Category: Uncategorized
Incentives matter
Chad Haag considered living in a cave to escape his student debt. He had a friend doing it. But after some plotting, he settled on what he considered a less risky plan. This year, he relocated to a jungle in India. “I’ve put America behind me,” Haag, 29, said.
He now lives in a concrete house in the village of Uchakkada for $50 a month. His backyard is filled with coconut trees and chickens. “I saw four elephants just yesterday,” he said, adding that he hopes to never set foot in a Walmart again.
His debt is currently on its way to default. But more than 9,000 miles away from Colorado, Haag said, his student loans don’t feel real anymore.
“It’s kind of like, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it really exist?” he said.
The philosophy major concedes that his student loan balance of around $20,000 isn’t as large as the burden shouldered by many other borrowers, but he said his difficultly finding a college-level job in the U.S. has made that debt oppressive nonetheless. “If you’re not making a living wage,” Haag said, “$20,000 in debt is devastating.”
Here is the full story by Annie Nova, with photos and video. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Sunday assorted links
Kenyan hospital markets in everything
The Kenyatta National Hospital is east Africa’s biggest medical institution, home to more than a dozen donor-funded projects with international partners — a “Center of Excellence,” says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The hospital’s website proudly proclaims its motto — “We Listen … We Care” — along with photos of smiling doctors, a vaccination campaign and staffers holding aloft a gold trophy at an awards ceremony.
But there are no pictures of Robert Wanyonyi, shot and paralyzed in a robbery more than a year ago. Kenyatta will not allow him to leave the hospital because he cannot pay his bill of nearly 4 million Kenyan shillings ($39,570). He is trapped in his fourth-floor bed, unable to go to India, where he believes doctors might help him…
The hospitals often illegally detain patients long after they should be medically discharged, using armed guards, locked doors and even chains to hold those who have not settled their accounts. Mothers and babies are sometimes separated. Even death does not guarantee release: Kenyan hospitals and morgues are holding hundreds of bodies until families can pay their loved ones’ bills, government officials say.
Dozens of doctors, nurses, health experts, patients and administrators told The Associated Press of imprisonments in hospitals in at least 30 other countries, including Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China and Thailand, Lithuania and Bulgaria, and others in Latin America and the Middle East.
Here is the full story by Maria Cheng, via Daniel Lippman.
Saturday assorted links
1. Is this the beginning of the World Wide Wall? (related to Emergent Ventures, also). Recommended.
2. My parents give me 28k a year.
4. Profile of Bruno Latour (NYT).
5. Annapurna Devi has passed away (NYT).
Toward a theory of optimal personality?
If you are too conscientious, you might experience undue stress during a negative performance review. Or being too agreeable is correlated with lower salary levels, especially for men. And surely too much extroversion and too much openness are possible too?
Rolf Degen reproduces a few relevant paragraphs from a new paper. The work is by Nathan T. Carter, Joshua D. Miller, and Thomas A. Widiger, here is one excerpt from their abstract:
…researchers have only recently begun to uncover evidence that extreme standing on “normal” or “desirable” personality traits might be maladaptive…many more people possess optimal personality-trait levels than previously thought…
I don’t quite agree with that, though I wouldn’t, would I? I think they are overrating normality. The notion that “weirdos are bad” seems to me longstanding, and one of the most durable human intuitions, not something that researchers have only started to realize. In a world with growing division of labor, and greater accountability (in the private sector, at least), extreme traits would seem to be rising in social value. And perhaps some of that return can be captured as private value too — Silicon Valley anybody?
Overall, I still think that “falling short” on say either conscientiousness or openness is undesirable for most though not all individuals. How can conscientiousness ever be bad, you might be wondering? Well, if the world is underproducing people with unusual interests and inclinations, more conscientiousness might make “more weirdos” a harder outcome to achieve. For instance, conscientiousness, with respect to obligations toward broader society, might keep many people more conformist. That said, there still are many people who would do better to get up in the morning and go to work, one manifestation of conscientiousness.
Agreeableness is the trait that remains a hard to define black box. Cooperativeness is often good, though simple deference to the opinions of others, without critical examination, is often bad. When I hear “agreeableness” discussed as a formal personality trait, the possible clash between those two (and other) underlying features of agreeableness seems to receive insufficient attention.
Here is a previous MR Post on related issues.
