Category: Uncategorized
From my email, on bioethicists
Hi Tyler. I had a brief career as an ethicist. I realized quickly that the incentives are all wrong if what we want is people who will think hard about humanity’s pressing ethical dilemmas and who will suggest intuitively appealing solutions.
Since almost all ethicists are academics, they have to publish, and in order to publish you have to be novel, and since the basic principles of ethics are little changed for millennia the incentives to do thorough homework on the basis of principles which are widely understood and accepted is not great.
Furthermore, if you decide to be a utilitarian, then basically all ethical issues will boil down to cost/benefit analyses which you have to outsource to technocrats, so your unique expertise as an ethicist will be worth little.
For whatever it’s worth, one could justify most of the widespread opinions of bioethicists and other ethicists who reach conclusions quite repugnant to utilitarians on the basis of “care ethics”. The result is not important and even the rule is not important, what is important is the amount of personal concern you project to specific human beings. Most people would prefer not to expose their close family members to mortal danger so adopting a policy deliberately exposing strangers to such danger appears un-caring.
If ethicists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
The name of the author has been anonymized to protect the innocent.
Sunday assorted links
1. That Biogen conference in Boston was worse than you thought. And Swedish deaths now at 2/3 of April peak.
2. The bull semen storage culture that is India.
3. Will the French invest in “enhanced soldiers”?
4. The Economist on hydrogen-powered flight.
5. James Flynn has passed away.
6. Very good Ross piece (NYT).
What might an end to the Great Stagnation consist of?
If indeed it did, they are asking a similar question at The Economist. In recent times you might cite the onset of Apple’s M1, GPT-3, DeepMind’s application of AI to protein folding, phase III for a credible malaria vaccine, a CRISPR/sickle cell cure, the possibility of a universal flu vaccine, mRNA vaccines, ongoing solar power progress, wonderful new batteries for electric vehicles, a possibly new method for Chinese fusion (?), Chinese photon quantum computing, and ongoing advances in space exploration, most of all from SpaceX. Tesla has a very high market valuation, and Elon is the world’s second richest man.
Distanced work is very important, and here is a separate post on that.
I would say that almost certainly the great stagnation is over in the biomedical sciences. It is less obvious that the great stagnation is over more generally, as we might simply retreat into our former sloth and complacency once we are mostly vaccinated. Applied Divinity Studies has posed some pointed questions about why we might think that stagnation is over.
If you are looking for a quick metric to indicate the great stagnation might be over, consider total factor productivity. It is entirely possible that tfp in 2021 will be 5 or more, its highest level ever. (To be sure, this will show up as a measured increase in inputs more than as tfp, but we all know why those inputs will be increasing and that is because of science…yes this is a problem with tfp measures!) Over the two years to follow after that, we should be seeing very high tfps around the world. So that will be very high tfp for a few years.
Again, that is not proof of a permanent or even an ongoing end to the great stagnation. But it is something.
Two more general points seem relevant. First, many of the biomedical advances seem connected to new platforms, new modes of computation, new uses of AI, and so on, and they should be leading to yet further advances. Second, there are (finally!) some very real advances in energy use, and those tend to bring yet other advances in their wake, and not just advances in bit space.
But not all is rosy. If you recall my paper with Ben Southwood, the obstacles standing in the way of faster scientific progress, such as specialization and bureaucratization, mostly remain and some of them will be getting worse.
My The Great Stagnation, published in 2011, offered some pointed predictions. It argued that the “next big thing” was already with us, namely the internet, but we simply hadn’t learned to use it effectively yet. Once we put the internet at the center of many more of our institutions, rather than treating it as an add-on, the great stagnation would end. Numerous times (using roughly a 2011 start date) I predicted that the great stagnation would be over within twenty years time, though not in the next few years. The Great Stagnation in fact was an optimistic book, at least if you read it to the end and do not just mood affiliate over the title.
By no means would I say that specific scenario has been validated, but as a prediction it is looking not so crazy.
The gains from truly mobilizing the internet may in fact right now be swamping all of the accumulated obstacles we have put in the way of progress.
I also wrote, in 2011, that as the great stagnation approaches its end, we will all be deeply upset, and long for the earlier times. That too is by no means obviously wrong.
That was then, this is now; science and chaos edition
A blast from the past, circa 1688 and thereabouts:
Even as the House of Lords was starting to consider what to do after the departure of James, many sprang to settle old scores and reopen old issues. Legal toleration made the Church of England more defensive and less tolerant of sceptical or heterodox opinions. The Nine Years War from 1688, in which England at first suffered severe reverses at sea, strained the economy and finances of the country almost to breaking. The great silver recoinage of the late 1690s aggravated the problems; Halley was then deputy controller of the country Mint in Chester. He may have suffered from the great disaster of 1693, the loss of many ships of a Levant Company fleet off Lagos. The war lasted for much of the time that Halley was Clerk, and it undoubtedly delayed his project to observe the magnetic variation in the Atlantic. It was an anxious decade, a dangerous decade for anyone holding responsible office; in it [Edmond] Halley had some of his most original and influential ideas.
