Category: Uncategorized
Tim Harford on Catastrophe and Innovation
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.
Not From the Onion: Grenade Launchers for School Police
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.
Friday assorted links
1. Cyberextortion of universities.
2. Redux of my 2017 column on taking down statues and monuments.
3. The Poetry Foundation purge seems to me perhaps the weirdest purge — what exactly did they do wrong? (NYT)
4. Interview with Frank Serpico.
5. Andrew Gelman on peer review.
6. My talk to Jason Crawford’s Progress Studies group. SoundCloud here.
What should I ask Melissa Dell?
She is a professor of economics at Harvard, and winner of the most recent John Bates Clark medal. I would describe her as a both a rising star and an already-risen star. From Wikipedia:
Melissa Dell’s research interests include development economics, economic history and political economy. Her work has mainly focused on explaining economic development through the persistence of historical institutions and climate. She has also investigated the effect of conflict on labor market and political outcomes and vice versa. Much of her research has focused on Latin America and Southeast Asia. She was one of the first economists to use a spatial regression discontinuity design, in her paper on the long-term effects of Peru’s Mining Mita.
Her broader biography is interesting as well (see Wikipedia). Here is previous MR coverage of Melissa Dell, and here is the very good Clark medal summary of her research.
So what should I ask her?
The NIH Should Run Human Challenge Trials for COVID
As I have been warning, social distancing measures are making it more difficult to test COVID vaccines even as the cost of COVID remains very high.
WashPost: The Oxford group earlier boasted that it had an 80 percent chance of developing an effective vaccine by September. Hill said the difficulty of testing the vaccine in Britain may mean there’s only a 50 percent chance of success within that time frame now.
The probability of an Oxford vaccine by September has fallen by 30 percentage points. Oxford isn’t the only vaccine and we may be able to find clinical trial candidates in Brazil and the United States where infections continue to occur. So let’s be generous and convert this into say a 10% increase in a one month’s delay of any vaccine. The world economy is losing $375 billion a month so this means we have lost an expected $37.5 billion. That number highlights why we should be willing to pay large sums to speed vaccines and it also indicates the immense value of human challenge trials.
More than 28,000 people have already volunteered to be part of a challenge trial and if we paid a few hundred volunteers a million dollars each it would be worthwhile (and would surely increase the number of volunteers).
The main impediment to human challenge trials appears to be skittish firms rather than bureaucratic governments which is why challenge trials should test multiple vaccines under the auspices of the NIH. The NIH umbrella can protect the firms and increase the efficiency of the trials.
Addendum: China is adopting a bold approach. We used to be bold. Apathy is killing us.
Thursday assorted links
2. NYT covers the Uhlig debate. And so does the WSJ. Is there any good paper on how academic departments make their non-voting decisions?
3. Alice Evans mini-textbook on development theory.
Underpoliced and Overprisoned, revisited
I’ve been writing for years that the United States is underpoliced and overprisoned. Time for a review:
NYTimes: “The United States today is the only country I know of that spends more on prisons than police,” said Lawrence W. Sherman, an American criminologist on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Cambridge University in Britain. “In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice as high as on corrections. In Australia it’s more than three times higher. In Japan it’s seven times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history.”
…Dr. Ludwig and Philip J. Cook, a Duke University economist, calculate that nationwide, money diverted from prison to policing would buy at least four times as much reduction in crime. They suggest shrinking the prison population by a quarter and using the savings to hire another 100,000 police officers.
Here’s a graph from Daniel Bier on the ratio of police to prison spending comparing the United States to Europe. The US spends relatively less on police and more on prisons than any European country.
And here’s a graph from President Obama’s CEA report on incarceration and the criminal justice system. The graph shows that the United States employs many more prison guards per-capita than does the rest of the world. Given our prison population that isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that on a per-capita basis we employ 35% fewer police than the world average. That’s crazy.
