Video games and looks
We investigate the relationship between physical attractiveness and the time people devote to video/computer gaming. Average American teenagers spend 2.6% of their waking hours gaming, while for adults this figure is 2.7%. Using the American Add Health Study, we show that adults who are better-looking have more close friends. Arguably, gaming is costlier for them, and they thus engage in less of it. Physically attractive teens are less likely to engage in gaming at all, whereas unattractive teens who do game spend more time each week on it than other gamers. Attractive adults are also less likely than others to spend any time gaming; and if they do, they spend less time on it than less attractive adults. Using the longitudinal nature of the Add Health Study, we find supportive evidence that these relationships are causal for adults: good looks decrease gaming time, not vice-versa.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Emergent Ventures India, eighth cohort
Post and selection by Shruti Rajagopalan:
Lakshay Taneja is an innovator and entrepreneur with a background in blockchain and AI. He received an EV grant to develop his project aiming to harness ocean and tidal energy to generate electricity.
Madhulash K. Babu is a 24-year-old entrepreneur and electronics engineer and the founder of Edodwaja. He received his EV grant to develop flowbus/lab on wheels to bring the latest technology to schools allowing students to have hands-on STEM lab experiences.
Ryan Nadar is an engineering student and received his EV grant for his research on ion batteries.
Samay Sanghvi is a 17-year-old self-taught engineer from Mumbai. He received his EV grant to develop gliders to generate electricity from high altitude winds, at his start-up Alteon Energy which aims to generate 7.5Mw/h with just $12m (about 4.5x cheaper than solar in India).
Divyanshu Dembi is an antitrust lawyer and writes at Impatiently Curious. He received the EV grant for his podcast Jack of all knowledge with people doing interesting projects in the field of law, policy, arts and technology.
Sriram Kuchimanchi is a social entrepreneur and the founder of Smarter Dharma. He received an EV Grant to build India’s first data-driven open platform for sustainable materials and solutions which can help accelerate the decarbonising of the building industry from the design stage.
Junaid Ahmed is a 21-year-old entrepreneur and founder of WalkingPal – the world’s first walking buddy app – with a mission to change the way how people cover their last mile, by making walking more fun and the preferred way to commute.
Akshin Makkar is a 17-year-old from Toronto, Canada, building a drone-related application to help farmers with ground-weed problems in an agricultural setting.
Nikhil Garg is a 15-year-old high-school dropout working as a software engineer for the last four years. He received his EV grant to develop his startup bytecubetech. He is also working on Advisely, to help students who wish to study abroad.
Ayush Chauhan is a high-school student and young entrepreneur who was awarded an EV grant to expand multi-device charging station system to improve electricity access in underserved areas in rural India.
Moksh Soni is a 20-year-old innovator from Mandi, Himachal Pradesh. As a teenager, he made an electrolyzer by stripping a bus tire for rubber and cutting up some old steel plates from his mother’s kitchen. He received his EV India grant to design a relatively smaller electrolyzer, in a lab, and hopes to produce greater yields of hydrogen.
Amanjot Singh and Sehaj Pasricha are 19-year-old AI engineers. Badal Panchani, also 19, has worked as a developer and designer, and ran a natural science community. They received their EV grant to move to Bangalore and start Wayfarers Space, their start-up which aims to create a social environment for those on unconventional paths.
Indraneel S. Bankapure is a journalist and indologist from Kolhapur, Maharashtra. His organization Virasat: Indian Heritage Initiative hopes to introduce the wonders of Indian culture to the world. He received his EV grant to develop a machine learning tool which will help identify and recreate sculptures in their original glory.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, fourth cohort, and fifth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Finally, exchange rate models seem to work pretty well
Exchange-rate models fit very well for the U.S. dollar in the 21st century. A “standard” model that includes real interest rates and a measure of expected inflation for the U.S. and the foreign country, the U.S. comprehensive trade balance, and measures of global risk and liquidity demand is well-supported in the data for the U.S. against other G10 currencies. The monetary and non-monetary variables play equally important roles in explaining exchange rate movements. In the 1970s – early 1990s, the fit of the model was poor but the fit (as measured by t- and F-statistics, and R-squareds) has increased almost monotonically to the present day. We make the case that it is better monetary policy (inflation targeting) that has led to the improvement, as the scope for self-fulfilling expectations has disappeared. We provide a variety of evidence that links changes in monetary policy to the performance of the exchange-rate model.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Charles Engel and Steve P.Y. Wu. For how long will this last?
