Category: Uncategorized
What I’ve been reading
1. Ethan Sherwood Strauss, The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty. On top of everything else this is an excellent book on management, and the random events along the way to making a team (the Warriors once wanted to trade both Curry and Thompson for Chris Paul). Kevin Durant ends up as the fall guy, recommended to those who care.
2. Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World — and Globalization Began. Worth reading, my favorite part was the discussion of how Cahokia in Mississippi was connected to the Mayans. And Chichen Itza is probably the world’s best preserved city from the year 1000.
3. Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. “Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz’s own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought.”
4. Alaine Polcz, One Woman in the War: Hungary 1944-1945. I am surprised this book is not better known. I found it deeper and more gripping than many of the more broadly recommended wartime memoirs, such as Viktor Frankl. And more honest about the toll of war on women.
5. Adam Thierer, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. A very good libertarian, “permissionless innovation” look at tech.
I have browsed Judith Herrin’s Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, and it seems to be the definitive book on the early history of that city (one of my favorite one-day visits in the whole world).
What happened to male youth movements?
I’ve been wondering, at what point did youth movements dissipate in America (and the West more generally?). It seems to be a perfect opportunity for organization and deployment of 18-25 year old men, who are nearly unphased by covid.
As workers in essential meat plants, factories, and other labor intensive supply chains grow sick and die, it seems that having an organized workforce of young men prepared to temporarily take over would be an ideal situation. (Women of course have a role to play, but they are already playing an outsized role in medicine).
More generally, I’m reminded of your previous blog post ‘What the hell is going on?’. This type of event seems to be exactly what wayward young men live for — the ability to contribute to something greater than themselves. Combined with the fact that healthy young men are at remarkably low risk, isn’t the opportunity to support their country at little risk to themselves, and in return gain high status, the ideal situation?
What do you think the failure mode is here? Why does the idea of mobilizing a few thousand men or women in each locality to contribute to the greater good feel so weird? It’s so weird no one even suggests it. Could I suggest that this even feels embarrassing? Why?
That is from an email from Simon Riddell.
Sunday assorted links
1. The acquired immune system.
2. Latest update on Swiss cantons.
3. Maybe the smoking result is still holding up?
4. New Taiwan test and trace data. Better and more relevant numbers than I have been seeing.
5. How did Covid-19 disrupt the Treasuries market?
6. Were WWI helmets in some ways better for blast protection than current helmets?
7. The NYT covers heterogeneities in Covid-19 cases and fatalities. And here is the FT on Portugal vs. Spain. And why is the Covid-19 death rate so low in Israel?
8. Control without information.
9. David Goldhill is upset. My short summary would be: “Public health experts insist on RCTs except when it comes to their own policy recommendations.” That’s right, isn’t it?
10. Richard F. Fenno, political scientist, has passed away, possibly of Covid-19.
Why aren’t there more Covid-19 deaths in U.S. prisons?
There are about 2.3 million prisoners in the United States, and so far the number of reported Covid-19 deaths is 251, or higher by the time you are reading this. If you know of a better data source, please let me know.
For purposes of contrast, Rhode Island has about a million people and currently 266 deaths (and rising). Connecticut has 2,339 Covid-19 deaths, and a population of about 3.5 million, or in other words almost ten times the deaths as the prisons without having even twice the population. In other words, at least nominally the prison system seems to be doing better against Covid-19 than either The Nutmeg State or The Ocean State.
And I read this kind of line quite frequently:
Ohio officials found that more than 80% of those inmates had the virus with the vast majority showing no symptoms.
Yet asymptomatic cases in non-prison samples are often in the 40-50% range, not higher. Furthermore, the Bureau of Prisons just tested 2000 prisoners (how random a sample?…but don’t forget the false negatives!) and 70% tested positive. Again, the death rate does not seem to be through the ceiling.
How can this heterogeneity be? I see a few options:
1. Actual Covid-19 deaths in prisons are much higher than reported. This is quite possible, though I don’t see the media coverage that might go along with this. At the very least, prisons might have longer death reporting and classification lags than does Connecticut.
2. Prison deaths are about to explode, due to exponential growth in the number of cases and their progression through time. Again, this is quite possible, but you know what? I thought of writing this post a few weeks ago and then figured I would be refuted by an explosion of the death total over the next few weeks. So far it hasn’t happened. It may yet.
3. Prisoners are younger. Here is data on inmate ages, they are not that much younger than the general U.S. population. But they are somewhat younger, and surely this is one factor.
4. Prisoners smoke a lot, and nicotine actually may have protective properties against Covid-19. And is obesity low in prison? I do not know. Still, I don’t think of prisoners as a group in perfect physical health.
