Category: Uncategorized
The Ivy League culture that is Major League Baseball
But the rise of analytics also has resulted in another massive shift: an influx of white, male graduates of Ivy League schools and other prestigious universities into teams’ front offices. In a data analysis conducted by ESPN, the percentage of Ivy League graduates holding an organization’s top baseball operations decision-making position — which, depending on the club, could be its president, vice president or general manager — has risen from just 3% in 2001 to 43% today; while the percentage of graduates from U.S. News & World Report’s list of the top 25 colleges — both universities and liberal arts schools — holding the same positions has risen from 24% to 67%.
Here is more from ESPN, via Adam Minter. How do you think other economic sectors will be evolving? And what would Malcolm Gladwell say?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Who funds WHO?
2. “Rather than reflect current practical realities, the CDC’s Atlanta address apparently stems from concerns about mosquito breeding patterns back in the 1940’s.” A good look at why the CDC has so many political problems.
3. What different people have learned from Conversations with Tyler.
4. Ross Douthat on cancel culture, recommended (NYT).
5. For Covid deaths four weeks out, some models predict they will go down, other models predict they will go up. And here are some related Arizona disputes (Bloomberg).
Rewatching *The French Connection*
I had not seen this 1971 movie since I was thirteen or so, and I was startled by how well I remembered the famous “subway scene.” This time around, it struck me much more as a portrait of the decline of New York City than as a plot-driven vehicle per se. “Popeye” (Gene Hackman) has no back story or love interest whatsoever, so I viewed this as a tale of how the dysfunctionality of New York simply was absorbing everything in its wake. It is perhaps the best movie to view to understand just how much NYC has improved, and if you click on the top link you can see they were not just filming in dumpster bin sites but rather in the heart of Manhattan.
It is striking how tacky, and indeed poor, the “rich people” appear to be when the movie is trying to make a point about income inequality. The critique of “the War on Drugs,” as it later became known, is ahead of its time. The shots of Marseille are lovely.
It is hard to believe they almost cast Jackie Gleason in the lead.
Recommended.
Unbundling disability rights
From my email:
My name is Max Grozovsky. I’m an economics student at the University of Delaware (until I finish a few more papers and can start my life) and a fan of your blog/column.
Thanks a lot for using your platform to elevate disability rights. I hope you’ll write more on the topic going forward, perhaps mentioning supported decision-making mechanisms which have been touted by the National Council on Disability as alternatives to guardianship that actually help people rather than bundle and strip their rights wholesale based on the canard that incapacity in one area implies incapacity in an unrelated one.
Also, since you (or is it someone else?) sporadically post on Islamic architecture/history, here’s my favorite nonficiton book, unsolicited.
Monday assorted links
1. An unusual and indeed very positive book review, of a book about China.
2. South Africa reinstates alcohol ban.
3. Smart piece on why cancel culture is not so bad today, the reader who sent it in insisted that I not mention/thank him by name.
5. Celine Halioua on tech vs. biotech.
Our regulatory state is failing us, antibodies edition
It might be the next best thing to a coronavirus vaccine.
Scientists have devised a way to use the antibody-rich blood plasma of COVID-19 survivors for an upper-arm injection that they say could inoculate people against the virus for months.
Using technology that’s been proven effective in preventing other diseases such as hepatitis A, the injections would be administered to high-risk healthcare workers, nursing home patients, or even at public drive-through sites — potentially protecting millions of lives, the doctors and other experts say.
The two scientists who spearheaded the proposal — an 83-year-old shingles researcher and his counterpart, an HIV gene therapy expert — have garnered widespread support from leading blood and immunology specialists, including those at the center of the nation’s COVID-19 plasma research.
But the idea exists only on paper. Federal officials have twice rejected requests to discuss the proposal, and pharmaceutical companies — even acknowledging the likely efficacy of the plan — have declined to design or manufacture the shots, according to a Times investigation. The lack of interest in launching development of immunity shots comes amid heightened scrutiny of the federal government’s sluggish pandemic response.
Here is more from the LA Times, substantive throughout, via Anecdotal.
What is the future of the intellectual right?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. I suggest it will take three major forms, namely anti-China, pro-internet as a communications medium (as an offset to left-wing media), and dislike of the Left, most of all the latter. Note these are predictions rather than normative claims about what should happen. Here is one excerpt:
Last and perhaps most significant, the intellectual right will dislike the left. It pretty much does already, but the antagonism will grow. Opposition to political correctness and cancel culture, at least in their left-wing versions, will become the most important defining view. As my colleague Bryan Caplan succinctly put it four years ago: “Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist.”
