Unintended Geoengineering
In my post SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited I noted that regulations requiring ships to reduce sulfur have increased global warming. Science has a new piece on the phenomena and the implications for intended geoengineering:
Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”
By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.
The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.
Growth models and new goods
Growth models typically assume an inaccurate equivalence between the consumption of greater quantities of existing products (as an individual achieves by growing richer, all else equal) and the consumption of new products. As a result, they typically arbitrarily understate the welfare benefits of growth. They also arbitrarily overstate the extent which future growth will motivate a substitution from consumption to other goods. Finally, a more realistic model of new product introduction can be shown to alleviate the equity premium puzzle: steeply diminishing marginal utility in within-period consumption is compatible with a high saving rate because the marginal utility of consumption will be higher when new products are available.
That is a new paper from Philip Trammell, via Kris Gulati.
This also has implications for who should be subject to congestion pricing. I am currently in Chennai, which can be quite congested, most of all on the roads. Some kind of congestion fee (if it were possible to enforce) would be appropriate. But such a fee probably should not be levied on those who come to Chennai to consume new goods, or in other words visitors and outsiders. Those are also the people most likely to learn things from being in Chennai, and then to apply those learnings elsewhere. Beware of those who apply only a single microeconomic idea!
Shadow Effects of Tennis Superstars
In multi-stage tournaments, anticipated competition in future stages might affect the outcome of competition in the current stage. In particular, the presence of super- stars might demotivate the next-best competitors from seeking to advance to later rounds, where they ultimately are likely to face a superstar. Data from men’s professional tennis tournaments held between 2004 and 2019 affirm that the participation of superstars (Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Murray) reduces the probability that the remaining Top 20 players win their matches. Such shadow effects arise even in very early tournament stages, in which favoured players lose more often than expected, given their ability. The effects are more pronounced when multiple superstars com- pete in the tournament and disappear once all superstars have been eliminated from competition. Furthermore, shadow effects increase the probability of retirement of strong but non-superstar competitors and disappear once superstar performance is not dominant.
That is from a new paper by Christian Deutscher, Lena Neuberg, and Stefan Thiem, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Dominican Republic fact of the day
The Dominican Republic 🇩🇴 is experiencing a remarkable convergence in per capita income with the US, outpacing all other Latin American countries. With the right policies, it has the potential to become an advanced economy within the next four decades. ➡️ https://t.co/s8ofH9u1B9 pic.twitter.com/wJ7MSy48k7
— IMF (@IMFNews) August 4, 2023
Saturday assorted links
1. Interview with David Garrow. I found this a fascinating piece, one of the best of the year. But it says as much about Garrow as Obama — how you can be that much of a grump? How much “authenticity” do you expect from a president anyway?
2. Does surname diversity imply more innovation?
3. Morris Chang profile (NYT).
4. The distribution of five-star hotels in India.
5. It is great to see Ben Casnocha again, here is his account of when we met in 2006 (“that was then, this is now”).
6. Sílvia Pérez Cruz i Cástor Pérez. And one more.
Health Alert: Your Survival Odds May Increase When Surgeons Take a Break!
Another bit from my review in the WSJ of Random Acts of Medicine by Jena and Worsham:
The authors do not always endear themselves to their colleagues. In one intriguing study spanning a decade and involving 200,000 patients, a surprising revelation emerged. Patients who happened to have a heart attack during a week when hot-shot cardiac surgeons were away at national conferences were found more likely to survive. It sounds like a joke—stay away from hospitals because that’s where lots of people die—but the statistics are solid. The heart surgeons most likely to attend the national meetings also tend to be the go-getters, eager to cut and demonstrate their prowess in the operating theater. When these surgeons are away, mortality rates decrease by about 12.5%, a decrease “similar in magnitude to some of the best treatments we have available for heart attacks.” (Emphasis in the original). The president of the American Heart Association breezily dismissed the study’s findings, saying, “there’s nothing in this study that we see that would lead us to recommend a change in clinical practice.” Such dismissal in the face of significant evidence feels akin to malpractice.
