Category: Uncategorized

1.Cultural tightness as a predictor of Covid-19 outcomes?

2. Advice for ambitious teenagers.

3. New look at the Drake Equation: 26 intelligent, communicating civilizations in our galaxy?  Speculative, if anything ever was.

4. Ninja bombs?  And Ross Douthat on police reform (NYT).  And confessions of a former cop.  Think of the latter as an attempt to model the behavior of the police.

5. Mondegreen.

The United States is one of the few countries in the world where plasma donors are paid and it is responsible for 70% of the global supply of plasma. If you add in the other countries that allow donors to be paid, including Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Czechia, the paid-donor countries account for nearly 90% of the total supply.

Countries that follow the WHOs guidance to rely exclusively on voluntary, unpaid donors all have shortages of plasma (hmmm…what’s the WHOs track record like?) So what do these countries do? Import plasma from the paid-donor countries. The United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and some Canadian provinces, for example, prohibit paid donors and they import a majority of their plasma from paid donor countries. (See chart at right).

As Nobel prize winner Al Roth puts it, in his gentle way:

I find confusing the position of some countries that compensating domestic plasma donors is immoral, but filling the resulting shortage by purchasing plasma from the US is ok.

The UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada can afford their moral hypocrisy but their decision to forbid paid-donors reduces the world supply of plasma driving up the price and harming people in poorer countries.

I have cribbed from an excellent new report by Peter Jaworski, Bloody Well Pay Them: The Case for Voluntary Remunerated Plasma Collections.

Previous MR posts on plasma.

1. Why might poor white Americans feel especially bad?

2. Raj Chetty talk on Covid-19, coming this Wednesday.  And forthcoming seminar on what students think of on-line education.

3. Study of T-cell immunity in Singapore.  Small numbers, but of interest.

4. Useful list of top economics blogs.

5. Woman in China, 45, made S$589,800 by buying insurance on flights she predicted would get delayed.

Robertas Zubricka has a clever idea, Contingent Wage Subsidies. Many macroeconomic problems are caused by a coordination failure–you don’t spend because I’m not spending and vice-versa and so the economy becomes trapped in a low-spending, low-employment equilibrium. Zubrickas shows how to solve these coordination problems. The government announces a contingent wage subsidy, a subsidy that is paid only if hiring is low. If a firm hires and others do not they get the subsidy. If a firm hires and others do hire they get the demand. A no-lose proposition. Hence, all firms hire and the subsidy never has to be paid. Instead of a big push, a zero push! Here’s Zubrickas:

New hiring by one firm is a reason for new hiring by other firms because of employment externalities related to additional aggregate demand, new trading opportunities, or production synergies. Without a coordinated action, however, the virtuous hiring cycle may not start, stranding the economy in a low‐employment, low‐spending equilibrium as in the aftermath of the 2007–2009 financial crisis (OECD, 2016). The traditional approach to this problem emphasizes a “big push,” when one large player like the government spends enough to convince others to spend. In this paper, we show how a “zero push” can achieve the same results.

With the economy in a low‐employment equilibrium, we propose a policy that offers firms wage subsidies for new hires payable only if the total number of new hires made in the economy does not exceed a prespecified threshold. An example would be a promise to cover all new labor costs contingent on that less than, say, 100,000 new jobs are created in total. From a firm’s perspective two outcomes can occur from this policy. One outcome is when the number of new jobs is less than the threshold, in which case the firm has its additional labor costs covered while keeping all the additional revenue. The second outcome is when the threshold is met and no subsidies are paid. The firm then benefits from employment spillovers generated by a substantial increase in total employment which makes hiring profitable even without any subsidies. With hiring profitable in both scenarios and, thus, all firms hiring, the threshold for new hires is reached, bringing the economy to high‐employment equilibrium without any subsidies paid.

Attentive readers will note that the idea has the same structure as my dominant assurance contract (which Zubrickas notes was an inspiration).

Read the whole thing.

1. File under “Questions that are rarely asked.”

2. U.S. envoy returns to Wuhan (!).

3. Paranoia in Russia’s communal apartments (NYT).

4. Problems with reopening a public library.

5. Which industries are easiest and hardest to reopen.

6. “Interestingly, she is also an ex-Mormon, and goes to international meetings wearing a Maori cape.“

1. Revision of the Correia, Luck, and Verner paper on the 1918 flu, with response to critics.

2. Tim Harford update.  And Tim Harford on whether the pandemic will help fix our innovation problem.

3. Why was New York State so badly hit by Covid-19?

4. “Even when controlling for density, counties with a high proportion of #Trump voters have lower cases and deaths.”  Link here.  And an argument that the protests increased net stay at home behavior.

5. Toto song played on TESLA coils.  Or maybe this link works better.

6. “Plastics.”

7. Uhlig placed on leave as editor of JPE.

8. Possible evidence of different Covid-19 strains?  Not yet confirmed, use with care, but at least appears that it might be serious work.

Tim Harford has an excellent piece in the Financial Times that covers my work with the Kremer team on accelerating vaccines but weaves it into a larger panorama on the innovation slowdown and how barriers to innovation can sometimes break down with catastrophes.

There is no guarantee that a crisis always brings fresh ideas; sometimes a catastrophe is just a catastrophe. Still, there is no shortage of examples for when necessity proved the mother of invention, sometimes many times over.

The Economist points to the case of Karl von Drais, who invented an early model of the bicycle in the shadow of “the year without a summer” — when in 1816 European harvests were devastated by the after-effects of the gargantuan eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Horses were starved of oats; von Drais’s “mechanical horse” needed no food. It is a good example. But one might equally point to infant formula and beef extract, both developed by Justus von Liebig in response to the horrifying hunger he had witnessed in Germany as a teenager in 1816.

Read the whole thing. I also highly recommend, Tim’s new book, The Next Fifty on how seemingly simple things like the brick changed the world.

LATimes: Los Angeles Unified school police officials said Tuesday that the department will relinquish some of the military weaponry it acquired through a federal program that furnishes local law enforcement with surplus equipment. The move comes as education and civil rights groups have called on the U.S. Department of Defense to halt the practice for schools.

The Los Angeles School Police Department, which serves the nation’s second-largest school system, will return three grenade launchers but intends to keep 61 rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicle it received through the program.

A school police department with grenade launchers and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicle! Only in America.

The article is from 2014 but relevant to current discussions of militarized police.

Hat tip: Noah Smith.