Category: Uncategorized
Tuesday assorted links
1. Somewhat good news on the anti-inflammatory front.
2. Anna Netrebko sings Mussorgsky’s The Nursery.
3. Long report on the new virus strain (“not yet in Houston”), yet no one is saying we need to hurry up. And a further update.
4. Spectacular Ice Age rock paintings found in Colombian rainforest.
5. Yves Nat Beethoven piano sonatas now complete on YouTube. Old-fashioned sound and clunky in some ways, but also some of the most profound Beethoven to have been recorded. It is the “direct, frank, bring you right to tears” approach.
School Closures During the 1918 Flu Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited interest in responses to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, the last comparable U.S. public health emergency. During both pandemics, many state and local governments made the controversial decision to close schools. We study the short- and long-run effects of 1918-19 pandemic-related school closures on children. We find precise null effects of school closures in 1918 on school attendance in 1919-20 using newly collected data on the exact timing of school closures for 168 cities in 1918-19. Linking affected children to their adult outcomes in the 1940 census, we also find precise null effects of school closures on adult educational attainment, wage income, non-wage income, and hours worked in 1940. Our results are not inconsistent with an emerging literature that finds negative short-run effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning. The situation in 1918 was starkly different from today: (1) schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average, (2) the 1918 virus was much deadlier to young adults and children, boosting absenteeism even in schools that stayed open, and (3) the lack of effective remote learning platforms in 1918 may have reduced the scope for school closures to increase socioeconomic inequality.
That is from a new paper by Philipp Ager, Katherine Eriksson, Ezra Karger, Peter Nencka, and Melissa A. Thompson. This is very good and important work, though you will find some Denkfehler in the second half of the abstract, namely confusing short- and long-run (is it so appalling to consider that “school” isn’t always “useful learning” over a 20-year time horizon?) and confusing inequality with absolute performance. Those are simple points people, you are being misled by your ideology.
Classic Star Trek and rape (with spoilers)
With so few significant new movie releases to follow, I have taken to some strange pasttimes, including the viewing of old classic Star Trek episodes. I was struck by two obscure episodes in particular. One is Who Mourns for Adonais?, and the other is Metamorphosis, both from early in the second (and best) season.
In Adonais, a crazed being, who is in fact the ancient Greek God Apollo, seizes control of the ship and of a landing party, consisting of Kirk and a few others, including a beautiful Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas. In due time Apollo “takes” her, with her degree of actual compliance being highly uncertain (the whole ship and landing party are under constant threat of death). Kirk and the others encourage her to court him further, and then to reject him, to weaken his spirits, which leads to his eventual loss of control. It is Carolyn’s cleverness that saves them, she has been through emotional hell, and then they spurn and forget her while returning to the ship.
I am very familiar with “Golden age” science fiction and how badly it treated women, not to mention classic Star Trek’s own reputation. Nonetheless watching this episode it struck me, as a 2020 viewer, that the main message is how unaware high-achieving men are of the sexual travails of coerced women, most of all the coerced women they so often rely upon. Really.
In Metamorphosis, Kirk is carrying a lovely female ambassador on a trip, and they are waylaid by a strange being on a strange planet. I’ll spare you the whole story, but the ambassador ends up meeting a male castaway she dislikes, an alien takes over the body and partly the mind of the ambassador, and the combined alien/ambassador decides to marry the castaway so they can live happily ever after on the strange planet (really). The ambassador never would have chosen any of that on her own, and it seems to me this counts as a lifetime of rape for her, not to mention imprisonment, exile, and having to share one’s life and thoughts with a deeply alien being.
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are just fine with this! Admittedly, given the powers of the alien, they didn’t have much choice, but they are downright jolly — from Wikipedia: “When McCoy asks who will complete Nancy Hedford’s [ambassadorial] mission, Kirk shrugs and says, “I’m sure the Federation can find another woman, somewhere, who’ll stop that war.””
Brutal! The collateral damage on the distaff side deserves not a single mention or act of mourning, though otherwise Kirk will risk the whole ship to save the life of Bones or Spock or Scottie.
