Category: Uncategorized
Tuesday assorted links
1. “In Sweden we have this phenomenon called Jantelagen. It’s when someone is famous, and the people around use up all their energy to ignore the fact that the person is famous.” (NYT link here)
3. New and significant results on working remotely, very good paper: fine for gains from trade, lower productivity outweighed by worker gains, still negative adverse selection associated with the practice as a whole. Author Emma Harrington is on the job market from Harvard.
4. New, long paper developing a better cyclically-adjusted measure of TFP. TFP is still falling, but more gradually than under alternate measures. For Europe the revisions make less of a difference.
5. Good summary of some Fast Grants-supported research on Interferon.
6. Daniel Gross is bullish on Starlink.
My favorite fiction of 2020
Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel.
Anne Enright, Actress: A Novel.
Susannah Clarke, Piranesi.
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet.
Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults.
Of those Hamnet was my clear favorite, then the Enright. Here is my non-fiction list, which also explains why the lists have come earlier this year.
Monday assorted links
1. That was then, this is now: Daniel Defoe vs. Covid-19. And the pandemic has reduced affective polarization.
2. Interview with a retired PLA colonel about U.S.-China relations.
3. The rise of Platonic co-parenting?
4. You will not remain known for your contributions, a striking poll. Not even Thomas Schelling. That said, this is a potential source of comparative advantage for you. If you are willing to give up traditional notions of “receiving credit,” often you can be far more effective.
5. Prominent British epidemiologist unable to answer basic questions about trade-offs (about ten minutes). Embarrassing and indicative.
6. Russian holidays predict troll activity. And the sauna crossbow Sausage King-killing culture that is Russia.
7. Lower-education people (lower status people?) feel more knee pain for a given ailment.
Vaccine politics will soon replace electoral politics
That is the title and theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
And who should get the vaccine first? The elderly are more vulnerable, but the young are more likely to spread Covid-19. Some recent results suggest it would be better to vaccinate the young first, but that is less politically likely. Again, it is easy to see potential conflicts over this question, cutting across traditional party lines.
An even more complex problem would arise if one good vaccine is available but other, possibly better, vaccines are imminent. Does everyone get the “good enough” vaccine, disrupting the ability to conduct clinical trials to see if the other vaccines are better? How much patience do Americans have, really?
Americans would probably resent having to wait. But if they end up choosing a lesser quality vaccine, over the long run they might be unhappier yet. It is not clear the U.S. public health bureaucracy is up to the task of approving one vaccine and restructuring the other trials (possibly by paying participants more to stay in, or by shifting to other countries for data) so they can continue.
Be prepared for a mess, with almost everybody unhappy.
Blog and Substack contest winners
To date there are three:
1. Anton Howes for his Substack Age of Invention. He is a historian of invention, often but not exclusively focusing on the eighteenth century, here is Anton on Twitter. As a separate matter, don’t forget Anton’s excellent recent book Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation.
2. Works in Progress. Here is their About page: “Works in Progress is a new online magazine dedicated to sharing novel ideas and stories of progress, and features original writing from some of the most interesting thinkers in the world.” The major individuals behind Works in Progress are Sam Bowman, Saloni Dattani, Ben Southwood, and Nick Whitaker, all with bios at the previous link, all strong intellectual forces.
Note also: “Works in Progress is always looking for new writers for upcoming issues and our blog. Reach out if you want to talk about writing for us, with a short summary or abstract of your piece.”
3. Alice Evans, lecturer at King’s College London. Here is Alice on Twitter. She is working on “”THE GREAT GENDER DIVERGENCE” What explains global variation in gender relations?” and here is her related blog on that same topic. Here is her famous post on gender relations in north vs. south India. Her home page also links to her podcast.
I do expect there will be further awards, and I will keep you posted (here is the original announcement). If you just started writing a blog and submitted, you may still be in the running for the future. In the meantime, congratulations to these winners!
Uncertainty and the import of norm adherence
The cabinet agreed the measures during an emergency Zoom meeting after being presented with data that showed the NHS would run out of bed capacity by the first week in December.
That is from the London Times, and it is the government’s rationale for a new and very strict lockdown plan. Once you are in this position, there are truly no good choices, nor will you succeed in “protecting the vulnerable” under any of the paths before you.
But let’s turn the clock back a wee bit, shall we say to Liverpool, circa July 2020. At that point, in the “clubby” part of town, drunken youths were walking around, arm-in-arm, serenading each other and singing. Without masks. Barber shops were full, the barbers are wearing plastic visors (often no masks, and it seems the visors are less effective) and many of the patrons were wearing no masks. Overall the mask-wearing rate did not seem to exceed ten percent, if that. People on the (closed window) trains to and from Liverpool often did not have masks, and they were gabbing rather than silent. Few natives were looking aghast at any of this. And unlike in London and parts of southeast England, there was no plausible reason whatsoever to believe in herd immunity for Liverpool.