Our focus on prisons over police may be crazy but it is consistent with what I called Gary Becker’s Greatest Mistake, the idea that an optimal punishment system combines a low probability of being punished with a harsh punishment if caught. That theory runs counter to what I have called the good parenting theory of punishment in which optimal punishments are quick, clear, and consistent and because of that, need not be harsh.
Increasing the number of police on the street, for example, would increase capture rates and deter crime and by doing so it would also reduce the prison population. Indeed, in a survey of crime and policing that Jon Klick and I wrote in 2010 we found that a cost-benefit analysis would justify doubling the number of police on the street. We based our calculation not only on our own research from Washington DC but also on the research of many other economists which together provide a remarkably consistent estimate that a 10% increase in policing would reduce crime by 3 to 5%. Using our estimates, as well as those of some more recent papers, the Council of Economic Advisers also estimates big benefits (somewhat larger than ours) from an increase in policing. Moreover, what the CEA makes clear is that a dollar spent on policing is more effective at reducing crime than a dollar spent on imprisoning.
Can we increase the number of police? Not today but in recent years large majorities of blacks, hispanics and whites have said that they support hiring more police. It is true that blacks are more skeptical than whites of police and have every reason to be. Some of the communities most in need of more police are also communities with some of the worst policing problems. Better policing and more policing, however, complement one another. Demilitarize the police, end the war drugs, regulate people less, restrain police unions and eliminate qualified immunity so that police brutality can be punished and the bad apples removed and the demand for police will soar.
As we reform and unbundle policing let us remember that lower crime has been one of the greatest benefits to African American men over the past 30 years.
…the most disadvantaged people have gained the most from the reduction in violent crime.
Though homicide is not a common cause of death for most of the United States population, for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34 it is the leading cause, which means that any change in the homicide rate has a disproportionate impact on them. The sociologist Michael Friedson and I calculated what the life expectancy would be today for blacks and whites had the homicide rate never shifted from its level in 1991. We found that the national decline in the homicide rate since then has increased the life expectancy of black men by roughly nine months.
…The everyday lived experience of urban poverty has also been transformed. Analyzing rates of violent victimization over time, I found that the poorest Americans today are victimized at about the same rate as the richest Americans were at the start of the 1990s. That means that a poor, unemployed city resident walking the streets of an average city today has about the same chance of being robbed, beaten up, stabbed or shot as a well-off urbanite in 1993. Living in poverty used to mean living with the constant threat of violence. In most of the country, that is no longer true.
More police on the street is one cause, among many, of lower crime. Chicago just had a horrendous day with 18 innocent people murdered in mostly random drive-by shootings, in part because the police were occupied with protests and riots. As we reform, unbundle, and reimagine, let’s be careful not to reverse nearly thirty years of falling crime which has produced a tremendous increase in the standard of living of the poorest Americans.
We need better policing so that we can all be comfortable with more policing.
What I’ve been reading
1. Alex Wiltshire and John Short, Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation. Thrilling photos, I suspect the text is very good too but I don’t need to read it to recommend this one.
2. Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: the poet who changed the world. A magisterial biography by Bates, who has been working on this one for many years. The best Wordsworth (ah, but you must be selective!) is at the very heights of poetry, and Bate exhibits a great sympathy for his subject. if you wish to understand how the still semi-pastoral England of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution transformed into…something else, Wordsworth is a key figure.
3. Maria Pia Paganelli, The Routledge Guidebook to Smith’s Wealth of Nations. It goes through WoN book by book, this is the best reading guide to Smith that I know of.
4. Daniel Todman, Britain’s War 1942-1947. An excellent book, one of the best of the year, full of politics and economics too. You might think you have read enough very good WWII books, but in fact there is always another one you should pick up. Right now this is it.
5. Carl Jung, UFOs: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. A short book of high variance, occasionally fascinating, half of the time interesting, often incoherent. The most interesting parts are the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” discussions, basically suggesting that decentralized mechanisms do not give people a sufficient sense of “wholeness.” He is trying to find a classical liberal answer to the fascist temptation, and worried that perhaps he cannot do it.