There is now widespread recognition that too much medical care can be wasteful, but less recognition that it can also be harmful. Unfortunately, nearly all stakeholders, including patients, doctors, pharmaceutical firms and hospitals, are incentivized to spend and do more. Only insurance companies bear the burden of saying no. Given the inherent bias in our information sources toward positivity, it’s crucial to remain vigilant about instances where medical care has exceeded reasonable boundaries.
Progress in Sri Lanka
…for Sri Lanka, the only country in the region to default on its official debt amid the economic squeeze caused by the pandemic and the Ukraine war, these are sunny days.
Tourism revenue and remittances from Sri Lankan workers overseas have come roaring back. Inflation, which reached 70% last September, was back down to 6.3% in July. As a result, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka has cut its benchmark interest rate by 4.5 percentage points since June…
To win the IMF’s support, Colombo took hard but much-needed steps to increase fuel and electricity prices as well as raise tax rates and extend the tax net. A new central bank governor raised benchmark interest rates by 8 percentage points over the course of 2022 to try to put a lid on inflation and bring a degree of macroeconomic stability…
The IMF, which approved support for Colombo in March, estimates Sri Lanka’s current-account deficit will be around 1.5% of gross domestic product from this year onward. This would be a manageable and normal level for any developing country that is a net importer of fuel and food.
Here is the full Nikkei story, via AM Livingston.
*Unshackled*
The subtitle is A practical guide for highly-skilled immigrants to thrive in the United States, and the authors are Soundarya Balasubramani and Sameer Khedekar, just published. Covers all of the main immigration options into the United States in clear, understandable language. Even if you do not wish to come, this is perhaps the best and clearest attempt to explain a very muddled immigration system. You can buy it here. Here is the book’s website, with many resources, including on-line materials with core content.
The power of the agenda setter
We model legislative decision-making with an agenda setter who can propose policies sequentially, tailoring each proposal to the status quo that prevails after prior votes. Voters are sophisticated and the agenda setter cannot commit to future proposals. Nevertheless, the agenda setter obtains her favorite outcome in every equilibrium regardless of the initial default policy. Central to our results is a new condition on preferences, manipulability, that holds in rich policy spaces, including spatial settings and distribution problems. Our findings therefore establish that, despite the sophistication of voters and the absence of commitment power, the agenda setter is effectively a dictator.
That is from a new paper by S. Nageeb Ali, B. Douglas Bernheim, Alexander W. Bloedel, and Silvia Console Battilana, forthcoming in American Economic Review. We already have ten (?) percent less democracy! Of course you might think that who becomes the agenda setter has something to do with democracy, and indeed it is. But in limited, roundabout ways…at the margin it is still not very democratic.
Friday assorted links
1. “(If anyone out there can explain why homoerotic fascists keep seeking my company, please let me know.)” More on BAP, from The Atlantic by Graeme Wood.
2. If you give people a free 10k, what will they do with it?
3. Why tourists no longer want to go to China (WSJ).
4. The economic case for generative AI.
5. Claims about optimizing the use of coffee (NB: I consider all this an argument against drinking coffee.)
The true nature of American polarization
Adding marital status to the mix, the GOP advantage among married men shoots up to 20 points (59% Republican to 39% Democrat) and shrinks among unmarried men to just 7 points (52% Republican to 45% Democrat).
But what most people don’t know, including everyone who works at Politico apparently, is that among married women, Republicans still maintain a sizable 14-point advantage (56% Republican to 42% Democrat).
But if Republicans are winning married men by 20 points, married women by 14 points, and unmarried men by 7 points, then who is keeping Democrats competitive?
Single women are single-handedly saving the Democratic Party. By a 37-point margin (68% to 31%), single women overwhelmingly pulled the lever for Democrats.
Any discussion of polarization really does need to put that fact front and center — why have single women become such political outliers? Here is the full piece, via i/o.
Will AI boost autocratic regimes?
