Category: Uncategorized
Should NBA referees call fouls objectively in playoff games?
I call them “rule of law” foul calls, because they are in accord with clearly defined standards for a foul call. In contrast, in the “good ol’ days” referees used to think: “I’m not going to let a foul call determine the outcome of this playoff game in the decisive moments.” So unless the defender really slugged the guy, or whacked his hand down when shooting, the refs would “let them play,” and the chips would fall as fate determined.
But Wednesday night I saw three critical foul calls (across two games) in the closing moments that were all “marginal fouls.” They were, in my opinion (and in the opinion of former referee Steve Javie), all legitimate foul calls. But just barely, and I am pretty sure that none of them would have been called fifteen years ago, or maybe not even five years ago. Bumping into a guy after he already missed his shot and the clock ran out? Is it a foul objectively speaking? Yes. Should it be called? Well…
The case against rule of law fouls is that games decided by the referees have less legitimacy, and that in turn hurts both the legitimacy and the popularity of the league. Even if it was “objectively a foul,” the fans either don’t know that, were unwilling to recognize that, or they may, like I, favor the good ol’ days when fouls were called less objectively and also less frequently in the closing moments of close games.
The case in favor of rule of law foul calls is that replays and social media make the truth easier to determine, and place extra burden on the refs to appear fair and consistent over time, to protect the legitimacy and popularity of the league. Furthermore, the heightened salience of racial issues encourages a more consistent standard to limit charges of discrimination, whether those charges are founded or not. It is more defensible to always call the same play the same way, regardless of the clock or the closeness of the score, which are ultimately somewhat subjective standards (just how close does the game have to be?).
So I recognize that rule of law foul calls may now be necessary, even if I do not myself prefer them.
One relevant point here is that with better recording and a wider dissemination of the recordings, the NBA has in fact moved much closer to the rule of law.
So it can be done, and perhaps others can do it too. Just like the spit testing.
Addendum from the comments: “The real reason must be gambling – they want gambling on the NBA to be legitimate, and this causes a lot of problems if the refs have a lot of latitude to make choices. The NBA has had problems with this.”
Friday assorted links
1. PBA cards, and implicit trades with police.
2. Australia: “Lawyers and civil liberty groups have expressed concerns about the way a pregnant woman was arrested at her home in Ballarat for allegedly encouraging people to take part in an anti-lockdown rally.” I guess she didn’t have a good enough PBA card.
3. The football culture that is Fargo. 10,000 at an indoors game? And is a two-puffin photo twice as good as a one-puffin photo?
5. New data on the Russian vaccine.
Parasite and Burning
I was asked by Russell Hogg to join him on his movie podcast with Agnes Callard and Abe Callard. We discussed Parasite and Burning. Russell labeled the podcast Alex Tabarrok Versus the People, although there was much agreement among the panel with my controversial analysis of Parasite! I also threw in a reactionary reading of Snowpiercer at the end. We also had a fine discussion of Burning and whether the orange peeling is a hint about the meaning of the ending.
Brazil growing popularity of Bolsonaro fact of the day
As I have been saying, the median voter does not die of Covid-19, which means that many political responses will be highly imperfect. Here is one recent narrative:
Some 66 million people, 30% of the population, have been getting 600 reais ($110) a month, making it the most ambitious social program ever undertaken in Brazil, a shocking shift under President Jair Bolsonaro who railed against welfare, dismissed the virus — and now finds himself newly popular.
The government hasn’t published its own figures yet but data from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, one of Brazil’s top universities, show that those living on less than $1.9 a day fell to 3.3% in June from 8% last year, and those below the poverty line were at 21.7% compared with 25.6%. Both represent 16-year lows.
Here is is more from Lima, Rosati, and Iglesias at Bloomberg. By the way, Brazil’s primary deficit will be 11% this year.
Via Michael Pettengill.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn has reinstated Ms Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi to her post of royal noble consort, and returned her royal insignia and military ranks, the palace announced on the royal gazette on Aug 29.” Link here, short, and interesting throughout.
2. Straussian vaccine analysts: “And I don’t think people can use that information responsibly.”
3. “Staff at Hagerstown [Community College] must now go into their offices to work because they can’t access the VPNs.” No support for remote work there!
4. Morgan Kelly on understanding persistence. That is historical persistence, not the personal quality.
5. SPACs explainer, though it doesn’t convince me the implicit bid-ask spread/fees on securities offerings and deals will narrow so dramatically. Many of you are asking me about this, but it still feels poorly understood to me.
6. The Swiss canton of Zug will now accept taxes paid in either Bitcoin or Ether (Bloomberg). Limited to up to 100k, however, and maybe more of a marketing move than a real fiscal validation of crypto as money?