Again, I went away from the whole episode feeling this was a progressive rather than repugnant take on the whole narrative.
Perhaps it is I who am crazy, but I am beginning to think that “The Revisionist Sexual History of Classic Star Trek” remains to be written.
And maybe you prefer TNG, or some other later Star Trek version, but I tell you the 1967-69 version is far less “censored” and for that reason much more interesting to rewatch.
Monday assorted links
1. Steve Kirsch on current Covid-19 treatments. He is attempting to maximize expected value, coming from me that is praise.
2. Ezra Vogel has passed away.
4. Bob Dylan on Paul McCartney.
5. “Harvard University scientists plan to fly a test balloon above Sweden next year to help advance research into dimming sunlight to cool the Earth, alarming environmentalists opposed to solar geoengineering.” Link here.
6. Insights on carbon pricing (which many overrate).
Les priorités
F.D.A. Wants to Stop Regulating French Dressing
The federal agency said it was seeking to revoke its definition for the carrot-colored dressing, effectively erasing a government-required list of ingredients at the request of an industry group…the federal government has shown great interest in the humble dressing, painstakingly regulating since 1950 the ingredients that it must contain and revising the rules at least five times since then…
The lengthy and legalistic regulations for French dressing require that it contain vegetable oil and an acid, like vinegar or lemon or lime juice. It also lists other ingredients that are acceptable but not required, such as salt, spices and tomato paste.
Ahem. Here is the full NYT story.
p.s. It is disgusting, and it is not even French.
Sunday assorted links
1. Ross D. on when you can’t just trust the science (NYT).
2. Markets in everything: Covid-19 Christmas sweater that ensures social distancing – it flashes and sounds alarm when people get too close.
3. “Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump’s policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus’s death toll and rate the president’s performance even more highly.” (TC: not unexpected to me…and a lesson in risk communication for the Twitter yappers…you’ve made the problem worse.)
4. Microsoft analysis of the recent hacking developments.
The new Covid strain and its policy implications
Here is one account, please note this investigation is in its early days:
“An increase in R of 0.4 or greater is extremely bad news. During the national lockdown in November the best we could achieve was an R value of somewhere between 0.8 and 1.0 around the UK,” said Prof Hunter. “What this means is that even if we went back to the lockdown it would still not be enough to bring the R value down to less than 1.0.”
Note also it is very likely the new mutation already has spread well beyond the UK. And with compounding, an R increase of 0.4 is really bad as time passes.
If this all is true, what are the policy implications? First, a lockdown with no pending vaccine will only postpone problems, a’ la the herd immunity theorists.
Second, we do have vaccines and so in any plausible model faster viral spread implies a faster timetable for vaccine approval and distribution. And it implies we should have been faster to begin with.
If you used to say “we were just slow enough,” you now have to revise that opinion and believe that greater speed is called for, both prospectively and looking backwards.
In any plausible model.
If Godzilla is faster than you had thought, you need to start running away sooner. And you needed to have started running away sooner. In any plausible model.
In any plausible model.
Yet somehow I do not expect the rooftops to be so crowded over the next few days.
Paul McCartney as management study
I am listening to McCartney III, the new Paul album, recorded at age 78 with Paul playing all of the instruments and doing all of the production at home. There is no “Hey Jude” on here, but it is pretty good and given the broader context it is remarkable. I recently linked to an Ian Leslie post on 64 reasons why Paul is underrated, but I don’t think he comes close to the reality.
Paul has been writing songs and performing since 1956, with no real breaks. Perhaps he has written more hit songs than anyone else. He brought the innovations of Cage and Stockhausen into popular music, despite having no musical education and growing up in the Liverpool dumps. His second act, Wings, sold more records in its time than the Beatles did. On a lark he decided to learn techno/EDM and put out five perfectly credible albums in that area. He decided to learn how to compose classical music, and after some initial missteps his Ecce Cor Meum is perhaps the finest British choral work in a generation, worthy of say Britten or Nicholas Maw. And that is from a guy who can’t really read music. He has learned how to play most of the major musical instruments, typically well. He can compose and play and perform in virtually every musical genre, including heavy metal, blues, music hall, country and western, gospel, show tunes, ballads, rockers, Latin music, pastiche, psychedelia, electronic music, Devo-style robot-pop, drone, lounge, reggae, and more and more and more.
