Category: Uncategorized

2021 assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1.Why a longer dosing interval should be fine.  And the UK case for first dose prioritisation.

2. “We find that [Chinese] police stations are more likely to be located within walking distance of foreign religious sites (churches) than other sites (temples), even after controlling for the estimated population within 1km of each site and a set of key site attributes.”  Link here.

3. Some UK doctors will defy instructions on postponing the second shot (NYT).

4. Two new reports on greater transmissibility.

5. Andy Matuschak on how to write great prompts.

X-inefficiency is an underrated idea

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is Harvey Leibenstein from way back when:

Complete constraint concern is the same as maximization. Selective rationality usually involves less than complete constraint concern. Also, there is a tradeoff between less constraint concern and more internalized pressure that an individual feels as a consequence of less concern. Thus an individual’s personality will determine the combination of degree of constraint concern and pressure he or she would like to choose — one that he feels most comfortable with. In general the individual strikes a compromise between the way he would like to behave (very low constraint concern) and the way he feels he ought to behave, which depends on internalized standards for performance and external pressures. This implies that individuals do not necessarily or usually pursue gains to be obtained from an opportunity to a maximum degree or marshal information to an optimal degree; also, maximizing behavior is a special case in this system.

…Thus personality and context select, so to speak, the degree of rationality that will control an individual’s decision-making (and performing) behavior.

A competitive environment may not eliminate X-inefficiency for at least two reasons. First, “There may be a lack of supply of the right kind of entrepreneurs.”  Second, firms may engage in rent-sheltering activities instead.

Inertia and peer groups also were central ideas in Leibenstein’s theory, and you can see both factors at work today, or sometimes not at work, in our response to various emergencies.  You will note this framework may help explain why the responses of our national, state, and local governments can vary so much in quality, depending on the issue.

Leibenstein was still at Harvard when I studied there, but word was that he himself had “gone X-inefficiency” and decided to stop producing.  Here are Dean and Perlman with an appreciation of Leibenstein.  As for Leibenstein’s key piece on x-inefficiency: “Between 1969 and 1980, the article was the third most frequently cited in the Social Science Citation Index.”  Today it is virtually forgotten.

Welcome to another year of MR!

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Durlauf.

2. “Atmanand Shanbhag, chairman of Chariot World Tours, claimed to have “strong contacts” in the UK who have told him that the vaccine will be made available for foreigners by mid-March in 2021.”

3. To think that rescheduling second dose appointments is such a problem…(UK).  This is what the GPs are saying.

4. The sanity of Greg Ip (WSJ, on the checks).

5. The kanji culture that is Japan.

6. New data on the transmissibility of the new strain, not good news.  It seems to basically mean a much expanded pool of superspreaders?  And Zeynep on the new strain (Atlantic).

Blaming the states yes I do you should too

by  Tyler Cowen in

States and local public health officials have warned for months that they would need more than $8 billion in additional funding to stand up the infrastructure needed to administer vaccines. The Trump administration instead provided states $340 million in funding to prepare for vaccinations. Congressional lawmakers also balked for months at appropriating additional funding for vaccine distribution, although the coronavirus stimulus package signed by President Trump on Sunday included $8 billion in funding for that effort.

That is from a recent StatNews article.  Now I gladly would have expanded the federal contribution, by several times over if need be.  But people, let us put this in perspective.  First, the states got the $8 billion they were asking for.  Yes, the delay is very very bad, but let’s say they had come up with $8 billion on their own several months ago.

Total state and local spending is about $3.7 trillion, $2.3 trillion from the states alone.  $8 billion is how much of that?

About one-third of one percent.

Our states cannot come up with one third of one percent of their budgets to meet the greatest emergency in my lifetime?

This has been a pandemic of outrages, but this undercovered issue is one of the very largest of those outrages.  Heaven forbid that states should have to take a sliver of their budget away from deserving recipients.  To so many people this is simply unthinkable, and I mean that word in a very literal sense.

(And yes I do know this year is especially tight on state budgets, etc.  But even if those budgets were cut to a third of their normal level — hardly the case — that is still only one percent of state budgets.)

The other outrage is how few people have been willing to criticize the states for not having done better fiscal planning here.  You will find many deserved criticisms of Trump on this, but there is more than one line of defense, or at least there is supposed to be.  So yes, you should be mad at the states.

Jeff Holmes does a CWT with Tyler

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the summary:

On this special year-in-review episode, producer Jeff Holmes sat down with Tyler to talk about the most popular — and most underrated — episodes, Tyler’s personal highlight of the year, how well state capacity libertarianism has fared, a new food rule for ordering well during the pandemic, how his production function changed this year, why he got sick of pickles, when he thinks the next face-to-face recording will be, the first thing he’ll do post vaccine, an update on his next book, and more.

Here is the full dialogue, with audio and transcript, here is one short excerpt:

I also tell you what I thought of the guests we had on for the year, and also which episode had the most downloads.  Self-recommended.

And if you have enjoyed this year in Conversations, please consider donating here before the end of the year.  Thank you!

Single cell learning seems to be real

by  Tyler Cowen in

The question of whether single cells can learn led to much debate in the early 20th century. The view prevailed that they were capable of non-associative learning but not of associative learning, such as Pavlovian conditioning. Experiments indicating the contrary were considered either non-reproducible or subject to more acceptable interpretations. Recent developments suggest that the time is right to reconsider this consensus. We exhume the experiments of Beatrice Gelber on Pavlovian conditioning in the ciliate Paramecium aurelia, and suggest that criticisms of her findings can now be reinterpreted. Gelber was a remarkable scientist whose absence from the historical record testifies to the prevailing orthodoxy that single cells cannot learn. Her work, and more recent studies, suggest that such learning may be evolutionarily more widespread and fundamental to life than previously thought and we discuss the implications for different aspects of biology.

