Planet Earth fact of the day
China is far and away the global leader in greenhouse gas emissions, and for all of the EU’s stern tone and finger wagging on climate change, the bloc’s latest data show that its emissions actually increased 0.5 percent in 2015. Contrast that with the United States, which saw emissions drop a whopping 3 percent last year as a result of the continuing (shale-enabled) transition from coal to natural gas.
That is from Jamie Horgan at The American Interest, who makes many other good points, including this:
One’s opinion of the new climate course Trump just charted for America will ultimately depend on how much faith one puts in climate diplomacy as the holy grail for addressing climate change. The truth is, climate diplomacy has always been more about preening, posturing, and moralizing—about optics—above all else. What happened today was also all about optics (intentionally so) and that’s why greens committed to finding “diplomatic” solutions are pulling their hair out today.
I still think it was a mistake to pull out, as “bad optics” are one form of “bad.” Most of all, Trump’s action contributes to the common and growing perception that America simply isn’t reliable. But have any market prices indicated that the world’s future is now likely to be more carbon-intensive? I just don’t see it.
The most important truth about hard work, and also reading, that you can find
Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!
What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don’t like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There’s no question about this.
That is from Richard W. Hamming, invaluable throughout. Hat tip is from Patrick Collison. Here is the book by Hamming.
Would deregulated building lead to higher urban density?
Maybe not if deregulation is across the board:
Were we to unilaterally liberalize zoning, some builders would see new opportunities in Manhattan. But it seems far more likely gazillions of suburban folks would see the benefit to building a cheap extra unit in the yard and renting it.
In terms of raw potential, it seems quite likely there is more “zoning-prevented housing” in the suburbs or in fairly low-density areas than in already high-density ones. The result could easily be that uniform upzoning boosts metro-wide population, but also causes a shift of population out of the center, into the ‘burbs, where geography may prove less of a constraint. The fact that less-regulated places also seem to be less dense suggests that this outcome is at a minimum plausible. That is to say, if density is your goal, deregulation may be a very uncertain way to get there because, while there may well be demand for urban cores (maybe), land use rules are just one of many supply constraints. Geography, higher construction costs, large existing investments, and the dramatically lower costs to adding equivalent supply in the ‘burbs all combine to suggest blanket liberalization could cause the typical household to reside in a less dense neighborhood than they did under stricter regulation.
That is from a partially confused but still interesting short essay by Lyman Stone. Here are some criticisms of the piece.
Thursday assorted links
1. Why is there sex segregation for cheese rolling?
2. MIE: Groper insurance, for those accused of such behavior on Japanese trains. Talk about moral hazard…
3. Krugman notes on bilateral imbalances, with respect to Germany (pdf).
4. I am interviewed by the Swiss on-line periodical Watson (in German).
5. Over 1200 “covfefe” products on Amazon — “Did you mean: “coffee””?
6. Relatively masculine and relatively feminine activities, across societies.
Those new service sector jobs average is over spelling bee tutor edition
In the world of competitive spellers, Sylvie Lamontagne is known as a juggernaut. She placed fourth in last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, and ninth in 2015. Last summer, she traveled to California and won the Spelling Bee of China’s North America Spelling Champion Challenge, a contest for kids in the United States and China.
Now that the 14-year-old from Denver is no longer eligible to compete in this week’s National Spelling Bee at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Maryland — which is televised on ESPN and often turns kids like Sylvie into momentary celebrities — she’s focusing on a new vocation: spelling bee coach.
Sylvie’s rate? $200 an hour.
Hiring coaches isn’t new. But bee aficionados say a recent surge in competition, and a tightening of rules meant to limit co-champions, has spawned a demand for younger coaches such as Sylvie: high-schoolers or college kids, months or just a few years into their bee retirement, who can pass along fresh intelligence on words to memorize and how to decode bizarre words based on their language of origin.
That is from Ian Shapira at WaPo.
Should the federal government be paying more or less overhead to universities?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
…it is possible to imagine an alternative vision where federal overhead allocations fall and the liberated money allows more scientists to get more (smaller) grants. Would that be a good idea?
