Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday assorted links
1. Is the wealth-freedom correlation weakening?
2. Mechanism design to reduce medical supply shortfalls during pandemics.
3. Vox covers Emergent Ventures/Fast Grants.
4. Good summary of the new Los Angeles prevalence results. And here is a thread of caution.
6. James Hamilton on negative oil prices.
7. Salim Furth blames the automobile, not the NYC subway. And here is criticism of the subway result from a blogger. Reading both my judgment is that the subway result does not hold up.
8. Journal of Controversial Ideas is now open and accepting papers.
9. Using Kalman filtering to estimate R.
10. “Wash Your Hands,” Roaring Lion, Trinidad calypso.
Escape from New York
We look at demographic mobility responses to Covid in NYC using mobile phone GPS, finding – wealthy flee the city – different sheltering response among demographic groups in the city – helps account for disparities in health outcomes
That is from new research by Arpit Gupta, full paper here. And:
Searches for moving to NYC suburbs are up almost 250% compared to the same period in 2019.
Story here. Of course maybe those are the same people who in 2016 promised to move to Canada.
Immigration will be largely shut down for some time to come
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Whether or not that reaction is rational, it is easy to imagine the public being fearful about the potential of immigration to contribute to a pandemic resurgence. It does seem that regions able to restrict in-migration relatively easily — such as New Zealand, Iceland and Hawaii — have had less severe Covid-19 problems. New York City, which takes in people from around the world, has had America’s most severe outbreak. And the recent appearance of a second wave of Covid-19 in Singapore has been connected to ongoing migration there.
I have never thought the federal government would build Trump’s wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. But now I wonder whether it may well happen — perhaps in electronic form.
And:
In addition to these effects, many migrants currently living in the U.S. might go back home. Say you are from southern India and live in Atlanta, and typically your parents or grandparents come to visit once a year. That is now much harder for them to do, and will be for the foreseeable future. India also might make it more difficult for Indian-Americans to return to visit their relatives, perhaps demanding an immunity certificate for entry. Many of these current migrants will end up returning home to live in their native countries.
But not all immigration will vanish:
n spite of all those possible restrictions, the pandemic itself may offer new reasons to embrace some forms of migration, if only to help Western economies continue to function. Many jobs are now more dangerous than before, because they involve face-to-face contact and time spent in enclosed spaces. Such professions as nursing and dental assistants, for example, already attracted many immigrants even before Covid-19. Working on farms may yet become more perilous if the virus strikes farm worker communities. New migrants from poorer countries will be willing to take on these risks — for extra income of course — but most U.S. citizens won’t go near them.
The reality may be an uptick in some forms of migration, mostly for relatively hazardous jobs.
In any case, the immigration debate two or three years from now will seem virtually unrecognizable, compared to what we had been expecting.
California estimate of the day
Using daily state-level coronavirus data and a synthetic control research design, we find that California’s statewide SIPO reduced COVID-19 cases by 152,443 to 230,113 and COVID-19 deaths by 1,940 to 4,951 during the first three weeks following its enactment. Conservative back of the envelope calculations suggest that there were approximately 2 to 4 job losses per coronavirus case averted and 108 to 275 jobs losses per life saved during this short-run post-treatment period.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Friedson, McNichols, Sabia, and Dave. As you probably know from now, I am reluctant to take “how well have we done with death so far” estimates at face value, but there you go. You now have your California estimate of the day.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Estimating and classifying the labor market hit.
2. Watching Tucker Carlson is safer than watching Hannity.
3. Better governance is correlated with slower policy responses to Covid-19.
4. Tabulated data on asymptomatic infection rates.
5. Singapore getting much worse again (NYT). And are hospitalizations decelerating in Sweden?
6. How the Belgians count Covid-19 deaths. I call that one big nursing home fail, and I don’t just mean for Belgium.
7. Research paper with predictions for Stockholm.
8. Claims about heterogeneous strains — please use with extreme caution, I do not consider this verified, though it could be very important if true.
9. Study of France — only about 6% infected, other numbers too.
10. Covid-related deregulation on its way?
11. The Amish health care system.
12. The U.S. as insurer to the rest of the world during crises.
The Japanese coronavirus story
You may recall that some time ago MR posted an anonymous account of how the coronavirus problem actually was much worse in Japan than was being admitted by the Japanese government and broader establishment. It is now clear that this Cassandra was correct.
I can now reveal to you the full story of that posting behind the first link, including my role in it. Here is the opening excerpt:
By March 22nd, I strongly suspected there was a widespread coronavirus epidemic in Japan. This was not widely believed at the time. I, working with others, conducted an independent research project. By March 25th we had sufficient certainty to act. We projected that the default course of the epidemic would lead to a public health crisis.
We attempted to disseminate the results to appropriate parties, out of a sense of civic duty. We initially did this privately attached to our identities and publicly but anonymously to maximize the likelihood of being effective and minimize risks to the response effort and to the team. We were successful in accelerating the work of others.