The recommendation is simply that Liverpool and most or all other parts of England needed stronger norms back then. To stop later severe lockdowns.
And here is Max Roser on testing.
If someone talks about “protecting the vulnerable,” ask a simple follow-up question: how much are they also talking about masks and testing (and biomedical advances)?
You can argue about exactly how effective masks are, or how much the current Covid return is a purely seasonal effect, or what about Peltzman effects (mask wearers will take more risks), and so on. There is typically uncertainty about just how strong norms will be in their final effects, but that is not reason to toss out those norms.
But if people aren’t even trying, you know something is very, very wrong. Blame the elites. Blame the people themselves. Those two alternatives are not nearly as distinct as they might seem.
And I am not asking for the impossible or for the totalitarian. Liverpudlians and the now on the run cohorts of Europeans would be much better off if they had only matched the rather ragged norms and safety record of my own northern Virginia, which is full of immigrants I might add. People here made many mistakes, but on the whole never became altogether negligent.
Europe is seeing a major second wave of its current magnitude because, in so many places, people simply stopped trying. With vaccines on the way, those were indeed grave errors.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Scrutiny of this proposition through the lens of rational choice theory suggests, however, that exorcism was inferior to executions as a technology choice for the congregant-maximizing Puritan ministers in Salem Village in 1692.” Link here.
2. Good Ross column! (NYT)
4. Economists give reasons why they voted. What do you think?
5. Is this true?: “Iran bypassing American sanctions by nationalizing cryptocurrency miners. A new regulation requires miners to sell their coins directly to the Iranian central bank for use to fund imports.”
6. Bruno and his substack on Islam, good piece.
Micro-hemorrhages and the importance of vaccination
Neurological manifestations are a significant complication of coronavirus infection disease-19 (COVID-19). Understanding how COVID-19 contributes to neurological disease is needed for appropriate treatment of infected patients, as well as in initiating relevant follow-up care after recovery. Investigation of autopsied brain tissue has been key to advancing our understanding of the neuropathogenesis of a large number of infectious and non-infectious diseases affecting the central nervous system (CNS). Due to the highly infectious nature of the etiologic agent of COVID-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), there is a paucity of tissues available for comprehensive investigation. Here, we show for the first time, microhemorrhages and neuropathology that is consistent with hypoxic injury in SARS-CoV-2 infected non-human primates (NHPs). Importantly, this was seen among infected animals that did not develop severe respiratory disease. This finding underscores the importance of vaccinating against SARS-CoV-2, even among populations that have a reduced risk for developing of severe disease, to prevent long-term or permanent neurological sequelae. Sparse virus was detected in brain endothelial cells but did not associate with the severity of CNS injury. We anticipate our findings will advance our current understanding of the neuropathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 infection and demonstrate SARS-CoV-2 infected NHPs are a highly relevant animal model for investigating COVID-19 neuropathogenesis among human subjects.
That is from new Fast Grants supported research by Tracy Fischer, et.al. And here are some related earlier results from Kabbani and Olds. Here are some more general recent results about brain damage.
How bad are these micro-hemorrhages anyway? I don’t know! You may notice I have hardly lunged at the “permanent damage” papers that have been coming out on Covid (in fact many of them already have collapsed or not replicated). But there are genuine reasons for caution, these results do not seem to be collapsing, and Covid-19 is not just a bunch of people trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. And “exposing the young” decisions should not be taken lightly either. The people who are very cautious about reopening may be too risk-averse given realistic alternatives, but they are not all just statists, Trump haters, lazy teachers’ unions, and so on. There are very genuine concerns here.
Saturday assorted links
1. Can black holes shed information?
2. “Ancient dogs were much more diverse genetically than modern dogs.” And Finnish Covid-sniffing dogs doing just fine.
3. Admissions pauses and reductions in Harvard graduate programs?
5. When Paul McCartney met Bertrand Russell.
6. Stanford/Hoover disputes over Covid freedom of speech. How is this for Orwellian doublespeak: “There are limitations to academic freedom. What you express has to be honest, data-based and reflect what is known in the field. If you are going to claim academic freedom, you had better be academic, as well as free.”
Friday assorted links
Novid — a pre-exposure notification system for Covid (and other things)
I find the (short) video easiest to follow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN-dw-45Cwc
Best of all, it is incentive-compatible. The founder Po-Shen Loh, a mathematician from Carnegie Mellon, wrote to me:
…for each positive case, don’t just ask the direct contacts to quarantine; instead, tell everyone how many relationships away COVID just struck (e.g., “3” is a contact of a contact of a contact). Then animate this over time like a weather radar…Keep everything anonymous.