The intensity of this dislike will mean that, within right-wing circles, free speech will prosper. As long as you take care to signal your dislike of the left, you will be allowed to hold many other heterodox views without being purged or penalized.
If you are on the Left, note that it does not suffice to dislike the Right, you have to dislike most parts of the Left as well (why is that? Can you model this?).
I also consider social conservatism, libertarianism, communitarianism, and Sam’s Club Republicanism as possible alternative directions for the intellectual Right. The entire column repays careful study.
Sunday assorted links
1. As I had promised I would report, there is now an uptick in the seven day moving average for Covid-19 deaths, take a look. Here is a claim that the increase is a reporting spike, due to previously unreported past deaths. “54% of deaths reported in the week of July 11 ( if her data is correct) actually occurred over 2 months earlier.” At the present time I am unable to confirm the actual distribution of numbers one way or the other — opinions and leads welcome!
3. Thread on the new Klein and Pettis book.
4. Is Shostakovich overrated or underrated? (I say underrated.)
5. Markets in everything: Meet the company that sells your lost airplane luggage, recommended, excellent link. It seems to be a natural monopoly as well.
Too many autistic adults are denied basic rights
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Some of the very worst treatment of the vulnerable is hardly being discussed. There is an entire category of American adults being denied almost all of their basic legal rights: to hold a job, choose a residence, determine their health care, enter into contracts and even decide what to do with their own body. These are adults under legal guardianship — a court-imposed process, in Ohio as elsewhere, “by which a person is relieved of the right to make personal life decisions and another is appointed to make those decisions on that person’s behalf.”
Among the adults who have lost such rights, or live under the fear that they will, are those with autism. It is entirely possible that they will end up in guarded and segregated communities, often against their will.
Perhaps you think many of these individuals are unable to care for themselves and therefore their full rights cannot be respected. To whatever extent that may be true, it is not a reason for trampling on human rights. And even if you believe it is, you must concede that the legal system is prone to horrible misjudgments and mistakes.
After recent revelations about institutional racism, it is hard to believe that prejudices do not affect decisions about guardianship. The justice system is already heavily biased in favor of plea bargains, in effect favoring efficiency over constitutional rights. And even when there is no bias, there is the reality of simple error — which are common enough in hospitals, where the stakes are much higher.
Definitely recommended, do read the whole thing. And don’t forget this:
When it comes to guardianship, is there any reason to be so sure that liberty-protecting institutions are in place? Especially since basic information is so hard to come by? As both a people and a polity, Americans do not always behave best “when no one is watching.”
Overall it is remarkable to me how little good information, or for that matter argumentation, is available on this topic.
Saturday assorted links
1. What the auction listing for a campus looks like.
2. As fewer kids played football, hospitals saw a big drop in ER visits.
3. Polite explanations of why so many professional athletes test positive for coronavirus (NYT). Why can’t they just come out and write the likely truth about multiple sex partners?
5. Carrying cost of cruise ship > liquidity premium, at least for now (Bloomberg).
6. The shooting cops problem is much worse out in the west, and other regularities.
7. I do a 45-minute podcast with Dwarkesh Patel (he is interviewing me, mainly). My only podcast where I use “the f word”? (Not for any good reason, I just felt like it.)
Fight the Virus! Please.
One of the most confounding aspects of the pandemic has been Congress’s unwillingness or inability to spend to fight the virus. As I said in the LA Times:
If an invader rained missiles down on cities across the United States killing thousands of people, we would fight back. Yet despite spending trillions on unemployment insurance and relief to deal with the economic consequences of COVID-19, we have spent comparatively little fighting the virus directly.
Economists Steven Berry and Zack Cooper have run the numbers:
By our calculations, less than 8 percent of the trillions in funding that Congress has allocated so far in response to the virus has been for solutions that would shorten or mitigate the virus itself: measures like increasing the supply of PPE, expanding testing, developing treatments, standing up contact tracing, or developing a vaccine. A case in point is the most recent House Covid-19 package. It calls for $3 trillion in spending; less than 3 percent of that total is allocated toward Covid testing. As Congress considers next steps, it’s imperative to shift priorities and direct more funding and effort toward actually ending the pandemic.
