Category: Uncategorized
Saturday assorted links
1. Medical hand-washing is addictive, and persists once monitoring is removed, an important result. That is by Reshmaan Hussam, currently a job market candidate at MIT. Here is her YouTube talk on the same topic. This is probably going to be one of the best and most important job market papers of the year.
2. The audacious plan to bring back supersonic flight.
3. Can scientists publish their best work at any age? This seems counterintuitive to me, but it is always worth examining that which challenges our prior beliefs.
4. Does the “bike desk” improve cognitive performance?
6. “Rogoff predicts that future cash registers will include scanners that log purchases with plastic bills, blending elements of digital and physical currencies.” Link here, that is a Jeremy Bentham idea, basically.
What else is happening
Turkey continues a major crackdown against the Kurds.
This week at least 239 people drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean.
Huawei will begin marketing its smart phone in the United States this January.
Journalists will try to tell you that Carlsen vs. Karjakin will be close. Other journalists will try to tell you that someone other than Golden State or Cleveland will win the next NBA title. Other journalists will try to tell you…
“U.S. military hackers have penetrated Russia’s electric grid, telecommunications networks and the Kremlin’s command systems, making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the U.S. deem it necessary”…link here.
TaterGrams: New Alberta company lets you mail personalized potatoes.
Just keep Mexico, South Korea, and Estonia in mind, and I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.
*Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts*
That is the new book by Christopher de Hamel, and it is one of the very best non-fiction books this year, in fact so far it might rank #1. It is twelve chapters, each one about an individual medieval manuscript, the best-known of those being the Book of Kells. The integration of text and the visuals is of the highest order of quality. Most of all, the book brings each manuscript to life, relating its creators and creation, the surrounding historical context, its subsequent preservation and fame, and how that history has embodied varying attitudes toward copying and preservation. No less illuminating is the anthropological treatment of how each manuscript is currently guarded and displayed, the author’s travel history in getting there, and a more general “philosophical without the philosophy” introspection on what these objects are really supposed to mean to us.
This book is not in every way light reading, and it does assume some (very broad) background in medieval history, but it brings a whole topic to light, and instructs, in a way that few other works do.
Here is just one short excerpt:
My initial inquiry as to whether I might see the manuscript of the Aratea in the Universiteitsbibliotheek in Leiden was met with the reply that this would hardly be necessary, since there is a high-class published facsimile from 1989 and the complete book is in any case digitized and freely available on-line. It was a response entirely within the theme of copying. If you had applied to the palace librarians of Aachen in the early ninth century to see the late-antique Terence, they would almost certainly have assured you that you would be better off with their nice new copy by their scribe Hrodgarius.
Hamel worked for a long time in the book department at Sotheby’s and then in a library at Cambridge University. He is a bit of a fuddy-duddy (he thinks the bustle of NYC is extreme, for instance), but nonetheless has produced a lovely and complete work that virtually every author should envy. I am ordering his other books too, mostly on the history of books.
Here is a Guardian review, John Banville in the FT raves about it, and here is The Paris Review. I believe I ordered it on Amazon.uk, all five-star reviews by the way. Here is the U.S. Amazon listing, with access to used copies, I am not sure when the American edition comes out.
Friday assorted links
1. Rachael Meager has new and very high quality evidence on microcredit; it’s good but not great and sometimes possibly zero effect in the aggregate. She is a job market candidate at MIT.
2. “Neiman Marcus Is Selling Frozen Collard Greens For $66 Plus Shipping.”
3. Watch a drone hack a room of smart light bulbs from outside the window.
4. “Proponents of the gondola argue that it is far cheaper and quicker to build than a Metro station.” When it comes to transportation, there is definitely a great stagnation. ““Just think of it as a Georgetown Metro station,” Sternlieb said.” Building the system, by the way, would take considerably longer than fighting and winning WWII.
5. Do Nanodegrees (TM!) have a future?
6. I’ve been waiting for someone to call a piece “White Riot,” now it has been done. The piece has too much posturing, and pandering/moralizing, but on the factual side it has a variety of worthwhile and interesting points.
Thursday assorted links
1. Are airline legacy mergers anti-competitive?
2. What happened to the Gary Johnson campaign?
3. Are chains the future of global food?
4. Evidence for Amihai Glazer’s theory of expressive voting, namely that you vote against the supporters of the other candidate.
Why the British parliamentary vote may matter
No, I don’t see them voting down Brexit, any more than Republican Senators ever were going to endorse Hillary Clinton, even though many of them are rooting for her. The more likely scenario out of Brexit is simply that Parliament stalls, demanding that Theresa May give them “the right Brexit.” Of course there is no such thing, wrong Brexit is wrong Brexit, if only because EU-27 cannot agree on very much. But with enough stalling, eventually another national election will be held and of course Brexit would be a major issue, probably the major issue. That in essence would serve as a second referendum, and if anti-Brexit candidates did well enough, parliamentarians would have cover to go against the previous expression of the public will.
