Category: Uncategorized
Sunday assorted links
1. Backstory on the Amazon minimum wage hike.
2. Root cause of the major Russian intelligence failure.
3. “The Democrats are the party of rights…For Democrats, an unfriendly Supreme Court is a threat to everything.”
4. Unleashed. By Cass Sunstein.
5. “Today, 20 per cent of tech-based Delaware C-Corps started on Stripe Atlas.”
6. San Francisco Review of Books interviews me about Stubborn Attachments.
The Child Care tax credit may have unfavorable incidence
Child care tax credits are intended to relieve the financial burden of child care for working families, yet the benefit incidence may fall on child care providers if they increase prices in response to credit generosity. Using policy-induced variation in the Child and Dependent Care Credit, this paper presents evidence of substantial pass-through: over half of every dollar is passed through to providers in the form of higher prices and wages. Increased non-refundable credit generosity may have the unintended effect of making child care less affordable for low-income families, a result with distributional and spatial implications due to income sorting of families within an urban area.
That is from a new paper by Luke P. Rogers, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Whiners, in this case whiners about Airspace
We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started…
The profusion of generic cafes and Eames chairs and reclaimed wood tables might be a superficial meme of millennial interior decorating that will fade with time. But the anesthetized aesthetic of International Airbnb Style is the symptom of a deeper condition, I think.
Why is AirSpace happening? One answer is that the internet and its progeny — Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb — is to us today what television was in the last century…
That is all from Kyle Chayka at The Verge. I found this article interesting, well-written, and making a valid point. Still, is it not mostly your fault if you are stuck in “Airspace,” as it is called? Northern Virginia has some of the wealthiest counties in the United States, yet most of the terrain still is not Airspace or anything close to it. Nor is most of San Francisco this way, or most of Manhattan, much less the other boroughs. (And might you not prefer Airspace for the NYC subway?) Seoul is a city which has its share of Airspace, but again is hardly dominated by it — the dense, low-slung neighborhoods of small restaurants are fascinating and mostly retro.
I think of Airspace as a 2-3% of our living space condition, yet a 2-3% that you can immerse yourself in if you are so inclined.
Which I am not.
Via edmundogs.
Who will win the Nobel Prize in economics this year?
I’ve never once gotten it right, at least not for exact timing, so my apologies to anyone I pick (sorry Bill Baumol!). Nonetheless this year I am in for Esther Duflo and Abihijit Banerjee, possibly with Michael Kremer, for randomized control trials in development economics.
Maybe they are too young, as Tim Harford points out, so my back-up pick remains an environmental prize for Bill Nordhaus, Partha Dasgupta, and Marty Weitzman.
What do you all predict?
Saturday assorted links
1. Insect Allies.
2. Consider the Wombat: “Despite the fact that they do not look streamlined, a wombat can run at up to 25 miles an hour, and maintain that speed for 90 seconds. The fastest recorded human footspeed was Usain Bolt’s 100m sprint in 2009, in which he hit a speed of 27.8 mph but maintained it for just 1.61 seconds, suggesting that a wombat could readily outrun him. They can also fell a grown man, and have the capacity to attack backwards, crushing a predator against the walls of their dens with the hard cartilage of their rumps. The shattered skulls of foxes have been found in wombat burrows.”
3. NeanderCare.
4. Neil Gorsuch will be teaching at GMU Law.
6. Hacker News thread on the Bloomberg China chip hack story. Quora on the same.
China fact of the day
Share of all export-dependent jobs that are threatened by tariffs within counties won by:
Trump
8.1%
Clinton
3.2%
That is from Eduardo Porter and Karl Russell at The New York Times.
Politics isn’t about policy don’t put Shetland in a box
New rules barring public bodies from putting Shetland in a box on official documents have come into force.
Islands MSP Tavish Scott had sought to change the law to ban the “geographical mistake” which “irks” locals, by amending the Islands (Scotland) Bill.
The bill’s “mapping requirement” has now come into force, although it does give bodies a get-out clause if they provide reasons why a box must be used.