5. Prisoners are…um…locked up. The superspreaders just aren’t that super, there are not many new entrants to the prison population, few tourists from Italy, and so on. Not only do they live in cells, but the prison system as a whole is like thousands of scattered islands.
I see 1-5 all as possible significant options, with #4 as the weakest candidate. What else might be playing a role here?
Communism still matters liberty still matters
Those who grew up in East Germany seem to have a harder time cottoning to the realities of capitalism:
We analyze the long-term effects of living under communism and its anticapitalist doctrine on households’ financial investment decisions and attitudes towards financial markets. Utilizing comprehensive German brokerage data and bank data, we show that, decades after Reunification, East Germans still invest significantly less in the stock market than West Germans. Consistent with communist friends-and-foes propaganda, East Germans are more likely to hold stocks of companies from communist countries (China, Russia, Vietnam) and of state-owned companies, and are unlikely to invest in American companies and the financial industry. Effects are stronger for individuals exposed to positive “emotional tagging,” e.g., those living in celebrated showcase cities. Effects reverse for individuals with negative experiences, e.g., environmental pollution, religious oppression, or lack of (Western) TV entertainment. Election years trigger further divergence of East and West Germans. We provide evidence of negative welfare consequences due to less diversified portfolios, higher-fee products, and lower risk-adjusted returns.
That is from a new NBER paper by Christine Laudenbach, Ulrike Malmendier, and Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi.
But if you are looking for a contrary point of view, consider this new paper by Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, and Ludger Woessmann:
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, World War II and the subsequent occupying forces affected East and West differently. Third, a selective fifth of the population fled from East to West Germany before the building of the Wall in 1961. In light of our findings, we propose a more cautious interpretation of the extensive literature on the enduring effects of communist systems on economic outcomes, political preferences, cultural traits, and gender roles
That said, I still believe that communism really matters, and durably so, even if the longer history matters all the more so. And now there is yet another paper on East Germany and political path dependence, by Luis R. Martinez, Jonas Jessen, and Guo Xu:
This paper studies costly political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, 40% of the designated Soviet occupation zone was initially captured by the western Allied Expeditionary Force. This occupation was short-lived: Soviet forces took over after less than two months and installed an authoritarian regime in what became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We exploit the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within the GDR to show that areas briefly under Allied occupation had higher incidence of protests during the only major episode of political unrest in the GDR before its demise in 1989 – the East German Uprising of 1953. These areas also exhibited lower regime support during the last free elections in 1946. We argue that even a “glimpse of freedom” can foster civilian opposition to dictatorship.
I take the core overall lesson to be that the eastern parts of Germany will experience significant problems for some time to come.
And speaking of communist persistence, why is it again that Eastern Europe is doing so well against Covid-19? Belarus is an extreme case, with hardly any restrictions on activity, and about 14,000 cases and 89 deaths. You might think that is a cover-up, but the region as a whole has been quite robust and thus it is unlikely to be a complete illusion. And no, it doesn’t seem to be a BCG effect.
Does communism mean there is less of a culture of consumption and thus people find it easier to just stay at home voluntarily? Or have all those weird, old paranoid communist pandemic ministries persisted and helped with the planning? Or what?
Double credit on this one to both Kevin Lewis and Samir Varma, neither less excellent in his conjunction with the other.
Saturday assorted links
1. Are the turning points of epidemics intrinsically unpredictable?
2. An increasing number of state governments are seizing unused gift cards as unclaimed property.
3. How much do work-related visitors predict coronavirus spread?
4. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Charles I. Jones now have a Covid-19 deaths tracker, very useful.
5. Six Covid-related deregulations to watch.
6. The variety of college plans.
7. Innate immunology? (NYT)
8. Deepak Lal has passed away.
9. A rogue pandemic view, speculative. And Kelsey Piper on the IHME model, recommended.
10. Meara O’Reilly, Hockets for Two Voices, short distraction, by the way she is the daughter of Tim O’Reilly.
A critique of contact-tracing apps
Here are some relevant criticisms from Soltani, Calo, and Bergstrom:
Studies suggest that people have on average about a dozen close contacts a day—incidents involving direct touch or a one-on-one conversation—yet even in the absence of social distancing measures the average infected person transmits to only 2 or 3 other people throughout the entire course of the disease. Fleeting interactions, such as crossing paths in the grocery store, will be substantially more common and substantially less likely to cause transmission. If the apps flag these lower-risk encounters as well, they will cast a wide net when reporting exposure. If they do not, they will miss a substantive fraction of transmission events. Because most exposures flagged by the apps will not lead to infection, many users will be instructed to self-quarantine even when they have not been infected. A person may put up with this once or twice, but after a few false alarms and the ensuing inconvenience of protracted self-isolation, we expect many will start to disregard the warnings.
