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My Conversation with Jason Furman
Yes, the Jason Furman, here is the audio and transcript, please note this was recorded in January. Here is part of the summary:
Jason joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on how monopolies affect investment patterns, his top three recommendations to improve American productivity, why he’s skeptical of place-based development policies, what some pro-immigration arguments get wrong, why he’s more concerned about companies like Facebook and Google than he is Walmart and Amazon, the merits of a human rights approach to privacy, whether the EU treats tech companies fairly, having Matt Damon as a college roommate, the future of fintech, his highest objective when teaching economics, what he learned from coauthoring a paper with someone who disagrees with him, why he’s a prolific Goodreads reviewer, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: The US is losing some of its manufacturing capacity, and certainly a lot of its manufacturing workforce. Are there external benefits to keeping those activities more in the US? Significant benefits?
FURMAN: I don’t think that manufacturing itself should be an important objective of US policy. It’s one type of job. It’s been a good type of job, but there’s other good types of jobs as well. I wouldn’t focus on where physical things are being made as opposed to where services are being made. In fact, if anything, I think the error in policy is probably a little bit too much emphasis on manufacturing and a little bit less on services.
COWEN: What do you think of the national security argument? That, say, when building a ship, we might be dependent on South Korean components. If there were a war in Asia, those might be, for some reason, unreliable. We depend on China for rare earths. We depend on Taiwan, to some extent, for high-quality chips, even though we make our own. Is the supply chain extended too long, and it was a kind of economic fantasy, and it doesn’t make national security sense?
FURMAN: I don’t consider myself an expert in any of those national security questions, so I would be open to thinking about the national security concerns associated with the supply chain. I have an awful lot in specific cases — both when I was in government and just in the world more generally — heard people make national security arguments that I found tendentious and pretty unpersuasive.
There may be some that are persuasive and that are true. There’s an awful lot that aren’t. Our administration, towards the end, worried a bit about semiconductors. When I’ve looked at that, there’s enough of a diversified world supply, enough of an ability to scale up if necessary in the United States, that I don’t think on semiconductors — there, it was protectionism under the guise of national security.
So I think we should accept the possibility of national security, take it seriously, but be really, really wary that a lot of protectionist arguments use that trappings.
Economics throughout, with a touch of Dickens. Recommended.
Swiss Chinese markets in everything
Swiss authorities want to renew a discreet agreement with China, signed in 2015, which allows officials from Beijing to enter the country and question Chinese citizens residing here illegally…
The agreement allows Chinese officials to enter Switzerland for a period of two weeks – without official status – in order to investigate Chinese citizens found to be staying illegally in the Alpine Nation. Once identified, these people can be deported in collaboration with SEM.
Individuals affected by the agreement include rejected asylum seekers, illegal travellers, and those without identity papers.
And what exactly do the Swiss get in return? Here is the full story, via Fergus McCullough.
Differential occupational mortality in Sweden from Covid-19
We use data the Swedish authorities organized as an early release of all recorded COVID-19 deaths in Sweden up to May 7, 2020, which we link to administrative registers and occupational measures of exposure. Taxi and bus drivers had a higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than other workers, as did older individuals living with service workers. Our findings suggest however that these frontline workers and older individuals they live with are not at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 when adjusting the relationship for other individual characteristics. We also did not find evidence that being a frontline worker in terms of occupational exposure was linked to higher COVID-19 mortality. Our findings indicate no strong inequalities according to these occupational differences in Sweden and potentially other contexts that use a similar approach to managing COVID-19.
Overall I am quite surprised how large is the bus and taxi driver effect (even after adjusting for demographics), and how small are the other professional effects. Here is the paper, by Sunnee Billingsley, et.al., via Daniel B. Klein.
The Black Lives Matter Plaza, WDC
Just north of the White House, I visited Sunday for the first time. I am very much a fan of the “Black Lives Matter” block print letters as an artwork, and I wished to take in the broader social scene. On the plaza I saw fully boarded up buildings for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the AFL-CIO, and the Motion Picture Association of America, suitable victims it would seem.
On the Reagan building the sign reads “Fire Command Center.”
