Category: Uncategorized
Thursday assorted links
1. Haircuts for airlines. And time to prepare for voting by mail.
2. David Piling (FT) wonders whether India and Africa should do full lockdown.
3. Redundancy, not reshoring, is the key to supply chain security.
4. “Our classification implies that 34 percent of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home.”
5. Why was it so hard to raise the coronavirus alarm? (the yappers are one reason, btw — are you one of them?)
6. Under these calculations, an average coronavirus death in China means 11 years lost, 16 years lost in the United States.
8. Are the new testing kits going to be sent to the American South, which has fewer measured cases? Where should they be sent? A good piece.
9. Economist Eric Budish on viewing R less than 1 as a fundamental economic constraint.
10. Overnight, Magnus Carlsen just revolutionized the future organization of chess play. This will become the new normal.
11. Social distancing tips from a hermit. “Keep track of something” is a good one.
12. How are the Amish adapting to shuttered schools?
13. Marginal Revolution University landing page for economic resources on coronavirus.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
Lots of economics, remember what that is? Here is the link, check out the contents. Topics include bracero labor, lone shooters, film incentive programs, FDA liberalization, should Ed Leamer get a Nobel Prize, reviewing money and banking textbooks, and much more.
Wednesday assorted links
2. Timeline of the federal government response to coronavirus.
3. Anti-price gouging laws mean masks leave America, I wonder if Alex is preparing a whole post on this link?
4. Holman Jenkins of the WSJ goes Straussian on the Straussian bloggers.
5. The culture that is Bengali priorities: sweet shops will stay open. And a short history of coronavirus in Japan. And Ezra Klein interviews Evan Osnos on coronavirus and U.S.-China relations.
6. Self-isolation proves a boon to rainfall project.
7. Why there are lags in scaling up California testing. A very good (and depressing) piece.
8. Mossad officer describes their battle for ventilators. And is the U.S. taking ventilators from Paraguay? (speculative)
9. The singing stops in southern Italy as tensions rise.
10. “Our infectiousness model suggests that the total contribution to R0 from pre-symptomatics is 0.9 (0.2 – 1.1), almost enough to sustain an epidemic on its own. For SARS, the corresponding estimate was almost zero (9), immediately telling us that different containment strategies will be needed for COVID-19.” Link here.
11. Hospitals that won’t let their doctors wear masks (NYT).
12. Economist Peter Sinclair has died from Covid-19.
13. Should very young countries such as Nigeria opt for suppression?
15. Our system of scientific funding is broken for rapid science (recommended).
What should you read during the crisis?
Agnes Callard writes (NYT):
Like many others, I have been finding my taste in books and movies turning in an apocalyptic direction. I also find myself much less able than usual to hold these made-up stories at a safe distance from myself…
If I have something to feel guilty about, I want to feel guilty. If something frightening is happening, I want to be afraid of it. Which is to say: When things are bad, I want to suffer and would choose to suffer and even seek out suffering.
Having just rewatched Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and then The Virgin Spring, I agree at the margin, but not altogether. I would raise the following points:
1. In times of turmoil, we may have a stronger craving for art that “feels real.” But such art is in fact often especially phony. The “special effects” have to be all the better, so to speak. None of what we are consuming is a realistic experience in the first place, so perhaps we are seeking out greater artifice and fooling ourselves about its realism even more than usual.
2. Should we be watching videos of bad events in hospitals? (originally Chinese hospitals, now NYC). Some people are indeed doing this, but as a substitute for Jane Austen? How about videos of people dying from Covid-19? Videos of other respiratory diseases as the next best fill-in?
3. What about the art vs. non-art margin as a larger choice? Don’t many people with terminal diseases (more terminal than usual that is) want to go for long walks in nature? Doesn’t fiction exercise much less of a hold on elderly minds and matter most for teenagers and people in their early 20s and perhaps also women in their 40s-50s? Perhaps the implication is, during a pandemic, to move away from art and literary fiction altogether.
4. The Guardian reports that sales of long, classic novels have gone up. What do those novels have in common? Are they a kind of comfort food? Do we value their length? That they are high status? That we read them already in earlier and perhaps happier periods of life? Are they long projects we can absorb ourselves in? Those seem like illusion-laden motives for reading them, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
5. Perhaps we like to read especially pessimistic dystopian novels as a kind of talisman. “Tell me the worst, let’s get dealing with the fear over with, then I will feel protected that reality will not disappoint my expectations because things won’t in fact be that bad.” That is again another kind of illusion. The aforementioned Guardian link suggests that sales of dystopian novels are up in general, even if they are not about plagues and pandemics.