And:
At least as problematic is the issue of false negatives—instances where these apps will fail to flag individuals as potentially at risk even when they’ve encountered someone with the virus. Smartphone penetration in the United States remains at about 81 percent—meaning that even if we had 100 percent installation of these apps (which is extremely unlikely without mandatory policies in place), we would still only see a fraction of the total exposure events (65 percent according to Metcalf’s Law). Furthermore, people don’t always have their phones on them.
And:
There is also a very real danger that these voluntary surveillance technologies will effectively become compulsory for any public and social engagement. Employers, retailers, or even policymakers can require that consumers display the results of their app before they are permitted to enter a grocery store, return back to work, or use public services—is as slowly becoming the norm in China, Hong Kong, and even being explored for visitors to Hawaii.
Taken with the false positive and “griefing” (intentionally crying wolf) issues outlined above, there is a real risk that these mobile-based apps can turn unaffected individuals into social pariahs, restricted from accessing public and private spaces or participating in social and economic activities. The likelihood that this will have a disparate impact on those already hardest hit by the pandemic is also high. Individuals living in densely populated neighborhoods and apartment buildings—characteristics that are also correlated to non-white and lower income communities—are likelier to experience incidences of false positives due their close proximity to one another.
In another study:
Nearly 3 in 5 Americans say they are either unable or unwilling to use the infection-alert system under development by Google and Apple, suggesting that it will be difficult to persuade enough people to use the app to make it effective against the coronavirus pandemic, a Washington Post–University of Maryland poll finds.
And here are skeptical remarks from Bruce Schneier.
I also have worried about how testing and liability law would interact. If the positive cases test as positive, it may be harder for businesses and schools to reopen, because they did not “do enough” to keep the positive cases out, or perhaps the businesses and the schools are the ones doing the testing in the first place. Whereas under a lower-testing “creative ambiguity” equilibrium, perhaps it is easier to think in terms of statistical rather than known lives lost, and to proceed with some generally beneficial activities, even though of course some positive cases will be walking through the doors.
I wonder if there also is a negative economic effect, over the longer haul, simply by making fear of the virus more focal in people’s minds. The plus of course is simply that contact tracing does in fact slow down the spread of the virus and allows resources to be allocated to individuals and areas of greatest need.
Who wants to take UFO sightings more seriously?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Among my friends and acquaintances, the best predictor of how seriously they take the matter is whether they read science fiction in their youth. As you might expect, the science-fiction readers are willing to entertain the more outlandish possibilities. Even if these are not “little green men,” the idea that the Chinese or Russians have a craft that can track and outmaneuver the U.S. military is newsworthy in and of itself. So would be a secret U.S. craft, especially one unknown to military pilots.
The cynical view is that the science-fiction readers are a bit crazy and are trying to recapture the excitement of their youth by speculating about UFOs. Under this theory, they shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than Tolkien fans who wonder if orcs are hiding under the next stone.
The more positive view is that science-fiction readers are more willing to consider new ideas and practices. This kind of openness presumably is a good thing, at least in general, so why aren’t the opinions of more “open” observers accorded more respect? Science-fiction readers have long experience thinking about worlds that are very different from the current one, and perhaps that makes them more perceptive when something truly unusual does come along.
Some of the individuals who were early to see and point out Covid-19 risk, such as tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, also have taken the UFO reports seriously, perhaps due to the same flexibility of mind.
Do read the whole thing, the column does not excerpt easily.
Friday assorted links
1. Black hole in the outer solar system? By Edward Witten.
2. Mechanism design against cheaters.
3. “Except now it’s not my sister I want to vanquish, destroy and dominate—it’s my children.”
5. Peruvian indigenous rap (NYT).
6. Paul Romer on tests and sodas.
7. The culture that was French: France to sell some of nation’s antique furniture to support hospitals.
8. The debate over Human Challenge Trials.
9. The culture that is Japan: should you video chat your local aquarium eel?
Rapid progress from Fast Grants
I was pleased to read this NYT reporting:
Yet another team has been trying to find drugs that work against coronavirus — and also to learn why they work.
The team, led by Nevan Krogan at the University of California, San Francisco, has focused on how the new coronavirus takes over our cells at the molecular level.
The researchers determined that the virus manipulates our cells by locking onto at least 332 of our own proteins. By manipulating those proteins, the virus gets our cells to make new viruses.