Downtown Washington D.C. will not be returning to its prior nature for some time to come.
Tuesday assorted links
1. 538 on why NBA scoring has been so high.
3. Derek Lowe on convalescent plasma.
4. “Most of the time, most people do not know (precisely) what they are talking about.”
6. Valuable perspective on Covid-19 reinfection, not yet the worry it might seem to be. This associated, linked Science piece is excellent not only for its content, but also for showing how reasoning ought to be done.
7. Update on the FDA and test regulations, recommended for those who care.
How bad was the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918?
Yes it was a terrible tragedy, but many locales had much worse events fairly recently:
Between 1917 and 1918 New York City’s crude mortality rate increased by 3.173 deaths per 1000 persons. While tragic, the hollow circles in Figure 1 depict 12 other years where the year-over-year increase in mortality exceeded the magnitude of the 1917 to 1918 change. During the cholera epidemics of 1832, 1834, 1849, and 1854 the year-over-year increase in mortality was 3 to 5 times larger in magnitude than what occurred in 1918. As another comparison, the mortality rate in New York City was higher in nearly every year between 1800 and 1905 than the mortality rate in 1918.
The same is true for many other American cities, but here is a picture for NYC:
And this:
During the first half of the 20th century, Black Americans in urban areas died from infectious disease at a rate that was greater than what urban whites experienced during the 1918 flu pandemic every single year.
On a different but related topic:
…the evidence suggests that the 1918 pandemic was not a major determinant of U.S. stock market volatility.
That is all from the new and very interesting NBER paper by Brian Beach, Karen Clay, and Martin H. Saavedra, “The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and its Lessons for Covid-19.”
Monday assorted links
1. Michael Kremer is moving to the University of Chicago.
2. The very small island countries that have kept Covid out.
3. Laura Deming: “What is the most important US law that seemed really insignificant when originally passed?”
4. Clinical trials are coming along slowly (NYT).
Why so much scoring in the bubble?
Toronto just beat Brooklyn 150-122, and an ESPN headline for another game reads “Mitchell’s 51 upstage Murray’s 50 in classic duel.” Toronto is also a team with a sometimes iffy or stagnant offensive, especially in the half court set. So why are so many points being scored? I see a few hypotheses:
1. It is harder to commit fouls, since referees can hear every slap, push, and grunt. That in turn favors the scorers.
2. The players are still somewhat out of shape from the long layoff, and perhaps that favors offense over defense. (A’ la Leontief, might the defense quality be determined by the “most out of shape” player?)
3. The absence of a live crowd demotivates the defense more than the offense? Similarly, perhaps the absence of home court effects demotivates the defense more?
4. Playing every other night is exhausting for all but the top players. Defense is more or less evenly distributed (you can’t leave anyone totally open, unless it is Charles Jones), but offense is concentrated in a smaller number of top scorers. Differential stamina effects thus favor the offense.
5. Good offense beats good defense anyway. Due to the absence of late night partying, boozing, “frolicking,” etc. we are seeing better, purer forms of both offense and defense, and that on net helps the offense.
6. Lack of travel and consistency of courts favor the offense more than the defense.
What else? And which of these are true?
Convalescent plasma?
Here is the FDA press release. Here is StatNews coverage. Scott Gottlieb tweets:
The available data seems to meet the bar for an EUA.
Here is his WSJ Op-Ed with McClellan, Straussian throughout I suspect. They will only hint at their outrage at the process, noting that both are former FDA heads. Here is the FDA truth twist.
I found this Adam Rogers Wired piece insightful and the best single treatment so far, and also interesting more generally on RCTs:
“Fifty thousand people have been given a treatment, and we cannot know whether it worked or not,” says Martin Landray, one of the leaders of the Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapies (or Recovery) Trial in England, a large-scale, multi-center, multi-drug randomized controlled trial that showed that the corticosteroid dexamethasone saved the lives of Covid-19 patients and the autoimmune drug hydroxychloroquine did not. (That 50,000 number was from a few weeks back, just after the plasma preprint came out.)