The situation is, as of this writing, still very serious. In retrospect, our pre-registered results were largely correct. I am coming forward with them because the methods we used, and the fact that they arrived at a result correct enough to act upon prior to formal confirmation, may accelerate future work and future responses here and elsewhere.
I am an American. I speak Japanese and live in Tokyo. I have spent my entire adult life in Japan. I have no medical nor epidemiology background. My professional background is as a software engineer and entrepreneur. I presently work in technology. This project was on my own initiative and in my personal capacity.
I am honored to have played a modest role in this story, though full credit goes elsewhere, do read the whole thing. Hashing plays a key role in the longer narrative.
The Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience
Led by Danielle Allen and Glen Weyl, the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard has put out a Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience (I am a co-author along with others). It’s the most detailed plan I have yet seen on how to ramp up testing and combine with contact tracing and supported isolation to beat the virus.
One of the most useful parts of the roadmap is that choke points have been identified and solutions proposed. Three testing choke points, for example, are that nasal swaps make people sneeze which means that health care workers collecting the sample need PPE. A saliva test, such as the one just approved, could solve this problem. In addition, as I argued earlier, we need to permit home test kits especially as self-swab from near nasal appears to be just as accurate as nasal swabs taken by a nurse. Second, once collected, the swab material is classified as a bio-hazard which requires serious transport and storage safety requirements. A inactivation buffer, however, could kill the virus without killing the RNA necessary for testing and thus reduce the need for bio-safety techniques in transportation which would make testing faster and cheaper. Finally, labs are working on reducing the reagents needed for the tests.
Understanding the choke points is a big step towards increasing the quantity of tests.
Economists survey epidemiological models
The authors are Christopher Avery, William Bossert, Adam Clark, Glenn Ellison, Sara Fisher Ellison, the paper is very good but the abstract is uninformative. Here is one excerpt:
A notable shortcoming of the basic SIR model is that it does not allow for heterogeneity in state frequencies and rate constants. We discuss several different sources of heterogeneity in more detail in Section 2.
The most important and challenging heterogeneity in practice is that individual behavior varies over time. In particular, the spread of disease likely induces individuals to make private decisions to limit contacts with other people. Thus, estimates from scenarios that assume unchecked exponential spread of disease, such as the reported figures from the Imperial College model of 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the United States, do not correspond to the behavioral responses one expects in practice. Further, these gradual increases in “social-distancing” that can be expected over the courses of an epidemic change dynamics in a continuous fashion and thus blur the distinctions between mechanistic and phenomenological models.13 Each type of model can be reasonably well calibrated to an initial period of spread of disease, but further assumptions, often necessarily ad hoc in nature, are needed to extend either type of model to later phases of an epidemic.
I recommend the whole paper.
Assorted non-Covid links
1. Bad trade and the loss of variety.
2. Can money buy happiness revisited: the new take is to hire a happiness agent.
3. Do people have a bias for low-deductible insurance? (yes, partly for peace of mind reasons)
4. Weird Phillips curve behavior has to do with costs, not degree of tightness in the labor market.
5. New results on Harvard discrimination against Asian-Americans. “Asian Americans are substantially stronger than whites on the observables associated with admissions…the richness of the data yields a model that predicts admissions extremely well. Our preferred model shows that AsianAmericans would be admitted at a rate 19% higher absent this penalty.”
6. New Devon Zuegel podcast with Alain and Marie-Agnes Bertaud.
Monday assorted links
2. An extensive and pretty devastating article on the testing fail of the CDC. Again, our regulatory state has been failing us. And coverage from the NYT.
3. At the margin: “Results show that informants were given approximately 70 East German marks worth of rewards more per year in the areas that had access to WGTV, as compared with areas with no reception—ironically an amount roughly equivalent to the cost of an annual East German TV subscription.”
4. “Bars and Restaurants Peel Cash From Walls to Help Idled Workers” (NYT).
5. Scott Sumner watch the islands. This piece seems to imply that in-migration is a major source of heterogeneity. I’ve also been receiving some emails from Xavier suggested tourist inflow is a major cause of heterogeneity, due to an ever fresh supply of hard to trace cases. No rigorous test yet of that one, but it is certainly in the running as a hypothesis. And if true, it suggests many parts of Africa may not be hit that hard.
6. Karlson, Stern, and Klein on Sweden.
7. South Africa and HIV/AIDS: will the latter have been good training for Covid-19? (Economist)
8. The danger of “herd immunity overshoot.”
9. Singapore government and the Virus Vanguard.
10. Beloit University moves to more flexible two-course module system. For now at least.
More simple economics of a pandemic
The difference in value to society of getting a vaccine in May 2021 vs March 2022 is huge, but the difference in private profits is not
That is from Luis Pedro Coelho. And thus there is a great import to accelerating speed, at least in some critical matters.
Brad DeLong makes the point that if you have some downward nominal (or real?) rigidities, you should allow prices to rise in the expanding sectors all the more.
So many of the most important points of economics can be expressed succintly, which makes it well-suited for both blogs and Twitter.
That’s all!