Suddenly, the main purpose of the intervention is no longer to protect others from you (quarantining after being exposed). Instead, it is to directly protect you from others, because that early warning of approaching COVID lets you know it’s a good time to wear a better mask, or to be more vigilant about distancing, because the situation is getting hot. This appeals to self-protection instincts instead of altruistic instincts. Since this app is already in deployment, we know anecdotally, for example, of a person who installed the app because his kid was going to a university that was using the app. Why? So that he could be alerted in case COVID started spreading his way from the university via his kid.
Here is his associated preprint. As economists, ought we not to feel that appealing to self-interest and love of family sometimes works?
Threadhelper, a new method for improving Twitter
Vasco Queirós, from the 7th cohort of Emergent Venture grant winners, has, with Francisco Carvalho, launched ThreadHelper – “A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar”. You can get it here.
ThreadHelper is a browser extension that finds you the tweets you need. It shows as a sidebar on the right hand side of your Twitter timeline and instantly and automatically searches bookmarks, retweets, and your past tweets for tweets that are semantically relevant to the tweet being composed. It can be used as a specific search that’s faster than Twitter’s or as a fuzzy search tool.
Thursday assorted links
1. Indian caste bias in Silicon Valley.
2. Strong new results on monoclonal antibodies. And further coverage, yet we don’t have enough of them.
4. Vaccine timelines are continuing to slip further out.
5. Smith College boring no reason to watch this one.
6. New variant of the virus has come through Spain, its properties still unknown (FT). Research paper here.
Are Dead People Voting By Mail?
The subtitle of this new paper is “Evidence From Washington State Administrative Records,” and the authors are Jennifer Wu, Chenoa Yorgason, Hanna Folsz, Cassandra Handan-Nader, Andrew Myers, Tobias Nowacki, Daniel M. Thompson, Jesse Yoder, and Andrew B. Hall. Here is the abstract:
A commonly expressed concern about vote-by-mail in the United States is that mail-in ballots are sent to dead people, stolen by bad actors, and counted as fraudulent votes. To evaluate how often this occurs in practice, we study the state of Washington, which sends every registered voter a mail-in ballot. We link counted ballots and administrative death records to estimate the rate at which dead people’s mail-in ballots are improperly counted as valid votes, using birth dates from online obituaries to address false positives. Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state between 2011 and 2018, we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters. Even these few cases may reflect two individuals with the same name and birth date, or clerical errors, rather than fraud. After exploring the robustness of our findings to weaker conditions for matching names, we conclude that it seems extraordinarily rare for dead people’s ballots to be counted as votes in Washington’s universal vote-by-mail system.
No, in other words. And here is a tweet storm on the paper by Andy Hall.
What I’ve been reading
1. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime. Mostly not about climate per se, rather how we are failing at being true materialists: “In a sense, Trump’s election confirms, for the rest of the world, the end of a politics oriented toward an identifiable goal. Trumpian politics is not “post-truth,” it is post-politics — that is, literally, a politics with no object, since it rejects the world that it claims to inhabit.” Mostly interesting, as one expects from Latour, but not exactly in the Anglo-American style either. It also shows a kind of convergence with the ideas of Bruno Macaes, reviewed here by John Gray.
2. Robert Townsend, Distributed Ledgers: Design and Regulation of Financial Infrastructure and Payment Systems. Bitcoin and crypto yes, but the more fundamental concept in this book is…distributed ledgers, which include Thai rice allocation schemes and Mesopotamia circa 4000 B.C. It is highly intelligent and well done, but somehow I think books like this work better when they are more speculative and future-oriented.
3. Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life. So many pages, and perhaps this will not be surpassed soon. Yet it never quite tells you how he got to be so smart, or how his intellectual development proceeded, or even what his smartness consists of. So I can’t say I liked it. By the way, for those of you who don’t know, it seems to me that Stoppard is one of the smartest people and also the most important living playwright, most of all for anyone interested in intellectual history.
4. Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. Lovely visuals, blurb from Pinker, the curves slope upward, get the picture? Let’s hope they’re right! Ultimately I find this kind of exercise less convincing than I used to, instead preferring a broader theory that also accounts for what I perceive to be a growing disorientation. Which brings us to the next title…
5. Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain. How do transhumanism, Elon Musk/Neuralink, the Singularity, Book of Genesis, and Hegel all fit together? There is only one person who could pull off such a book, noting this version is dense and not for the uninitiated. Here is one squib: “Police is closer to civil society than state; it is a kind of representative of state in civil society, but for this very reason it has to be experienced as an external force, not an inner ethical power.” If you take away all the people who quite overrate him, Žižek is in fact remarkably underrated.