Mapmakers argue that boxes help avoid “publishing maps which are mostly sea”.
The Islands Bill, which aims to offer greater protections and powers to Scotland’s island communities, was unanimously passed in May.
Here is the full story, via Glenn Mercer. You can’t call it “racist,”or “sexist,” might someone coin a future term for the objectionable act of…”putting my islands into a box”?
The Sokal Squared hoax
Here is coverage from The Chronicle, the bottom line is that a number of humanities journals were trolled by phony submissions, and yes the journals accepted some absurd articles.
For varying perspectives, here is Henry, and here is Jonathan Rauch. Here is Yascha Mounk. Here is Bryan.
I would frame the matter somewhat differently, and perhaps more cynically. Not every undergraduate major can have majors as smart and as rigorous as we find say in mathematics. And yes I do mean some of the humanities majors. In the resulting equilibrium, the rigor and smarts of associated faculty vary across fields as well. The top people in quantum mechanics have passed through some pretty tough filters. But again, we cannot usefully generalize those filters across all fields and majors to a country where such a high percentage of people attend college. (Slow improvement can come from K-12 progress, of course, and we should fight for that.) Some of the majors have to be easier than others, no names will be named. By the way, don’t assume that basket-weaving is such an easy skill!
So simply calling for higher standards in the fields you object to begs the question. Instead ask “what are those fields for?” And “might I prefer a different kind of error process in those fields?” And “Might I want those fields to be (partly) bad in a very different way?” You probably have to compare bad against bad, not bad against “my personal sense of what clearly would be better.”
After such inquiries, you still will find that too much bogus work is being researched and published in journals. The most rigorous fields in turn tend to have too much irrelevant or overspecialized work — is all of string theory or for that matter game theory so much to be envied?
Many of you will be inclined to call for fewer subsidies. I won’t tackle that larger question right now, I’ll just note that any system-wide subsidies — especially egalitarian ones — also will boost the less rigorous fields and majors, and in some manner you need to be prepared to live with the not entirely rigorous consequences of that.
Overall I view bad pieces in the humanities as a potential profit opportunity, rather than something to just whine about. You don’t like those troll-published pieces? Get to work!
Addendum: You will note that the sociology journals were not fooled by the troll submissions. By many outsiders sociology is a much-underrated field.
Thursday assorted links
1. DonorSee: gives donors video evidence of where their funds have gone.
2. China’s “Big Hack”: amazing Bloomberg story. One of the best and biggest stories of the year.
3. Hi-fi bars arrive in Los Angeles.
4. Why do many San Francisco renters behave like NIMBYs?
5. Economist Amy Finkelstein is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. Here are previous MR posts on her work.
What is a good name for a trade deal?
When I see USMCA, I also think of “United States Marine Corps,” a connection Donald Trump himself has noted. Of course the Marines have nothing to do with international trade policy, but given the public’s longstanding confidence in the military, the association is unlikely to hurt politically. Other people may confuse USMCA with USCMA, or the United States Catholic Mission Association, another positive connotation.
This next point may sound slightly cynical, but here goes: Perhaps being so easy to say and remember has been part of Nafta’s problem. The sad reality is that voters do not love the idea of free trade once it is made concrete to them, and both Barack Obama and Trump campaigned against Nafta in its current form. So maybe every time people heard the name Nafta, they were reminded of how much they disliked it.
I recall, more than a decade ago, hearing talk of a supposed “Nafta superhighway,” a series of roads that would supposedly bring the three Nafta countries under some kind of joint, conspiratorial rule, enforced by the movement of vehicles on these connector roads and sometimes in league with Satan himself. The alternative phrase — “USMCA Superhighway” — doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily, so maybe it will be harder to drum up fake news about the new deal.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column on the topic. And this:
Looking back, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) had a pretty good name for its time. It conveyed that there was in fact a general agreement, and that branding sold well enough in an earlier, more multilateral era. It might have sounded dull and technocratic, but that was OK for policies which were … dull and technocratic. Much worse, however, was the 1995 relabeling into the World Trade Organization, a name which to many people sounds globalist, faceless and sinister. They might as well have called it SPECTRE, the name of the criminal group in many James Bond novels and films.