The main arguments against the decision from Trump/FDA seem to be “do RCTs” and “convalescent plasma isn’t shown to be so great.” But those points have it exactly backwards. Patients for trials are extremely scarce right now, and if convalescent plasma is not the highest probability big winner (and I suspect it isn’t), you won’t want to waste scarce patients on doing the RCT. Moreover, if you can’t get the RCT done with 98,000 or so patients, maybe you’re just not up to doing it period! (Please do think at the margin.) In the meantime, convalescent plasma does not seem to involve harms or risks, and it may offer some benefits. So why not let more people have easier access to it?
And might there be a tiny chance that American citizens demand stronger payment incentives for the relevant supplies here and also for other treatments?
If all people have is “do RCTs and CP isn’t shown to be so great,” I don’t think they have begun to engage with the arguments. And additionally politicizing the FDA is definitely a real cost to be reckoned with, but the Twitter noise I am seeing from public health experts seems oblivious to the fact that the FDA’s ex ante risk-averse stance was politicized to begin with (which is not necessarily a bad thing, but yes this is a basic fact — “politicization for me, but not for thee,” etc.).
What I’ve been reading
1. Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice. A well-written, highly intelligent book, inveighing against various aspects of the current meritocracy, and how they contribute to what the author calls “social injustice.” People who do educational policy, or who think about inequality should read this book. But ultimately what is his remedy? I would sooner attack homework, credentialism, and bureaucratization than testing. And yes, IQ is overrated, but the correct alternative view emphasizes stamina and relentlessness in a manner that I don’t think will make deBoer any happier. To lower the status of smarts, in the meantime, I fear is not going to do us any good.
2. Chris Ferrie and Veronica Goodman, ABCs of Economics (Baby University). Is this for a 5 or 6 year old? It seems good to me, though perhaps the part where they teach “Nash equilibrium” is a stretch. I say calculus should be available in the fifth grade, stats in the eighth grade, so full steam ahead.
3. Christopher I. Caterine, Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. Did you realize that most of the supposed advantages of academia, such as control over your own time, do not exist to the extent they once did? The advice in this book, such as about how to prepare your resume, seems correct to me, although that it needs to be given does not convince me of the marketability of these academics in the private sector or indeed anywhere at all.
4. Robert D. Putnam, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. A fact-rich, well-reasoned and indeed reasonable take on numerous American trends, most of them related to social solidarity. A good book, provided you are not looking too hard for what the title and subtitle would seem to promise.
5. Greg Woolf, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History. A very useful introduction and overview to its chosen topic, a good and readable book for urbanists who are looking for general historical background.
Notable are two new books on liberalism abroad. The first is Ingemar Stahl: A Market Liberal in the Swedish Welfare State, edited by Christina and Lars Jonung, and The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand: Dogmatic and Pragmatic Views on Free Markets and the State of Economic Theory, by Karl Mittermaier, with other contributions, concerning South Africa, and free on Kindle at least for the time being.
Sunday assorted links
1. Why are tennis crowds so quiet?
3. Jordan Schneider and Tanner Greer dialog over China, Taiwan, etc., recommended, two EV winners by the way.
4. Moishe Postone going on about stuff.
5. WSJ covers monoclonal antibody treatments, one focus of Fast Grants I might add. Some of the drugs might be available by the fourth quarter, if they clear testing.
What has Become of the Ticker-Tape Parade?
Jason Crawford at the Roots of Progress points out that we used to have a lot of ticker-tape parades. The most famous was perhaps the Victory Parade of World War II but we used to have many parades to celebrate technological and cultural milestones. There were huge celebrations, for example, when the final spike of the transcontinental railroad was nailed, when the Brooklyn Bridge was completed, and the Statute of Liberty dedicated. In the 1920s and 1930s there were big celebrations for aviation pioneers including for Charles Lindburgh, Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes and that tradition continued in the 1960s and 1970s with multiple parades for the astronauts:
During the early space program, there were also several NYC ticker-tape parades for astronauts—not just the Apollo 11 heroes, who went on a world tour after the Moon landing, but missions before and after as well:
- 1962, March 1 – John Glenn, following the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission.
- 1962, June 5 – Scott Carpenter, following the Mercury 7 mission.