6. Yiyun Li said: ““I have found that the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and structure Tolstoy’s novels provide. In these times, one does want to read an author who is so deeply moved by the world that he could appear unmoved in his writing,” she wrote.”
7. If people are bored, should they then wish to experience further boredom through their choice of fiction? Or would a diversion from boredom be acceptable and indeed preferred?
Somehow I think in terms of a portfolio approach to aesthetics. In harder times you need more tugs, pulls, distractions, and offsets than usual, but they should not all run in the same direction, or they will become predictable and cease to move you.
So when it comes to fiction, take some chances in your reading and toss in some of the older classics and horror and dystopia as well, and lots of fun and warmth and those walks in nature too.
So yes make a (marginal) turn in the apocalyptic direction, but in part it is to shore up your own sappiness.
Emergent Ventures India
Thanks to a special grant, there is now a devoted tranche of Emergent Ventures India. In the last two years, EV has received excellent applications related to India, both from residents in India and entrepreneurs and academics around the world working on India-related projects. This is not surprising because India has exceptional young talent with great ideas, but its traditional educational and philanthropic institutions have not always identified and nurtured these ideas and individuals. And given the size of the opportunity in India, a successful idea can change the lives of a very large number of people. In this sense, EV India is our attempt at a moonshot.
And a given dollar goes much further there!
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here.
EV India will provide grants and micro grants to jump-start high-reward ideas that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and the well-being of Indians. We encourage unorthodox ideas and also requests that are too small to attract interest from the traditional models of funding and philanthropy.
Shruti Rajagopalan (also an Emergent Ventures Winner) joined Mercatus in the fall of 2019 as a senior research fellow studying Indian political economy and economic development. Shruti and I (Tyler) are already working together to evaluate applications for EV India. And note we are now working on some Covid-19-related grants!
To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
Here is a list of past grants and fellowships made to India related projects:
Harshita Arora (first EV cohort), an 18-year-old Indian prodigy from Saharanpur, in addition to her work in the sciences, she recently co-founded AtoB, a startup building a sustainable transportation network for intercity commuters using buses.
Neil Deshmukh, high school student in Pennsylvania, for general career support and also to support his work on smartphone apps for helping Indian farmers identify, diagnose, and recommend treatment options for crop diseases (PlantumAI) and for helping the blind and visually impaired interpret images through sound (VocalEyes).
Paul Novosad, at Dartmouth, with Sam Asher, at Johns Hopkins, to enable the construction of a scalable platform for the integration and dissemination of socioeconomic data in India, ideally to cover every town and village, toward the end of informing actionable improvements. The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset on India (SHRUG) is available here.
Tejas Subramaniam, a high schooler from Chennai, for prospective work on disseminating information about the prevalence of sexual violence, the harm it does, and effective tools to reduce its incidence. Tejas (with his team) won the World Schools Debating Championships (WSDC) in August 2019.
Namrata Narain, Harvard Ph.D student in economics, for work on “What happens to the ability of firms to write contracts when courts are dysfunctional?”
Samarth Jajoo, a high school student in Ahmedabad, India, to assist in his purchase of study materials for math, computer science, and tutoring. He has developed a project called read.gift, which is a new book gifting project.
Himanshu Dhingra, an entrepreneurial Indian law student, to support his travel and internship at Project Arizona.
Ashish Kulkarni, an economics professor at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, to support a podcast on asynchronous mentoring.
Shrirang Karandikar, to support an Indian project to get the kits to measure and understand local pollution.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Further Tuesday assorted links yes they are all really interesting
What will post-pandemic New York City look like?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Most of all, there will be an exodus of elderly residents. New York City will become even more the province of young people, assuming the role that Berlin has long played in Germany. That will be good for the city’s long-run vitality. [TC: No, I am not saying this is a good thing overall.]
Rents and land prices are likely to fall. This is not necessarily because of a high number of deaths, a ghoulish and difficult detail to predict. Nonetheless many businesses will think twice about locating their headquarters in New York City, if only because senior managers tend to be relatively old. The net effect will be to make the city less attractive for businesses but more affordable for residents, most of all young people. It will be more like the New York of the 1970s and 1980s, with fear of infection replacing the fear of crime.
