Category: Uncategorized
Sunday assorted links
1. “Belgium was the worst-hit country per capita in Europe. They did systematic testing for #SARSCoV2 in long-term care facilities, just reported…o symptoms were reported in 6,244 *(74.8%)* of 8,343 people who tested positive” Link here.
2. Scott Sumner on Joseph Conrad.
3. “On a per-capita basis, of the European majors only Germany has done better than the US in death rate” Link here.
4. The WHO was (and is) wrong about the virus being airborne (NYT). A remarkable story about an unfathomable error of great import.
5. Georgia Tech professors revolt over reopening.
“The purchasing power of money is the same everywhere”
Didn’t Mises insist on that proposition in his Theory of Money and Credit? The claim always bugged me, as it is true only tautologically. Here is one counterexample:
In a remote area of Papua’s Pegunungan Bintang regency, purchasing staple commodities will put a far bigger dent in your wallet than in most other areas of Indonesia.
For a sack of rice, typically weighing 10 kilograms, people in the traditional gold mining area of Korowai have to spend at least Rp 2 million (US$138.5), similar to the cost of a low-end smartphone.
For comparison, in Jakarta, 1 kilogram of rice costs Rp 10,000 to Rp 11,000, meaning 10 kg of rice costs people in the capital around Rp 110,000.
The massive price discrepancies are not limited to rice. A box of instant noodles costs Rp 1 million in Korowai. Sometimes, people even pay with two grams of gold.
“A pack of instant noodles costs Rp 25,000,” said Hengki Yaluwo, an administrator of a cooperative in Korowai’s Mining Area 33 on Wednesday.
“Ten kilograms of rice costs four grams of gold. If you pay with cash, you need Rp 2 million,” he said.
One can of fish typically costs Rp 150,000, while a cell phone could cost 10 to 25 grams of gold, Hengki said.
As for arbitrage:
Reaching Korowai is difficult. People must take a helicopter from Bovel Digoel regency, and then continue by longboat, traveling along the Boven Digoel river for one day. After this, they must travel by foot for two days before finally arriving at the Korowai mining area.
Here is the full story, via Shaffin Shariff. Here are photos of the Korowai people, ignore the text. Here is a more sober and probably more accurate Wikipedia article.
The NBA’s reopening is a warning sign
There’s only one problem: An increasing number of players do not seem very interested in being guinea pigs in this experiment. At first the secessions were a trickle. Now they are picking up steam.
Davis Bertrans, arguably the second-best active player on my home team the Washington Wizards, will not play because he doesn’t want to risk injury and endanger his prospects as a free agent next season. [TC: Bradley Beal has since announced his indecision.] That’s an entirely reasonable excuse, and more and more players are finding them…
These players will still be paid, but they are lowering their future market value by expressing less than a full commitment to the team. And it is hard to imagine that many other workplace environments can be made much safer than the planned NBA bubble.
One has to wonder how many other players are planning to drop out, or perhaps hoping that the decision will be made for them: Maybe they will get an injury during training camp, say, or worsening conditions in Florida will require cancellation of the season, or it will become more socially acceptable not to play. In the meantime, the dominant strategy may simply be to wait and root against the resumption of play.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column on this topic. The broader point of course is this: if players being paid millions, and put into a highly regulated bubble, and tested regularly, feel this way, what about the broader work force?
Saturday assorted links
The Deleted Clause of the Declaration of Independence
When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776. Jefferson’s passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document. It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us.” Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Jefferson’s original passage on slavery appears below.
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
From Blackpast. Kevin Kallmes at Notes on Liberty has more details.
Hat tip: Brandon C.
The merit of Mount Rushmore
I went there once, I think in 1988. To me it was a nightmare, aesthetically and otherwise. The art of the monument was “not even as good as fascism.” (Various Soviet-era memorials are far superior as well.) I am not into the whole cancelling thing, but I didn’t feel I needed to pay additional homage to a bunch of well-known presidents. The surrounding food scene appeared quite mediocre, although probably that has improved. Overall it was crowded, tacky, and unpleasant, with absolutely nothing of value to do.
The main value of the scene was to liberate space and ease congestion in other parts of the universe, so I certainly hope they never abolish it.
Madden on the FDA
Here is the excellent Bartley Madden interviewed on the FDA and Free To Choose Medicine. See also Bart’s rejoinder to a critique of Free To Choose Medicine in Japan published in Science.
What should I ask Nicholas Bloom?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, so what should I ask? Here is part of his official bio:
Nicholas (Nick) Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow of SIEPR, and the Co-Director of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK Treasury and McKinsey & Company.
Is there anyone whose name is on more important/interesting papers over the last ten years? Here is a sampling.
So what should I ask him?
Friday assorted links
1. Profile of Nathan Tankus. And Clockwork Orange review.
2. The growing influence of Sci-hub.
3. Somerville, Mass. recognizes polyamory (NYT).
4. France bans Dutch bike TV ad for creating ‘climate of fear’ about cars. “The French advertising code prohibits the exploitation of fear and suffering in commercials.”
5. “…a novel song sung by white-throated sparrows is spreading across Canada at an unprecedented rate. What’s more, the new song appears to be replacing the pre-existing melody, which dates as far back as the 1960s.” Link here.
Combining life insurance and health insurance
Why not internalize the relevant externalities by bringing the two together?:
We estimate the benefit of life-extending medical treatments to life insurance companies. Our main insight is that life insurance companies have a direct benefit from such treatments because they lower the insurer’s liabilities by pushing the death benefit further into the future and raising future premium income. We apply this insight to immunotherapy, treatments associated with durable gains in survival rates for a growing number of cancer patients. We estimate that the life insurance sector’s aggregate benefit from FDA-approved immunotherapies is $9.8 billion a year. Such life-extending treatments are often prohibitively expensive for patients and governments alike. Exploiting this value creation, we explore various ways life insurers could improve stress-free access to treatment. We discuss potential barriers to integration and the long-run implications for the industrial organization of life and health insurance markets, as well as the broader implications for medical innovation and long-term care insurance markets.