Tuesday assorted links
Beware research in large teams
Teamwork has become more important in recent decades. We show that larger teams generate an unintended side effect: individuals who finish their PhD when the average team in their field is larger have worse career prospects. Our analysis combines data on career outcomes from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients with publication data that measures team size from ISI Web of Science. As average team size in a field increased over time, junior academic scientists became less likely to secure research funding or obtain tenure and were more likely to leave academia relative to their older counterparts. The team size effect can fully account for the observed decline in tenure prospects in academic science. The rise in team size was not associated with the end of mandatory retirement. However, the doubling of the NIH budget was associated with a significant increase in team size. Our results demonstrate that academic science has not adjusted its reward structure, which is largely individual, in response to team science. Failing to address these concerns means a significant loss as junior scientists exit after a costly and specialized education in science.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Europeans deserve to be as cool as Americans
That is the (very good) title they gave my recent Bloomberg column. Should Europe have more air conditioning? Basically yes. Here is one excerpt:
Some 90% of the US has air conditioning, according to one estimate, compared to only 19% for Europe. Worldwide, the US, China and Japan account for about two-thirds of all air conditioning…
And yet it will not be easy to make Europe as cool (speaking only in terms of temperature) as America. Much of the continent faces higher energy prices than does the US, and there are taxes — in France, they are 20% on AC systems.
And then there are the esthetics. Many Europeans complain that artificially cooled air is less healthy or less pleasant to breathe — a view this American has some sympathy for. (I am not much bothered by the heat and enjoyed the fresh air of Siena.) European buildings are also on average older than those in the US, and were not built to make AC units easy to install. So issues may arise from local regulations and historic-preservation laws.
Some Europeans also have an option unavailable to Americans if the temperature truly is unbearable: They can take the entire month of August off. They can swim in the Mediterranean, or take a quick flight to Finland or Ireland. The economic lesson that people adjust to their circumstances is borne out by these realities.
Personally, I would prefer a world with less air conditioning, or with temperatures not so low. And in Europe in particular, I enjoy how the relative paucity of AC forces people outdoors and into public squares. But that is only me. In sum;
So the best argument an American can make for why Europe should have more air conditioning is this: because Europeans want it. There are cultural forces keeping the shift toward more AC from proceeding as quickly as it ought to, but the transition will eventually happen. Why not accelerate the pace of installation and get to where much of Europe is likely to end up anyway?
My current hotel in Ireland…has no air conditioning.
The pay of Presidents (from my email)
Adjusting for inflation, President Biden is one of the lowest-paid Presidents in American history. See the first and last figures in this analysis from 2012.
This source’s figures are all in 2012 dollars, and there’s been 39% cumulative inflation since then, while the President’s nominal salary has stayed fixed at $400,000/year (nominal). So Bill Clinton’s average real salary over his presidency – the lowest real historical pay as of the time of this source’s analysis – would be worth $403,100 today, just barely edging out Biden’s current salary of $400,000. (But Clinton’s average real salary was probably lower than Biden’s average salary over the course of Biden’s presidency. There have been a few years when the President’s real annual salary was below its current level, including during most of Clinton’s presidency.)
The last time the President’s real salary dropped down below its current level, Congress voted to double it.
That is from TP.