Dr. Krogan’s team found 69 drugs that target the same proteins in our cells the virus does. They published the list in a preprint last month, suggesting that some might prove effective against Covid-19…
It turned out that most of the 69 candidates did fail. But both in Paris and New York [where the drugs were shipped for testing], the researchers found that nine drugs drove the virus down.
“The things we’re finding are 10 to a hundred times more potent than remdesivir,” Dr. Krogan said. He and his colleagues published their findings Thursday in the journal Nature.
The Krogan team was an early recipient of Fast Grants, and you will find more detail about their work at the above NYT link. Fast Grants is also supporting Patrick Hsu and his team at UC Berkeley:
There are >100 antibody tests for coronavirus on the market. I explained https://t.co/fVV8ggQ5QI on @CNNTonight to @donlemon with @MarsonLab: what antibody tests can and cannot tell you, which tests perform well or don’t, and how scientists are racing to connect the dots https://t.co/uC5BMn726e
— Patrick Hsu (@pdhsu) April 30, 2020
And the work of the Addgene team:
Thanks #FastGrants (https://t.co/v7PtYNkOxG) for empowering us to continue supporting #COVID19 related reagent sharing. A thread, for some stats and shoutouts ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/eVKjbBguds
— Addgene (@Addgene) April 30, 2020
Nursing homes across nations
This is all from Michael A. Alcorn, from my email, no further indentation offered:
“Just to keep hammering on this nursing home point… I saw your Tweet about Eastern vs. Western Europe and decided to explore the nursing home angle there too. The WHO has data on the number of nursing and elderly home beds for different countries here. Unfortunately, the data only goes up to 2013-ish for many countries, but it’s suggestive nonetheless.
Italy and France were clearly trending up seven years ago in its number of beds… would be interesting to see if Italy had a similar jump to Spain at some point. The number of beds gives us a proxy for the number of people who are highly vulnerable to COVID-19. Obviously, these countries have different total populations, but I don’t think that should matter too much because I suspect nursing homes tend to be highly concentrated within countries (e.g., how many of France’s nursing homes are in the Paris metro?). Based on what I’ve read about nursing home staff often being low paid and so perhaps coming to work when sick and working at multiple facilities, I suspect nursing home density is nonlinearly related to the number of COVID-19 deaths in a country (especially when you account for some of the truly horrifying government decisions regarding nursing homes).
Here are those Nordic countries everyone likes to compare:
You can get exact numbers on the website, but Sweden had twice as many nursing home beds as Finland and three times as many as Norway. The ship might have sailed on what we can do to protect these vulnerable populations, but I would love to see a Fast Grant go towards investigating the COVID-19/nursing home tragedy.”
An epidemiologist (who is also an economist) responds
Matthew Bonds, who is at Harvard, wrote this response to my original post on epidemiologists. I am offering it in its entirety, click here.
Here is the first paragraph:
Since the novel coronavirus outbreak turned into a global health and economic crisis, one of the few silver linings has been unprecedented collaboration across spheres of science, innovation, and policy that have potential for long-term benefits. My training is in economics (PhD) and ecology (PhD) with a specialty in infectious disease modeling. Over the past decade, I have focused on implementing global health delivery programs where the lack of models and technical solutions are rarely the biggest problem – instead, the challenge often lies with breakdowns in the systems of delivering those solutions. That is not the case with COVID-19. We do not have solutions at our fingertips. We do not know the full scope of the problem, and consequently how to best navigate policy tradeoffs. So, I was dismayed to read, “What does this economist think of epidemiologists?” by Tyler Cowen, which struck me as a reinforcement (maybe even a celebration?) of boundaries that do more harm than good.
Do read the whole thing, and note that Bonds wrote his economics dissertation with Dwight Lee (a former co-author of mine) at the University of Georgia. Here is the home page of Matthew Bonds.
Thursday assorted links
1. The Sahara was once the most dangerous place on earth, and why were there so many carnivorous relative to plant-eating dinosaurs and was that a paradox (Correct link here).
2. This guy documents product placement.
3. Good John Cochrane post about university finances and endowments in particular.
4. Words from Holman Jenkins (WSJ): “Please, if you are a journalist reporting on these matters and can’t understand “flatten the curve” as a multivariate proposition, leave the profession. You are what economists call a “negative marginal product” employee. Your nonparticipation would add value. Your participation subtracts it.”
