Paging Dr. Siri

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In 2004 I wrote In Praise of Impersonal Medicine arguing:

I have nothing against my physician but I would prefer to be diagnosed by a computer.  A typical physician spends most of the day playing twenty questions. Where does it hurt?  Do you have a cough?  How high is the patient’s blood pressure?  But an expert system can play twenty questions better than most people.  An expert system can use the best knowledge in the field, it can stay current with the journals, and it never forgets.

and in 2006 I noted:

The practice of modern medicine is surprisingly primitive…My credit card company knows far more about my shopping history than my physician knows about my medical history.

I now believe that we are on the cusp of major changes to medicine. The thousand dollar genome sequence is less than a year away, Ford has just developed a car seat that can monitor your health, many people are already using wrist monitors to measure heart and sleep patterns. All of this data will soon be combined with massive databases to offer predictive and prescriptive health diagnosis.

In Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla expands:

IBM’s Watson computer… is now being applied to medical diagnosis after handling imprecise and vague tasks like winning at Jeopardy, which experts a few years ago would have said could not be done. “Computers cannot match the judgment of humans on these kinds of tasks!” And with enough data, medical diagnosis or 90% of it is an easier task than Jeopardy.

Already Kaiser Permanent already has 10 million real-time medical records with details of 30,000,000 e-visits last year with caregivers and computer modeling of key diseases per individual that data scientists would love to get their hand on. Already, according to IDC 14% of the US population is using their phones for medical help and 200 million health and fitness related mobile applications have been downloaded according to pyramid research. Fun stuff, though early. They are probably two generations away from systems that are actually useful.

…But I doubt very much if within 10-15 years (given continued investment and innovation and keeping the AMA from quashing such efforts politically) I won’t be able to ask Siri’s great great grandchild (Version 9.0?) for an opinion far more accurate than the one I get today from the average physician. Instead of asking Siri 9.0, “I feel like sushi” or “where can I dispose a body” (try it…it’s fairly accurate!) and with your iPhone X or Android Y with all the power of IBM’s current Watson computer in the mobile phone and an even more powerful “Nvidia times 10-100” server which will cost far less than med school with terabytes or petabytes of data on hundreds of millions (billions?) of patients, including their complete genomics and proteomics (each sample costing about the same as a typical blood test).

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Dave Prager, Delirious Delhi: Inside India’s Incredible Capital.  An excellent book on India, an excellent book on a city, and an excellent book on Delhi, all rolled into one.  Unlike many travel books, it tells you a lot about the city.  Here is a short excerpt.  I believe it does not yet have full availability in the United States; order it from the first link above, the author tells me that the current Amazon link is actually a fraud.

2. Katerina Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941.  A detailed and insightful revisionist look at Soviet culture during that period, asking whether it really can all be boiled down to communism or if there was more behind it and it turns out there was.

3. David Roodman, Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance.  Puts microfinance into a broader historical perspective, balanced and insightful throughout, informationally dense, recommended.  A good model for many other non-fiction books.

4. Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners.  A fun and useful book, you can take the subtitle literally.  You need to ignore the very weak material on neurodevelopmental issues.

5. John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent.  Unlike George Steiner’s claim, this is not comparable to Tolstoy.  Still, it is an excellent if uneven 1920s novel that ought to be read more widely.  The best passages are frequent and striking.  The bottom line is that I can imagine someday reading it again.  If you are tempted, give it a try.

There is also the self-explanatory Emrys Westacott, The Virtues of Our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness, and Other Bad Habits.

ECB collateral requirements for lending

by  Tyler Cowen in

…we said the ECB’s decision in September to accept unlisted bank bonds — i.e., bonds that the banks could have issued purely to themselves solely in order to pledge them as collateral for central bank funding — was “potentially very significant”.

There is much more at the link, all along the same lines.  For better or worse, the ECB is engaging in lots of (de facto) unsecured lending.  Hat tip goes to Sober Look.

