Category: Uncategorized
Monday assorted links
1. On the history and use of EUAs (NYT).
3. Sara Lowes on ethnographic and field data in economics.
4. Saez and Zucman respond to their critics in great detail.
5. The value of rapid self-testing for Covid-19. Yes it works and the medical professionals and the FDA are wrong on this one.
6. Logistical problems with supplying monoclonal antibodies, important. It is time to stop dumping on this treatment people, and get our act together. Now. Let’s not have another fiasco. And a good NYT story on the whole topic, you can feel the media mood shifting toward the positive and away from the skeptical.
7. Can you even win at the Japanese crane game? What else is like this?
8. The captain of Operation Warp Speed (WSJ).
9. How it enters your brain. Or might.
10. A Fine Theorem on Milgrom and Wilson, recommended, note that Milgrom also does not have a Ph.D. in economics.
The Nobel Prize: Milgrom and Wilson
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics goes to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for auction theory and the improvement of auction designs. The Nobel Committee has a popular introduction and good scientific overview of auction theory. Billions of dollars of spectrum and other natural resources have been allocated using auctions designed by Milgrom and Wilson and their co-authors.
The money won’t mean much to these winners, who have made plenty of money advising firms about how to bid in the auctions that they designed. Milgrom’s firm Auctionomics advertises its service and Milgrom notes:
Milgrom has advised bidders in radio spectrum auctions, power auctions, and bankruptcy auctions. One advisee, Comcast and its consortium, SpectrumCo, followed the advice of a Milgrom’s team in FCC Auction 66 to achieve the most exceptional performance in US spectrum auction history. SpectrumCo saved nearly $1.2 billion on its spectrum license purchases compared to the prices paid by other large bidders – such as T-Mobile and Verizon – for comparable spectrum acquired at the same time in the same auction. SpectrumCo’s tactics included a $750 million jump bid – the largest in the history of US spectrum auctions and a move that prompted the FCC to change the auction rules.
You can figure that Milgrom got a percentage of those savings! Milgrom also advised Yahoo and Google, among other tech firms, on their advertising auctions.
My post Mechanism Design for Grandma written for the Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson Nobel, has some background on auctions.
Auction theory and auction practice arose together–this is not a case of theory being rediscovered decades later by practitioners but of the demands by practitioners leading to new theory and new theory leading to new institutions. The Nobel committee notes:
In the early 1990s, an explosion of the demand for mobile communication made the U.S. federal government decide to use an auction for allocating radio-spectrum licenses among telecommunication firms. Previously, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had only been allowed to rely either on administrative procedures—commonly referred to as “beauty contests”—or on lotteries. These methods had notably failed in a number of complex settings, at the expense of both taxpayers and end-users…The obvious alternative is to adopt an auction to as-sign licenses. In fact, as early as in the 1950s, the 1991 Laureate Ronald H. Coase argued that the basic principle should be to allocate objects, such as broadcasting licenses, to the firms who will make the most efficient use of them, and the best way to identify these firms is to assign the objects through a competitive price mechanism (Coase, 1959).
…Following the FCC policy shift, multi-object auctions turned from an esoteric topic at the fringe of microeconomic theory to a hot research topic almost overnight.
…For the 1994 FCC auction, the final version of the newly designed auction was the Simultaneous Multiple Round Auction (SMRA)…[which] raised some $20 billion for the U.S. federal government, twice the forecasted amount. This outcome attracted considerable media attention and led other governments to set up their own auctions. The U.K. 3G spectrum auction that concluded in 2000 raised about $34 billion for the British government (Binmore and Klemperer, 2002). The SMRA auction format became the dominant design for spectrum sales worldwide, and versions of it have been used in Canada, Finland, Germany, India, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, theU.K., and the U.S. These auctions have generated hundreds of billions of dollars for governments worldwide.
Perhaps the most impressive culmination of this work was the 2017 incentive auctions which “simultaneously” bought licenses from over-the air broadcast television stations and resold them to modern cellular phone bidders while respecting constraints so that over-the-air frequencies could be repackaged in ways such that they would not interfere with one another. The auction bought licenses for $10 billion, sold them for $20 billion, generating $10 billion in profit and generating an even larger increase in consumer surplus.
