Category: Uncategorized
Are pre-docs in economics a good idea?
Formal pre-doc programmes have burgeoned, especially in elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Yale. Participants clean and analyse data, write papers and do administrative tasks. In exchange they may receive free or subsidised classes, a salary in the region of $50,000, potential co-authorship of the papers they work on, and, most prized of all, a letter of recommendation to a top programme.
In part pre-docs show how economic research has changed. “Economics has become more like the sciences in terms of both the methods and the production process,” says Raj Chetty of Harvard, who directs the Opportunity Insights team, a group with a reputation for working its pre-docs hard. When analysing tax records that gave access only to a certain number of people, he switched away from using part-time research assistants to a lab-like team, inspired by his own family of scientists. As bigger data sets, new techniques and generous funding made such collaboration worthwhile, others followed.
Here is much more on pre-docs from Soumaya Keynes at The Economist. I suspect this development is inevitable, but I see at least two things going on here. First, letter writers are internalizing the very high value of those letters in the form of personal services received. Second, this will push out “weirdos” and make the profession more homogenized, more obedient, more elite, more dependent on school of origin, and less interesting. I do understand the value of the training received, and don’t propose any mechanism to “stop this,” but overall it does not make me an entirely happy camper.
Friday assorted links
Ideas Of India
Ideas Of India is Shruti Rajagopalan’s new podcast about India. This is going to be an excellent podcast, well worth subscribing to. Shruti’s first guest is Ajay Shah discussing his book with Vijay Kelkar, In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy. As you may recall, I called In Service, the new Arthashastra, the book every policy maker and future policy maker should be given while being told, “before you do anything, read this!”
Here’s one bit from Ajay in the podcast:
[S]tate capacity is very hard to change. It evolved very slowly, but it is something you learn. There’s a learning by doing for a republic to learn to achieve state capacity. So we would tell a more constructive story of saying,” Pick a few battles, do a few things, learn how to do them well.” Then maybe in the future you might like to creep out, while understanding that these are 20-year, 40-year, 80-year, hundred-year journeys. Don’t think that these things can be solved in two years.
…There’s a quote in the book from Kaushik Basu where he said that we have libertarianism of necessity, and we have libertarianism of choice. In India, we have to do libertarianism of necessity because we every day confront the malfunctioning state institutions. We’ve always got to think, can this work? Would it go wrong? We’re surrounded by unchecked coercive power in the hands of very frail state institutions, and that creates limits on state capacity. So I think that’s the way our lived experience in India has brought us.
Exactly right and very consistent with the argument that Rajagopalan and I make in Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State:
In the alternative view put forward here…presumptive laissez-faire is the optimal form of government for states with limited capacity and also the optimal learning environment for states to grow capacity.
Much more of interest. You can (and should!) subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or the podcast app of your choice.
Stack-Push-Pop COVID Testing
A COVID test that doesn’t come back in a few days is close to useless and PCR tests are taking a long time to process:
NYTimes: Most people who are tested for the virus do not receive results within the 24 to 48 hours recommended by public health experts to effectively stall the virus’s spread and quickly conduct contact tracing, according to a new national survey by researchers from Harvard University, Northeastern University, Northwestern University and Rutgers University….People who had been tested for the virus in July reported an average wait time of about four days. That is about the same wait time for those who reported taking a test in April. Over all, about 10 percent of people reported waiting 10 days or more.
…“A test result that comes back in seven or eight days is worthless for everybody — it shouldn’t even be counted,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security and a physician in Pittsburgh. “It’s not a test in any kind of effective manner because it’s not actionable.”
One seemingly severe but potential solution is to change how tests are processed. Right now it’s mostly first come, first-served but this means we can easily have a situation where everyone eventually gets a test result but all the results are useless because they take a week or more to process. I propose instead that any test that can’t be reported back in 3-4 days be thrown out immediately. Labs should focus only on processing tests that can be reported back quickly.
One way of thinking about this is to use a stack or last-in first-out (LIFO) model for testing. In a stack model the newest test request is pushed onto the top of the stack and the next test to be processed is popped off the top of the stack. One disadvantage of this model is that some test requests will never be processed (they should be removed from the bottom of the stack and returned as null results). Some people will be angry.
But the stack model of testing has a huge advantage over first-come, first-served. Namely, just as many tests will be completed as under the current model but the tests results will all come back faster and be much more useful. What would you rather have, guaranteed stale test results or fresh results with some possibility of a null return? Since a stale result is not much better than a null it seems obvious that the stack system is superior. Most importantly, faster, more useful tests will help to end the crisis by reducing the number of infections.
Addendum: See also my posts Pooled Testing is Super-Beneficial and Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive on other methods to improve testing.
What I’ve been reading
My local public library has reopened! From the library and from elsewhere, I have been enjoying:
1. Orlando Figes, The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. The three lives are Turgenev, his mistress Pauline Viardot, and the husband of his mistress, Louis Viardot, a noted financier and activist. Consistently interesting, even if you are not looking to read about those three particular figures.