I have only skimmed Bruce A. Kimball and Daniel R. Coquilette, The Intellectual Sword: Harvard Law School, The Second Century, but it appears to be an impressive achievement at 858 pp.
Should departments own and control journals?
There is some discussion on Twitter of this matter, and overall I say yes, I would like to see more of this at the margin. In economics, the two best-known department-owned journals are the Journal of Political Economy (Chicago) and Quarterly Journal of Economics (Harvard). They also have longstanding histories of being “a bit different,” the JPE having had a Chicago school orientation, and the QJE publishing lots of Harvard grad students and graduates, and being more willing to accept papers with “behavioral” results, and perhaps with more speculative empirics as well. In both cases, I should add those different orientations are much diminished compared to say the 1990s, the JPE in particular these days not seeming especially “Chicago school” to me, and I wonder if a Chicago school still exists amongst younger economists.
I am very glad we have had these two journals standing out as different in orientation, and I strongly believe that has encouraged innovation, even if (and in fact because) the AER would not have accepted all of those papers. A lot of “shaky” behavioral results, for instance, have in fact turned out to be quite relevant or at the very least interesting and worthy of further investigation.
One risk is that the different general interest journals become too much alike, too subject to the same pressures, and too homogenized. And the actual “monopoly” danger, to the extent there is one, is that the American Economic Association controls too many top journals.
To be clear, I don’t see anything sinister afoot with all the AEA journals, but here is a simple way to express my worry. If I had to, standing on one foot, recite all of the names of those journals and their missions or areas, I don’t think I could do it without multiple mistakes. (And frankly not so many people in the entire world devote so much attention to following published economic articles as I do, noting that Larry Katz may be #1.) Somehow the identities are too blurred together, and I wish someone else were running one or two of them.
I am hardly “anti-big business,” but I view commercial publishers as the worst alternative for journal ownership and control. In addition to all of the usual complaints, I think the commercial publishers often (not always) care less about the quality of the editor, as the emphasis is on how well the sales force can market the journal to libraries.
So unless you want the AEA to run everything, and I certainly do not, that is going to mean more department-owned journals. I am impressed by those departments that have the money and the commitment to see these journals through — it is not easy.
As of late, there has been a squabble on Twitter about removing one particular journal editor for his injudicious tweets on recent public events (I don’t wish to link to this and add fuel to the fire). Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion about this particular editorship, but I will say this: Twitter is not the right forum for such a debate. I am very pro-Twitter, as I have written numerous times in the past, but it does have some of the biases of virality, including peer pressure, and it is not always good for reproducing context or considering objections and revisions to viewpoints. Instead, start by writing out your opinion, and considering objections, in a long, judicious, thoughtful piece. Spend at least a few days on the piece, have three of your more critical friends “referee” it in advance of on line publication, and let it be debated for weeks. Is “too much trouble” really a good reason not to do that? If you think that who controls the rigorous refereeing process at a top journal is so important, the method for making judgments here is no less important. “The refereed journals aren’t good, fair, and rigorous enough for me, so we need to slug it out and rush to judgment on…Twitter” just doesn’t make any sense. We can do better.
Addendum: Paul Novosad has some useful suggestions for encouraging decentralization.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Braintwister Bayesian chess doomsday arguments from Ken Regan. More about crime than chess per se.
2. Jordan Schneider podcast with Evan Osnos. Now, better link with transcript too.
3. D.C. toughens officer hiring and discipline. And the Republican plan in the Senate. And the music category of “urban” may be disappearing.
4. Good vaccine and drug explainer (NYT).
Colin Camerer: Economist in the Wild
The latest video in the MRU series, Economists in the Wild, features the excellent Colin Camerer talking about his research comparing what people say they will do with what they actually do and then asking whether you can use brain imaging to better predict what people will actually do. Very cool.
Each of these videos also includes a teacher’s resource, a set of questions that teachers can assign to students.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Short video feature on Curative, Inc., an earlier Emergent Ventures winner.