His vocal range once spanned over four octaves, he is sometimes considered the greatest bass player in the history of rock and roll, and he was the first popular musician to truly master the recording studio, again with zero initial technical or musical education of any sort.
He is perhaps the quickest learner the music world ever has seen.
He has collaborated with John Lennon, George Harrison, George Martin, Ravi Shankar, Jimmy McCullough, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Carl Perkins, Kiri Te Kanawa, David Gilmour, Kanye West, Rihanna, and numerous others. He wrote the best theme song for any James Bond movie. He was the workaholic of the Beatles. He was one of the most influential individuals worldwide, including behind the Iron Curtain, in the 1960s and sometimes beyond.
He was a very keen businessman in buying up the rights to music IP at just the right time, making him a billionaire.
He is OK enough as a painter, has been an effective propagandist for vegetarianism, active in numerous charities, and has put out two (?) children’s books, which I strongly doubt are ghostwritten. He has been very active as a father in raising five children, while touring regularly, often intensely. He had planned to be touring this summer at age 78, with a world class show spanning two and a half hours with Paul taking no break or even letting up (I saw the previous tour).
There is no backward-bending supply curve for this one.
If you are looking to study careers, Paul McCartney’s career is one of the very best and most instructive.
Saturday assorted links
1. Computer science rejects computer science (link corrected).
2. A substantive management/corporate culture piece on the L.A. Clippers.
3. A new paper from Treasury suggesting the job effects of PPP loans were significant, WSJ Op-Ed version here.
4. New strain in South Africa? Probably a red herring, but not entirely reassuring to read that it affects young people more. Boris Johnson is saying that the new strain in the UK is 70% more contagious (whatever that means). That too may be speculative, more information here. The general point is you wish to minimize the “reservoir” for such mutations, and that is another reason to want to keep cases low.
6. “1947: 5,000,000 NYC residents were vaccinated for small pox IN TWO WEEKS”
That was then, this is now
Many professors at universities routinely quizzed their students too, although not as commonly as faculty at smaller colleges did. [In 1910]…a questionnaire of University of Chicago faculty revealed that 25 of 122 replying professors gave some kind of quiz each day; 31 gave them each week, and 10 others did so every other week. The following year, in 1911, a survey of 188 economics professors around the country showed that 171 of them employed “oral quizzes” in class; only 60 of them used written tests. Surveying undergraduates alongside faculty, the 1910 University of Chicago survey found that four of five students favored written tests over oral ones.
That is from Jonathan Zimmerman’s quite interesting The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.
Friday assorted links
2. Don Boudreaux open letter to me. Here is my original post, and here is AIER being useful. If the GBD had been this second link here, I would be wrong. But it wasn’t.
3. Chinese to vaccinate 50 million for lunar new year.
4. Model and evidence for the IPO market being efficient.
5. Why Iger is a bad pick for ambassador to China.
6. Whether you agree or not, the method and approach of the government/CDC here on vaccine allocation are so low quality as to almost defy belief. Again, whether or not you are convinced by Matt Yglesias, his simple Substack on this same question did a better job (and at a profit, presumably!). A useful reminder for those of you who “blame the CDC problems on Trump.” Here is related NYT coverage. And never forget Glazer. Why do we not prioritize men, who are at higher risk? And from “an expert in ethics.”
8. “Atlantic City has launched an auction in which the winner will get to virtually push the button that starts the long-anticipated implosion of the former Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino building.” Link here.