Monday assorted links
1. Live caption glasses let the deaf see conversations. And use ChatGPT to estimate true male height.
2. Claims about claims, this guy says it’s happening.
3. Karpathy on RLHF.
4. Pro-progress will win when it wins women.
5. How you would do in various Olympic sports, a ranking. And Olympic performance per capita.
US Human Experimentation Without Consent or Contract
In July 1946, 20-year-old Helen Hutchison walked into the Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic in Nashville, Tennessee. Helen found herself pregnant after her husband had returned from combat in World War II. The pregnancy, however, had not been easy. During her visit to the clinic Helen’s doctor handed her a small drink.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a little cocktail,” her doctor replied. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“Well I don’t know if I should be drinking a cocktail,” she responded in jest.
“Drink it all. Drink it all down” (quoted in Welsome 1999, p. 220).Helen did as her doctor ordered.
Three months later Helen’s daughter, Barbara, was born. Not long after, Helen began to experience some frightening health problems; her face swelled, and her hair fell out. She then experienced two miscarriages, one of which necessitated 16 blood transfusions (Welsome 1999, p. 220). Baby Barbara experienced her own health problems from early childhood. She suffered from extreme fatigue and developed an autoimmune disorder and eventually skin cancer.
…Unbeknownst to Helen, she and her unborn baby had been subjects in a government-funded experiment. She was one of hundreds of women who received an experimental “cocktail” between 1945 and 1947 during one of their prenatal visits, compliments of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which provided the materials (Wittenstein 2014, p. 39).
The 829 women of the Vanderbilt clinic were but a few of hundreds of thousands of individuals, mostly U.S. citizens, who would be subjected to illegal experiments and suffer human-rights violations during in the post-World War II period at the hands of scientists with funding and materials provided by the U.S. government. These experiments were meant to provide the government with information about the effects of atomic weapons on the human body to advance military capabilities in the name of “national security.”
This paper tells the story of U.S. government activities related to human experimentation after World War II.
That’s Coyne and Hall writing on Dr. Mengele, USA Style: Lessons from Human Rights Abuses in Post World War II America. It’s interesting that these immoral experiments using radiation and also agents of chemical warfare are less well known to the public than say the Tuskegee Study even though they involved far more people.
IRA manufacturing delays
Some 40 per cent of the biggest US manufacturing investments announced in the first year of Joe Biden’s flagship industrial and climate policies have been delayed or paused, according to a Financial Times investigation.
The US president’s Inflation Reduction Act and Chips and Science Act offered more than $400bn in tax credits, loans and grants to spark development of a US cleantech and semiconductor supply chain.
However, of the projects worth more than $100mn, a total of $84bn have been delayed for between two months and several years, or paused indefinitely, the FT found.
Here is more from Amanda Chu, Alexandra White and Rhea Basarkar at the FT.
What I’ve been reading, or not reading
1. August Strindberg, The People of Hemsö. Hardly anyone (non-Swedish?) reads this classic novel any more, but it holds up as one of the more compelling creations of its time. Direct and compelling. Swedish people on an island, but will this marriage work? Why has it so faded from our attentions? I’ve long loved Strindberg, so why did it take me until so late in life?
2. Michael McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism. Another very good book no one told me about, somehow I stumbled on it browsing Amazon. You can make Rushdoony sound like a nut, but you also can make him sound like one of the most influential figures in the 20th century history of American conservatism and also libertarianism. Would the modern home schooling and Christian home schooling movements exist without him? And yet he believed in extreme theocracy. This book also has plenty of meaty material on the Volker Fund, Gary North, FEE, and much more.
3. Dawn Ades and David F. Hermann, Hannah Höch. As part of my attempt to brush up on the Weimar period, I have been reading and browsing through this excellent picture book of works by one of Germany’s most famous dada artists. Here are some images.
4. Paul Collier, Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places. Spoiler: he does not say “tax them so people leave.” If I had a nickel every time he misrepresented the views of Milton Friedman and market economics… We are told that shock therapy failed in Russia, but not that it succeeded in Poland, which followed through with it consistently and ran less corrupt privatizations. Somehow each subsection in this book is too short. He ends up in a sensible state capacity view, but it would have been much simpler if he had started there.
5. Marina Münkler, Anbruch der Neuen Zeit: Das Dramatische 16. Jahrhundert. An excellent analytical overview of the 16th century, which of course is what set the stage for so much of what was to follow. Not surprisingly, has more of a Central European emphasis than many Anglo works on the same period.