The first is a reverse auction that determines a price at which the remaining over-the-air broadcasters voluntarily relinquish their existing spectrum-usage rights. The second is a forward auction of the freed-up spectrum. In 2017, the reverse auction removed 14 channels from broadcast use, at a cost of $10.1 billion. The forward auction sold 70 MHz of wireless internet licenses for $19.8 billion, and created 14 MHz of surplus spectrum. The two stages of the incentive auction thus generated just below $10 billion to U.S. taxpayers, freed up considerable spectrum for future use, and presumably raised the expected surpluses of sellers as well as buyers.
These auctions also brought home that economics is now tied to computer science. The complexity of the allocation process was so high that new algorithms had to be devised. In particular, repackaging of the frequencies involved solving hundreds of thousands of graph-coloring problems, an NP-hard problem. Computer scientist Kevin Leyton-Brown was brought in to design and optimize the necessary algorithms. At the same time, Milgrom and Segal had to prove that their auction could be characterized in such a way that it could be solved in reasonable time by known algorithms.
Computer scientist Tim Roughgarden has an excellent video lecture on how implementing the incentive auction required a combination of cutting-edge economics and computer science. More generally, mechanism design in the real world, including auction design, Uber’s supply and demand mechanism, blockchains like bitcoin and many other examples, requires both economists and computer scientists to devise institutions and algorithms that incentivize socially beneficial behavior and that can also be solved in real time for real populations.
See Tyler’s post on Milgrom and on Tyler’s post on Wilson for much more, going well beyond their contributions to auction theory.
Paul Milgrom, Nobel Laureate
Most of all this is a game theory prize and an economics of information prize, including game theory and asymmetric information. Much of the work has had applications to auctions and finance. Basically Milgrom was the most important theorist of the 1980s, during the high point of economic theory and its influence.
Here is Milgrom’s (very useful and detailed) Wikipedia page. Most of his career he has been associated with Stanford University, with one stint at Yale for a few years. Here is Milgrom on scholar.google.com. A very good choice and widely anticipated, in the best sense of that term. Here is his YouTube presence. Here is his home page.
Milgrom, working with Nancy Stokey, developed what is called the “no trade” theorem, namely the conditions under which market participants will not wish to trade with each other. Obviously if someone wants to trade with you, you have to wonder — what does he/she know that I do not? Under most reasonable assumptions, it is hard to generate a high level of trading volume, and that has remained a puzzle in theories of finance and asset pricing. People are still working on this problem, and of course it relates to work by Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann on when people should rationally disagree with each other.
Building on this no-trade result, Milgrom wrote a seminal piece with Lawrence Glosten on bid-ask spread. What determines bid-ask spread in securities markets? It is the risk that the person you are trading with might know more than you do. You will trade with them only when the price is somewhat more advantageous to you, so markets with higher degrees of asymmetric information will have higher bid-ask spreads. This is Milgrom’s most widely cited paper and it is personally my favorite piece of his, it had a real impact on me when I read it. You can see that the themes of common knowledge and asymmetric information, so important for the auctions work, already are rampant.
Alex will tell you more about auctions, but Milgrom working with Wilson has designed some auctions in a significant way, see Wikipedia:
Milgrom and his thesis advisor Robert B. Wilson designed the auction protocol the FCC uses to determine which phone company gets what cellular frequencies. Milgrom also led the team that designed the 2016-17 incentive auction, which was a two-sided auction to reallocate radio frequencies from TV broadcast to wireless broadband uses.
Here is Milgrom’s 277-page book on putting auction theory to practical use. Here is his highly readable JEP survey article on auctions and bidding, for an introduction to Milgrom’s prize maybe start there?
Here is Milgrom’s main theoretical piece on auctions, dating from Econometrica 1982 and co-authored with Robert J. Weber. it compared the revenue properties of different auctions and showed that under risk-neutrality a second-price auction would yield the highest price. Also returning to the theme of imperfect information and bid-ask spread, it showed that an expert appraisal would make bidders more eager to bid and thus raise the expected price. I think of Milgrom’s work as having very consistent strands.