4. Andrew Potter, a former newspaper editor, on why people hate the media.
5. Henry Farrell on the evolution of libertarianism. And the pandemic, government, and libertarianism. By Brink Lindsey.
Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety?
It’s an unacknowledged peculiarity that police are in charge of road safety. Why should the arm of the state that investigates murder, rape and robbery also give out traffic tickets? Traffic stops are the most common reason for contact with the police. I (allegedly) rolled through a stop sign in the neighborhood and was stopped. It was uncomfortable–hands on the wheel, don’t make any sudden moves, be polite etc. and I am a white guy. Traffic stops can be much more uncomfortable for minorities, which makes the police uncomfortable. Many of the police homicides, such as the killing of Philando Castile happened at ordinary traffic stops. But why do we need armed men (mostly) to issue a traffic citation?
Don’t use a hammer if you don’t need to pound a nail. Road safety does not require a hammer. The responsibility for handing out speeding tickets and citations should be handled by a unarmed agency. Put the safety patrol in bright yellow cars and have them carry a bit of extra gasoline and jumper cables to help stranded motorists as part of their job–make road safety nice. Highways England hires traffic officers for some of these tasks (although they are not yet authorized to issue speeding tickets).
Similarly, the police have no expertise in dealing with the mentally ill or with the homeless–jobs like that should be farmed out to other agencies. Notice that we have lots of other safety issues that are not handled by the police. Restaurant inspectors, for example, do over a million restaurant inspectors annually but they don’t investigate murder or drug charges and they are not armed. Perhaps not coincidentally, restaurant inspectors are not often accused of inspector brutality, “Your honor, I swear I thought he was reaching for a knife….”.
Another advantage of turning over road safety to an unarmed, non-police unit would be to help restore the fourth amendment which has been destroyed by the jurisprudence of traffic stops.
As we move to self-driving vehicles it will become obvious that road safety does not belong with the police (eventually it will be more like air traffic control). We can get a jump start on that trend by more carefully delineating which police duties require the threat of imminent violence and which do not.
Defunding the police, whatever that means, is a political non-starter. But we can unbundle the police.
What I’ve been watching
Graduation, a Romanian movie and perhaps the most notable film about corruption I have seen, ever. From the director of Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, also known as “the Romanian abortion movie.” Both strongly recommended.
Moana. I had to stop watching this one. I am not amongst those who regard Disney as a tool of Satan, but the transparent emotional manipulations are so strong in each and every scene that they distracted me from the ongoing technical marvels. It just wasn’t worth it, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.
Malcolm X, directed by Spike Lee. I thought this was a grave disappointment, noisy and cluttered rather than insightful, and grossly overrated. To put my evaluation in context, I consider The Autobiography of Malcolm X to be one of the greatest American books of all time.
Bullitt, with Steve MacQueen, San Francisco crime drama circa 1968, interesting throughout. Drama from start to finish, nothing hurried, wonderful soundtrack, always feels remarkably cinematic and reflects so many of the movie-making virtues of that era. No one seems that surprised when a guy ends up on a plane with a gun, by the way.
Dust in the Wind, directed by Taiwanese marvel Hou Hsiao-Hsien. One of his least scrutable movies, nonetheless memorable, and yes they are boyfriend and girlfriend. Do keep track of which passages are said in which languages, and what is the vision of both Taiwan’s past and future. Most of you won’t like this one, but nonetheless a landmark in Asian cinema.
Ozu, The End of Summer. Could this be the most underrated movie of classic Japanese cinema? It is hard for me to say more without bumping into spoilers, my only complaint is that the soundtrack is garish and unsuitable.
Monday assorted links
1. The role of pollen: weird but interesting.
2. How has the coronavirus affected the reign of Xi?
3. “Advisors do not always want advisees to fully adopt their advice.”
4. “Recency negativity: Newer food crops are evaluated less favorably.“
5. A new study of which non-pharmaceutical interventions are most effective, argues that open schools can be a significant transmission mechanism.
6. Is large household size a critical problem?
7. Map of international travel restrictions related to Covid-19.