Category: Uncategorized
A simple proposal for boosting health care workers
One recent report suggests that 10% of the doctors in northern Italy are infected with coronavirus. No matter what the exact figure, that is clearly a problem. In response, Italy is opting for at least two reforms. First, health care workers who are retired are being lured back to work:
Italy on Saturday began recruiting retired doctors as part of urgent efforts to bolster the healthcare system with 20,000 additional staff to fight the escalating viral epidemic.
Second, the government is giving accelerated treatment to those studying for health care jobs:
In addition, nursing students who were due to take their final exams next month are now expected to graduate in the coming days so they can be immediately put to work
The United States should consider measures in the same direction.
Will the coronavirus and the poor response doom Trump’s reelection chances?
Ross Douthat wonders maybe so (NYT), Arnold Kling says probably not:
Closing the border is his signature issue, and the Democrats have staked out a position as the “resistance” to that. I know that they think they can benefit from this crisis, but I would be surprised if they do.
My earlier Feb.3rd Bloomberg column suggested it would help Trump. I won’t repeat the core claims of my column (some summarized here), but I am still sticking with that earlier call for a few reasons:
1. Few Americans will know/understand that some foreign governments did a better job than we did, and indeed that is already the case in many other policy areas. “Foreign country did this better than us” is never an argument that works in American politics.
2. The literature on political business cycles suggests that absolute performance is not what matters, but rather whether the economy is gaining momentum. So if the coronavirus situation is improving in the months leading up to November, Trump will receive some credit for that, no matter how poor the initial response. And I think that plausibly will be the case. Even if you believe in a second winter wave, it may take longer to materialize.
3. The literature on disaster spending suggests politicians are rewarded electorally for their response to disasters, not for preparation. Enough of the American public still is oblivious to this issue that a major Trump action still could be marketed as timely and indeed pro-active.
4. For my hypothesis to be true, Trump at some point needs to make a “big push” kind of response, but I consider that highly likely, even if the push is ill-considered in its details.
Sunday assorted links
1. Stuart Whatley reviews Stubborn Attachments.
2. Ungated version of my growth-raters vs. base-raters column.
4. 2009 study: “”Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending.”
5. Chinese birth rates coming in lower than expected.
6. How to get money to people fast (it isn’t the bridges).
My avian flu blog days
Circa 2004 or so, it seemed to me that America was grossly underprepared for a possible pandemic. I started reading up on the topic, and I produced a very basic, simple Mercatus policy paper on avian flu. For obvious reasons, much of it is out of date and some of the recommendations have been adopted, but here is the first part of the Executive Summary:
1. The single most important thing we can do for a pandemic—whether avian flu or not—is to have well-prepared local health care systems. We should prepare for pandemics in ways that are politically sustainable and remain useful even if an avian flu pandemic does not occur.
2. Prepare social norms and emergency procedures which would limit or delay the spread of a pandemic. Regular hand washing, and other beneficial public customs, may save more lives than a Tamiflu stockpile.
3. Decentralize our supplies of anti-virals and treat timely distribution as more important than simply creating a stockpile.
4. Institute prizes for effective vaccines and relax liability laws for vaccine makers. Our government has been discouraging what it should be encouraging.
5. Respect intellectual property by buying the relevant drugs and vaccines at fair prices. Confiscating property rights would reduce the incentive for innovation the next time around.
6. Make economic preparations to ensure the continuity of food and power supplies. The relevant “choke points” may include the check clearing system and the use of mass transit to deliver food supply workers to their jobs.
7. Realize that the federal government will be largely powerless in the worst stages of a pandemic and make appropriate local plans.
8. Encourage the formation of prediction markets in an avian flu pandemic. This will give us a better idea of the probability of widespread human-to-human transmission.
9. Provide incentives for Asian countries to improve their surveillance. Tie foreign aid to the receipt of useful information about the progress of avian flu.
10. Reform the World Health Organization and give it greater autonomy from its government funders.
And also from later on:
4. We should not expect to choke off a pandemic in its country of origin. Once a pandemic has started abroad, we should shut schools and many public places immediately.
5. We should not obsess over avian flu at the expense of other medical issues. The next pandemic or public health crisis could come from any number of sources. By focusing on local preparedness and decentralized responses, this plan is robust to surprise and will also prove useful for responding to terrorism or natural catastrophes.
Still relevant today. For a while I also wrote an avian flu blog with Silviu Dochia, archived here.