Sunday assorted links
1. Profile of Amy Finkelstein.
2. 1/3 test positive in a semi-random Chelsea, Mass. sample. And “Notably, 43.2% (95% CI 32.2-54.7%) of the confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections detected across the two surveys were asymptomatic.” That is from northern Italy. and a further critique of the Santa Clara study.
3. Droplet more significant transmission than aerosol?
5. “According to the Navy, the classroom antics had a darker side.”
6. The new Magnus Carlsen tournament. And new @pmarca book recommendations.
7. NYT survey piece on heterogeneities.
8. Good and extensive west coast Kaiser data set, and further evidence that R doesn’t fall nearly as much as you might wish for. If you are advocating an extended lockdown, you really need to think this one through and present your reasoning. So far I don’t see enough people doing that, nothing close, including the economists maybe even especially the economists. Right now this is one of the biggest deficiencies in the debate.
9. Countries that have banned alcohol as part of their Covid-19 response. It is striking to me how accepting the American coastal intelligentsia is of a strict lockdown, yet a permanent ban on alcohol is to them an unacceptable idea, curtailing basic liberties and impractical.
10. “…stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: county-level measures of mobility declined by between 9% and 13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect.” And: “We show that COVID-19 as a whole reduced consumer spending in a panel of over 1 million small businesses by 40% year-over-year. Conversely, COVID-19 did not affect aggregate consumer spending at 3,600 large businesses.3…Consumer spending at the brick-and mortar stores of large firms fell by 9%, but online transactions at these large firms increased by 56%.”
11. All this debt during a global recession is in fact dangerous.
12. William Hanage and Helen Jenkins at WaPo cover the IHME model with some seriousness. Good piece, but we should have been debating this six weeks ago or more.
13. Andrew Gelman on the Santa Clara study (brutal).
Estimating the COVID-19 Infection Rate: Anatomy of an Inference Problem
That is a recent paper by Manski and Molinari, top people with econometrics. Here is the abstract:
As a consequence of missing data on tests for infection and imperfect accuracy of tests, reported rates of population infection by the SARS CoV-2 virus are lower than actual rates of infection. Hence, reported rates of severe illness conditional on infection are higher than actual rates. Understanding the time path of the COVID-19 pandemic has been hampered by the absence of bounds on infection rates that are credible and informative. This paper explains the logical problem of bounding these rates and reports illustrative findings, using data from Illinois, New York, and Italy. We combine the data with assumptions on the infection rate in the untested population and on the accuracy of the tests that appear credible in the current context. We find that the infection rate might be substantially higher than reported. We also find that the infection fatality rate in Italy is substantially lower than reported.
Here is a very good tweet storm on their methods, excerpt: “What I love about this paper is its humility in the face of uncertainty.” And: “…rather than trying to get exact answers using strong assumptions about who opts-in for testing, the characteristics of the tests themselves, etc, they start with what we can credibly know about each to build bounds on each of these quantities of interest.”
I genuinely cannot give a coherent account of “what is going on” with Covid-19 data issues and prevalence. But at this point I think it is safe to say that the mainstream story we have been living with for some number of weeks now just isn’t holding up.
For the pointer I thank David Joslin.
Saturday assorted links
1. How to take care of your green onions.
2. New U. Texas mortality projections model. Here is an accompanying paper.
3. Spit tests seem to work pretty well relative to swabs.
5. Precht designs Parc de la Distance for outdoor social distancing.
6. “We are the neurotypicals of the COVID-19 world.”
8. A history of unemployment insurance.
9. “Outpacing the Virus: Digital Response to Containing the Spread of COVID-19 while Mitigating Privacy Risks,” by Glen Weyl, et.al.
10. They are the Chinese restaurant road trippers.
11. Measured effective reproduction numbers for various states (please note this comes with the usual data problems!). Will social distancing get these much below 0.8? I found this link to be quite pessimistic in its implications.
What I’ve been reading
1. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, quite a good book.
2. Louis Galambos with Jane Eliot Sewell, Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1995. Imagine a book with both Vannevar Bush and Maurice Hilleman as leading and indeed intersecting characters. How is this for a sentence?: “Hilleman had spent his boyhood on a farm on which the German-American tradition was to “work like hell and live by the tenets of Martin Luther.””
3. John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health. A little boring, and not conceptual enough, but is anything on this topic entirely boring at the current moment in time? Nonetheless this is a very useful overview and survey of public health issues in American history, and so I do not hesitate to recommend it.
4. Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles, Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites. Remarkably fair-minded and substantive, here is my blurb: “”Who are the Never Trumpers, what do they want, and what are their stories? Robert P. Saldin and Steven Teles have produced the go-to work on a movement that will likely prove of enduring influence in American politics.” Here is a relevant Atlantic article by Saldin and Teles. Recommended.
5. Anne Enright, Actress: A Novel. A subtle Irish story of a woman telling the tale of her now-departed famous, charismatic mother and her career in the theater. Unpeels like an onion as you read it, and reveals successively deeper layers of the story, it would make my “favorite fiction of the year” list pretty much any year. But please note it has not have the “upfront attention-grabbing style” that many of us have been trained to enjoy.