Structurally impaired jobs vs. non-impaired jobs

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is some text from the post:

One way to look at the US job market is to break it up into two components: jobs generated by structurally “impaired” and “non-impaired” sectors. Credit Suisse defines structurally impaired sectors to “include real estate related industries, finance, manufacturing, and the state and local government sector.” These are the sectors that at least in part rode the “bubble” economy wave. Many of these jobs were credit dependent, with growth beyond what the economy could sustain naturally.

The chart below shows the job creation and loss of the two components. The structurally impaired sector jobs created during the period of over-capacity growth simply never returned.  The sectors were highly credit dependent and with all the deleveraging taking place, the jobs are not likely to come back any time soon…

On the other hand job growth of the non-impaired sectors has almost returned to the pre-crisis levels.

Could it be that 2011 is what macroeconomic recovery looks like, minus the remaining structural problems?  Hat tip goes to FT Alphaville for the pointer, and here is my earlier post on the disaggregated aggregate demand.

Markets in everything (and proud ye shall be)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Interesting throughout, but let’s cut to the chase:

Advertising our altar bread is a positive thing for Cavanagh Company. We take a lot of pride in putting our family name on a product that will eventually become the body and blood of Jesus.

You can file that under “Very good paragraphs.”  How about this one?:

Had production remained the exclusive bailiwick of monastic communities, it is likely that the findings of Vatican II would have prompted some minor changes in Communion-wafer production. Among the guidelines issued by the Church was a directive to “make the bread look more breadlike,” head of production Dan Cavanagh told me. It is a change whose significance may yet be lost on the millions of churchgoers who continue to think of hosts as a form of Styrofoam. Nevertheless, Cavanagh’s more “breadlike” whole-wheat wafer caught on. It became the industry standard, and forced the Poor Clare nuns to follow suit.

Some of it is better than satire:

…the company maintains a fully-automated production process where employees are forbidden from laying their hands on the wafers. “I feel pretty strongly that the host should not be touched,” Dan said. His view makes it easier to comply with legal guidelines for industrial food production, but it also gives the company something to market. “Our wafers are untouched by human hands,” boasts one promotional brochure. “That gets my dander up,” a Sister in Clyde told the Chicago Tribune: The Sisters’ touch gives what other businesses would call “added value.”

And what if you have coelic disease?  Every paragraph in this story is fascinating.  I thank Paul Hsieh for the pointer.

Arab Spring and the stability of monarchy

by  Tyler Cowen in

Victor Menaldo has a new paper:

This paper helps explain the variation in political turmoil observed in the MENA during the Arab Spring. The region’s monarchies have been largely spared of violence while the “republics” have not. A theory about how a monarchy’s political culture solves a ruler’s credible commitment problem explains why this has been the case. Using a panel dataset of the MENA countries (1950-2006), I show that monarchs are less likely than non-monarchs to experience political instability, a result that holds across several measures. They are also more likely to respect the rule of law and property rights, and grow their economies. Through the use of an instrumental variable that proxies for a legacy of tribalism, the time that has elapsed since the Neolithic Revolution weighted by Land Quality, I show that this result runs from monarchy to political stability. The results are also robust to alternative political explanations and country fixed effects.

Here are his other papers.

Maybe those papers are correct?

by  Tyler Cowen in

As a small test, Zingales looked at the 150 most-downloaded papers that had been done on executive pay. He found that papers supporting high pay for top executives were 55 percent more likely to be published in prestigious economic journals. They were also much more likely to be cited in other papers.

Here is more.  This is considered evidence for the “capture” of economists.  Here is another article on the new code of ethics.  It will hurt researchers who work in finance.  From Olaf Storbeck, here is more, an interview with Gerald Epstein.  Here is coverage from David Warsh.  Here is coverage from The Chronicle.  How many people will basically just stop publishing in the top journals?

