Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday assorted links
1. The economics of vending machines.
2. Geneva introducing a minimum wage of $25 an hour.
3. Senegal proceeding with festival that usually attracts four to five million people (NYT).
4. Those new service sector quarantine work for the super-rich jobs. And Covid-19 and acedia.
5. New calculations on what is needed for herd immunity.
6. A much quicker and easier serological test.
7. Lessons from the Israeli second wave. Good stuff, but I would note a common tension found in many discussions. When arguing against herd immunity and “segregate the old” approaches, it is common to note “you can’t stop the young from infecting the old,” though that point in the broader picture does not in fact work against herd immunity approaches.
My Conversation with Audrey Tang
For me one of the most fun episodes, here is the audio, video, and transcript. And here is the longer than ever before summary, befitting the chat itself:
Audrey Tang began reading classical works like the Shūjīng and Tao Te Ching at the age of 5 and learned the programming language Perl at the age of 12. Now, the autodidact and self-described “conservative anarchist” is a software engineer and the first non-binary digital minister of Taiwan. Their work focuses on how social and digital technologies can foster empathy, democracy, and human progress.
Audrey joined Tyler to discuss how Taiwan approached regulating Chinese tech companies, the inherent extraterritoriality of data norms, how Finnegans Wake has influenced their approach to technology, the benefits of radical transparency in communication, why they appreciate the laziness of Perl, using “humor over rumor” to combat online disinformation, why Taiwan views democracy as a set of social technologies, how their politics have been influenced by Taiwan’s indigenous communities and their oral culture, what Chinese literature teaches about change, how they view Confucianism as a Daoist, how they would improve Taiwanese education, why they view mistakes in the American experiment as inevitable — but not insurmountable, the role of civic tech in Taiwan’s pandemic response, the most important remnants of Japanese influence remaining in Taiwan, why they love Magic: The Gathering, the transculturalism that makes Taiwan particularly open and accepting of LGBT lifestyles, growing up with parents who were journalists, how being transgender makes them more empathetic, the ways American values still underpin the internet, what he learned from previous Occupy movements, why translation, rotation, and scaling are important skills for becoming a better thinker, and more.
This bit could have come from GPT-3:
COWEN: How useful a way is it of conceptualizing your politics to think of it as a mix of some Taiwanese Aboriginal traditions mixed in with Daoism, experience in programming, and then your own theory of humor and fun? And if you put all of that together, the result is Audrey Tang’s politics. Correct or not?
TANG: Well as of now, of course. But of course, I’m also growing, like a distributed ledger.
And this:
COWEN: You’re working, of course, in Taiwanese government. What’s the biggest thing wrong with economists?
TANG: You mean the magazine?
COWEN: No, no, the people, economists as thinkers. What’s their biggest defect or flaw?
TANG: I don’t know. I haven’t met an economist that I didn’t like, so I don’t think there’s any particular personality flaws there.
Finally:
COWEN: Now, my country, the United States, has made many, many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level. What is it in the United States that those mistakes have come from? What’s our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?
TANG: I don’t know. Isn’t America this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and share it with the world? That’s the American experiment.
COWEN: Have we started correcting them yet?
TANG: I’m sure that you have.
Definitely recommended.
New Canadian data on mask effectiveness
We estimate the impact of mask mandates and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) on COVID-19 case growth in Canada, including regulations on businesses and gatherings, school closures, travel and self-isolation, and long-term care homes. We partially account for behavioral responses using Google mobility data. Our identification approach exploits variation in the timing of indoor face mask mandates staggered over two months in the 34 public health regions in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. We find that, in the first few weeks after implementation, mask mandates are associated with a reduction of 25 percent in the weekly number of new COVID-19 cases. Additional analysis with province-level data provides corroborating evidence. Counterfactual policy simulations suggest that mandating indoor masks nationwide in early July could have reduced the weekly number of new cases in Canada by 25 to 40 percent in mid-August, which translates into 700 to 1,100 fewer cases per week.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Alexander Karaivano, Shih En Lu, Hitoshi Shigeoka, Gong Chen, and Stephanie Pamplona.
Why are North and South India so different on gender?