Friday assorted links
1. Francis Bacon and machine learning.
2. Fat Cats in The New Yorker.
3. Top 100 albums of the last ten years? By Quietus, a highly intelligent source.
4. South Korea will not allow its citizens to smoke pot in Canada.
5. Interview with Stephen Sondheim.
6. How to judge tech companies, recommended. By Patrick McKenzie. “You might sensibly read these heuristics and think “Hmm, you seem to over-focus on speed. Aren’t quality, price, etc also really important?” These questions don’t *really* test for speed. They test for *repeatable competence at scale*, which is another thing entirely.”
Thursday assorted links
Do SAT-optional policies matter?
Not really:
Despite many conversations regarding the applicability and relevance of the SAT as a valid admissions tool, there is limited evidence regarding the effects of test-optional policies on various aspects of an institution’s effectiveness and the collegiate experiences within each institution. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) coupled with a difference-in-difference analysis, we find that test-optional policies have very limited effects. We find SAT optional policies to have no significant effect on diversity or enrolled student quality. The only statistically significant effect we find is a brief increase in the number of applicants in response to the new policy.
That is from Matt Saboe and Sabrina Terrizzi, in Economics Letters, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The new CEA report on socialism is better than critics are claiming
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
More to the point, by far the longest section in the report covers a specific health-care bill, introduced in both the Senate and House and supported by 141 members of Congress, that has become a centerpiece of debate in the Democratic Party. It is hardly irrelevant.
The legislation would eliminate cost sharing, prevent private insurance plans from competing, and prevent private markets from supplementing government coverage (outside of, say, cosmetic surgery). The House version would even prohibit health-care providers from earning profits. These provisions are far more extreme than what is found in most Western European health-care systems. The analogies with traditional socialism are indeed apt — the bill is much worse than anything the Trump administration has proposed to date.
Many of the criticisms of the report have been directed at the section on health-care economics. The critics tend to proclaim their own moderate views and favorably compare some of the Western European health-care systems to that of the U.S. The goal is apparently to smash the report for associating those well-functioning health-care systems with Lenin and Mao. Yet I haven’t seen any of the report’s critics acknowledge the extreme nature of the current Democratic proposal, or that it might need rebuttal, and that such a rebuttal is inevitably going to sound somewhat over the top.
And:
The report also commits the now-unpardonable and immediately punished sin of supporting a doctrine of “false equivalence” — namely, that these days many Democratic ideas are as unacceptable as those associated with Trump.
There are further points at the link, controversial throughout. Here is the report itself.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Yale to open new economics center, The Tobin Center.
2. Russ Roberts on whether the rich capture all of the gains from economic growth.
3. Trust in various institutions, by Democrat and Republican, including the major tech companies.
4. Rules for the history of philosophy (and many other things too).
5. Reason podcast with the excellent Nick Gillespie, on Stubborn Attachments.
6. Charter city > caravan. And again, here is Reihan’s new book on immigration.
My Conversation with Ben Thompson
Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the summary opener:
Not only is Ben Thompson’s Stratechery frequently mentioned on MR, but such is Tyler’s fandom that the newsletter even made its way onto the reading list for one of his PhD courses. Ben’s based in Taiwan, so when he recently visited DC, Tyler quickly took advantage of the chance for an in-person dialogue.
In this conversation they talk about the business side of tech and more, including whether tech titans are good at PR, whether conglomerate synergies exist, Amazon’s foray into health care, why anyone needs an Apple Watch or an Alexa, growing up in small-town Wisconsin, his pragmatic book-reading style, whether MBAs are overrated, the prospects for the Milwaukee Bucks, NBA rule changes, the future of the tech industries in China and India, and why Taiwanese breakfast is the best breakfast.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why should I want a tech device in my home at all? Take Alexa — I don’t have one, I’m pretty happy, my life is simple. I don’t want anyone or anything listening to me. What does it do for me? I know I can tell it to play me a song or buy something on Amazon, but that’s one-click shopping anyway, could hardly be simpler. Why do devices in the home have any future at all?
THOMPSON: The reality is — particularly when it comes to consumer products — is that in the long run, convenience always wins. I think people will have them in their homes, and they’ll become more popular because it’s convenient.
You can be doing whatever you want; you can say something like, “Set a timer five minutes,” or “What temperature should I grill my steak to?” And you’ll get an answer with your hands busy, and altogether it’s going to be a more convenient answer than it would’ve been otherwise.
And:
COWEN: How bullish are you on India’s tech sector and software development?
THOMPSON: I’m bullish. You know, India — people want to put it in the same bucket as, “Oh, it’s the next China.” The countries are similar in that they’re both very large, but they’re so different.