2. John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World. Although it has a stereotypically bad subtitle, this is an excellent book. It clarifies exactly where the Freemasons came from (dissident thought connected to James II), its connection to actual masons, how the movement got routed through Scotland, its prominence to the Enlightenment, its African-American component (Martin Delany), how it influenced Joseph Smith and Mormonism, why Castro tolerated it and the Shah of Iran encouraged it, and much more. Not in the book, but did you know that the Freemasons claim Shaquille O’Neal? Shaq confirms.
3. Callum Williams, The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives. A clear, well-written, and useful introduction to the lives and thought of some of the leading classical economists. The “unusual picks,” by the way, are Harriet Martineau, Rosa Luxemburg, and Dadabhai Naoroji. The author is a senior economics writer for The Economist.
4. Michael Hunter, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment. “Though it is often thought that the scientists of the early Royal Society tested magic and found it wanting, this is a misconception. In fact, the society avoided the issue because its members’ views on the subject were so divided, and it was only in retrospect that this silence was interpreted as judgmental.”
Forthcoming from Marc Levinson, the author of The Box, is a new book Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas, a more general history of globalization.
Thursday assorted links
1. Bradykinin, and icatibant, danazol, stanozolol, ecallantide, berinert, cinryze and haegarda. Here is the actual link. Are those usable Scrabble words?
2. New and direct evidence for T-cell immunity as a factor behind heterogeneity.
3. Emily Hamilton on the Singapore housing model.
4. Pakistan is doing much better now against Covid (WSJ).
5. Clementine Jacoby of Recidivez, Emergent Ventures winner.
Is Early Vaccination a Good Idea?
On August 2, bio-statistician Steven Salzberg argued that We Should Consider Starting Covid-19 Vaccinations Now. But, under immense pushback, including an article by another bio-statistician Natalie Dean writing in the NYTimes, he changed his mind and reversed course. I was frustrated by both sides of the debate since neither “biostatistician” presented any numbers to justify their arguments! So let’s do this better.
Suppose you take a vaccine now as opposed to (optimistically) on Dec. 1, 2020. From May 1 to August 5 we averaged 1001 deaths a day. There are 117 days between now and Dec 1 so at that rate there will be ~117,000 additional deaths by Dec. 1. Let’s call it 100,000. There are 324 million people living in the United States so the probability of dying from COVID in the next 117 days is 1/3240 or .03%.
Now what are the risks of dying from a vaccine? We don’t know these risks but suppose the vaccine is given to 100 million people in the United States then in order for there to be an equal number of deaths the probability of death from the vaccine would have to be 1/1000. That’s unlikely but not impossible!
Furthermore, phase three trials are the acid test for efficacy. Results from many phase II trials look good but we will learn more in a larger, more varied population actually at risk for the disease. We will also will learn which vaccines are better, e.g. Novavax’s protein based vaccine looks much better than others in early trials and that will become clearer with larger trials.
Overall, the numbers here do not make a strong case for vaccinating early. I’ve long argued that the FDA is much too risk averse in approving new drugs but vaccines are meant to be given to large numbers of healthy people which makes risk aversion more reasonable.
Note, however, that these numbers are for a randomly chosen member of the population but the people choosing to vaccinate early will not be randomly chosen. If you are an African-American or Latino, for example, your risks are higher. Your risks are higher still if you are an older, male, African-American or Latino physician, nurse, taxi driver or nursing home resident. In these cases, my judgment is that the benefits swing towards early vaccination. The benefits would be larger still if we assume that a vaccine won’t be available until 2021.
I’ve focused on deaths. Clearly, there are also other health risks but they fall on both sides of the equation.
A mass vaccination campaign in advance of phase three clinical trials would be unwarranted. Vaccinating large numbers of healthy people has real risks. Nevertheless, in my view it would not be unreasonable for someone at high-risk of COVID to choose to be vaccinated before waiting for longer clinical trials and such early vaccination, as Tyler noted, would also provide valuable information for everyone else.
Addendum: The Open Source RADVAC vaccine is one option for those with the requisite medical expertise.
What did the China hawks get right and wrong about China?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is part of the closing bit:
Where does all this leave U.S. China policy? As a rule of thumb: If it is of clear and limited scope and can be conducted technocratically, and can avoid both excess media coverage and political polarization — and, crucially, if it requires no obvious sacrifices from American citizens — then a policy stands a pretty good chance of succeeding. But that is not enough to justify a new global crusade. Over the last year or so, no matter what you might think of the government in Beijing, it has become clear that the government in Washington faces some real limits in responding to it.
I would stress that predictively, in their analysis of China, the hawks got almost everything right and the accommodationists got almost everything wrong. There is just not so much we can do about that…
Wednesday assorted links
1. The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple.
2. Jennifer Doleac with Rob Wiblin podcast on crime and police reform.
3. Is there less “prolific cronyism” in economics?
4. U.S. Covid death count starting to turn down again, let us hope this trend continues.
5. Short immune system explainer (Atlantic).
6. The current coronavirus situation in the UK. And some more detail on the Russian vaccine.
Textbook Talk: Teaching Online
Modern Principles was designed to work online and has more resources for teaching online than any other textbook. Online teaching, however, is not just about COVID. As Tyler points out in this short video, it’s also about recognizing that students learn in different ways and we need to reach them using a variety of media.
https://youtu.be/f5RPtqYmIu4
*Finntopia: What We Can Learn From the World’s Happiest Country*
That is the new book by Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen, and I opened randomly to a page and saw a chart for Total Fertility Rate in Finland, 1900-2018. The numbers keep on falling off a table, without even the promise of an asymptote toward the end of the series:
Both supporters and critics of the Finntopia can cite those numbers.