That is from a recent article by Ralph S J Koijen and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh in the May 2020 QJE. Here are ungated versions of the same paper. And here is Robin’s related idea from 1994.
New evidence that amino acid mutations matter for contagiousness
It seems the virus mutated in Europe and became significantly more contagious (though not more dangerous per unit dose):
The Spike D614G amino acid change is caused by an A-to-G nucleotide mutation at position 23,403 in the Wuhan reference strain; it was the only site identified in our first Spike variation analysis in early March that met our threshold criterion. At that time, the G614 form was rare globally, but gaining prominence in Europe, and GISAID was also tracking the clade carrying the D614G substitution, designating it the “G clade”. The D614G change is almost always accompanied by three other mutations: a C-to-T mutation in the 5’ UTR (position 241 relative to the Wuhan reference sequence), a silent C-to-T mutation at position 3,037; and a C-to-T mutation at position 14,408 that results in an amino acid change in RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp P323L). The haplotype comprising these 4 genetically linked mutations is now the globally dominant form. Prior to March 1, it was found in 10% of 997 global sequences; between March 1- March 31, it represented 67% of 14,951 sequences; and between April 1- May 18 (the last data point available in our May 29th sample) it represented 78% of 12,194 sequences. The transition from D614 to G614 was occurred asynchronously in different regions throughout the world, beginning in Europe, followed by North America and Oceania, then Asia (Figs. 1-3, S2-S3).
That is from a new paper in Cell by B. Korber et.al., via Eric Topol. You will note there is another recent paper suggesting the east and west coasts of the United States have faced different mutations and thus different levels of contagiousness, but that seems less well established.
The authors do not mention Taiwan, but if I understand their chronology correctly, it would seem that Taiwan has not significant been hit by the most contagious version of the virus.
In any case, I will repeat my general point: moralizing about the virus is premature. And of course the main result presented in this new paper is subject to revision, further scrutiny, and possible reversal.
Addendum: Here is NYT coverage.
Thursday assorted links
1. A massive star has disappeared without a trace.
2. The Roy and Paul Romer WSJ “keep our schools open and test” ad. Yet the CDC recommends against entry testing for higher education, see these Bergstrom tweets. Deeply irresponsible.
3. The culture that was Finland — until now!
4. Alabama students are throwing Covid parties.
5. British plan to become a science superpower.
6. What are the proper standards for informed consent in photographing protests?
7. Baz Luhrmann to adapt Master and Margarita for the large screen.
My Conversation with Annie Duke
Here is the transcript and audio, here is the opening summary:
Annie joined Tyler to explore how payoffs aren’t always monetary, the benefits and costs of probabilistic thinking, the “magical thinking” behind why people buy fire insurance but usually don’t get prenups, the psychology behind betting on shark migrations, how her most famous linguistics paper took on Steven Pinker, how public policy would change if only the top 500 poker players voted, why she wasn’t surprised to lose Celebrity Apprentice to Joan Rivers, whether Trump has a tell, the number one trait of top poker players, and more.
Here is one bit from Annie:
DUKE: So when I went on my first date with my husband, my brother and brother-in-law immediately decided to make a market, and it was whether we were going to get married. Now to be fair, my husband and I — before we went on our first date, we’d been friends. Both my brother and my brother-in-law knew my eventual husband, but this is when we’re going on our first date. They make a market. I think that my brother-in-law ended up bidding 23.
My brother then called me up, cracking up, that my brother-in-law had bid 23 when we hadn’t been on a first date yet. And I then started laughing at my brother, said, “Well, that means you had to bid 22. Why are you laughing at him? You somehow bid 22. It’s our first date.” Now, that’s because we’re all people who sort of think this way. And so this sort of becomes the fun of the friendship, but there are other people . . .
And this from Annie:
DUKE: My suspicion is that if only the top 500 poker players voted, people would be thinking a lot more about edge cases — where things could go wrong, for sure, because poker players just are obsessed with that. I think that there would be more long-termism as opposed to short-termism, again, because you have to be obsessed with that as a concept. I think that people would be thinking about “What are the unintended consequences? How does this look?”
Another thing that’s really important that poker players think about is, “If I put this policy in that looks like it’s awesome, how can someone come in and find the cracks in it so that it can turn into something bad?” I feel like the top 500 players would definitely be thinking in that way more.
You will have to read or hear the dialogue to take in my many good questions.
Why American lockdown exceptionalism?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and here is part of the explanation:
The danger lies in the potential for ratchet effects. If hardly anyone is eating out or going to bars, you might be able to endure the deprivation. But once others have started doing something, you will probably feel compelled to join them, even at greater risk to your life.
Consider that in the 1920s, the chance of catching a disease or infection from dining out was pretty high, but people still went out. Accepting that level of risk was simply considered to be part of life, because everyone saw that everyone else was doing it. In similar fashion, members of an infantry brigade are usually willing to charge an enemy position so long as they can be assured that all their comrades are, too.
So if you are wondering why the U.S. has become so tolerant of Covid-19 risk, one reason is simply that it has the most pro-consumption norms of any major Western nation. The pursuit of socially influenced high consumption levels is far more common in America than in, say, Kosovo, a country with a relatively good anti-Covid safety record.
And one implication is this:
So telling Americans that they are stupid and excessively sociable is likely only to make the problem worse.
Better in fact is everyone thinks no one else is going out very much.