6. Netflix will make another season of Borgen.
7. Swedish public opinion. And Swedes deter park visitors with horse manure.
8. What can we learn from other coronaviruses?
9. Why so many asymptomatic cases in prison? And more heterogeneities: why are eastern European death rates so low?
How tourism will change
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Some of the safer locales may decide to open up, perhaps with visitor quotas. Many tourists will rush there, either occasioning a counterreaction — that is, reducing the destination’s appeal — or filling the quota very rapidly. Then everyone will resume their search for the next open spot, whether it’s Nova Scotia or Iceland. Tourists will compete for status by asking, “Did you get in before the door shut?”
Some countries might allow visitors to only their more distant (and less desirable?) locales, enforcing movements with electronic monitoring. Central Australia, anyone? I’ve always wanted to see the northwest coast of New Zealand’s South Island.
Some of the world’s poorer countries might pursue a “herd immunity” strategy, not intentionally, but because their public health institutions are too weak to mount an effective response to Covid-19. A year and a half from now, some of those countries likely will be open to tourism. They won’t be able to prove they are safe, but they might be fine nonetheless. They will attract the kind of risk-seeking tourist who, pre-Covid 19, might have gone to Mali or the more exotic parts of India.
And:
laces reachable by direct flights will be increasingly attractive. A smaller aviation sector will make connecting flights more logistically difficult, and passengers will appreciate the certainty that comes from knowing they are approved to enter the country of their final destination and don’t have to worry about transfers, delays or cancellations. That will favor London, Paris, Toronto, Rome and other well-connected cities with lots to see and do. More people will want to visit a single locale and not worry about catching the train to the next city. Or they might prefer a driving tour. How about flying to Paris and then a car trip to the famous cathedrals and towns of Normandy?
Maybe. But I might start by giving Parkersburg, West Virginia, a try.
My Conversation with Glen Weyl
I found it interesting throughout, the first half was on Covid-19 testing, and the second half on everything else. Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the summary:
Tyler invited Glen to discuss the plan, including how it’d overcome obstacles to scaling up testing and tracing, what other countries got right and wrong in their responses, the unusual reason why he’s bothered by price gouging on PPE supplies, where his plan differs with Paul Romer’s, and more. They also discuss academia’s responsibility to inform public discourse, how he’d apply his ideas on mechanism design to reform tenure and admissions, his unique intellectual journey from socialism to libertarianism and beyond, the common element that attracts him to both the movie Memento and Don McLean’s “American Pie,” what talent he looks for in young economists, the struggle to straddle the divide between academia and politics, the benefits and drawbacks of rollerblading to class, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
WEYL: There’s one really critical element of this plan that I don’t think has been widely discussed, which is that there are 40 percent of people in the essential sector who are still out there doing their jobs. There may have been some improvements in sanitation. There probably have been, though there have been a lot of issues with getting the PPE required to do that.
But those people are basically transmitting the diseases they always have been. And so, by far, our first priority has to be not “reopening the economy,” but rather stabilizing that sector of the economy so that transmission is not taking place within that sector.
Once we’ve accomplished that goal, it will actually be relatively easy to reopen the rest of the economy, given that that’s 40 percent. It’s just a doubling to get to everybody being in a disease-stabilized situation. So I really think the focus has to be on stabilizing the essential sector by building up this regimen. I think we can do that by the end of June.
Once that’s accomplished, I think we can, over the course of July, reintroduce most of the rest of the economy and have the confidence that, because we haven’t seen reemergence of diseases within the essential sector, that reintroducing everybody else will proceed in a similar fashion.
And:
COWEN: Other than possibly the adoption of your plan, what do you think will be the most enduring economic or social change from this pandemic?
WEYL: My guess is that there will be a lot of large corporations that take on important social responsibilities because of the trust environment that you were talking about and that it becomes increasingly illegitimate for them to be run under a pure shareholder-maximization perspective once they’re taking on that role. I think we’re going to see fundamental shifts in some of the corporate governance parameters as a result of the social role that a bunch of companies end up taking on.
And:
COWEN: At heart, coming out of the Jewish socialist tradition, through a matter of biographical accident, you first became a libertarian. Needed time to find your way back to the tradition you belonged to. Along the way, did economics, so you believe in some notion of markets, albeit directly adjusted by regulation and mechanism design. And you’ve moved away from methodological individualism.
But you’re this weird person of a Jewish socialist, believes in markets, and had this path leading away from libertarianism. No other person in the world probably is that, but you are. Is that a unified theory of you?
WEYL: Well, the thing that throws a little bit of a wrench into that is that I was actually a Jewish socialist before I became a libertarian.
COWEN: Does that strengthen or weaken the theory?
For me the most instructive part was this:
COWEN: What do you view yourself as rebelling against? At the foundational level.
But you will have to read or listen to hear Glen’s very good answer.
Definitely recommended.