And:
If Covid-19 survivors have immunity, as is the case with many viruses, the city’s social life may become very segregated. Survivors will have time-stamped immunity certificates and lead relatively active social lives. Those who have not had the virus will be far more Puritan — spending more time online, refusing to shake hands, biking rather than taking the subway. Different bars and even different parts of town will have reputations as better for one group or the other.
This kind of segregation is not an especially appealing prospect. Yet New York City, with its incredible choice and diversity, will be better suited to deal with it than will rural or suburban America. Of course if you haven’t been infected yet, and cannot prove immunity and get into the safe clubs and bars, you will be all the more scared to visit the riskier outlets available to you.
In fact many people, especially the young, may actually expose themselves to the virus deliberately, to join what is ostensibly the more fun-seeking crowd. Maybe there will be bars and parties for people in the “actively infected” phase.
I hope to return to the broader topic of our future in subsequent posts. And here is a new NBER piece that the coronavirus curve already is flattening in NYC.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Michael Munger on state capacity libertarianism.
2. Confirmation of the mid-life dip in well-being?
4. The Netherlands And the Swedish approach finally seems to be running up the death rate (of course don’t just judge short-term).
5. How drones can help fight the coronavirus.
6. U.S. figures out what is it drug supply chain by asking New Zealand (reminds me of the old Communist joke about letting NZ stay capitalist so they know how to price electricity).
7. New paper on fiscal policy responses to the pandemic.
8. Polling economists on the lockdown.
9. A new study claims that reinfections are simply cases that did not fully resolve (be very careful with papers of this sort in this genre!).
10. The Kinsa thermometer data (NYT).
11. Covid symptom tracker, self-report daily and contribute data to science.
Emergent Ventures winners, eighth cohort
Eibhlin Lim, Penang and University of Chicago.
“I interview founders from different industries and around the globe and share their origin stories to inspire the next generation of founders to reach for their own dreams. I previously shared these stories in Phoenix Newsletters, an online newsletter that organically grew to serve more than 7000 high school and university student subscribers primarily from Malaysia. In July 2018, I decided to self-publish and distribute a book, ‘The Phoenix Perspective’, which contains some of the most loved stories from Phoenix Newsletters, after learning that some of our biggest fans did not have constant access to the Internet and went through great lengths to read the stories. With the help of founders and organizations, I managed to bring this book to these youths and also 1000+ other youths from 20+ countries around the globe. I hope to be able to continue interviewing founders and share their origin stories, on a new website, to reach even more future founders from around the world.”
Carole Treston/Association of Nurses in AIDS Care
To jump-start a Covid-19 program to produce cheap informational videos and distribute them to their nurse network for better information and greater safety, including for patients.
“Right now, the main sources of data for Coronavirus are CSV files and websites which make the data fairly inaccessible to work with for developers. By giving easy access to this data more products can be built and more information can be shared. The API I built is an easily accessible, single source of Coronavirus data to enable developers to build new products based on COVID19 data. These products could be mobile applications, web applications and graphed data…The API exposes this data in JSON which is the easiest data format to work with for web and mobile developers. This in turn allows for quick integration in to any products. The API is also completely free to users.”
17 year old from Ontario, wishes to work in San Francisco, he does computational biology with possible application to Covid-19 as well, Twitter here. His Project De Novo uses molecular machine learning methods for novel small molecule discovery, and the grant will be used to scale up the cloud computing infrastructure and purchase chemical modelling software.
Joshua Broggi, Woolf University
To build an on-line university to bring learning programs to the entire world, including to businesses but by no means only. His background is in philosophy and German thought, and now he is seeking to change the world.
Congratulations!
There is also another winner, but the nature of that person’s job means that reporting must be postponed.
Here are previous Emergent Ventures winners, here is an early post on the philosophy of Emergent Ventures. You will note that the Covid-19-related work here is simply winning regular EV grants, these are not the prizes I outlined a short while ago. I expect more prize winners to be announced fairly soon.
Monday assorted links
2. Kotlikoff argues for group testing.
4. Why America took so long to test, and yes the FDA is largely to blame (NYT).
5. “Those shown to have developed immunity could be given a “kind of vaccination passport that allows them, for example, to be exempted from curbs on their activities”, Gérard Krause, a leading immunologist co-ordinating the study, told Der Spiegel magazine.” (The Times)
6. Why Singaporean health care workers have remained relatively safe.
7. This Week in Virology podcast. I have not heard it, but it comes recommended.
8. The Gottlieb/Rivers/McClellan/Silvis/Watson AEI policy paper.
9. Audrey Moore RIP, Fairfax County environmentalist, she influenced my life a great deal, both good and bad. Fairfax County now has 427 parks, in part because of her.
