Category: Uncategorized
Environmental impact statements can do great harm
In pursuit of federal approval for the nation’s first congestion pricing scheme, the one officials suggested would launch in January 2021, the question was this: Should New York State and New York City conduct a quick “environmental assessment” or a full scale “environmental impact statement,” a process that could take years?
Federal officials didn’t provide a definitive answer in that meeting, nor have they since.
That haziness puts MTA officials, and the massive system-wide rehabilitation plan whose funding is reliant on congestion pricing, in a serious bind.
Here is the full story, via Austin V.
Canine collar markets in everything
There are a lot of great options for dog collars on the market, but none of them will amuse you quite like the Cuss Collar from Mschf Labs. It’s a relatively simple product that combines a patent leather collar strap with an injection-molded speaker that does exactly what you think it does–it swears every time your dog barks. After all these years, it turns out Fido wasn’t saying things like “I love you,” “let’s go for a walk,” or “feed me,” he was saying things like “motherf#*ker,” “shit,” and all kinds of other expletives.
Here is the full story, via Michael.
Tuesday assorted links
2. “Tossing of the heavy wok at high speed may be one contributor to shoulder pain, which is reported by 64.5% of Chinese restaurant chefs.” And the physics of perfect fried rice.
4. My podcast with Erik Torenberg and Jasmine Wang. And John Cochrane seems to be starting a podcast.
5. More from Scott Gottlieb on FDA regulation of coronavirus testing.
Lubbock, Texas notes
Hill BBQ is perhaps the best I have had — ever. It is open Thursday and Saturday only, get the burnt ends and beef ribs. Next in line is Evie Mae’s, better known on the barbecue circuit, but still mostly unsullied by tourists and so the lines remain manageable.
There is no real center of town, but you can visit the world’s largest windmill museum (it is windy there), a prairie dog park, and Robert Bruno’s self-constructed, funky Steel House on a nearby lake. There are Confederate memorials remaining by the main courthouse. You will see tumbleweed. There is a strange man walking around town with a tricolor hat.
The economy is cotton, health care, and Texas Tech at about 40,000 students. Buddy Holly was from Lubbock.
It still has a strong regional feel, much as say parts of the Dakotas do. The dinosaur displays in the museum are labeled “The Original Longhorns.”
I would go long on Lubbock: no NIMBYs (yet), the housing stock is rising in quality, they are opening an entertainment center downtown, and it could be the next Marfa but on a larger scale. What’s not to like?
How valuable is social impact investing?
Perhaps it is overrated? That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
A second risk is that social impact investing simply redistributes wealth from investments — maybe to less socially conscientious individuals. Imagine a socially conscious investment firm that declines to participate in the initial public offering of a company that pollutes the ocean. That might create downward pressure on the price of the IPO. But there is a problem: The value of the actual investment has not declined, so at a potentially lower IPO price other investors will step in to fill the demand. In fact, those investors may have the chance to buy at a discount and earn a higher return than otherwise.
The net result is that conscientious investors have missed out on a profitable opportunity, while less socially aware investors have earned more. Over time, the less socially aware investors will become richer, and their greater wealth may translate into greater political and economic influence.
That also put less conscientious investors in control of the firm. And:
It is also difficult to monitor the performance and social efficacy of the funds focused on doing good. In actively managed sustainable equity funds, for example, the most commonly held stocks are estimated to be Microsoft, Alphabet, Visa, Apple and Cisco. I have nothing against those companies, but you have to wonder exactly how much social improvement those investment funds are buying.
So many matters in today’s America are increasingly performative, and so:
It is increasingly difficult for businesses and investment funds to perform their proper work under the glare of perpetual debate and periodic condemnation.
Recommended.
Monday assorted links
1. The pricing of Lego blocks and sets, more interesting than it sounds, though not to me. And hockey is too expensive for a growing number of Canadians (NYT).
2. Fixing the problems of credentials today.
3. Ben Thompson podcast with Dan Wang.
4. A new bibliography on the best books against socialism.
5. Erik Torenberg channels/integrates some of my remarks from interviews.
Why are we letting FDA regulations limit our number of coronavirus tests?
Since CDC and FDA haven’t authorized public health or hospital labs to run the [coronavirus] tests, right now #CDC is the only place that can. So, screening has to be rationed. Our ability to detect secondary spread among people not directly tied to China travel is greatly limited.