With Bengt Holmstrom, also a Nobel winner, Milgrom wrote on principal-agent theory with multiple tasks, basically trying to explain why explicit workplace incentives and bonuses are not used more widely. Simple linear incentives can be optimal because they do not distort the allocation of effort across tasks so much, and it turned out that the multi-task principal agent problem was quite different from the single-task problem.
People used to think that John Roberts would be a co-winner, based on the famous Milgrom and Roberts paper on entry deterrence. Basically incumbent monopolists can signal their cost advantage by making costly choices and thereby scare away potential entrants. And the incumbent wishes to be tough with early entrants to signal to later entrants that they better had stay away. In essence, this paper was viewed as a major rebuttal to the Chicago School economists, who had argued that predatory behavior from incumbents typically was costly, irratoinal, and would not persist.
The absence of Roberts’s name on this award indicates a nudge in the direction of auction design and away from game theory a bit — the Nobel Committee just loves mechanism design!
That said, it is worth noting that the work of Milgrom and co-authors intellectually dominated the 1980s and can be identified with the peak of influence of game theory at that period of time. (Since then empirical economics has become more prominent in relative terms.)
Milgrom and Roberts also published a once-famous paper on supermodular games in 1990. I’ve never read it, but I think it has something to do with the possible bounding of strategies in complex settings, but based on general principles. This was in turn an attempt to make game theory more general. I am not sure it succeeded.
Milgrom and Roberts also produced a well-known paper finding the possible equilibria in a signaling model of advertising.
Milgrom and Roberts also wrote a series of papers on rent-seeking and “influence activities” within firms. It always seemed to me this was his underrated work and it deserved more attention. Among other things, this work shows how hard it is to limit internal rent-seeking by financial incentives (which in fact can make the problem worse), and you will see this relates to Milgrom’s broader work on multi-task principal-agent problems.
Milgrom also has a famous paper with Kreps, Wilson, and Roberts, so maybe Kreps isn’t going to win either. They show how a multi-period prisoner’s dilemma might sustain cooperating rather than “Finking” if there is asymmetric information about types and behavior. This paper increased estimates of the stability of tit-for-tat strategies, if only because with uncertainty you might end up in a highly rewarding loop of ongoing cooperation. This combination of authors is referred to as the “Gang of Four,” given their common interests at the time and some common ties to Stanford. You will note it is really Milgrom (and co-authors) who put Stanford economics on the map, following on the Kenneth Arrow era (when Stanford was not quite yet a truly top department).
Not what he is famous for, but here is Milgrom’s paper with Roberts trying to rationalize some of the key features of modern manufacturing. If nothing else, this shows the breadth of his interests and how he tries to apply game theory generally. One question they consider is why modern manufacturing has moved so strongly in the direction of greater flexibility.
Milgrom also has a 1990 piece with North and Weingast on the medieval merchant guilds and the economics of reputation, showing his more applied side. In essence the Law Merchant served as a multilateral reputation mechanism and enforced cooperation. Here is a 1994 follow-up. This work paved the way for later work by Avner Greif on related themes.
Another undervalued Milgrom piece is with Sharon Oster (mother of Emily Oster), or try this link for it. Here is the abstract:
The Invisibility Hypothesis holds that the job skills of disadvantaged workers are not easily discovered by potential new employers, but that promotion enhances visibility and alleviates this problem. Then, at a competitive labor market equilibrium, firms profit by hiding talented disadvantaged workers in low-level jobs.Consequently, those workers are paid less on average and promoted less often than others with the same education and ability. As a result of the inefficient and discriminatory wage and promotion policies, disadvantaged workers experience lower returns to investments in human capital than other workers.
With multiple, prestigious co-authors he has written in favor of prediction markets.
He was the doctoral advisor of Susan Athey, and in Alex’s post you can read about his auction advising and the companies he has started.
His wife, Eva Meyersson Milgrom, is herself a renowned social scientist and sociologist, and he met her in 1996 while seated next to her at a Nobel Prize dinner in Stockholm. Here is one of his papers with her (and Ravi Singh), on whether firms should share control with outsiders. Here is the story of their courtship.