10. Robin Hanson argues for variolation.
11. The gender gap in housing returns. (Do women care more about the non-pecuniary factors?)
12. The Ebola scare helped Republicans.
13. New SEIR infectious disease model from NBER. And a new James Stock paper with a model.
14. Summary of where John Cochrane is at.
15. MIT The Elevate Prizes, up to $5 million.
16. Viral load as a source of heterogeneity?
17. James Altucher interviews me about the coronavirus economy, podcast.
Who and what will rise and fall in status?
A reader asks:
will we see a post from you with predictions of ‘risers & fallers’ in our new coronowartime world?…What are your predictions for (semi-) permanent changes in status of various insititutions & ideologies in the new times?!
Here goes:
Risers
Health care workers — duh, and much deserved.
The internet and the tech community more broadly — Their institutions have performed the best, and even Anand G. has more or less recanted.
Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea
Peter Thiel, who numerous times cautioned us about the fragility of globalization and global supply chains.
State capacity libertarianism
The NBA and Adam Silver — They led the charge to shut things down.
Surveillance — It worked in parts of East Asia, and Europe’s unwillingness to use it will cost many lives.
Telemedicine
Science and scientists
Balaji Srinivasan, who saw it all coming on Twitter.
Individuals who can create structure for themselves — the true winners of lockdown.
The Federal Reserve System and Jay Powell — hail QE Infinity!
Losers
The FDA, CDC, and WHO — ouch.
Social justice warriors — who cares about your microaggression these days?
Rudy Gobert — will never be in the running for “Defensive Player of the Year” ever again. That said, his being Covid-positive led to the closing of the NBA and may have benefited America more than any other NBA player “action” has done, ever. He has since given a good deal of money to charity and ought to go up in status.
Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York.
Bolsonaro, López Obrador, and populism more generally.
Academics in the humanities — have they added much to our understanding of the situation, or to our response?
The media. No matter what you think they might deserve, they just seem to keep on going down in status. Bet on the trend!
Mixed
Various “right wing types,” of varying degrees of fringe, were early on this issue. But I suspect they will rise in status only within their “in groups.” Same with Matt Stoller.
Triage — we had to do it, and we did it unflinchingly. But in the “social record,” will this go down as OK, or as horrifying and “we can’t ever let this happen again”? Or maybe we’ll just forget about it, and pretend those silly philosophers doing trolley problems are wasting our time.
Donald Trump and also China. I’ll delete any comments that discuss these, because as topics they do not encourage subtlety of response. No matter what you may think is a just outcome here, in predictive terms the paths of these reputations are still difficult to call.
I thank C. for some assistance with this post.
Price dispersion and pandemics
Price dispersion is an excellent indicator of transactional frictions. It isn’t that absent price dispersion, we can confidently say that frictions are negligible. Frictions can be substantial even when price dispersion is zero. For instance, if the search costs are high enough that it makes it irrational to search, all the sellers will price the good at the buyer’s Willingness To Pay (WTP). Third world tourist markets, which are full of hawkers selling the same thing at the same price, are good examples of that. But when price dispersion exists, we can be reasonably sure that there are frictions in transacting. This is what makes the existence of substantial price dispersion on Amazon compelling.
Amazon makes price discovery easy, controls some aspects of quality by kicking out sellers who don’t adhere to its policies and provides reasonable indicators of quality of service with its user ratings. But still, on nearly all items that I looked at, there was substantial price dispersion. Take, for instance, the market for a bottle of Nature Made B12 vitamins.
Prices go from $8.40 to nearly $30. It is not immediately clear why sellers selling the product at $30 are in the market. It could be that the expected service quality for the $30 seller is higher except that between the most expensive and the next lowest price seller, the ratings of the next highest seller are lower. And I would imagine that the ratings (and implied quality) of Amazon, which comes in with the lowest price, are the highest.
p.s. Sales of the boxed set of Harry Potter show a similar pattern.
That is all from Gaurav Sood.
Sunday assorted links
1. Margaret Atwood on public health in the 1940s.
2. 250 things an architect should know, recommended, Michael Sorkin RIP.
3. Sign up for curated videos from The Browser.
4. The enforcement culture that is Britain: “”We are getting calls from people who say ‘I think my neighbour is going out on a second run – I want you to come and arrest them’.”
