Category: Uncategorized
UK Tory fact of the day
In the UK, Conservative party membership has been dwindling for decades. At its peak, in the early 50s, it was 2.8 million. Last year, it was 124,000 and the party received twice as much money from dead members, through wills, as from the living.
That is from a longer Andy Bennett piece on the deepening crisis in conservatism.
The dark side of the internet, in a nutshell?
As incentives to take higher actions increase—due to higher stakes or more manipulable signaling technology—more information is revealed about gaming ability, and less about natural actions. We explore a new externality: showing agents’ actions to additional observers can worsen information for existing observers. Applications to credit scoring, school testing, and web searching are discussed.
That is from a forthcoming JPE paper “Muddled Information,” by Alex Frankel and Navin Kartik.
Saturday assorted links
1. Somehow, American racism exploded in 2010-2012. Recommended (model this).
4. Gay stereotyping deracializes somewhat.
5. Are rare earths a paper tiger?
6. Was Scandinavian gender equality also high in Viking times?
Heritability of lifetime earnings
Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alternative definitions of earnings, to adjusting for the role of education, and to measurement errors in the measure of genetic relatedness.
That is from a newly published paper by Ari Hyytinen, Pekka Ilmakunnas, Edvard Johansson, and Otto Toivanen.
Friday assorted links
Thursday assorted links
Wednesday assorted links
1. The death of the Left in Indian politics?
2. Those new service sector jobs: icefall doctors.
3. Is the FDIC running “Operation Choke Point”?
4. Mobile phones lowered murder rates.
5. Is the start-up deficit mainly the result of demographics?
6. Mohamed El-Arian named head of Queens’ College, Cambridge.
Physician and Nurse Incomes Have Increased Tremendously
There has been a lot of ink spilled over the rising cost of health care and in Why Are the Prices So D*mn High? Helland and I do not cover every theory and cannot satisfy every objection. Our goal is more modest. We can say that one major factor in rising health care costs is the rising price of skilled labor.
We argue that there is a direct, obvious, and measurable cause of higher costs in healthcare—namely, the price of skilled labor. No profession other than physicians has seen such large increases in incomes over the past 50 years. Figure 19 shows the real income of physicians from 1960 to 2016, indexed to 100 in 1960. Since 1960 the real income of physicians has increased by a factor of three. By comparison, barbers and bus drivers have seen essentially no increase in real incomes. Median incomes are up only modestly whereas mean incomes, which are pulled up by outliers, are up by only 50 percent.
Moreover, nurse incomes have risen in lock-step with those of physicians.
At the same time, we have hired more physicians and more nurses per capita. As Figure 20 shows since 1960 the number of physicians and the number of nurses has more than doubled.
With more physicians and more nurses each making more, it’s not surprising that the cost of medical care would increase.
Addendum: Other posts in this series.
Tuesday assorted links
1. The technologies that are Canada: “Audible hockey puck could revolutionize the sport for blind players.” Note: “[It] sounds pretty much like a smoke detector,” Francois Beauregard, who helped come up with the idea for the puck prototype…”It is not made to be harmonious or pleasant.”
2. Was Leonardo da Vinci ADHD? (speculative)
3. Professional football is also much riskier for subsequent heart attacks.
4. Paul Keating, former Australian Prime Minister, on classical music.
5. Homeopathy in the French health care system, but much more than that too.
Monday assorted links
China fact of the day
We find that party members on average hold substantially more modern and progressive views than the public on issues such as gender equality, political pluralism, and openness to international exchange.
That is from Chengyuan Ji and Junyan Jiang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Of course this may partly explain why China’s rising middle class is not so outright enthusiastic for democratization.
Sunday assorted links
1. How Huawei became a smartphone giant (podcast, and sign-up page).
2. New results on the cost of the China trade war.
3. China is more carbon efficient than you might think (The Economist).
4. eSports a bubble?
5. Will Wilkinson on regional renewal (NYT).
6. Ross Douthat on how liberalism loses (NYT).
Saturday assorted links
Friday assorted links
*Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World*
That is the new book by David Epstein, the author of the excellent The Sports Gene. I sometimes say that generalists are the most specialized people of them all, so specialized they can’t in fact do anything. Except make observations of that nature. Excerpt:
In an impressively insightful image, Tetlock described the very best forecasters as foxes with dragonfly eyes. Dragonfly eyes are composed of tens of thousands of lenses, each with a different perspective, which are then synthesized in the dragonfly’s brain.
I am not sure Epstein figures out what a generalist really is (and how does a generalist differ from a polymath, by the way?), but this book is the best place to start for thinking about the relevant issues.