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.138 (no spoilers)
Some surprises have come, and I am liking it more. Is it fair to judge it against the Neapolitan quadrology? This book has only one major character rather than two, so is it doomed to be only half as good? Can any current book manage to be half as good? Can we read this one fresh at all? (Is it better to view the Mona Lisa “fresh,” or not?) Should we be trying to discard prior expectations, or not be trying to discard expectations for a book such as this?
You’ll be getting another report soon, please note I am deliberately not reading the book too quickly. Here is my previous post on the book. I agree with the commentator who described the male characters as mostly flat.
Show your work, people — advice on vaccines and approval timing
Every day I read maybe twenty or more tweets decrying Trump’s acceleration of the FDA vaccine approval process. And yet I do not see a single blog post with back of the envelope calculations. This is such an important decision, and it deserves better, just as we analyze the Fed’s monetary policy decisions in great detail. On those points, here is my latest Bloomberg column, excerpt:
One of your weaker arguments is that Trump’s push is disturbing because it is making the FDA “too political.” First, American responses to crises, such as Sept. 11 or the Great Recession, have always been political. Second, and more to the point, there is a strong case that the FDA should take politics into account more, not less.
The FDA has been too risk-averse in the very recent past, for instance in its reluctance to approve additional Covid-19 testing. Economists have generally concluded that the FDA is too risk-averse in the long term as well, considering all relevant trade-offs. What kind of fix might there be for those problems, if not a “political” one? Of course the initial risk-aversion was itself the result of a political calculation, namely the desire to avoid blame from the public and from Congress…
The American people will not buy the claim that the current [pre-Trump] FDA is above politics. Nor should they.
And:
As a public-health expert, you are also missing the broader context behind the current vaccine debate. In the early months of the pandemic, as late as April, it was common to hear that there might not be a vaccine for at least four years, and many were not sure if it would be possible at all. It is now likely (though not certain) that there will be a pretty good vaccine within a year.
That is a wonderful development, and it speaks well of your intelligence and hard work. Still, given that recent history, is it crazy for the American people to wonder if the process could be accelerated further? After all, the Chinese have a vaccine right now (albeit probably an inferior one), and they have been known to complete complicated infrastructure projects with a speed not previously thought possible.
And:
It’s not just about wanting to speed things up. One might argue that, due to the unprecedentedly high number of vaccines currently under consideration, the optimal threshold should be higher, not lower, for fear that the world will be left with a suboptimal choice.
Finally:
Too often I have seen one of you cite a single factor on one side of the approval equation, then invoke your authority or some previously existing institutional standard to suggest that this factor is decisive. In a Trumpian world, where credentials and authority no longer settle a debate — on public health or other matters — this kind of argument is not sufficient.
My plea is that such arguments and others be accompanied by concrete numbers, if only rough back-of-the-envelope estimates, and that all of the factors be considered together. Those numbers should incorporate the human, economic and public-health costs of allowing the current situation to continue for months. The result could be a useful public debate about the optimal speed of vaccine approval.
Yes, blah blah blah. But — public health experts — show your work.
Wednesday assorted links
1. An actual willingness to pay study for in-person university attendance.
2. How big is the “dry tinder” effect for Sweden?
4. “Thus, in ecologically valid real-world samples, people who do good are also likely to look good.”
5. The state that is California: “”I miss when it was just a pandemic and depression,” my mom told me.”
Monkey Parenting Matters
In a new NBER paper, a group of economists, including James Heckman, have joined with researchers who study child development to analyze data from a multi-generational monkey raising experiment. It’s well known from the Harlow experiments of the 1950s that monkeys raised without their mothers don’t do so well. (It’s also from these experiments that the mantra of skin-to-skin mother-child contact comes from.) What’s distinctive in the new paper is that there are two generations of monkeys who are raised by their mothers or in nurseries and in each generation the treatment is randomly chosen. Indeed, I believe this new paper includes the children of monkeys discussed in this earlier paper which also included Heckman. The multi-generational experiment lets the researchers test whether disadvantage is transmitted down the generations and whether it can be alleviated.
The analysis indicates first that being raised by a mother results in better health and higher social status than being raised in a nursery (as measured by who wins disputes and ELO scores similar to those used in chess!). Second being raised by a mother who was raised by a mother is better than being raised by a mother who was raised in a nursery. The latter indicates that disadvantage transmits down the generations. Indeed, being raised by a mother who was raised in a nursery is just as bad as being raised in a nursery. In other words, it’s hard to ameliorate disadvantage in one generation.
The sample is small (about 100 monkeys in generation one and 60 in generation two) but because of random assignment still potentially useful.