I give that path out of Brexit p = 0.2, with another p = 0.1 for “somehow Brexit just doesn’t happen.”
Here is commentary from Joshua Tucker. And from Jolyom Maugham.
Addendum: The final word on Brexit rights may be held by…the European Court of Justice.
How much are charities a scam?
Silvana Krasteva and Huseyin Yildirim have a new and interesting series of results on this question:
Drawing upon the all-pay auction literature, we propose a model of charity competition in which informed giving alone can account for the significant quality heterogeneity across similar charities. Our analysis identifies a negative effect of competition and a positive effect of informed giving on the equilibrium quality of charity. In particular, we show that as the number of charities grows, so does the percentage of charity scams, approaching one in the limit. In light of this and other results, we discuss the need for regulating nonprofit entry and conduct as well as promoting informed giving.
The paper title is “Information, competition, and the quality of charities.” In the basic model, informed donors encourage a “race to the top,” but that competition also consumes excess resources through signaling to get good ratings. An optimum is therefore some mix of informed donors and uninformed donors. As the number of charities becomes very large, however, the chance of attracting informed donors goes to zero, and charity scams end up dominating. According to one cited study, over 90 percent of donors claim to care about quality, but only about 3 percent of them seek out the highest rated charity for a given task.
Under some assumptions, only a single charity provides the public good and all the others end up as scams. Overall I would say that informed donors can be thought of as a scarce resource who cannot be easily leveraged.
For the pointer, I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “Though so much younger, Methfessel was the more practical of the two, “brave & sensible,” as Bishop readily acknowledged.” Link here.
2. The NFL ratings malaise. The Wall Street Journal malaise.
4. How the Chinese view current American politics. And J.D. Vance on social decay. And a poker champ on the tells of Clinton and Trump.
5. Does technology substitute for nurses? (pdf).
My Conversation with Steven Pinker
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Steven of course was in top form. We started with irregular verbs, and then moved on to Chomsky, theories of language, the mind and Jon Haidt’s modules, reason, what unifies the thought and work of Steven Pinker, rap music, William Shatner (underrated, “although maybe not his singing”), Sontag on photography, the future of world peace, and the Ed Sullivan show.
Here is one bit:
COWEN: Let me now put on my economist’s hat and ask you about this. As you know, in George Orwell’s 1984, the Party bans all irregular verbs. It’s a kind of excess regulation. But from a social point of view, are there too many or too few irregular verbs in English?
PINKER: [laughs] I like the irregular verbs. I’d like to see more of them.
…One distinction that is vanishing that I think is sad is the three-way distinction in verbs like sink, sank, sunk; stink, stank, stunk; shrink, shrank, shrunk; where the shrank and the stank are giving way to their participle forms shrunkand stunk.
COWEN: No shrank and stank.
PINKER: No shrank and stank. Admittedly it would have been hard to have a movie called Honey, I Shrank the Kids instead of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. In my style manual, The Sense of Style, I recommend hanging on to them. I think they’re nice.
And on Chomsky:
PINKER: It’s a moving target. Also, as you say, it was neither specified in a precise way nor field‑tested against a dataset of language variation, which I think is unfortunate in terms of ordinary scientific practice.
On peace:
COWEN: Let me ask you a general question. Let’s say it were possible by spending $10,000 and devoting a few months of your life to it that any person on earth could blow up a significant part of a major city.
They could buy something, some kind of explosive. It would cost them $10,000. How long would it take before someone actually did this?
…PINKER: I don’t know. My optimism doesn’t consist of prophecy in that sense. That is, my optimism consists of looking at what has happened and noting that, first of all, the pessimistic view is factually incorrect. Namely, people believe that we’re living in unusually violent times and we’re not.
How to project that into the future is a separate set of questions. There are many unknowns that I’m not arrogant enough to know the answer to. It’s something that we could debate. We could explore them. I am not an optimist in the sense of saying, “Well, let’s just extrapolate the curves in the future without asking questions like that.”
Self-recommending, to be sure…
Chicago faculty recruiting in 1946 who is Roy Blough how well did these voters do?
In 1946 the University of Chicago economics department considered the following individuals for job offers: John Hicks, Paul Samuelson, Friedrich A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Lionel Robbins, A. G. Hart, and George Stigler.
The names making the final vote were Hicks, Hart, Stigler, Friedman, and Samuelson. The Borda point count method was used, and Hicks turned out to be the clear number one choice. Neither Friedman nor Samuelson were the number one choices of any departmental voter, while Stigler won three first-choice votes (see Table one in the paper).