Saturday assorted links
1. The economics of Mount Everest.
2. Some unpleasant pandemic arithmetic.
3. Where did I put my phone again? (with a pelican cameo, watch the video)
4. Are NBA coaches using their new call challenge privileges rationally? (WSJ) Also WSJ is the 24k kitchen knife. Both pieces are quite interesting.
*The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life*
That is the new forthcoming book by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton, which will prove one of the best and most important works of the last few years. Imagine following one thousand or so Dunedin New Zealanders for decades of their lives, up through age 38, and recording extensive data, and then doing the same for one thousand or so British twins through age 20, and 1500 American children, in fifteen different locales, up through age 15. Just imagine what you would learn!
You merely have to buy this book. In the meantime, let me give you just a few of the results.
The traits of being “undercontrolled” or “inhibited,” as a toddler are the traits most likely to persist up through age eighteen. The undercontrolled tend to end up as danger-seeking or impulsive. Those same individuals were most likely to have gambling disorders at age 32. Girls with an undercontrolled temperament, however, ran into much less later danger than did the boys, including for gambling.
“Social and economic wealth accumulated by the fourth decade of life also proved to be related to childhood self-control.” And yes that is with controls, including for childhood social class.
Being formally diagnosed with ADHD in childhood was statistically unrelated to being so diagnosed later in adult life. It did, however, predict elevated levels of “hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity” later in adulthoood. I suspect that all reflects more poorly on the diagnoses than on the concept. By the way, decades later three-quarters of parents did not even remember their children receiving ADHD diagnoses, or exhibiting symptoms of ADHD (!).
Parenting styles are intergenerationally transmitted for mothers but not for fathers.
For one case the authors were able to measure for DNA and still they found that parenting styles affected the development of the children (p.104).
As for the effects of day care, it seems what matters for the mother-child relationship is the quantity of time spent by the mother taking care of the child, not the quality (p.166). For the intellectual development of the child, however, quality time matters not the quantity. By age four and a half, however, the children who spent more time in day care were more disobedient and aggressive. At least on average, those problems persist through the teen years. The good news is that quality of family environment growing up still matters more than day care.
But yet there is so much more! I have only scratched the surface of this fascinating book. I will not here betray the results on the effects of neighborhoods on children, for instance, among numerous other topics and questions. Or how about bullying? Early and persistent marijuana use? (Uh-oh) And what do we know about polygenic scores and career success? What can we learn about epigenetics by considering differential victimization of twins? What in youth predicts later telomere erosion?
I would describe the writing style as “clear and factual, but not entertaining.”
You can pre-order it here, one of the books of the year and maybe more, recommended of course.
Friday assorted links
1. Who are the Masters of Their Domains?
2. Austan Goolsbee on the vulnerability of the U.S. economy to coronavirus: so many face-to-face services (NYT).
4. More on the effective Taiwanese response to the coronavirus. And on the South Korean testing response.
Further results on social security wealth and inequality
From a recent paper by John Sabelhaus and Alice Henriques Volz:
…the present value of Social Security benefits for everyone who has paid anything into the system was $73.3 trillion in 2019. Thus, the present value of Social Security benefits is estimated to be roughly double all other household-sector pension and retirement account assets combined, and approximately three-fourths the size of all conventionally measured household net worth. Social Security is also an important retirement wealth equalizer, as employer-sponsored pension and retirement accounts accrue disproportionately to high wealth families.
…the bottom 50 percent of persons aged 35 to 44 in 2016 had average Bulletin net worth of only $13,500. However, the same group had average expected SSW of nearly $40,000, the difference between a PDV of benefits around $125,000 and a PDV of taxes around $85,000. Again, this is unsurprising given that low wealth individuals have much lower lifetime incomes, and the Social Security tax and benefit formulas are inherently progressive, even though differential mortality offsets some of that redistribution….although incorporating SSW into household wealth has a substantial impact on wealth inequality levels, it does not change overall trends in top wealth shares. While the top ten percent share of SCF Bulletin wealth (within age-sorted and person-weighted) increased from 58 percent to 66 percent between 1995 and 2016, the expanded wealth share that includes both DB wealth and SSW increased from 40 percent to 47 percent.
That is via the excellent David Splinter, one of the most important economists working today, and here is his new paper Presence and Persistence of Poverty in U.S. Tax Data. And here is the previous MR post on wealth inequality and social security.
From a scientist, coronavirus pictures to ponder
Figure legend
– Plotted in log scale!