Robert B. Wilson, Nobel Laureate
Here is his home page. He has been at Stanford Business School since 1964, and born in Geneva, Nebraska. Here is his personal website. Here is his Wikipedia page. He has a doctorate in business administration from Harvard, but actually no economics Ph.D. (bravo!) Here is the Nobel designation.
Most of all Wilson is an economic theorist, doing much of his most influential work in or around the 1980s. He is a little hard to google (no, he did not work with Philip Glass), but here are his best-cited papers. To be clear, he won mainly for his work in auction theory and practice, covered by Alex here. But here is some information about the rest of his highly illustrious career.
He and David Kreps wrote a very famous paper about deterrence. Basically an incumbent wishes to develop a reputation for being tough with potential entrants, so as to keep them out of the market. This was one of the most influential papers of the 1980s, and it also helped to revive some of the potential intellectual case for antitrust activism. Here is Wilson’s survey article on strategic approaches to entry deterrence.
Wilson has a famous paper with Kreps, Milgrom, and Roberts. They show how a multi-period prisoner’s dilemma might sustain cooperating rather than “Finking” if there is asymmetric information about types and behavior. This paper increased estimates of the stability of tit-for-tat strategies, if only because with uncertainty you might end up in a highly rewarding loop of ongoing cooperation. This combination of authors is referred to as the “Gang of Four,” given their common interests at the time and some common ties to Stanford.
His 1982 piece with David Kreps on “sequential equilibria” was oh so influential on game theory, here is the abstract:
We propose a new criterion for equilibria of extensive games, in the spirit of Selten’s perfectness criteria. This criterion requires that players’ strategies be sequentially rational: Every decision must be part of an optimal strategy for the remainder of the game. This entails specification of players’ beliefs concerning how the game has evolved for each information set, including information sets off the equilibrium path. The properties of sequential equilibria are developed; in particular, we study the topological structure of the set of sequential equilibria. The connections with Selten’s trembling-hand perfect equilibria are given.
Here is a more readable exposition of the idea. This was part of a major effort to figure out how people actually would play in games, and which kinds of solution concepts economists should put into their models. I don’t think the matter ever was settled, and arguably it has been superseded by behavioral and computational and evolutionary approaches, but Wilson was part of the peak period of applying pure theory to this problem and this might have been the most important theory piece in that whole tradition.
From Wikipedia:
Wilson’s paper “The Theory of the Syndicates,”JSTOR 1909607 which was published in Econometrica in 1968 influenced a whole generation of students from economics, finance, and accounting. The paper poses a fundamental question: Under what conditions does the expected utility representation describe the behavior of a group of individuals who choose lotteries and share risk in a Pareto-optimal way?
Link here, this was a contribution to social choice theory and fed into Oliver Hart’s later work on when shareholder unanimity for a corporation would hold. It also connects to the later Milgrom work, some of it with Wilson, on when people will agree about the value of assets.
Here is Wilson’s book on non-linear pricing: “What do phone rates, frequent flyer programs, and railroad tariffs all have in common? They are all examples of nonlinear pricing. Pricing is nonlinear when it is not strictly proportional to the quantity purchased. The Electric Power Research Institute has commissioned Robert Wilson to review the various facets of nonlinear pricing.” Yes, he is a business school guy. Here is his survey article on electric power pricing, a whole separate direction of his research.
Here is his 1989 law review article about Pennzoil vs. Texaco, with Robert H. Mnookin.
Wilson also did a piece with Gul and Sonnenschein, laying out the different implications of various game-theoretic conjectures for the Coase conjecture, namely the claim that a durable goods monopolist will end up having to sell at competitive prices, due to the patience of consumers and their unwillingness to buy at higher prices.
Wilson was the dissertation advisor of Alvin E. Roth, Nobel Laureate, and here the two interview each other, recommended. Excerpt:
Wilson: As an MBA student in 1960, I wrote a class report on how to bid in an auction that got a failing grade because it was not “managerial.”