The authors suggest that there are lessons for humans:
Our findings are in line with results from a social experiment on humans. Heckman and Karapakula (2019) document the intergenerational effects of the Perry Preschool Project,which was a randomized social experiment in the 1960s that provided high-quality preschool experiences to socially disadvantaged children. They find that the positive effects of the preschool program were transmitted into the next generation. The offspring of the treated participants were more likely to have better health, achieve higher education, and were more likely to be employed than the offspring of the non-treated participants. In the same way that early-life advantage via maternal presence for rhesus-monkeys led to improved health and higher social rank for their offspring, early-life advantage via high-quality preschool in humans led to better health and social outcomes for their children.
But note the subtle shift in “treatment” meaning. In the monkey experiment, mother-raised is better and it’s the nurseries which are bad but in the human experiment it’s the nurseries that are good. It’s hard enough to justify external validity across human experiments in different places or times doing so across species is an even more perilous leap.
*The Stakes: American at the Point of No Return*
That is the new book by Michael Anton, the famed then pseudonymous author of the “Flight 93 piece.”
I consider this to be the very best book for understanding where the current Intellectual Right “is at.” In that sense I recommend it highly. The opening chapter is a polemical fear that all of American will go the route of California, and then Anton keeps on digging further in on what has gone wrong.
To be clear, my vision is not the same as Michael’s. I would like to see more emphasis on economic growth, on individual liberty, to recognize the emancipatory strands within the Left, to move away from the current historical pessimism of the Right and of Anton in particular, to be more unabashedly cosmopolitan, think more about science, and to become more Bayesian. Nor do I agree that “…there’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.”
Nonetheless this book serves a very valuable purpose and many of you should read it.
Tesla’s Gigafactory
Elon Musk has said that he thinks not of building cars but of building factories that make cars, the machine that makes the machine. You can see what he is on about in this new video of the first Gigafactory.
Three points of note. The factory was up and running in 10 months. There are lots of robots, in a factory in China–that tells you a lot about Chinese wages and the productivity of robots today. Tesla is building Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas next.
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.63 no spoilers
It is a thrill to be dragged into her Neapolitan world of class and romantic intrigue and family strife once again, and the book is clearly Ferrante from the get go. Yet I have some doubts. The plot seems more accessible and less complex, and with fewer layers to be unpeeled. It has not yet moved out of “father-daughter cliché land.” Every page is engrossing, but I am still looking for the surprise.
They have been so stingy with advance review copies that there are still no Amazon reviews.
Tuesday assorted links
2. More on the vaccines from Russia and China.
3. “We conclude by analyzing New York’s efforts to address out-of-network billing through binding arbitration between physicians and insurers over out-of-network payments. This intervention reduced out-of-network billing by 12.8 percentage points (88%).” JPE link here.
4. “As if 2020 couldn’t get any weirder, airline pilots landing at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Sunday, August 30th, reported seeing “a guy in a jetpack” flying about 300 yards off their wing while on final approach to the bustling airport. What makes the reports even stranger is that, like a scene out of The Rocketeer, the airliners were descending through 3,000 feet when jetpack guy showed up next to them.” Link here.
5. The public choice of NIMBY: “Historic district designation generates a 12-23% premium for house transactions in Denver.”
*The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941*
The author is Paul Dickson, and the subtitle is The Forgotten Story of How America Forged a Powerful Army Before Pearl Harbor.
For one thing, I enjoyed the examples of “fast action” in this book. For instance, the U.S. passed draft registration Sept.16, 1940. All men between 21 and 45 are supposed to register, and on a single date, Oct.16. Almost all of them do, including people in mental hospitals. Some stragglers register over the next five days, but the overwhelming majority pull it off on day one, and with very little preexisting infrastructure to draw upon, as draft institutions had been abolished right after the end of WWI.
I had not realized how instrumental George Marshall had been, before Pearl Harbor, in investing in building up America’s officer corps.
The famous movie star, Jimmy Stewart, was drafted but then rejected for being ten pounds too light at 6’3″ and 138 lbs. He then put on ten pounds so he could join the service.
The tales of poor morale, mental illness, and prostitution camps (no antibiotics!) in 1940 are harrowing.
Recommended.
Economists in the Wild: Finkelstein, Oostrom and Ostriker
Here’s the latest Economists in the Wild video featuring Amy Finkelstein, Tamar Oostrom and Abigail Ostriker discussing some of their research (with Einav and Williams) on breast cancer screening. It’s a good video for illustrating how the tools of economics can be used to study a startling wide variety of problems.
Here’s a free assignment to help connect this video to class.
More professor resources.
High school teacher resources.