5. Why are airlines pricing tickets so very low even below marginal cost?
6. Health and Pandemics, Econ Working Group, now with virtual seminars.
7. Tape of the Neil Ferguson parliamentary testimony. And here are Ben Yeoh notes on the presentation.
8. Do we have the personnel infrastructure to support test and trace?
10. Christopher Balding’s full take. Chris makes many good points, but two comments. First, on the policy side he is far too quick to dismiss “test and trace,” which seems to be working in South Korea and Singapore. Second, I would like to see more comparative attention to the regions where we know things are going very, very badly.
11. Why previous attempts to build a new ventilator fleet failed (NYT).
Where does all the heterogeneity come from?
Here is a Christopher Balding tweet storm, excerpt:
Iceland has done almost 14k tests on an island of 360k so more than 3% of the total population…They have more than 800 confirmed cases, 10k people in quarantine, 800 in isolation, 18 hospitalizations, 6 in ICU, and 2 dead…About how many people SHOULD have corona if the spread etc numbers are accurate. As of March 27, Iceland would be expected to have more than 46k people that have corona. Emphasis this is on an island of 360k and 800 confirmed cases.
What is going on in the Icelandic numbers? What accounts for this apparent heterogeneity? Dosage? Is it that Icelandic clustering is mostly in one easy to control central city and the rest already is “socially distanced,” even in the best of times?
I know there are some MR readers in Iceland, and presumably they read the Icelandic press. Can anyone shed light on why the death rate is not higher in Iceland? Is it that the death rate is about to burst a week from now? Alternatively, you might think the Icelanders have kept their hospitals up and running — important for sure — but that doesn’t explain what seems to be a quite low rate of reported cases. Or is it that Iceland’s second largest city is so tiny — Akureyri at 18,925 inhabitants — that the virus doesn’t have many easy chances to recirculate once cut off for a while?
Similarly, Sweden hasn’t restricted public life very much and they do not seem to be falling apart?
How much better is Staten Island (less dense) doing than Manhattan (more dense)?
Some reports indicate that in hard-hit Westchester County,. NY, the rate of hospitalization is about one percent (8-10 percent in some other places). Alternatively, here is serious talk that the death toll in Wuhan is 20x official figures.
How much of the heterogeneity results from the kind of mixing you get? One account of the low German death rate is the young and the old were never pushed together so much by the policy response. One account of the high Italian death and hospitalization rate is that the initial quarantine was only regional and thus it spread very dangerous forms of mixing throughout the larger country.
It is possible that Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam still will be hit hard, but so far the signs do not indicate as such. Warm weather may play a positive role, though that remains speculative. The latest weather paper appears credible and indicates some modestly positive results. Of course weather won’t explain the relative Icelandic and Swedish success, if indeed those are truly successes.
By the way, on the “everyone already has it” theory, a semi-random sample of 645 from Colorado showed zero positives.
So where is all this heterogeneity coming from? Is it all just bad data? That seems hard to believe at this point, and Iceland seems like a plausible source of reasonably good data.
As for concrete conclusions, these heterogeneities should make us more skeptical about any models of the situation. But it would be wrong to conclude that we should do less, arguably risk-aversion could induce us to wish to do more, including on the lock downs front.
It is also worth pondering which heterogeneities are “baked in,” such as heat and age structure of the population, and which heterogeneities can be altered at the margin, such as forms of social mingling. It is at least possible that studying these heterogeneities could make policy far more potent.
Overall, I do not see enough people asking these questions.
Saturday assorted links
1. Economist Hans Stoll has passed away.
2. Who are the workers most needing support and how can we get cash to them?
3. Recommended occupational licensing reforms. And Certificate of Need and nurse practitioner laws. And the case for relaxing pharmacy regulations.
4. Why did U.S. testing get so held up? (quite good)
5. Covid-19 forecasting site from The Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford.
6. How slim are restaurant margins?
7. Mercatus “Way Forward” suggestions.
8. On why the German death rate is lower.
9. New Haven asks for coronavirus housing help, Yale says no.
10. Are Italian deaths being undercounted? And it seems Spanish deaths are being undercounted (in Spanish).
11. Japan now admits the situation there is much worse than had been recognized.
12. The self-isolation culture that is royal Thai.
14. “History will not absolve Bolsonaro.”
15. Rhode Island police go after New Yorkers seeking refuge (Bloomberg).