That is from a new paper by Samuel J. Gershman, Petra E. M. Balbi, C. Randy Gallistel, and Jeremy Gunawarden, of Harvard, MIT, and Rutgers.

Via the excellent Gaurav Venkataraman (an EV winner who did recent important work in this area).

The clock is ticking…

by  Tyler Cowen

President Trump’s signature Sunday on the $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief and government funding bill started a 180 day countdown for the Pentagon and spy agencies to say what they know about UFOs.

Here is a bit more information.  I don’t expect anything revelatory, simply confirmation that the current data truly are puzzling, and are considered puzzling by the most serious observers.

Sorry Alex!  But if we are going to spend $2.3 trillion, at least we will get something in return.  Via Jackson.

*The Trouble with Tribbles*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, another Star Trek episode.  This one was striking for its explicit Malthusianism (!).  The tribbles increase “arithmetically,” to use Malthus’s term — Spock notes that one tribble (bisexually) breeds on average ten tribbles a mere twelve hours later.  And what is it that the tribbles end up doing?  Trying to eat away a fixed supply of grain.  Yes, grain.  Might the tribbles exercise Malthusian moral restraint by opting for a later age of marriage and reproduction?  No, they are born pregnant.  Again, as Malthus suggests, a plague (poisoning) intervenes.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Why companies are not interested in single dose trials (NB: there is a more radical approach available here).

2. By Feb.1, 90% of all UK cases will be of the more infectious strain. But not yet significant in the United States.  And stability in Denmark continues.  And a good overview thread.

3. The excellent Dana Gioia on Ray Bradbury.

4. Japan is building wooden satellites to cut space junk.

5. Bad news from South Africa about the new Covid strain.

6. A new population of blue whales is discovered (NYT).

7. Some drone deregulation has arrived.

*The Way We Were* (with broad spoilers)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Oddly, I had never seen this 1973 movie before, and found a number of points noteworthy.  It is a more effective critique of the “white male patriarchy” than today’s performative yelpings, and makes the latter look, if anything, both hysterical and understudied.  And imagine a two hour movie which consists of little more than having two major stars — Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford — talk to each other.  I miss this in more recent Hollywood cinema.  And remember when movies generated hit songs?  By today’s standards, the sexual relationship between the two starts with her raping him while he is drunk (with implicit commentary on the famous bedroom scene from “It Happened One Night.”)  Circa 1973, the main sympathetic character (Streisand) could be shown as a fan of Lenin and Stalin (and Roosevelt) without anyone being too offended.  Nor does anyone mind that she smokes, drinks (more than a sip), and gets into scuffles while pregnant.  The core substantive takeaway from the plot seems to be “Jewish people should marry their own,” which is not the brand of segregationism that has remained popular today.

As stated, this movie for me was a first-time watch rather than a rewatch, but still it felt like a rewatch, as the most interesting elements were all a look into the past.  The more our world moves away from its previous moorings, the more “what to rewatch” will become an important skill.  Or what to reread, or what to listen to again.  This topic and this skill is underdiscussed.  When it comes to the past, increasingly “the uncensored” is more interesting than “high quality” per se.

Overall this movie is more interesting now than it was at the time of its release, so I guess I am glad I waited.  Here is an OK but quite cliched 1973 review of the film.  And here is Ebert from 1973.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Fund people not projects.

2. Vitalik year end notes from Singapore.  Outside of crypto, Vitalik is perhaps the most underrated thinker, period.

3. What the Brexit trade deal does.

4. Megan McArdle on dangerous group think in the public health establishment: “…the discussion of whether to prioritize essential workers was anything but robust. The committee left only 10 minutes for it, during which not one of those 14 intelligent and dedicated health professionals suggested adopting the plan that kills the fewest people. Nor did anyone run out of time to make that point. Ten minutes was actually a little too much for what turned out to be a pro forma opportunity to get on the record endorsing the plan, and particularly its emphasis on racial and economic equity in health care.”

5. “…I assign a 90% probability to at least one of the new variants being >30% more transmissible“

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, and Kevin Coldiron, The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis.  If you are looking for the most current version of Austrian Business Cycle theory, this is it.  Doesn’t mean it is right.

2. Abigail Tucker, Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct.  These days this science has an inevitably politically incorrect feel, in any case this is a good book for anyone contemplating or experiencing motherhood, or otherwise tied up in that whole set of issues.  That includes social scientists, too.

3. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.  A better book than it subtitle indicates, it has very good treatments of the role of Humphry Davy in British chemistry, William and Caroline Herschel, and the overall import of Joseph Banks for many decades, among other related topics.

4. Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790.  This tome offers 780 pp. about the Enlightenment, how unhappy can you be?  This book is a well-done introduction, yet perhaps for my knowledge level it spends too much time regurgitating general truths.  I am happy to recommend it to people less interested than I am in reading the primary sources.

I have read the first one hundred pages of Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, a lengthy book due out in April, and my physical review copy just arrived.

I have not had time to read Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, but it is of possible interest.

I have not had time to read Rachel Holmes’s Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel, about the suffragette movement and one of its leaders, but its 840 pp. would appear to be a major achievement with no comparable competitor.