If we look to the private sector as a model, maybe so. Private philanthropy is typically more oriented toward specific projects than toward overhead. One view is that makes federal government funding of overhead all the more important to fill in the gaps; an alternative take is that the private sector realizes a lot of overhead funding ends up wasted, and the federal government ought to see the same. There is some truth to both of these stories, but not surprisingly the academic scientific community is stressing the former.
Research funds spent on overhead strengthen the power and discretion of administrators (who capture and allocate the funds), senior scientists, the lab-based sciences and relatively expensive projects. They make universities more hierarchical and less egalitarian places, where the ability to bring in overhead funds yields status and influence.
Spending less on overhead and more on individual projects would favor small-scale research, and would decentralize authority and influence. Lower overhead allocations would give the government more authority over project choice, and the university less discretion, for better or worse. Overall, projects would have to prove themselves more in the broader world of prizes, donors and news coverage, rather than lobbying within the university for support.
A mixed bag of course — there is much more at the link.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
- Xingyuan Feng, Weisen Li, and Evan Osborne find some history and prospects for classical liberalism in China.
- Hannes Gissurarson traces Iceland’s liberal history from 1840 to 1991.
- Monique Bégin tells of a statement she often repeated in her time as Canada’s Minister of National Health & Welfare: “Canada is the Sweden of the Americas.”
- Michael Boskin reflects on his time as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and the hazards of misattribution, of not controlling op-ed titles, and of equations going missing.
- Tyler Cowen reflects on his circa 2007 underestimation of the likelihood of a major financial crisis.
- Jon Elster draws from his work on defective belief formation, illustrating with his own past errors, including about the electorate binding itself and about thinking of anti-communists “as a clock that is always one hour late rather than as a broken clock that shows the right time twice a day.”
- Richard Epstein tells of his conversion to consequentialism.
- Sam Peltzman relates his hardy forecast in 1988 of Michael Dukakis’s impending victory over George H. W. Bush.
- Cass Sunstein begins: “I have said a lot of things that I regret.” And he ends: “A main job of academics is to float ideas and take risks, and if they do not make mistakes, or learn enough to change their minds, well, that’s really something to regret.”
Wednesday assorted links
1. Jeremy Adelman on Karl Polanyi.
4. Does CRISPR cause lots of unintended mutations? And some critical commentary on that result here, there is a discussion of insider trading too.
5. The UK now has an eSports degree, with a “focus on employability.”
The book culture that is Iceland should not surprise the Coasean
For Tunglið, how you publish is as important as what you publish. Named after the Icelandic word for the moon, the tiny publisher prints its books in batches of 69 on the night of a full moon. So far, so weird. But keen readers must also buy their books that same night, as the publisher burns all unsold copies. Weirder still.
Why? While most books can survive centuries or even millennia, Tunglið – as its two employees tell me – “uses all the energy of publishing to fully charge a few hours instead of spreading it out over centuries … For one glorious evening, the book and its author are fully alive. And then, the morning after, everyone can get on with their lives.”
Here is the full story, and here is background information on durable good monopoly and the returns to rendering output less durable, as a means of precommitting to not lowering the price in later periods. Avoid remainders, in other words, so customers will buy it now. Guess who first came up with those insights?
Travel sentences to ponder
“My favorite is when the ship docks somewhere I’ve already visited,” she said. “One time, we were on a ship that docked in Rome. I’ve been there a million times. So everyone else gets out, and it’s just me and my husband on the ship. It’s the perfect antidote to New York life.”
The article is about couples who would rather live on cruise ships. For the pointer I thank the excellent Samir Varma.
Germany is the Silicon Valley of political innovation
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is a snippet of the argument:
After the war, Germany undertook an extensive and largely successful campaign of denazification. Other defeated nations, such as Austria or Japan, didn’t attempt anything comparable, much less succeed. In a relatively short period of time, Germany really did turn into a largely tolerant, peace-loving nation, acutely aware of the extreme nature of its previous wrongdoing. For all the imperfections in this process along the way, it is difficult in world history to find a comparable switch in attitudes.