Paul Cooper, Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline covers classic themes with intelligence.
Justene Hill Edwards, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedmen’s Bank is a good contribution to economic history and also black history.
I have not yet been able to start Jeffrey Ding, Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition.
Sunday assorted links
1. Simon Kuper on how to read a riot (FT).
2. “Did a furniture carver in Crouch End crack the code to early human writing?” (FT)
3. Mackenzie Hawkins on how the Chips Act is going (Bloomberg).
4. “Our findings indicate that a surviving [Chinese] revolutionary makes his birth county significantly more likely to receive the central government’s approval for railway investment.” Link here.
5. “Meta is decelerationist to the extent that open source AI deflates billions of dollars in gross margin that the frontier labs would’ve invested in scaling.” Link here. That is Sam Hammond.
6. Ozempic is most prominent in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
7. Travel tips from Nicholas Kristof (NYT).
The most typical place in each country?
For the United States, might it be a suburb of Columbus, Ohio? Or perhaps Knoxville, Tennessee, which is not too far from the country’s population center?
Those locales are relatively generic, and not too much of any single region, or perhaps they straddle regions. They represent life in the United States as a whole, unlike say NYC or Miami or San Francisco, or a small town.
For Germany, how about the town of Mainz?
For France, somewhere near Lyon?
Japan has to be the outskirts of Tokyo.
For the UK, you cannot name such a place, unless you think there is an “in-between” north of London and south of northern England? I can’t think of one.
For Italy, how about Bologna or Turino?
For Mexico, how about Puebla? An Ontario suburb for Canada?
For Brazil, Belo Horizonte?
Where else?
New data on marijuana legalization
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and here is one excerpt:
What do the numbers show? A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City offers some important keys toward an answer.
Start with the good news, or what appears to be the good news. Post-legalization, incomes in legalizing states grew by about 3%, home prices went up by 6%, and populations rose by about 2%. The researchers used appropriate statistical controls, but there is some question about causation vs. correlation. At the very least, it seems highly likely that state GDP went up: A state with legal marijuana can sell it, including to users in other states. Selling marijuana is a new business, and like any new business, it boosts the local economy.
But it is not so simple. Measures of GDP and GDP per capita are usually good metrics for human well-being — but not always. Cigarette sales, for instance, are not as beneficial for citizens as much as the initial GDP boost might indicate, because nicotine is bad for most people…
In states with legal marijuana, self-reported usage rose by 28%. Meanwhile, substance use disorders increased by 17%. Chronic homelessness went up by 35%, a possible sign that marijuana use leads to a downward financial spiral, and perhaps job loss, for many users. Arrests increased by 13%, although reported crime did not itself go up.
And in sum:
That said, these results are hardly a great advertisement for the legalization experiments. They stand in jarring contrast to what advocates promised: an end to black markets, safer marijuana and a better-protected user population. And if I may be allowed to think less like an economist for a moment, I confess I don’t feel good about a social practice that lowers effective IQ. No one smokes pot to perform better on their SATs.
I remain of two minds on the entire question.
Worth a ponder.
Schengen eroding, child legal arbitrage markets in everything
“We are increasing surveillance, in part to increase security, but also to prevent hired Swedish child soldiers who come to Copenhagen to carry out tasks in connection with gang conflicts,” he added.
Hummelgaard revealed on Thursday that there had been 25 incidents since April where Danish criminal gangs had hired what he called “child soldiers” to commit crimes in Denmark. In the last two weeks alone, Danish police have linked three shootings to Swedish teenagers…
Swedish police say that powerful criminal gangs often use children to commit murders as they will receive light sentences. Drug gangs — many of whom are led by second-generation immigrants now living outside the country — have infiltrated parts of the welfare, legal and political systems, meaning the fight against them could take decades, according to Swedish officials.
Here is more from Richard Milne at the FT. Elsewhere, “Brown bears are protected under EU law,” solve for the equilibrium (FT).