The Disparate Impacts of College Admissions Policies on Asian American Applicants
Dept. of Yikes, but at this point who is surprised?:
…we estimate the odds that Asian American applicants were admitted to at least one of the schools we consider were 28% lower than the odds for white students with similar test scores, grade-point averages, and extracurricular activities. The gap was particularly pronounced for students of South Asian descent (49% lower odds). We trace this pattern in part to two factors. First, many selective colleges openly give preference to the children of alumni, and we find that white applicants were substantially more likely to have such legacy status than Asian applicants, especially South Asian applicants. Second, after adjusting for observed student characteristics, the institutions we consider appear less likely to admit students from geographic regions with relatively high shares of applicants who are Asian.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Joshua Grossman, Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay C. Page, and Sharad Goel.
Doha bleg
What should I do in Doha? I will have a very limited amount of time there. What should I see and where should I eat?
Monday assorted links
1. Oddly distributed asymmetric worries. And U.S. scientists repeat fusion power breakthrough.
2. “Vidya Mahambare has a fun assignment for her students, and I fully intend to copy it this upcoming semester.” Link to the idea here.
4. Square watermelons in Japan.
5. More on the Collie transhumanist [transcollieist?].
6. MIE: “A funeral home in El Salvador has taken Barbie mania to an extreme, offering pink coffins with Barbie linings.”
Markets in everything, hockey romance edition
Posters gravitate to players who remind them of their favorite book boyfriends, and one popular choice is Seattle Kraken center Alex Wennberg. His team initially courted BookTok with posts and hashtags in the same style, and flew out a popular creator for a playoff game…
Within the subcategory of sports romance, hockey dominates. Right now, all 10 of the top sports romances on Amazon involve hockey.
Here is the full story.
USA poll fact of the day
Just as Woke has peaked, has “anti-Woke” peaked as well?:
When presented with the choice between two hypothetical Republican candidates, only 24 percent of national Republican voters opted for a “a candidate who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media and culture” over “a candidate who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.”
Among those 65 and older, often the most likely age bracket to vote, only 17 percent signed on to the “anti-woke” crusade. Those numbers were nearly identical in Iowa, where the first ballots for the Republican nominee will be cast on Jan. 15.
Around 65 percent said they would choose the law and order candidate…
About 38 percent of Republican voters said they would back a candidate who promised to fight corporations that promote “woke” left ideology, versus the 52 percent who preferred “a candidate who says that the government should stay out of deciding what corporations should support.”
As for Vivek:
The stickers that read “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek” are gone from his campaign stops, he said, replaced by hats that read “Truth.”
“At the time I came to be focused on this issue, no one knew what the word was,” he said. “Now that they have caught up, the puck has moved. It’s in my rearview mirror as well.”
The NYT piece offers this exaggeration:
Instead, Republican voters are showing a “hand’s off” libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about “law and order” in the nation’s cities and at its borders.
Developing, we will see how this one goes…
Murugan Idli
E. 149, Murugan Idli Shop, 1, 6th Avenue, opp. Velankanni Church, GOCHS Colony, Besant Nagar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600090, India
Most of all, get the Onion Rava Masala Dosa. The key dishes there cost not much more than one dollar, sometimes less.
Is there any general model as to why, so often in the world of food, price and quality are negatively correlated?
Sunday assorted links
1. Pakistan facts of the day, gift watch edition.
2. How much do different kinds of doctors earn?
3. Jason Furman reviews *Big Business*.
4. Why do the top dart throwers keep getting better and better? (NYT, good piece on talent issues, covers other sports too).
5. How much is NoVa residential real estate suffering from work from home?
6. Floridan Ederer is the new EU candidate for what had been the Fiona Scott Morton post.
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.