Region is a strong predictor of female survival, literacy, autonomy, employment, and independent mobility. A woman with the exact same household wealth/ caste/ religion will likely have more autonomy if she lives in the South.
It does not seem to be a function of wealth, nor was colonialism a major factor. And cousin marriage, which is more prevalent in the south? Alice notes:
Southern women may have gained autonomy despite cousin marriage, not because of it.
Islam, however, is one factor:
In sum, gender segregation became more widespread under Islamic rule. Men continue [to] dominate public life, while women are more rooted in their families, seldom gathering to resist structural inequalities.
But perhaps most significantly:
Female labour force participation is higher in states with traditions of labour-intensive cultivation…
Wheat has been grown for centuries on the fertile, alluvial Indo-Gangetic plain. Cultivation is not terribly labour-intensive, though cereals must still be processed, shelled and ground. This lowers demand for female labour in the field, and heightens its importance at home.
Rice-cultivation is much more labour intensive. It requires the construction of tanks and irrigation channels, planting, transplanting, and harvesting. Women are needed in the fields. Rice is the staple crop in the South.
And this:
Pastoralism may have also influenced India’s caste-system. Brahmins dominate business, public service, politics, the judiciary, and universities. Upper caste purity and prestige has been preserved through female seclusion, prohibiting polluting sexual access. These patriarchal norms may be rooted in ancient livelihoods. Brahmins share genetic data with ancient Iranians and steppe pastoralists. Brahmins also comprise a larger share of the population in North India and only 3% in Tamil Nadu.
Over the centuries, male superiority may have become entrenched.
Finally:
Northern parents increasingly support their daughters’ education, but this is primarily to improve their marriage prospects, not work outside the home.
There is much, much more at the link, including some excellent maps, visuals, and photos.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Update on Portuguese drug decriminalization (NYT).
2. Tidbits from the White House physician. And that was quick markets in everything commemorative coin.
3. Brink Lindsey and Samuel Hammond do a deep dive on many important policy issues.
4. Fiscal data for African polities since 1890.
6. “There are 19,000 economists in the US. Close to half are working in or around DC. New York is not even in the top five of states.” Link here, has more of interest.
Blockchain Meets it QAnon
When Jesus spit biblical rhymes on the mount, he too talked about the marshmallow test in the form of two gates that one could go through in life. One gate was narrow and lead to a difficult path; the other gate was wide and lead to an easy path. Most people, according to Jesus, took the easy path which lead to their ruin (Matthew 7:13–14). There can be no question that taking back your sovereignty is the hard path, but you must remember the alternative is destruction. Those who procure Zcash shall be part of the kingdom of God in the post-fiat world. More importantly, those who remain shitcoin pagans or bitcoin Jews will risk burning in the eternal flames of the surveillance state.
Not by any means the craziest paragraph in Intolerant Zeal a jeremiad by blockchain’s QAnon, Sixteen Holder, that combines religious history, evolutionary psychology, and meat-eating with ZCash as the savior. Is it performance art? Advertising? A sign of our times?
In other news, the Devil Facebook’s Libra is hiring economists (I have done some consulting work for a competitor):
Novi is a Facebook subsidiary whose goal is to provide financial services for Libra, a new global currency powered by blockchain technology. The first product Novi will introduce is a digital wallet, which will be available in Messenger, WhatsApp and as a standalone app. The first version of Novi will support peer-to-peer payments and a few other ways to pay such as QR codes which small merchants can use to accept payments in Libra. Over time there will be many other use-cases for Novi including in-store payments, integrations into Point-of-Sale systems, and more. When launched, Novi will have strong fraud and privacy protections. The Novi digital wallet is expected to launch in 2020.
The Novi economics team is seeking exceptional candidates from all fields, with a special focus on applied microeconomics, development, macroeconomics, finance, and market design, to join our team. Individuals in this role are expected to have deep expertise and the ability to leverage economic theory into real-world, practical solutions for blockchain based problems. We encourage applicants from all levels of seniority to apply, including PhD holders with subsequent work experience.