That is from Alan Cook’s Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Halley was a contemporary of Newton, Wren, Pepys, Hooke, Purcell, Locke, and Dryden, among others.
How should the possible end of the Great Stagnation influence your media diet?
I’ll soon write more on whether the Great Stagnation truly is over, and how we might know, but for now it suffices to mention a lot is going on in science and also in applied science and actual invention, not just nifty articles in Atlantic. On net, this means you should spend more time consuming YouTube videos (try this one on protein folding). They tend to be current, and to explain difficult matters in visual and also in fairly memorable terms. There will be such videos for virtually every new advance. You should read fewer normal books, more vertigo-inducing books, and spend less time on social media. You should read more Wikipedia articles, and when you read books you should select more from the history of science and times of turmoil. You should read this blog more often too.
Are the elites worse than you think?
Here is a new and important paper by Joshua D. Kertzer, noting that it mainly confirms what I observe every day (aren’t those the very best research studies?) Here is part of the abstract:
…political scientists both overstate the magnitude of elite-public gaps in decision-making, and misunderstand the determinants of elite-public gaps in political attitudes, many of which are due to basic compositional differences rather than to elites’ domain-specific expertise.
My rewrite of his sentence is that elites are arguing from their class and demographic biases (a bias can be positive, to be clear), not from their expertise. That lowers the marginal value of expertise, at least given how our world operates. I recall earlier research blogged by Alex showing that if you are a French economist, your views are more influenced by being a French person than by being an economist. And so on.
This is one of the very most fundamental facts about our world, and elites are among the people least likely to have internalized it.
Have a nice day.
What should I ask Noubar Afeyan?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is a partial bio:
Noubar was born in Beirut to Armenian parents in 1962, did his undergraduate work at McGill University in Montreal, and completed his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987.
He founded Flagship Pioneering:
Flagship has fostered the development of more than 100 scientific ventures resulting in $30 billion in aggregate value, thousands of patents and patent applications, and more than 50 drugs in clinical development.
During his career as inventor, entrepreneur, and CEO, Noubar has cofounded and helped build over 50 life science and technology startups.
Here is that link, and he is by the way co-founder and chairman of Moderna. And on the board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
So what should I ask him?
Friday assorted links
1. Using K-Pop to teach economics.
2. Redux of my April 4 post on tethered pairs.
4. Long blog post on DeepMind and protein folding, interesting throughout, but the most interesting section is toward the end on why DeepMind outperformed academic groups.
5. To be clear, I don’t know the answer, but why is no one even asking: “Can’t we just use the Sanofi vaccine on the young people only?” Is it that the answer is so obvious? Or is there excess confomism in this sphere? Is this simply the “this would cause the public to lose confidence in vaccines” mantra, an increasingly under-theorized and unsatisfactory substitute for an actual answer? (Would it even get a “B-” on an undergraduate, upper division psychology term paper or honors thesis?) Inquiring minds wish to know.
5b. And AstraZeneca is testing together with Russian options. Still an open question, but I’ve been saying that the Russian vaccine is underrated.
6. Good evidence for an Italian case of Covid in early December 2019.
How to build Haitian state capacity
Strengthening state capacity in low income countries requires raising tax revenue while maintaining political stability. The risk of inciting political unrest when attempting to increase taxes may trap governments in a low-tax equilibrium, but public goods provision may improve both tax compliance and political stability. To test these questions empirically, I partner with the national tax authority and a local mayor’s office in Haiti to cross-randomize both tax collection and public goods across one of the country’s largest cities. Effects are measured both via administrative data on tax revenue as well as through novel measures of political unrest. In the paper’s main result, I show that hand-delivering property tax invoices reduces individual tax compliance by 48%, and increases independently observed measures of localized political violence by 192%. In contrast, providing a valuable and visible public good (namely municipal garbage removal) increases tax compliance by 27%, and reduces localized political violence by 85%. Importantly, public goods provision significantly mitigates the adverse effects of tax collection in neighborhoods receiving both treatments. A cost accounting exercise suggests that providing the public good in this setting could pay for itself within the first year. These findings suggest that it may be possible to peacefully shift to a new equilibrium of higher tax compliance with a sufficient initial investment perhaps financed through foreign aid or other transfers.