Berry and Copper point to the vaccine plan that I am working on as an example of smart spending:
…a group of prominent economists, including Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer, has proposed spending a $70 billion dollar vaccine effort. The proposed expenditure is both much larger than anything proposed by the White House or Congress and also quite cheap compared to the potential benefits.
…[Similarly] Nobel Laureate Paul Romer and the Rockefeller Foundation have each sketched out $100 billion plans to increase testing. We say: Let’s fund both, allocating half the funds directly to states, who can spend to activate the vast capacity of university labs, and also fund Romer’s plan to scale up $10 instant tests for true mass testing. We could create a $50 billion dollar challenge prize that rewards the first 10 firms that develop effective treatments for Covid-19 — $5 billion each. We could fund Scott Gottlieb and Andy Slavitt’s bipartisan $50 billion contact tracing proposal. We could allocate $100 billion to fund the libertarian leaning Mercatus Center’s proposal for advanced purchase contracts to procure massive quantities of PPE.
What makes this all the more confounding is that spending to defeat the virus will more than pay for itself! As I said in my piece in the Washington Post (with ):
Economists talk about “multipliers” — an injection of spending that causes even larger increases in gross domestic product. Spending on testing, tracing and paid isolation would produce an indisputable and massive multiplier effect.
Who gains by killing the economy and letting people die? Yes, it’s possible to spin some elaborate conspiracy about someone, somewhere benefiting. But in talking with people in Congress the message I hear is not that there’s a secret cabal with a special interest in economic collapse and dying constituents. In a way, the message is worse. Multiple people have told me that things move slowly, no one is stepping up to the plate, leadership is absent. “Who is John Galt?,” they sigh. Ok, they don’t literally say that, but that sigh of resignation is what it feels like in the United States today at the highest levels of government.
Rereading Ayn Rand on the New Left
It used to be called The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, but the later title was Return of the Primitive. It was published in 1971, but sometimes drawn from slightly earlier essays. I wondered if a revisit might shed light on the current day, and here is what I learned:
1. “The New Left is the product of cultural disintegration; it is bred not in the slums, but in the universities; it is not the vanguard of the future, but the terminal stage of the past.”
2. The moderates who tolerate the New Left and its anti-reality bent can be worse than the New Left itself.
3. Ayn Rand wishes to cancel the New Left, albeit peacefully.
4. “Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned.” Ouch, it would be good to resuscitate this entire essay (on racism).
5. She fears the collapse of Europe into tribalism, racism, and balkanization. I am not sure if I should feel better or worse about the ongoing persistence of this trope.
6. It is easy to forget that English was not her first language: “Logical Positivism carried it further and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-epistemology of shyster lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system — by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations.”
6b. Kant was the first hippie.
7. The majority of people do not hate the good, although they are disgusted by…all sorts of things.
8. Like many Russian women, she is skeptical of the American brand of feminism: “As a group, American women are the most privileged females on earth: they control the wealth of the United States — through inheritance from fathers and husbands who work themselves into an early grave, struggling to provide every comfort and luxury for the bridge-playing, cocktail-party-chasing cohorts, who give them very little in return. Women’s Lib proclaims that they should give still less, and exhorts its members to refuse to cook their husbands’ meals — with its placards commanding “Starve a rat today!”” Feminism for me, but not for thee, you could call it.
Overall I would describe this as a bracing reread. But what struck me most of all was how much the “Old New Left” — whatever you think of it — had more metaphysical and ethical and aesthetic imagination — than the New New Left variants running around today. As Rand takes pains to point out (to her dismay), the Old New Left did indeed have Woodstock, which in reality was not as far from the Apollo achievement as she was suggesting at the time.
Excess deaths are down — below average — for those younger than eighteen
In the United States that is, link here, from Lyman Stone, photo here:
In other words, lockdown and shelter at home have limited some of the otherwise risky activities that young people engage in.
Excess deaths more generally seem to have reached a normal range, albeit at the upper end of that range:
I wouldn’t want to call this “good news,” but it is one form of putting the current situation into perspective.
Friday assorted links
Thursday assorted links
1. Thor Heyderdahl vindicated (NYT).
2. Just a bit more distancing and Sweden suddenly fell to 17 deaths per week?
3. Heterogeneities in who is most vulnerable, amazing data set (NYT). Original research is here.
4. Ross Douthat thread on free speech and coalitions.
5. They are solving for the equilibrium: “NYPD limits retirement applications amid 400 percent surge this week.“