I even quote a Canadian quoting Shakespeare…
What I’ve been reading
1. Nate Chinen, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century. Chinen mounts a persuasive argument that the “golden age of jazz” is in fact today, and fills in the background knowledge you might need to grasp such a claim. I’ve long suggested that if you enjoy live performance, the access/price/talent gradient is truly remarkable. You can see virtually any world class performer, from an A+ quality seat, for a mere pittance. Except in London. The bottom line is that I will keep this book, hardly ever the case.
2. James Mustich, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List. Paging through this book, from beginning to end, or just browsing it, and buying the attractive-sounding titles is in fact a good (but expensive) way to find new reading. I see no reason why such volumes should be regarded as absurd. Right now I am on “Bradley,” and while I don’t agree with all of the selections, they are unfailingly intelligent and at least plausible.
3. Can Xue, Love in the New Millennium. Is she the Chinese writer most likely to next win a Nobel Prize? “In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly.” Much of the story is set in a brothel, with a rotating cast of characters. Parts remind me of The Dream of the Red Chamber, in any case this is definitely a new fictional work of note. Here is an atypical excerpt: “He and Xiao Yuan had one thing in common: they both valued sensual pleasures. His greatest wish was to sit in the darkened National Theater and listen to La Traviata with her. He thought that after experiencing that atmosphere, their sex life would become satisfying. His idea was naive; Xiao Yuan said he was “too practical.” She added, “Sex is a black hole. People can’t understand all of its implications within a lifetime.”
4. Thomas J. Bollyky, Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways is a good history of public health advances, but also how they have led to what are now plague-prone poor megacities. Here is the author’s piece in Foreign Affairs.
Robert Pindyck on climate change models
Pindyck, from MIT, is a leading expert in this area, here is part of his summary conclusion:
It would certainly be nice if the problems with IAMs [integrated assessment models] simply boiled down to an imprecise knowledge of certain parameters, because then uncertainty could be handled by assigning probability distributions to those parameters and then running Monte Carlo simulations. Unfortunately, not only do we not know the correct probability distributions that should be applied to these parameters, we don’t even know the correct equations to which those parameters apply. Thus the best one can do at this point is to conduct a simple sensitivity analysis on key parameters, which would be more informative and transparent than a Monte Carlo simulation using ad hoc probability distributions. This does not mean that IAMs are of no use. As I discussed earlier, IAMs can be valuable as analytical and pedagogical devices to help us better understand climate dynamics and climate–economy interactions, as well as some of the uncertainties involved. But it is crucial that we are clear and up-front about the limitations of these models so that they are not misused or oversold to policymakers. Likewise, the limitations of IAMs do not imply that we have to throw up our hands and give up entirely on estimating the SCC [social costs of carbon] and analyzing climate change policy more generally.
The entire essay is of interest, via Matt Kahn.
Wednesday assorted links
Tuesday assorted links
1. Median wages still have not been rising in the U.S.
2. How about one proposal per year per PI?
3. “As expected, sexism was a significantly stronger predictor of voting for Trump the more left-leaning (vs. right-leaning) the voter. Not only was Clinton correct that sexism played a role in her electoral loss, but she correctly characterized sexism as endemic, an influence especially perceptible on the left.” Link here.
4. Gita Gopinath will be Chief Economist at the IMF.
What should I ask Ben Thompson?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with Ben Thompson the tech commentator at Stratechery (worth the $$), no associated public event. Here is Wikipedia on Ben:
Ben Thompson is an American business, technology, and media analyst, who is based in Taiwan. He is known principally for writing Stratechery, a subscription-based newsletter featuring in-depth commentary on tech and media news that has been called a “must-read in Silicon Valley circles”.
Here is Ben’s self-description. Here is Ben on Twitter. So what should I ask him?