That was then, this is now, Malthus and Ireland edition
In the present wreck of empires, and under the extinction of all international law, no small state can hope to maintain its independence. Great Britain and Ireland, from their situation, their language, and their mutual necessities, seem naturally destined to support each other’s strength, and supply each other’s wants; and we are quite convinced, that nothing but extreme misgovernment can separate them. Heavy indeed, then, will be the responsibility of those men, under who administration, or by whose previous unconciliatory measures such a separation is effected — whether the immediate cause of it be foreign conquest, or internal commotion.
That is Thomas Robert Malthus, “On the State of Ireland (II), published in the Edinburgh Review in 1809. It made perfect sense back then — and today — and yet for entirely different and indeed almost opposite reasons.
Covid-19 is also not so great for young people
Young adults are dying at historic rates. In research published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, we found that among U.S. adults ages 25 to 44, from March through the end of July, there were almost 12,000 more deaths than were expected based on historical norms.
In fact, July appears to have been the deadliest month among this age group in modern American history. Over the past 20 years, an average of 11,000 young American adults died each July. This year that number swelled to over 16,000.
The trends continued this fall. Based on prior trends, around 154,000 in this demographic had been projected to die in 2020. We surpassed that total in mid-November. Even if death rates suddenly return to normal in December — and we know they have not — we would anticipate well over 170,000 deaths among U.S. adults in this demographic by the end of 2020.
That is from Jeremy Samuel Faust, Harlan M. Krumholz and at the NYT. To be clear, this is not the main problem, but it is not a nothingburger either. 3,656 deaths per day right now, no matter what the ages how many other American catastrophes can rival that? #1 cause of death in the country right now, bar none.
Thursday assorted links
1. Those new service sector jobs: death witnesses (Canada).
2. The culture that is Dodge City.
3. An NPR segment with Cardiff Garcia and me: after the Great Stagnation ends, what will be overrated and underrated?
4. Will there be a tobacco vaccine?
Are IPO price pops signs of market irrationality?
Maybe not, or so I argue in my latest Bloomberg column. As you may know, the first day price pops for Airbnb and Doordash were considerable, Airbnb more than doubling in its first day of trading: Here is one excerpt:
On IPO day, each prospective buyer is wondering what the shares will be worth, and to a great extent looking to the judgment of the other investors. A buyer might start the day willing to pay $60 a share, but upon seeing that many others are willing to pay more, maybe she will, too. It is like Keynes’s famed “beauty contest,” where investors are guessing as much about each other as about the company.
In such a setting, prices can rise or fall extremely quickly, as the very process of trading reveals information about the stock’s value. That in turn makes it possible for the share price to soar on the first day of trading, creating the “pop.”
Now consider this scenario from the perspective of the issuing investment bank. If it sets the IPO price too high, it may set off a downward spiral of negative enthusiasm. Traders will see that most of the other traders think it is overpriced, leading to a plunge.
It’s all a bit like a restaurant on a Saturday night. If the place is seen as “cool” — whether because of its food and service (the product), its setting (the physical asset) or its ambience (the brand) — there will be a line out the door. Otherwise it will be fairly empty. Furthermore, the presence of a line will draw continued interest over time. It is hard or maybe even impossible to set prices so that every table is filled yet there is no line. To deploy some technical language, the demand curve may be discontinuous.
In this position, the IPO issuer likely will set the initial price too low — leading to a “line,” excess demand, and a big run-up in price on the first day. If the price is super-high in the first place, the market mood would be nervousness rather than eagerness, and most investors wouldn’t be able to see the surges in demand visible in lower price ranges.
Keep in mind that this surge in buying interest only has to make investors modestly more enthusiastic about the quality of the firm to generate a potentially big increase in final valuation.
All this said, in the current case, there is the question of why the initial prices were so low. Several theories present themselves: The markets for DoorDash and Airbnb might be more “winner take all” than usual. The value of those companies might be more closely linked to the value of their intangible assets. Or maybe the future of online services might be especially hard to predict in the midst of a pandemic, thus inducing larger bandwagon effects.
It is worth noting that differing auction systems for IPOs have not produced obviously superior results.