasons are for us being in a grant-dominated equilibrium? It seems that the science sector has done a great job of positioning itself as something other than an interest group, with its interests squarely aligned with the public good. (Even suggesting that the science sector is also an interest group seems slightly heretical. It’s interesting that Dominic Cummings, for all his radicalism, seems to see little need for any reform of the science/research ecosystem beyond ARPA).
First a general remark: I now see the current scientific (and cultural) establishment as having more implicit prizes than I used to realize. In fact, getting a grant is one of the biggest prizes you can receive, if the grant is sufficiently prestigious. By an “implicit prizes,” I mean a prize where the target achievement is not quite spelled out, but if “we” (however defined) judge you to have achieved enough, we will pour grants, status, and high quality social networks into your lap. For instance, Alex and I have received significant “prizes” for writing MR, although none of those prizes have names or bring explicit public recognition, as opposed to general recognition. We have in contrast never received a grant to write MR, so are prizes really so under-provided?
So my current thinking is a bit less “grants vs. prizes,” and somewhat more “implicit prizes vs. explicit prizes, each combined with grants to varying degrees.” Implicit prizes are more flexible, but they also are easier to cheat with, since the standard of achievement is never quite clear. Implicit prizes also are much more valuable to people who can use, build, and exploit their social networks, and of course that is not everyone (but shouldn’t we be giving more prizes to those people?). Implicit prizes also can be revoked through subsequent loss of status. Implicit prizes are more likely “granted” by the hands of social networks rather than judging panels, all of those features being both cost and benefit.
Now to the specific points:
1. As the venture capital ecosystem grows, and as the value of publicity rises (it is easier to monetize scientific and other sources of fame), and there are more “influencers in the broad sense,” there are more implicit prizes to be had. And did the Lunar XPrize fail? If an end is not worth accomplishing, a prize is one way to find that out.
2. In addition to my point about the proliferation of implicit prizes, the scientific, academic, and political communities are far too conservative in the literal sense of that word. How many top schools experiment with different tenure procedures? Different ways of running a department? It is sad how difficult it is to experiment with changes in academia and science, whether the topic be prizes or not.
3. The best researchers get both grants and prizes (one hopes).
By the way, here is a recent piece on the empirics of prizes, mostly positive results.
The Russo-Turkish Wars
Russo-Turkish wars, series of wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the 17th–19th century. The wars reflected the decline of the Ottoman Empire and resulted in the gradual southward extension of Russia’s frontier and influence into Ottoman territory. The wars took place in 1676–81, 1687, 1689, 1695–96, 1710–12 (part of the Great Northern War), 1735–39, 1768–74, 1787–91, 1806–12, 1828–29, 1853–56 (the Crimean War), and 1877–78. As a result of these wars, Russia was able to extend its European frontiers southward to the Black Sea, southwestward to the Prut River, and south of the Caucasus Mountains in Asia.
That is from the Encyclopedia Britannica, here is Wikipedia on the same.
Thursday assorted links
1. Various Magnus Carlsen updates.
2. Mark Koyama reviews Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome.
4. Pandemics and the advantages of globalization. And “A troop of special Chinese ducks is waiting to be deployed to neighbouring Pakistan to fight a swarm of crop-eating pests that threaten regional food security.”
5. If you lose Taiwan, you lose Japan.
6. What the Singaporean PM said about coronavirus. And illiquid Hypermind betting market in coronavirus.
Wednesday assorted links
3. “…colleges that ultimately boost earnings also tend to boost persistence, BA completion, and STEM degrees along the way.” Lots more in that paper.
4. “Singapore Airlines is the first major carrier to serve produce harvested just hours before a flight.”
5. I wish to thank and praise my Lubbock hosts, the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech.
6. 2006 study of the possible economic impact of avian flu. Possibly 4.25% of gdp.
Addendum, from the comments, from Aleh:
You don’t need to read the study-abroad paper to realize that it’s implausible. 35% less likely to receive an interview! That would be approaching the impact that’s been found for declaring a criminal record. And it it has to be in Europe specifically, and one year specifically!
Ok, the paper itself. Overall, study abroad per se has no effect. So they slice and dice by location, length, and whether it is a call-back of an interview request, and use a significance level of 0.1, and then – as you’d expect – a couple of weak “findings” appear. A year of Europe seems VERY bad (and yet two weeks in Europe, or any time in Asia, actually improves the raw numbers; that’s the theory there?). Going to Asia doesn’t show a statistically significant change in your chance of getting a callback, unless it’s a callback specifically asking for an interview – when it does help so.
The data here is under-powered and reaches to find any results (slicing and dicing, 0.1 threshold). The “statistical significance filter” works in such cases to ensure that when does one does find a statistically significant result, it will be be a massively overstated – if true at all. A year in Europe doesn’t just have the opposite sign effect than any other experience; it has an absolutely catastrophic effect (-35%). Just no.
This is bad statistics and (not necessarily the authors’ fault) thoughtless promotion of almost a self-evidently implausible claim. If there’s anything to be learned or honestly reported here, it’s the top level finding: that a reasonably controlled experiment found essentially no difference either way by adding study-abroad experience to your resume.
My Conversation with Garett Jones
Here is the transcript and audio, here is part of the opening summary:
Garett joined Tyler to discuss his book 10% Less Democracy, including why America shouldn’t be run by bondholders, what single reform would most effectively achieve more limited democracy, how markets shape cognitive skills, the three important P’s of the repeated prisoner’s dilemma, why French cuisine is still underrated, Buchanan vs. Tullock, Larry David vs. Seinfeld, the biggest mistake in Twitter macroeconomics, the biggest challenges facing the Mormon church, what studying to be a sommelier taught him about economics, the Garett Jones vision of America, and more.
Here is one bit:
COWEN: But let’s say it’s the early 1990s. Eastern European countries are suddenly becoming free, and they ask you, “Garett, what electoral system should we have?” What do you say?
JONES: What I really would go for is presidential systems, if you can handle it, something like a first-past-the-post system, where those people elected from local districts focused on local problems — which have less of a free-rider problem involved — go up to the parliament and actually argue their case. The presidential element is less important than the parliamentary idea of the single-district voting. I tend to think that creates more accountability on the part of the government.
And more:
COWEN: For the United States, what is the most effective way, in your view, that you would want us to have 10 percent less democracy? What’s the one thing you would change?
JONES: I would change the House of Representatives to a six-year term. I picked that because it’s not outside the range of plausibility, and because I think people would instantly understand what it accomplishes — not because it has the highest payoff, but because it balances payoff with plausibility in a democracy.
And on boosting IQ:
COWEN: But what’s the key environmental lever? Whatever Ireland did [to have induced an IQ rise], it’s not that people were starving, right? That we understand.
JONES: No, true.
COWEN: So why don’t we do more of whatever they did, whatever was done to the East Germans, everywhere?
JONES: Exactly.
COWEN: But what is that lever? Why don’t we know?
JONES: I would say that thing is the thing we call capitalism.
COWEN: Capitalism is a big, huge thing. Not all of capitalism makes us smarter.
JONES: Yeah, that’s the thing — figuring out which things within capitalism — what is it about living in a free society with competitive markets where, at least in our youth and middle age, we feel a need to sell ourselves as valuable creators. There’s something about that that probably is what’s most valuable for boosting cognitive skills. It’s a sort of demand-side desire to try to use our minds in socially productive ways. And I think in communism, we can —
COWEN: So marketing makes us smarter?
JONES: That’s what I would say, yeah.
There is much more at the link, an excellent Conversation. Here you can order Garett’s book 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust the Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. You can read the introduction to the book on-line.