- 1963, May 22 – Gordon Cooper, following the Mercury 9 mission.
- 1965, March 29 – Virgil “Gus” Grissom and John Young, following the Gemini 3 mission.
- 1969, January 10 – Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders, following the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon.
- 1969, August 13 – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, following Apollo 11 mission to the Moon.
- 1971, March 8 – Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, and Stuart Roosa, following Apollo 14 mission to the Moon.
- 1971, August 24 – David Scott, James Irwin, and Alfred Worden, following Apollo 15 mission to the Moon.
One of the last big ticker tape parades was in November of 1998 for John Glenn and the astronauts of Space Shuttle Discovery but since then the number of such parades has declined.Why? Has the number of accomplishments worthy of a parade declined? Or have we become complacent or even cynical about progress?
Jonas Salk famously turned down a ticker tape parade for the creation of the Polio vaccine but there was excitement and celebration around the world. When the time comes, I hope that we will enthusiastically celebrate science and the success of a COVID vaccine.
Anxiety is rising among the American young
Anxiety increased from 5.12% in 2008 to 6.68% in 2018 (p<.0001) among adult Americans. Stratification by age revealed the most notable increase from 7.97% to 14.66% among respondents 18-25 years old (p<.001), which was a more rapid increase than among 26-34 and 35-49 year olds (differential time trend p<.001). Anxiety did not significantly increase among those ages 50 and older. Anxiety increased more rapidly among those never married and with some college education, relative to their respective counterparts. Apart from age, marital status and education, anxiety increased consistently among sociodemographic groups.
That is from a new paper by Renee D. Goodwin, Andrea H. Weinberger, June H. Kim, Melody Wu, and Sandro Galea.
You should be spending a significant portion of your time pondering these data, because it is one of the very most important social trends today, as it also helps to explain many other social trends.
Via the excellent (and calm) Kevin Lewis.
Saturday assorted links
1. “Researchers one step closer to bomb-sniffing cyborg locusts.”
2. “How two British orthodontists became celebrities to incels.” (NYT)
3. Alice Oswald’s Homeric mood.
4. The Magnus Carlsen tour continues in November.
5. The culture that is Amsterdam, hemp-filled GreenPee.
6. High injury risk in the NBA bubble (NYT).
*Collected Writings of Morton Feldman*
Feldman probably was the most important American composer of his generation, he interacted with the leading NYC painters of his time, and it turns out he is a splendid writer as well. His observations are to the point, often with a Nassim Taleb kind of sting. Here is one bit:
Recently in the Sunday papers an article about Messiaen appeared in which a great virtue was made of his political “disengagement.” Reading this article, we learn how deeply religious this composer is, how much he looks forward to his vacations in Switzerland, how proud he is of Boulez, and how involved he is with bird calls. Can we say man is really disengaged? His chief occupation seems to be this disengagement. There is something curiously official in the way his interests and views are described — as though nothing could now disturb all this.
Or:
But he has nothing to worry about, that chap in Tempo. He’s going to have it all. Pitch relationships, plus sound and chance thrown in. Total consolidation. Those two words define the new academy. You can tie it all up in the well-known formula, “You made a small circle and excluded me; I made a bigger circle and included you.” A kind of Jonah-and-the-whale syndrome is taking place. Everything is being chewed up en masse and for the mass…
It may seem strange to call Boulez and Stockhausen popularizers, but that’s what they are. They glamorized Schoenberg and Webern, now they’re glamorizing something else. But chance to them is just another procedure, another vehicle for new aspects of structure or of sonority independent of pitch organization. They could have gotten these things from Ives or Varèse, but they went to these men with too deep prejudice, the prejudice of the equal, the colleague.
More books should have sentences like: “[Virgil] Thomson disliked me on sight, as a youth, and it’s never changed.”
The full title is Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman,” edited by B.H. Friedman.
I think Feldman two greatest works are For John Cage, and also String Quartet #2, which is about five hours long. This year I have been listening to the Philip Thomas 5-CD set of Feldman’s piano music more than just about any other CD. It is not the very best Feldman, but it is some of the best Feldman to listen to, if only because the pieces typically are shorter.