And here is an Alvin Roth blog post on the prize and the intellectual lineage.
The bottom line? If you are a theorist, Stockholm is telling you to build up some practical applications — at the very least pull something out of your closet and sell it on eBay! A lot of people thought Roberts and maybe Kreps would be in on this Prize, but they are not. The selections themselves are clearly deserving and have been “in play” for many years in the Nobel discussions. But again, we see the committee drawing clear and distinct lines.
Let’s see what they do next year!
Sunday assorted links
1. The (NBA) bubble is ending soon. A good piece.
2. “Lockdown deaths” are probably not very large in number.
3. What is it like to be threatened by The New York Times Guild? And with typographical errors.
Was the New Deal Racist?
In recent decades, “racial disparity” has become the central framework for discussing inequities affecting African Americans in the United States. In this usage, disparity refers to the disproportionate statistical representation of some categorically defined populations on average in the distribution of undesirable things—unemployment, low wages, infant mortality, poor education, incarceration, etc. And by corollary logic, such social groupings are also found to be statistically underrepresented in desirable things—wealth, income, educational attainment, etc.
…Identifying disparate treatment or outcomes that correlate with racial difference can be a critical step in validating a complaint. However, the inclination to fixate on such disparities as the only objectionable form of inequality can create perverse political incentives. We devote a great deal of rhetorical and analytic energy to the project of determining just which groups, or population categories, suffer or have suffered the worst. Cynics have sometimes referred to this brand of what we might term political one-downsmanship as the “oppression Olympics”—a contest in which groups that have attained or are vying for legal protection effectively compete for the moral or cultural authority that comes with the designation of most victimized.
Even short of that cynical view, a central focus on group-level disparities can lead to mistaken diagnoses of the sources and character of the manifest inequalities it identifies.
Ralph Hawtrey was a Moorean
Hawtrey came from a family long associated with Eton, where he was educated himself, before coming up to Trinity in 1898. In 1901 he was 19th Wrangler; in 1903 he briefly entered the Admiralty, before going to the Treasury, where he found his vocation as an economist and remained for forty-one years. He was a very faithful Apostle, attending every annual dinner until 1954, when he was prevented from going by ill health. He was devoted to Moore, whose impassioned singing of Die Beiden Grenadiere made him realize how horrible war was for the soldiers who actually did the fighting: this constituted an epiphany for Hawtrey, and reinforced his life-long Liberalism. Moore was so much the most important influence on the life and career of Sir Ralph Hawtrey that he spent his last years working on a systematic philosophical treatise (inspired also by Robin Mayor), which was to have been a summa of his twenty-odd books and the hundreds of letters he published in The Times. He was married to the famous pianist Titi d’Aranyi.
That is from Paul Levy’s book Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles. Here is more on Titi, also known as Hortense, who studied with Bartok and received numerous letters from him. And here is Scott Sumner on Hawtrey, one of the great monetary economists.
Saturday assorted links
1. Flying still seems pretty safe.
2. “Public opinion has softened its view on brutalism.”
3. In case you had forgotten this ongoing story: “By Thursday evening’s fourth round the 29-year-old from Oslo had extended his world record unbeaten streak to 125 games, with his last defeat coming in July 2018.”
4. Which 21st century works will merit a close reading or rereading in 2050? I tend to think virtually everything will be superseded, but I mean that as praise for what is to come, not pessimism about current work.
6. Further results on falling mortality rates and diminishing viral load. The broad upshot is that diminishing viral load seems to be more important than we had thought, and a variety of other factors less important.
The Hi-Tech Hayekians and the Cypherpunks
Reason has released the first of a four part series on the hi-tech Hayekians and the cypherpunk movement. As Tyler already mentioned, Don Lavoie at GMU played an early role in bringing economics and computer scientists together. I was at a few of the first seminars with Lavoie and people like Mark Miller, although it took decades for me to realize how far Lavoie was ahead of his time.
Does economic value reside in the brain?