That is from Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the FDA, and also from Scott:
#FDA and #CDC can allow more labs to run the RT-PCR tests starting with public health agencies. Big medical centers can also be authorized to run tests under EUA. For now they’re not permitted to run the tests, even though many labs can do so reliably 9/9 cdc.gov/coronavirus/20
Here is further information about the obstacles facing the rollout of testing. And read here from a Harvard professor of epidemiology, and here. Clicking around and reading I have found this a difficult matter to get to the bottom of. Nonetheless no one disputes that America is not conducting many tests, and is not in a good position to scale up those tests rapidly, and some of those obstacles are regulatory. Why oh why are we messing around with this one?
For the pointer I thank Ada.
Sunday assorted links
Who is Wealthy?
Branko Milanovic argues against comparing wealth over time:
The difficulty of measurement of wealth between different periods derives not only because of our lack of data for most of the past but from the inability to meaningfully compare wealth or consumption patterns in the past with those of today. Some economists believe that if people in the past did not have certain amenities that we have today they must have been infinitely poorer. This is what one finds in Nordhaus and DeLong’s view of historical progress as unfolfding through reduced cost of artificial lighting, the approach that Angus Maddison (in “Contours of the World Economy: 1-2030”) termed a “hallucigenic history”.
The logic of such authors is as follows. Take the example of artificial lighting or voice recording. For Julius Caesar to read a book overnight, easily move at night around his palace, or listen to the songs he liked would have required perhaps hundreds of workers (slaves) to hold the torches or sing his favorite arias all night. Even Caesar, if he were to do that night after night, might, after some time, have run out of resources (or might have provoked a rebellion among the singers). But for us the expense for a similar pleasure is very small, even trivial, say $2 per night. Consequently, some people come to the conclusion that Caesar must have had tiny wealth measured in today’s bundle of goods since a repeated small nightly expense of $2 (in today’s prices) would have eventually ruined him. Other people at Caesar’s time had obviously much less: ergo, the world today is incomparably richer than before, and people then must have felt horribly poor and deprived of all pleasurable things. (Even if you cannot feel deprived of the things you do not know exist.)
The logic seems at first reasonable even if somewhat extreme. But it is not reasonable. Let’s extend this logic, now in a different direction, from us today to the next 500 years. Suppose that in 500 years people are able to choose for their vacation between Mars, Venus, Pluto or perhaps even to go further than that. Suppose they can fly around our solar system, go to the bottom of the ocean, zip from one end of the Earth to another in a few minutes, or do lots of fun things that we cannot imagine today, no more than Caesar could have imagined that his singers’ voices could be recorded on a tiny chip and reproduced ad infinitum at almost no cost. And when we then look at Jeff Bezos’ wealth today using the consumption opportunities of the future, that wealth is likely to look to us –from the vantage point of 500 years hence- insignificant. Bezos might be rich in our own terms, but he cannot fly to Mars this weekend, no matter how much he tries.
So should we then absurdly turn around and claim that Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates et al. are poor? Clearly not.
I am baffled by the last two sentences. Bezos and Gates clearly are poor relative to people in the future who can choose to vacation on Mars. It seems absurd to me to think otherwise. Jeff Bezos has four children. Suppose one of them had cancer. If he could, do you think Bezos would hesitate for one minute to spend a billion dollars buying the medicine that will be available to an ordinary American in the year 2050? How much would Bezos pay for an extra 10 years of life? What about an extra 100? How much for a bionic eye, a dozen extra points of IQ, or freedom from Alzheimer’s disease?
Or put it the other way. How much wealthier would you have to be to want to live in 1950, 1900 or 1850? I can come up with numbers for 1950 and 1900 but I think I would prefer my income and lifestyle today to anyone’s income and lifestyle in 1850. Dentist anyone? I’d also prefer it if my wife didn’t die in childbirth.
Branko argues that comparisons of wealth across long time periods are impossible, meaningless, even “hallucinogenic.” I think he has it backwards. It’s quite difficult to compare wealth over fairly short periods. Am I wealthier than my father was at my age (he was also a professor). Maybe. Maybe not. We consume somewhat different bundles. I have Netflix and a nicer car. He had a nicer house. But am I wealthier than my grandfather? Absolutely. On either side.
What should I ask Philip Tetlock?
I will be having a Conversation with him, no associated public event. So what should I ask?
I thank you all in advice for your wisdom and counsel.