Is there an easy way out of the eurozone?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Robert J. Barro writes:

Italy could have a new lira at 1.0 to the euro. If all the euro-zone countries followed this course, the vanishing of the euro currency in 2014 would come to resemble the disappearance of the 11 separate European moneys in 2001.

In the meantime, doesn’t every euro — a few sticky grannies aside — leave the Italian banking system?  Presumably the new lira is not pegged at 1-to-1 forever.  Switching out of lira/euros in Italian banks, before the inevitable depreciation, would offer a short-run rate of return of at least thirty percent, maybe more.  Or if such a peg holds, and can be enforced, and is seen as credible, isn’t it just like the euro?  (Do they deflate their economy by thirty percent or more to validate the exchange rate?)  The difference being, of course, that with a separately marked currency it would be easier for Italy to leave the eurozone, which is one reason why a 1-to-1 peg would not be seen as eternally credible.  I don’t see how this transition works; am I missing some segment of Barro’s argument?

By the way, the switch to the euro was easier for a few reasons.  People believed the national currencies would become stronger (certainly for Italy), not weaker, and there were few doubts about the solvency of various banking systems.  That said, the switch to the euro did give rise to unsustainable capital flows into the weaker countries and that is not working out well either.

The Destruction of Pompeii

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Art Newspaper: A Unesco report has identified serious problems with the World Heritage Site, including structural damage to buildings, vandalism and a lack of qualified staff….The collapse of a column at Pompeii on 22 December raised further alarm. The column was in a pergola in the courtyard of the House of Loreio Tiburtino, whose adjacent rooms have very fine frescoes.

…The Pompeii crisis came to a head with the collapse of the Schola Armaturarum, known as the House of the Gladiators, in November 2010, along with three further collapses later in the month. This was after extremely heavy rain.

The problems at Pompeii are all too familiar in Italy:

Staffing at Pompeii remains a fundamental problem. The structure is “very rigid”, with “jobs ­being secure until retirement”, making it “virtually impossible to recruit new staff”. Although around 470 people are employed at Pompeii, it is “very short” of professional staff, there are “very few” maintenance workers and only 23 guards are on site at any one time.

The guards do not wear uniforms and fail to display their badges. The experts observed them “grouped together in threes or fours”, which meant there was a limited presence on the enormous site. Since 1987, the number of guards has been reduced by a quarter while visitor numbers have increased considerably.

And how about this for an Italian microcosm:

Management changes have resulted in further problems. In July 2008, the Italian government declared Pompeii to be in a “state of emergency”, putting it under special administration until July 2010 (two commissioners served during this period: Renato Profili and then Marcello Fiori). There have been four successive superintendents since September 2009: Mariarosaria Salvatore, Giuseppe Proietti, Jeannette Papadopoulos and Teresa Elena Cinquantaquattro.

Markets in everything the culture that is Scot

by  Tyler Cowen in

In 1907, Ernest Shackleton and crew set out on the ship Nimrod to visit Antarctica and, they hoped, the South Pole. The good news was, the entire party survived the trip, thanks in part to the Rare Old Highland Whisky they brought to the frozen continent. But the expedition was forced to evacuate in 1909, some 100 miles short of the Pole they sought. And, as winter ice encroached and the men hurried home, they left behind three cases of the choice whisky.

In 2007, just about a century later, the whisky was found, intact, at the expedition’s hut at Cape Royds in Antarctica.

The stuff was made by Mackinlay & Co at the Glen Mhor distillery in 1896 or thereabouts. Mackinlay hasn’t been an active brand for a while now, but the current owner of the Mackinlay name, Whyte and Mackay, obtained a few of the precious bottles and set out to do what any right-thinking Scot would do: first, taste the whisky; and second, attempt to analyze and re-create it. The result, a product called Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky, is, as of this writing, buyable in stores.

The article is here, and the pointer is from Jodi Ettenberg, who serves up her favorite longreads of 2011 here.