Maybe not:
An emerging literature suggests that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can greatly enhance autocrats’ repressive capability and strengthen authoritarian control. This paper argues that AI’s ability to do so may be hampered by existing repressive institutions. In particular, I suggest that autocrats suffer from a “Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a repression-information trade-off in which citizens’ strategic behavior in the face of repression diminishes the amount of useful information in the data for training AI. This trade-off poses a fundamental limitation in AI’s usefulness for serving as a tool of authoritarian control – the more repression there is, the less information there will be in AI’s training data, and the worse AI will perform. I illustrate this argument using an AI experiment and a unique dataset on censorship in China. I show that AI’s accuracy in censorship decreases with more pre-existing censorship and repression. The drop in AI’s performance is larger during times of crisis, when people reveal their true preferences. I further show that this problem cannot be easily fixed with more data. Ironically, however, the existence of the free world can help boost AI’s ability to censor.
Here is the paper by Eddie Yang, via Dan Wang. Here is my earlier column for Bloomberg on this topic.
Thursday assorted links
1. Twitter account on the weaponization on the U.S. government.
2. Paul Christiano on LLM safety.
3. “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” (NYT)
4. Two Canadians switched at birth (NYT, good piece).
6. When groups of scientists disagree, how do people decide what is correct?
Sort of Middlebury markets in everything
Middlebury lacks sufficient housing for all the students planning to attend this fall. After exhausting other options, the college plans to pay 30 students $10,000 each to stay away.
Clever idea, but I’m sure you all noticed the “After exhausting other options” clause in there. Here is from the rest of the story:
But the nonresidential buildings could not be renovated in time to add necessary safety features, and the college decided not to house students at Bread Loaf due to the logistics of running a satellite operation, as well as negative feedback from students who had lived there earlier in the pandemic and said they’d felt isolated from the main campus.
I say Granny Flats and beans! It is not for long, so let the learning continue. The article does not discuss the stance of the town of Middlebury, but as it is an exclusive village of about 9,000 I can take a wild guess…
Left Digit Bias in Medicine
From my review in the WSJ of Random Acts of Medicine by Jena and Worsham:
You have probably heard of left-digit bias—the idea that $7.99 seems cheaper than $8, even though $8 is only negligibly different than $8.01. Left-digit bias is widely observed in pricing but the effect is more general. A car with 39,990 miles on the odometer, for instance, sells for more than a car with 40,005 miles (so be smart and buy the car with 40,005 miles). Could left-digit bias show up in medicine?
People who end up in the emergency room complaining of chest pains a few weeks before their 40th birthday are very similar to people who end up in the emergency room with chest pains a few weeks after their 40th birthday. But on a chart, the former are 39 years old and the latter are 40.
The big 40 is a heuristic among physicians for potential heart attack. Looking at more than five million patient records, the economist Stephen Coussens found that patients who were slightly over the age of 40 were almost 10% more likely to be tested for a heart attack than those just under 40. The difference shows up as a discontinuity, a jump up in the probability of being tested as patients cross their
40th birthday.
Messrs. Jena and Worsham show that similar discontinuities appear throughout medicine. Heart-attack patients just under the age of 80, for instance, are more likely to be given coronary artery bypass surgery than those just over 80. Kidneys from patients who die at age 69, just short of their 70th birthday, are more likely to be used for transplant than kidneys from patients just over 70, even though by all objective measures the kidneys are equally viable and valuable. Perhaps most tellingly, “children” just under the age of 18 are less likely to be prescribed opioids than “adults” slightly over the age of 18, even though these groups are statistically indistinguishable.
The point of these studies isn’t to titter or sigh at the peculiarities of human reasoning but to use these natural experiments to estimate the effect of medical procedures. If the only reason that near-18 and 18-year-olds are prescribed opioids differently is the semantics of “child” and “adult,” then we can use the discontinuity in prescriptions as a natural experiment—it’s as if prescribing around the age of 18 were randomly assigned. The authors find, for example, that compared to the just-under-18s, the just-over-18s were 12.6% more likely to later be diagnosed for an opioid-related adverse event such as an overdose. The greater rate of overdose is valuable information—but imagine the difficulty of trying to convince an Institutional Review Board that it would be ethical to randomly prescribe opioids to young people.