I do not feel qualified to have an opinion here, but this piece, by Benjamin Y. Hayden and Yael Niv, seems of some interest:
Much of traditional neuroeconomics proceeds from the hypothesis that value is reified in the brain, that is, that there are neurons or brain regions whose responses serve the discrete purpose of encoding value. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that the activity of many neurons and brain regions covaries with subjective value as estimated in specific tasks. Here we consider an alternative: that value is not represented in the brain. This idea is motivated by close consideration of the economic concept of value, which places important epistemic constraints on our ability to identify its neural basis. It is also motivated by the behavioral economics literature, especially work on heuristics. Finally, it is buoyed by recent neural and behavioral findings regarding how animals and humans learn to choose between options. In light of our hypothesis, we critically reevaluate putative neural evidence for the representation of value, and explore an alternative: that brains directly learn action policies. We delineate how this alternative can provide a robust account of behavior that concords with existing empirical data.
Via Benjamin Lyons.
Friday assorted links
1. Video of good GeoWizard guessing, a little slow to start.
2. Does fluoride make you smarter? And “Lionel Penrose was a Professor of eugenics at University College London’s Galton Laboratory.”
3. Patrick McKenzie on Stripe.
4. The whole Cambridge Analytica thing seems to have been a load of b.s.
5. NYT profile of Matt Levine. And Bloomberg profile of Emily Oster.
6. The Monty Hall problem with many doors (goats).
The Agorics era at Mercatus and GMU
This started in the late 1980s, and was led by GMU economist Don Lavoie, who earlier had been a computer programmer. Here is one bit from Don’s extensive essay, co-authored with Howard Baetjer and William Tulloh:
The market for scholarly ideas is now badly compartmentalized, due to the nature of our institutions for dispersing information. One important aspect of the limitations on information dispersal is the one-way nature of references in scholarly literature. Suppose Professor Mistaken writes a persuasive but deeply flawed article. Suppose few see the flaws, while so many are persuaded that a large supportive literature results. Anyone encountering a part of this literature will see references to Mistaken’s original article. References thus go upstream towards original articles. But it may be that Mistaken’s article also provokes a devastating refutation by Professor Clearsighted. This refutation may be of great interest to those who read Mistaken’s original article, but with our present technology of publishing ideas on paper, there is no way for Mistaken’s readers to be alerted to the debunking provided by Clearsighted. The supportive literature following Mistaken will cite Mistaken but either ignore Professor Clearsighted or minimize her refutations.
In a hypertext system such as that being developed at Xanadu, original work may be linked downstream to subsequent articles and comments. In our example, for instance, Professor Clearsighted can link her comments directly to Mistaken’s original article, so that readers of Mistaken’s article may learn of the existence of the refutation, and be able, at the touch of a button, to see it or an abstract of it. The refutation by Clearsighted may similarly and easily be linked to Mistaken’s rejoinder, and indeed to the whole literature consequent on his original article. Scholars investigating this area of thought in a hypertext system would in the first place know that a controversy exists, and in the second place be able to see both (or more) sides of it with ease. The improved cross-referencing of, and access to, all sides of an issue should foster an improved evolution of knowledge.
A potential problem with this system of multidirectional linking is that the user may get buried underneath worthless “refutations” by crackpots. The Xanadu system will include provisions for filtering systems whereby users may choose their own criteria for the kinds of cross-references to be brought to their attention. These devices would seem to overcome the possible problem of having charlatans clutter the system with nonsense. In the first place, one would have to pay a fee for each item published on the system. In the second place, most users would choose to filter out comments that others had adjudged valueless and comments by individuals with poor reputations. In other words, though anyone could publish at will on a hypertext system, if one develops a bad reputation, very few will ever see his work.
And this:
Miller and Drexler envision the evolution of what they call agoric open systems–extensive networks of computer resources interacting according to market signals. Within vast computational networks, the complexity of resource allocation problems would grow without limit. Not only would a price system be indispensible to the efficient allocation of resources within such networks, but it would also facilitate the discovery of new knowledge and the development of new resources. Such open systems, free of the encumbrances of central planners, would most likely evolve swiftly and in unexpected ways. Given secure property rights and price information to indicate profit opportunities, entrepreneurs could be expected to develop and market new software and information services quite rapidly.