Or take German unification. It was hardly obvious this project to bring together East Germany and West after the fall of communism would succeed or even come to fruition, as there was plenty of talk at the time of a binational federation or perhaps a slowly phased evolution toward unity. Yet Chancellor Helmut Kohl and other German leaders, supposedly staid figures, had the vision to see unification could be achieved rapidly and relatively smoothly. They just went ahead and did it, even though many of the world’s leaders, such as U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were squeamish about the idea.
There are more arguments at the link, running up through the present day. You also can count Germany’s role in the EU and also the construction of social welfare states. Germany is in fact remarkably underappreciated as a political and also social innovator.
Why are there so few computer science majors?
That is a long and very interesting post by Dan Wang, it is hard to summarize, here is one tiny excerpt but better to read the whole thing:
2. You don’t need a CS degree to be a developer. This is another valid statement that I don’t think explains behaviors on the margin. Yes, I know plenty of developers who didn’t graduate from college or major in CS. Many who didn’t go to school were able to learn on their own, helped along by the varieties of MOOCs and boot camps designed to get them into industry.
It might be true that being a software developer is the field that least requires a bachelor’s degree with its associated major. Still: Shouldn’t we expect some correlation between study and employment here? That is, shouldn’t having a CS major be considered a helpful path into the industry? It seems to me that most tech recruiters look on CS majors with favor.
Although there are many ways to become a developer, I’d find it surprising if majoring in CS is a perfectly useless way to enter the profession, and so people shun it in favor of other majors.
And this, which runs close to my own thoughts:
Perhaps this is a good time to bring up the idea that the tech sector may be smaller than we think. By a generous definition, 20% of the workers in the Bay Area work in tech. Matt Klein at FT Alphaville calculates that the US software sector is big neither in employment nor in value-added terms. Software may be eating the world, but right now it’s either taking small bites, or we’re not able to measure it well.
Finally, a more meditative, grander question from Peter Thiel: “How big is the tech industry? Is it enough to save all Western Civilization? Enough to save the United States? Enough to save the State of California? I think that it’s large enough to bail out the government workers’ unions in the city of San Francisco.”
Here is Dan’s follow-up tweet on other answers to the puzzle.
Tuesday assorted links
Germany Russia fact of the day
When it comes to supporting the military alliance, it seems the German public agrees more with the American president than with its own government.
According to the latest 2017 Global Attitudes survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of German respondents said Berlin should not take military action “if Russia got into a serious military conflict with one of its neighboring countries that is our NATO ally.” Yet Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which created NATO in 1949, commits member countries to come to the assistance of a fellow NATO member if that ally is attacked.
Here is the full article, via Bob Cottrell.
Companies by revenue per employee
I was surprised by some of this:
We found that Energy companies have the highest average Revenue per Employee, while Industrials and Consumer Discretionaries perform worst on this metric.
Technology companies performed at the lower end of the range on Revenue per Employee; part of the reason for this however, is other companies in spaces like Energy and Healthcare have large non-employee costs that Technology companies do not have.
…AmerisourceBergen, a pharmaceutical distributor, tops the list, generating more than $7.9M per employee in 2016. With a reported team of 19,000, which is less than half the workforce of Cardinal Health (37,300) and McKesson (68,000), the company compares favorably to its peers on revenue per employee. Cardinal Health and McKesson‘s RPE were $3.3M and $2.8M, respectively. Overall, Healthcare companies score well on revenue per employee, though they have other huge costs (the costs of administering drugs and health services).
As for the lowest revenue per employee:
It is perhaps unsurprising that Restaurant and Hotel chains make up the majority of the list. What is more striking is that IT providers Cognizant and Accenture have among the lowest revenue per employee in the Index.
There are several useful tables at the link. I do not think this is making any adjustment for independent contractors.
For the pointer I thank the estimable Chug.