Depending on background, economists in this role will initiate and execute projects around topics such as financial inclusion, the macroeconomic aspects of the Libra currency, the economics of digitization and cryptocurrency markets. Candidates should demonstrate a strong research background and the ability to disseminate findings clearly and succinctly. This job will involve both foundational product work and academic research centered around the Novi digital wallet and the Libra currency.
Research Scientist, Novi Economics (Blockchain) Responsibilities
• Drive economics-based product decisions and research agendas involving the Libra currency and the Novi wallet.
• Work closely with other teams, including product and engineering, to identify and answer economics-related questions.
• Communicate findings clearly and concisely to leadership and other stakeholders.
• Author novel economics research.Minimum Qualifications
• PhD in economics or finance or 6+ years experience working in finance.
• Experience in a general purpose programming language such as knowledge in R or Python.
Superspreaders data from India
Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, worked with public health officials in the southeast Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to track the infection pathways and mortality rate of 575,071 individuals who were exposed to 84,965 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. It is the largest contact tracing study — which is the process of identifying people who came into contact with an infected person — conducted in the world for any disease.
Lead researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar in PEI, said that the paper is the first large study to capture the extraordinary extent to which SARS-CoV-2 hinges on “superspreading,” in which a small percentage of the infected population passes the virus on to more people. The researchers found that 71% of infected individuals did not infect any of their contacts, while a mere 8% of infected individuals accounted for 60% of new infections…
The researchers found that the chances of a person with coronavirus, regardless of their age, passing it on to a close contact ranged from 2.6% in the community to 9% in the household. The researchers found that children and young adults — who made up one-third of COVID cases — were especially key to transmitting the virus in the studied populations.
“Kids are very efficient transmitters in this setting, which is something that hasn’t been firmly established in previous studies,” Laxminarayan said. “We found that reported cases and deaths have been more concentrated in younger cohorts than we expected based on observations in higher-income countries.”
Here is the press release, here is the original research.
A Cost/Benefit Analysis of Clinical Trial Designs for COVID-19 Vaccine Candidates
I am very happy to see this new and urgently needed study. They have heeded the stricture to show their work. The authors are Donald A. Berry, Scott Berry, Peter Hale, Leah Isakov, Andrew W. Lo, Kien Wei Siah, and Chi Heem Wong, and here is the abstract:
We compare and contrast the expected duration and number of infections and deaths averted among several designs for clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including traditional randomized clinical trials and adaptive and human challenge trials. Using epidemiological models calibrated to the current pandemic, we simulate the time course of each clinical trial design for 504 unique combinations of parameters, allowing us to determine which trial design is most effective for a given scenario. A human challenge trial provides maximal net benefits—averting an additional 1.1M infections and 8,000 deaths in the U.S. compared to the next best clinical trial design—if its set-up time is short or the pandemic spreads slowly. In most of the other cases, an adaptive trial provides greater net benefits.
And what is an adapted trial you may be wondering?:
An adaptive version of the traditional vaccine efficacy RCT design (ARCT) is based on group sequential methods. Instead of a fixed study duration with a single final analysis at the end, we allow for early stopping for efficacy via periodic interim analyses of accumulating trial data…While this reduces the expected duration of the trial, we note that adaptive trials typically require more complex study protocols which can be operationally challenging to implement for test sites unfamiliar with this framework. In our simulations, we assume a maximum of six interim analyses spaced 30 days apart, with the first analysis performed when the first 10,000 subjects have been monitored for at least 30 days.
That means of course you might cut the trial short. Kudos to the authors for producing one of the most important papers of this year.
Monday assorted links
2. The Daniel Ek and Spotify production function, very interesting and with remarks on Beyonce too.
3. What destroyed the Bronze Age cities?
4. Having children is now starting to correlate with lower male earnings — selection or causal?
5. Good thread on monoclonal antibodies.
6. Somebody’s Nobel predictions, starting with Claudia Goldin and moving on to Dickey-Fuller. Plausible enough, but not sure what exactly their metric is.