Health care economist sentences to ponder
Various ideas to cut costs in Medicare and Medicaid have been proposed in recent years. Health economists generally oppose those changes.
And this:
If health economists were in charge of the health system, not a lot would change, with some notable exceptions. Medicaid would not have work requirements (which would be unpopular among conservatives in some states), and taxes would go up for Medicare and for employer-based health insurance (which would make it unpopular among just about everybody).
Here is a much longer and excellent piece by Austin Frakt, surveying what health economists in the United States believe about health care policy. Also do note that health care economists overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats.
What should we think about all this? That we can trust these health care economists to (more or less) endorse the current system because it is in fact pretty good, relative to available constraints? That radical reforms, as suggested by say some Democratic presidential candidates, are undesirable and unneeded? That the Democratic economists who endorse single payer are way overreaching? Or that these health economists are both deluded — in whichever direction — and also major wusses?
Inquiring minds wish to know. Here is a related Twitter thread from Michael Cannon.
*Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World*
That is the new book by Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei. It is perhaps not so novel to students of Jean Bodin and medieval political thought, or say Chinese history, but still the book crystallizes a moment and I consider its publication a matter of note. Here is one short bit:
But which hierarchical relations are justified and why? In our view, it depends on the nature of the social relations and the social context. As a method, we are inspired by Michael Walzer’s call for a pluralistic approach to justice. There is no one principle of justice appropriate for all times and places. Our main argument is that different hierarchical principles ought to govern different kinds of social relations. What justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens; what justifies hierarchy among citizens is different from what justifies hierarchy among countries; what justifies hierarchy among countries is different from what justifies hierarchies between humand and animals, and…The sum total of our argument is that morally justified hierarchies can and should govern different spheres of our social lives…
The discussion of the Kama Sutra, and its notions of hierarchy, was interesting too.
Saturday assorted links
2. Phasing out squat toilets in Tokyo (a few years ago they were 40% of the total). And has Germany moved to a de facto UBI?
3. “‘Parasite’ Backers Gain $100 Million on Film Tackling Inequality.”
4. New Yorker covers Bryan Caplan on Open Borders.
5. Types of highway interchanges and their efficiency ratings.
6. Seeking to abolish the family? Crazy and and maybe evil too, but interesting.
Patients as Consumers in the Market for Medicine: Bedside Manner > Survival Probability
Young and Chen, 2020: Consumer-driven health care is often heralded as a new quality paradigm in medicine. However, patients-as-consumers face difficulties in judging the quality of their medical treatment. With a sample of 3,000 U.S. hospitals, we find that neither medical quality nor patient survival rates have much impact on patient satisfaction with their hospital. In contrast, patients are very sensitive to the “room and board” aspects of care that are highly visible. Quiet rooms have a larger impact on patient satisfaction than medical quality, and communication with nurses affects satisfaction far more than the hospital-level risk of dying. Hospitality experiences create a halo effect of patient goodwill, while medical excellence and patient safety do not. Moreover, when hospitals face greater competition from other hospitals, patient satisfaction is higher but medical quality is lower. Consumer-driven health care creates pressures for hospitals to be more like hotels. These findings lend broader insight into unintended consequences of marketization.
It doesn’t surprise me that consumers respond much more to nice nurses than to survival probabilities. Nice nurses are observable by patients but survival probabilities can only be estimated from sophisticated statistical models. I do wish that patients paid more attention to the outputs of sophisticated statistical models when choosing doctors and hospitals, as I think this would improve quality, but mostly they don’t. As a result, competition increases patient satisfaction but less clearly increases medical quality and medical excellence. The authors, in fact, argue that competition reduces medical quality but that part of their paper is weaker than the former and the bulk of the economic literature indicates that hospital competition also increases quality albeit not strongly and with some mixed results.
Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.
Does digital socialism have a future?
No, not a good future, according to Jesús Fernández-Villaverde:
Can artificial intelligence, in particular, machine learning algorithms, replace the idea of simple rules, such as first possession and voluntary exchange in free markets, as a foundation for public policy? This paper argues that the preponderance of the evidence sides with the interpretation that while artificial intelligence will help public policy along with several important aspects, simple rules will remain the fundamental guideline for the design of institutions and legal environments. “Digital socialism” might be a hipster thing to talk about in Williamsburg or Shoreditch, but is as much of a chimera as “analog socialism.”
The paper is an excellent response to a growing set of claims, I would add further material on the work of Michael Polanyi and the importance of inarticulable knowledge.