Secure property rights are essential. Owners of computational resources, such as agents containing algorithms, need to be able to sell the services of their agents without having the algorithm itself be copyable. The challenge here is to develop secure operating systems. Suppose, for example, that a researcher at George Mason University wanted to purchase the use of a proprietary data set from Alpha Data Corporation and massage that data with proprietary algorithms marketed by Beta Statistical Services, on a superfast computer owned by Gamma Processing Services. The operating system needs to assure that Alpha cannot steal Beta’s algorithms, that Beta cannot steal Alpha’s data set, and that neither Gamma or the George Mason researcher can steal either. These firms would thus under-produce their services if they feared that their products could be easily copied by any who used them.
In their articles, Miller and Drexler propose a number of ways in which this problem might be overcome. In independent work, part of the problem apparently has already been overcome. Norm Hardy, senior scientist of Key Logic Corporation, whom we met at Xanadu, has developed an operating system caned KeyKOS which accomplishes what many suspected to be impossible: it assures by some technical means (itself an important patented invention) the integrity of computational resources in an open, interconnected system. To return to the above example, the system in effect would create a virtual black box in Gamma’s computer, in which Alpha’s data and Beta’s algorithms are combined. The box is inaccessible to anyone, and it self-destructs once the desired results have been forwarded to the George Mason researcher.
There is really quite a bit more at the link, noting that at the time Don had assembled a group of about ten people working on these ideas. As for the hyperlinks, I recall thinking at the time something like: “People don’t value reading so much, so making reading better with hyperlinks won’t have a huge marginal value!”
Thursday assorted links
1. Unrules.
2. New Italian results on monoclonal antibodies. And “Being previously infected with coronaviruses that cause the “common cold” may decrease the severity of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infections…”
3. “A substantial proportion of individuals in this population showed antibody reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 antigens despite low serological evidence of SARS-CoV-2 exposure.” Still a big puzzle!
4. How to rethink Chinese history.
5. A virus has infected scarlet fever bacteria and the results are not good.
Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The Persistence of Pay Inequality
Gender wage gaps appear even in markets where workplace discrimination is impossible or unlikely. Uber driver’s for example are assigned trips using a gender-blind algorithm and earn according to a known formula based on time and distance of trip. Yet, a small but persistent gender gap of about 7% exists which appears to be due mostly to the fact that male drivers drive a little bit faster, choose to work in more congested areas, and have a bit more experience. Litman et al. (2020) show that the same kind of difference also show up in earnings on Mechanical Turk
In this study we examined the gender pay gap on an anonymous online platform across an 18-month period, during which close to five million tasks were completed by over 20,000 unique workers. Due to factors that are unique to the Mechanical Turk online marketplace–such as anonymity, self-selection into tasks, relative homogeneity of the tasks performed, and flexible work scheduling–we did not expect earnings to differ by gender on this platform. However, contrary to our expectations, a robust and persistent gender pay gap was observed.
The average estimated actual pay on MTurk over the course of the examined time period was $5.70 per hour, with the gender pay differential being 10.5%.
In this case, however, neither experience nor task choice nor demographics appears to explain the difference. One interesting finding is that women are more likely to choose tasks with a lower advertised pay–perhaps men are just a bit lazier. Who knows? People are different.
N.B. The authors go out of their way to plead that they are not in fact politically incorrect.
Claims about politics (speculative)
Among white liberals under 30, nearly half have a mental health condition, compared to 21-26 % among centrists and conservatives. H/t @ZachG932 https://t.co/iG9saHtvRR
— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) April 12, 2020
First, I don’t think “liberals” is exactly the right word here, but I’m not going to relitigate that one now. Second, as I’ve argued in my The Age of the Infovore (and in some forthcoming writings you haven’t seen yet), I don’t think “mental health condition” is appropriate in this context. Furthermore, what are called “mental health conditions” often are sources of insight and can be positively correlated with talent.
That all said, I don’t think you can understand modern American discourse, most of all social media, without recognizing that “the intellectual Left” has higher neuroticism — as defined by Five-Factor personality theory — than say centrists. The Right of course has its own correlations, but that is a topic for another time.