7. Scott is right about Satantango, and most of the others too.
Tyrone on clinical trials and how to keep them up and running
Tyrone — my evil twin brother — received so much hate and love mail from his recent pronouncements about QAnon that he felt emboldened to offer additional opinions. As you might expect, he prefers to spew his hateful bile on matters of life and death. In particular, he has been following the debates about Covid and whether new treatments should be accelerated in their availability. Anyway, I told him I was willing to pass along another of his letters, as a kind of experiment (not quite a clinical trial) whether Tyler or Tyrone is a more beloved writer on MR. I am sure you readers — and especially commentators — stand ready to defend my honor!
So here is his (as usual) fallacy-ridden missive:
Tyler, I don’t see why you let the defenders of FDA stalling get away with their dawdling. They all end up with the same argument — if we let wonderful, salt of the earth Americans take beneficial medicines, treatments, and vaccines, we will not be able to set up informative clinical trials. Why partake in the trial when you can just get the stuff through normal means?
That is so lame! First, they could simply pay people to partake in those trials. Isn’t that in essence what the NBA did with its Covid testing in the bubble? If the value of those clinical trials truly is so high, it should be possible to internalize enough of those benefits to encourage participation. If institutional barriers stand in the way there, let’s obsess over fixing those.
Why should we force so many Americans to be sacrificial lambs, just to subsidize the trial costs? Let those costs be taken out of grant overhead! (And admin. salaries, if need be.)
If the current medical establishment is not as able as the NBA, well OK, can’t they just admit it and plead patheticness? We can send them to take care of Major League Baseball, and put Adam Silver and Lebron James in charge of our health care.
Second, there is another way to keep the trial up and running. Approve use of the treatment, but allow the suppliers to charge very high prices! Better yet, use the law to make them charge high prices and if need be forbid insurance coverage.
“What will it be sucker? Fifty percent chance of the placebo, or 100k for those monoclonal antibodies?”
I assure you Tyler that will restore a separating equilibrium. Furthermore, in the meantime only the most meritocratic of wealthy men will get the treatment outside of the trial, all for the better. If need be, you can pull away the price floor when the clinical trial is complete, in the meantime you have satisfied the Pareto principle.
And what about the Hippocratic Oath ? “Do no harm”? Is that not invoked so selectively by the public health commentators? Surely you realize they court public opinion and high status by taking sins of commission far more seriously than the far less visible sins of omission?
Is it not harm to deny patients ready accessibility to a treatment with positive expected value?
Is it really such a great rejoinder to insist “We can’t let those patients improve their lot by raising pecuniary costs for the medical professionals running their trials! That is true Hippocratic harm and must be avoided at all costs, because in fact we medical people would be too feckless to overcome that problem…”
Sigh. At that point I had to stop reading and transcribing. I am sorry readers, I didn’t know that Tyrone in his spare time was studying economics and indeed some logic as well. Maybe he has even been reading MR. That makes him less interesting, less funny, and maybe a bit too much like Tyler. That is not why you come to read Tyrone, and indeed you might as well be reading Tyler.
What can I do to make Tyrone better and more eccentric again? Perhaps try to get him premature access to some of those special treatments? Stay tuned….
New Emergent Ventures anti-Covid prize winners
The first new prize is to Anup Malani of the University of Chicago, with his team, for their serological research in India and Mumbia. They showed rates of 57 percent seroprevalance in the Mumbai slums, a critical piece of information for future India policymaking. Here is the research.
Professor Malani is now working in conjunction with Development Data Lab to extend the results by studying other parts of India.
The second new prize goes to 1Day Sooner, a 2020-initiated non-profit which has promoted the idea of Human Challenge Trials for vaccines and other biomedical treatments. Alex here covers the pending HCTs in Britain, as well as providing links to previous MR coverage of the topic.
I am delighted to have them both as Emergent Ventures prize winners.
Here are the first, second, and third cohorts of winners of Emergent Ventures prizes against Covid-19.
Sunday assorted links
1. My May predictions about the NBA bubble.
3. A second wave of Covid infections for London health care workers.
4. Floodgates work in Venice in first major test (NYT).
5. Borgen it ain’t: “The 15-year-old he slept with was member of the junior wing of the Social Democrats.”
6. Resource on aerosol transmission information.
7. Devaki Jain trauma harassment story. Now he is all the more the least deserving economics Nobel laureate.
What I’ve been reading
1. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears). A fun look at the Free Town project as applied to Grafton, New Hampshire: “During a television interview, a Grafton resident accused the Free Towners of “trying to cram freedom down our throats.””
2. Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeulen, Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State. Self-recommending from the pairing alone, there is a great deal of interesting content in the 145 pp. of text. It is furthermore an interesting feature of this book that it was written at all on the chosen topic. Perhaps the administrative state is under more fire than I realize. And might you consider this book a centrist version of…maybe call it “state capacity not quite libertarianism”?
3. Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. A somewhat forgotten but still fascinating episode in the history of science, extra-interesting for those interested in Venus. I had not known that Velikovsky pushed a weird version of a eugenicist theory stating that Israel was too hot for its own long-term good, and that its inhabitants needed to find ways of cooling it down.
4. History, Metaphor, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, edited by Bajohr, Fuchs, and Kroll. I love Blumenberg, but the selection here didn’t quite sell me. Better to start with his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, noting that book is a tough climb for just about anyone and it requires your full attention for some number of weeks. Might Blumenberg be the best 20th thinker who isn’t discussed much in the Anglo-American world? And yes it is Progress Studies too.
5. Laura Tunbridge, Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces. Smart books on Beethoven are like potato chips, plus you can listen to his music while reading (heard Op.33 Bagatelles lately?). In addition to some of the classics, this book covers some lesser known pieces such as the Septet, An die Ferne Geliebte, and the Choral Fantasy, and how they fit into Beethoven’s broader life and career. Intelligent throughout.
6. Sean Scully, The Shape of Ideas, edited and written by Timothy Rub and Amanda Sroka. Is Scully Ireland’s greatest living artist? He has been remarkably consistent over more than five decades of creation. This is likely the best Scully picture book available, and the text is useful too. Since it is abstract color and texture painting, he is harder than most to cancel — will we see the visual arts shift in that direction?
Jonathan E. Hillman, The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century, is a good introduction to its chosen topic.
Robert Litan, Resolved: Debate Can Revolutionize Education and Help Save Our Democracy: “…incorporate debate or evidence-based argumentation in school as early as the late elementary grades, clearly in high school, and even in college.”
I am closer to the economics than the politics of Casey B. Mulligan, You’re Hired! Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President, but nonetheless it is an interesting and contrarian book, again here is the excellent John Cochrane review.
There is also Harriet Pattison, Our Days are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn, a lovely romance with nice photos, sketches, and images as well, very nice integration of text and visuals.
Is the treatment positive expected value, or negative expected value?
Well, which one is it?
If you consider the treatments of remdesivir or monoclonal antibodies for President Trump, their application is either positive expected value or negative expected value.
If they are positive expected value, you should be for using them! (I don’t mean that as a political statement, sub in another patient’s name if you need to.)
If they are negative expected value, you should oppose the current widespread use of remdesivir in hospitals (not necessarily in every case, of course), and you should probably oppose the Advance Market Commitment already in place for Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment, not to mention its successful advance through various trials.
I don’t see anyone taking those stances.
Instead, I see commentators — including highly esteemed public health experts — claiming there is not yet enough data, “expressing reservations,” referring to other public health catastrophes, referring to more general irresponsible habits of the patient under consideration, and serving up various other rhetorical devices to indicate a negative attitude toward the treatment without actually saying “I think this treatment is negative expected value.”
That is a very bad thought and writing habit!
Made worse by Twitter, I might add. You are trying to create negative affect and mood affiliation without making the corresponding epistemic and predictive commitment.
Please just say you think it is negative expected value, and then apply that view consistently across the board. Stand your ground and defend it.
Or if you think it is positive expected value, praise its use, and then of course it is fine to add qualifiers and reservations.
If you genuinely have no opinion (ha), it is fine to say that too, but then you can drop the negative rhetoric and maybe don’t tweet about it at all.
To be sure, there are various heterogeneities and I am not applying the appropriate qualifiers in each sentence above, for reasons of expositional convenience. For instance, is Trump different from other patients? Are the treatments being applied at the right time? Who exactly has the private information here? And so on. Incorporating those factors should not change the basic analysis above, though for the most part they should push you toward a more positive attitude toward the treatments.