The book has a few pages on immigration policy, but no serious discussion of how scalable the Finnish model might be. Surely that matters for judging a utopia?
And that is my review, of both the book and the country.
Some doubts about medical ethics, and maybe that Russian vaccine is underrated
Most major questions in ethics are unsettled, though of course I have my own views, as do many other people. I take that unsettledness as a fairly fundamental truth, I have been studying these matters for decades, and I even have several published articles in the top-ranked journal Ethics.
Now, if you take a whole group of people, give them medical licenses, teach them all more or less the same thing in graduate school, but not much other philosophy, and call it “medical ethics“…you have not actually gone much further. Arguably you have retrogressed.
So when I hear people appeal to “medical ethics,” my intellectual warning bells go off. To be sure, often I agree with those people, if only because I think contemporary American institutions often are not very flexible or able to execute effectively on innovations. For instance, I didn’t think America could make a go at Robin Hanson’s variolation proposal, and so I opposed it. “Medical ethics” seems to give the same instruction, though with less of a concrete institutional argument.
Still, the Lieutenant Colombo in me is bothered. What about other nations? Should we ever wish that they serve themselves up as medical ethics-violating guinea pigs, for the greater global good?
Medical ethics usually says no, or tries to avoid grappling with that question too directly. But I wonder.
How about that Russian vaccine they will be trying in October?
To be clear, I won’t personally try it, and I don’t want the FDA to approve it for use in the United States. But am I rooting for the Russians to try it this fall? You betcha. (Am I sure that is the correct ethical view? No! But I know the critics should not be sure either.) I am happy to revise my views as further information comes in, but I see a good chance that the attempt improves expected global welfare, and I think that is very often (but not always) a standard with strong and indeed decisive relevance. And all the new results on cross-immunities imply that some pretty simple vaccines can have at least partial effectiveness.
Why exactly is “medical ethics” so sure this Russian vaccine is wrong other than that it violates “medical ethics”? All relevant scenarios involve risk to millions of innocents, and I have not heard that Russians will be forced to take the vaccine. The global benefits could be considerable, and I do note that the Russian vaccine scenario is the one that potentially spends down the reputational capital of various medical establishments.
Trying a not yet fully tested vaccine still seems wrong to many medical ethicists, even if the volunteers are compensated so they are better off in ex ante terms, as in some versions of Human Challenge Trials, an idea that (seemingly) has been elevated from “violating medical ethics” to a mere “problematic.” Medical ethics claims priority over the ex ante Pareto principle, but I say we are back to the unsettled ethics questions on that one, but if anything with the truth leaning against medical ethics.
I find it especially strange when “medical ethics” is cited — often without further argumentation or explanation — on Twitter and other forms of social media as a kind of moral authority. It then seems especially glaringly obvious that the moral consensus was never there in the first place, and that there is a gross and indeed now embarrassing unawareness of that underlying social fact. It feels like citing Kant to the raccoon trying to claw through your roof.
I think medical ethics would not like this critique of medical ethics. Yet I will be watching the Russian vaccine experiment closely.
Addendum: There is also biomedical ethics, but that would require a blog post of its own. It is much more closely integrated with standard ethical philosophy, though it does not resolve any of the fundamental philosophical uncertainties.
Do beliefs cause the great stagnation to persist?
The Great Recession was a deep downturn with long-lasting effects on credit, employment, and output. While narratives about its causes abound, the persistence of gross domestic product below precrisis trends remains puzzling. We propose a simple persistence mechanism that can be quantified and combined with existing models. Our key premise is that agents do not know the true distribution of shocks but use data to estimate it nonparametrically. Then, transitory events, especially extreme ones, generate persistent changes in beliefs and macro outcomes. Embedding this mechanism in a neoclassical model, we find that it endogenously generates persistent drops in economic activity after tail events.
That is from a new piece by Julian Kozlowski, Laura Veldkamp, and Venky Venkateswaran in the new Journal of Political Economy. Here are earlier ungated copies.
Tuesday assorted links
2. Is R doomed to converge to roughly one?
4. Rent prices in major U.S. cities are plummeting.
5. The economics of SPACs. And Lawfare on TikTok.
6. Coleman Hughes on Thomas Sowell, with biographical anecdotes too.
Textbook Talk: Modern Principles and Pandemics
Tyler and I talk about the pandemic economics in our textbook, Modern Principles of Economics. And don’t forget, Modern Principles has more materials for teaching online than any other textbook! Feel free to email us for more info or if we can assist in onboarding.
https://youtu.be/vTKq7RkpKiM