Probably the most underrated event — I don’t want to say in human history, but in the last hundred years — is the Cultural Revolution in China. And not just that 60, 70 million people were killed, or starved to death, or what it might be, but it really was like a scorched earth for China as a whole. Everything started from scratch. And from an economic perspective, that’s why you can grow for so long — because you’re starting from nothing basically. But the way it impacts culture, generally, and the way business is done.
Taiwan, I think, struggles from having thousands of years of Chinese bureaucracy behind it. Plus they were occupied by Japan for 50 years, so you’ve got that culture on top. Then you have this sclerotic corporate culture that the boss is always right, stay in the office until he goes home, and that sort of thing. It’s unhealthy.
Whereas China — it’s much more bare-knuckled competition and “Figure out the right answer, figure it out quickly.” The competition there is absolutely brutal. It’s brutal in a way I think is hard for people to really comprehend, from the West. And that makes China, makes these companies really something to deal with.
Whereas India did not have something like that. Yes, it had colonialism, but all that is still there, and the effects of that, and the long-term effects of India’s thousands of years of culture. So it makes it much more difficult to wrap things up, to get things done. And that’s always, I think, going to be the case. The way India develops, generally, because they didn’t have a clear-the-decks event like the Cultural Revolution, is always going to be fundamentally different.
And that is by no means a bad thing. I’m not wishing the Cultural Revolution on anyone. I’m just saying it makes the countries really fundamentally different.
Definitely recommended.
We are conformists who to some extent become regional thinkers
…voters appear to be sorting on non-political neighborhood attributes that covary with partisan preferences rather than explicitly seeking politically congruent neighbors. But, critically, we demonstrate through a simulation study that the estimated partisan bias in moving choices is on the order of five times too small to sustain the current geographic polarization of preferences. We conclude that location must have some influence on political preference, rather than the other way around, and provide evidence in support of this theory.
Unemployment is always about the supply side too
We document that unemployment is increasing with GDP per capita. Furthermore, we show that this fact is accounted for almost entirely by low-educated workers, whose unemployment rates are strongly increasing in GDP per capita, rather than by high-educated workers, whose unemployment rates are not correlated with income.
That is from Ying Feng, David Lagakos, and James E. Rauch. In their core model, reallocating low-education workers to the formal sector makes them harder to reemploy at short notice, in contrast to the informal sector and self-employment. An alternative view, not mutually exclusive, is that in poor societies low-education workers simply have to take jobs, due to extreme need.
You will on Twitter, and in blogs, see various attempts to mock supply-side theories by showing increasing employment, often accompanied by remarks such as “I didn’t know video games were getting so much worse.” Such comments are a mistake and a misunderstanding. Proper supply-side theories do not deny the relevance of the demand-side, and so nor should demand-side theories deny the relevance of the supply-side. It is possible to believe both “supply-side factors made the labor market recovery slower than usual,” and “demand-side forces have at this moment overcome many of those problems.” Just look at the disability rolls. The ability to receive disability kept many people out of the labor force in earlier years, slowing down labor market recovery. Yet it is also true that currently demand-side forces are creating jobs good enough that many of those same people finally are leaving the disability rolls.
The deeper lesson of course is that — outside of the short-run — demand-side forces are supply-side forces. And right now we are out of the short run indeed, at least when it comes to macroeconomic shocks.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Do conservatives prefer nouns?
2. The world’s longest sea bridge in pictures.
3. Wage growth is slower for just about everybody (in the U.S.) (NYT).
4. Preserving the visual history of K-Mart.
5. My podcast with Sean Carroll, with an interlude on cosmology and quantum mechanics and whether we are all doomed really, really soon. Transcript too.
In a short number of years this story will sound like madness
Canada installs Chinese underwater monitoring devices next to US nuclear submarine base
- Ocean Network Canada confirms addition of hi-tech sensors built by Chinese scientists to its marine observatories in Pacific Ocean
- US state department has ‘nothing to say’ on matter
Full story here, here is some further context from the piece:
Whatever the devices end up being used for, Chen Hongqiao, a researcher at the Centre for Canadian Studies at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, said there was no doubting the sensitivity of the issue.
“Deep sea observation networks are highly sensitive, and closely related to national security,” he said. “Countries don’t open them up to third parties unless there is a high level of trust and confidence.”
The decision to give China such access could have only come from highest corridors of power on both sides, he said.
“Such collaboration is very unusual. The implications go far beyond science, [so] it could have only happened with a nod from the top on both sides.”