– US cases based on deaths: estimated number of real cases using SK‘s current death rate of 0.6%
– US prediction 1a: predicted lower lower bound trajectory based on SK and China (assumes containment and large amount of testing )
– US 2a: upper bound, same assumptions as 1a
– US prediction 1b: no serious containment, trajectory similar to flu, lower bound
– 2b: Higher bound for flu-like trajectory
As I read this picture, it seems to suggest that the returns to properly done containment can be high. What do you all think?
Thursday assorted links
1. “The NWMC nongovernmental organization provides soft propaganda while they operate alongside the Russian military and imbed military tactics into foreign Russian populations through their corporate entity Wolf Holding of Security Structures.” (Huh?)
2. The heroism of Chinese doctors in Wuhan (WSJ, though I believe the paywall is off on this one). Recommended.
3. MIE: “A Coronavirus Pop-Up Shop Has Opened on Florida Avenue.”
5. Dan Klein on Smith, Hume, and Burke. And here.
6. Michael Strain on what to do (Bloomberg).
Our new world of classical music concerts
The line in the men’s room was to wash hands, not to use the other facilities. During the concert, there was remarkably little coughing compared to usual times. Is this because?:
1. The coughers were self-quarantining at home (there were more empty seats than usual).
2. Potential coughers didn’t want their seat neighbors to think of them as infecting pariahs.
3. Potential coughers abstained for fear of having to think, if they are coughing, that they might have coronavirus.
In any case, the elasticity of coughing with respect to self-reputation is higher than I had thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8-nWq6pqag
Yana and I were pleased to have watched from a private box (to be clear, we had a private box because the other people did not show up).
*Very Important People*
The author is Ashley Mears and the subtitle is Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. I loved this book, my favorite of the year so far.
Haven’t you ever wondered why more books shouldn’t just take social phenomena and explain them, rather than preening their academic feathers with a lot of non-committal dense information? Well, this book tries to explain the Miami club where renting an ordinary table for the night costs 2k, with some spending up to 250k, along with the underlying sociological, economic, and anthropological mechanisms behind these arrangements. Here is just a start on the matter:
Any club, whether in a New York City basement or on a Saint-Tropez beach, is always shaped by a clear hierarchy. Fashion models signal the “A-list,” but girls are only half of the business model. There are a few different categories of men that every club owner wants inside, and there is a much larger category of men they aim to keep out.
Or this:
Bridge and tunnel, goons, and ghetto. These are men whose money can’t compensate for their perceived status inadequacies. The marks of their marginal class positions are written on their bodies, flagging an automatic reject at the door.
A clever man can try to use models as leverage to gain entry and discounts at clubs. A man surrounded by models will not have to spend as much on bottles. I interviewed clients who talked explicitly about girls as bargaining chips they could use at the door.
The older, uglier men may have to pay 2k to rent a table for the evening, whereas “decent-looking guys with three or four models” will be let in for free with no required minimum. And:
Men familiar with the scene make these calculations even if they have money to spend: How many beautiful girls can I get to offset how I look? How many beautiful girls will it take to offset the men with me? How much money am I willing to spend for the night in the absence of quality girls?
How is this for a brutal sentence?:
Girls determine hierarchies of clubs, the quality of people inside, and how much money is spent.
Here is another ouch moment:
…I revisit a second critical insight of Veblen’s on the role of women in communicating men’s status. In this world, girls function as a form of capital. Their beauty generates enormous symbolic and economic resources for the men in their presence, but that capital is worth far more to men than to the girls who embody it.
if you ever needed to be convinced not to eat out at places with beautiful women, this book will do the trick. Solve for the equilibrium, people…
You can pre-order here. (By the way, I’ve been thinking of writing more about “lookism,” and why opponents of various other bad “isms” have such a hard time extending the campaign to that front.)
Wednesday assorted links
1. Productivity claims made by Daniel Gross, channeled by Erik Torenberg.
2. L. Summers on the appropriate response to the coronavirus.
3. Gender and the consulting academic economist.
4. New Steve Davis and Kevin Murphy economics podcast.
5. New Zealand birds are capable of statistical inference.
Donald Trump tweets my column
But they really knew who was going to win! https://t.co/WZnOx6ZHmW
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2020
Please don’t even try reading the comments on this post.
How an economist thinks
I saw this on Twitter:
Hard Times for Adjunct Professors: 25% of part-time university faculty nationally rely on public assistance programs.
My immediate reaction was “Given the crowding in the sector, and that they presumably earn non-pecuniary returns from the enjoyment of teaching, shouldn’t we be taxing them at a higher rate?”