That is a paper from Benjamin Krause, a job market candidate from UC Berkeley. Here is his home page and CV. He was also four years Chief of Staff to Sean Penn, check out the vita.
Thursday assorted links
Ben Thompson on the Facebook antitrust suit
At the same time, I do have serious rule-of-law reservations about undoing a deal eight years on, particularly given the fact that it appears that the advertising-supported space is doing better than I thought a few years ago: Snapchat in particular is building a great business, LinkedIn is doing much better, and TikTok is obviously on its way.
And:
- Andy Grove famously said “Only the Paranoid Survive”, but the takeaway from many of these emails is that “Only the paranoid get sued for antitrust”; to put it another way, Facebook executives come across as worried about everything, especially Google, which, by the same token, comes across as completely asleep at the wheel (now that is a monopoly indicator if I’ve ever seen one!).
- Facebook’s stock was down less than 2% yesterday; that may reflect investor skepticism about the success of the lawsuit, but you could also argue that splitting up the company would actually unlock value: all three products would keep their audiences, but would have to monetize independently, which, given the fact that Facebook ad prices are set by auction, not artificially propped up as you would expect with an alleged monopolist, could absolutely lead to more revenue in aggregate, not less.
- Relatedly, it’s not clear that advertisers will benefit from a break-up. The entire reason why Facebook owning both Facebook and Instagram is a problem for other consumer tech companies is because advertisers benefit from a one-stop shop and don’t necessarily want to support multiple platforms.
Ben writes for-pay content on Stratechery, you can (and should) subscribe here.
Gary Becker’s theory of punishment?
In the port city of Kaohsiung, in the south of Taiwan, a migrant worker from the Philippines was caught on surveillance cameras briefly stepping into the corridor of a hotel while he was under quarantine in November.
The unidentified man wanted to leave something outside the door of a friend, who was quarantining at the same hotel, according to the Central News Agency, the official Taiwanese news agency, citing the health department.
In a video clip that circulated online, the man, wearing shorts and flip-flops, could be seen taking six lumbering strides between his room and that of his neighbor, before turning around.
The breach cost him $3,550.
Here is the full NYT story, via the excellent Daniel Lippman.
Youyang Gu will estimate vaccination numbers and herd immunity
- We believe COVID-19 herd immunity (>60% of population immune) will be reached in the US by late summer/early fall 2021 (Sep-Nov 2021).
- At the time herd immunity is reached, roughly half of the immunity will be achieved via natural infection, and the other half will be achieved via vaccination.
- New COVID-19 infections may become negligible before herd immunity is reached. Our current best estimate of when daily community transmissions will drop below 1,000 per day is summer 2021 (Jul-Sep 2021).
- Summarizing the above findings, our best estimate of a complete “return to normal” in the US is late summer 2021 (Aug-Oct 2021).
- We estimate around 30% of the US population (~100 million) will have been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus by the end of 2021. This translates to a final US COVID-19 death toll of roughly 500,000 (+/-100k) reported deaths.
You can track the data here, his earlier forecasts of cases, hospitalizations, and the like were among the best. He is here on Twitter. For the pointer I thank CatintheHat.
Wednesday assorted links
1. I am happy to see StatNews expanding, they were earlier winners of an Emergent Ventures prize.
2. Herd immunity in Manaus, Brazil.
3. 64 reasons why Paul McCartney is underrated. The funny thing is, I could come up with yet another 64. Ian Leslie doesn’t even mention that McCartney ended up as an excellent classical music composer (after some effort and also false steps). Or how about his shrewd business acumen in buying up musical rights at the correct time?
4. Data on Chinese social science funding. And UAE data on the Sinopharm vaccine are looking pretty good (Bloomberg).
5. Can you teach your dog how to talk?
6. Coyne and Boettke creation on Austrian economics, also includes some videos.
7. “Influential mountain climber dies at 90.”
8. Japan to fund AI matchmaking to boost birth rate. What would Malthus say?
Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans?
Here is the abstract:
Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? To answer this question, we utilize the case of French colonists of Atlantic Canada (the Acadians) and a Native American tribe (the Mi’kmaq) between the 17th and 18th centuries in the areas around the Bay of Fundy in the modern provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Under a relative state of anarchy, both the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq were able to minimize the relative returns to using violence by adopting rules of collective decision-making that favored consensus-building. By prioritizing consensus, distributional coalitions were faced with higher decision-making costs, making it difficult for concentrated interest groups within each society to capture the gains from fighting and spilling them over as external costs over the rest of the population. As a result, both the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq were able to reap the benefits of productive specialization and social cooperation under the division of labor.
That is from a recent paper by Rosolino Candela and Vincent Geloso, forthcoming in Public Choice. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.