The voters themselves were quite prestigious, including Hazel Kyrk, Lloyd Mints, Jacob Marschak, Henry Simons, Tjalling Koopmans, H. Gregg Lewis, Frank Knight, and T.W. Schultz. If you are wondering, Knight’s first choice was Stigler. Friedman and Samuelson came in fourth and fifth, respectively, with Samuelson as a distant last place pick. Schultz however put Friedman dead last.
The winner Hicks was not interested, and that year, Chicago ended up with Friedman and Roy Blough. Here is the NYT obituary for Roy Blough:
Roy Blough, an economist who served in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, died on Friday at a retirement home in Mitchellville, Md. He was 98.
From 1938 to 1946, Mr. Blough was director of tax research at the Treasury Department and assistant to the treasury secretary. From 1950 to 1952, he was a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Later in the 1950’s, he was principal director of the economic affairs department at the United Nations. He also taught at several universities, including the University of Chicago, from 1946 to 1952, and Columbia University, from 1955 to 1970, when he retired.
He wrote several books, including ”The Federal Taxing Process” and ”International Business: Environment and Adaptation.”
That is all catalogued in this fascinating David Mitch piece, in the latest JPE. Here are ungated copies and some related information.
Addendum, via Doug Irwin:
Arnold Harberger on Roy Blough: “he came to Chicago and he was a very boring professor. He didn’t inspire anybody to do anything, and he didn’t do very much himself. And he was a little pompous, but nice, a decent analyst, not very deep analytically, didn’t really command the theory of the subject. Then he was named a member of the Council of Economic Advisors and he left Chicago. And all the colleagues sighed a sigh of relief and said, “Gee, we found a way to get rid of him.”
To replace Blough, they hired Arnold Harberger, I am told.
Implied marginal tax rates
For the elderly:
Consider, for example, the implications for those 60-64 of earning $20,000 more for one year. Among the lowest quintile, 51 percent will lose more than 80cen ts of every extra dollar earned, 8 percent will lose between 61 and 80cent s, and 7 percent will lose between 51 and 60 cents…Among those in the top quintile, 39 percent are in a 61 to 80 percent marginal net tax bracket.
That is from a new NBER paper by Auerbach, Kotlikoff, Koehler, and Yu. And for the poor:
But families participating in two or more programs, while still facing negative or modest positive rates at low earnings, usually face considerably higher MTRs [marginal tax rates] at higher earnings ranges, often up to 80 percent and even occasionally over 100 percent. While the fraction of families in this category is not large, they constitute about one-fifth of single parent families.
That is from Kosar and Moffitt.
And finally for the disabled there seems to be greater policy effectiveness. In the latest AER Manasi Deshpande considers SSI as it is paid out to low-income youth with disabilities, and here is the crux of her conclusion:
Using a regression discontinuity design based on a 1996 policy change in age 18 medical reviews, I find that youth who are removed from SSI at age 18 recover one-third of the lost SSI cash income in earnings. SSI youth who are removed and stay off SSI earn on average $4,400 annually, and they lose $76,000 in present discounted observed income over the 16 years following removal relative to those who do not receive a review.
Here are ungated versions of the paper. Income volatility goes up as well for those removed from the rolls, and giving them higher benefits does not seem to shrink their labor supply much.
At the very least reallocating more of America’s transfer payments to the disabled seems worthy of consideration. Do note the caveat that these results apply to those classified as disabled under earlier (and tougher) standards, not the standards of today.
Monday assorted links
1. “With Choi Soon-sil-gate, Park Geun-hye put the entire country into the Tyson Zone.”
2. Transmissible vaccines? (speculative)
3. Will machines run Singaporean food courts?
4. Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry, due out in April you can now pre-order.
5. Zombies for organ donation.
6. The flattening of the internet through video. And is it better to record reel-to-reel than digital?
Sunday assorted links
East Asian fact of the day
On average, married men in the United States spend 167 minutes per day in home production, whereas Japanese husbands spend only 40 minutes and Korean husbands spend 48 minutes.
The difference holds even after adjusting for the labor market status of the man and the woman.
That is from Daiji Kawaguchi and Soohyung Lee, “Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration,” Economic Inquiry. Here are various copies and drafts of the paper.
Saturday assorted links
1. Why do more educated workers enjoy greater employment stability?
2. I found this sentence strange for the NYT: “Ms. [Chelsea] Clinton often gravitated to weighty policy discussions and interspersed statistics and SAT words into casual conversations.”
3. Most people don’t have a good alibi.
4. Obamacare isn’t that easy to fix.