The new equilibrium, solved for
Ticket sales for Chris Rock’s comedy shows have reportedly spiked since Sunday night.
Live event ticketing site TickPick sold more tickets to see Chris Rock overnight than it had in the past month combined, according to a tweet from the company Monday.
Rock is set to perform standup at Boston’s Wilbur Theater on Wednesday. On March 18, the cheapest tickets were sold for $46, but had increased to $411 by Monday, according to TickPick’s public relations representative Kyle Zorn.
Here is the full story. Now solve for the next one!
Who gains and loses status from the war in Ukraine?
Today I will focus on the losers, with another post to follow on those who have gained status. Here goes:
1. An entire generation of German politicians.
2. Those who argued that the Russia misinformation machine was swinging major outcomes such as Western elections. Said misinformation machine just doesn’t seem that good!
2b. Those who argued the UFO footage was possibly of a Russian military craft.
3. Putin. And the coterie of Eurasianist intellectuals surrounding him, including Dugin. And various strands of the American right wing.
4. The anti-nuclear power crowd, and much of ESG more generally. Too much posturing, too few practical solutions and now the whole thing bites.
5. China, with India in contention but working somewhat to remedy the damage.
6. President Obama, for mocking Romney’s concern over Russia, in one of their debates.
7. People who spent most of their time debating The Woke, on either side of the issue.
8. Commentators and political scientists who saw the initial conflict as primarily about the eastward expansion of NATO. Putin’s war aims have shown this to be false (while to be clear Putin does also hate the eastern expansion of NATO). Desire to obliterate and absorb the nation of Ukraine far predates the history of NATO.
9. People who said “the next war will all be about cyber.” There is probably more cyberconflict going on than we are aware of, but still…
Who else?
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Tuesday assorted links
2. “The first lunar dust collected by Neil Armstrong from the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 is headed to auction, with an estimated value of between US$800,000 and US$1.2 million.” Link here.
3. What will the end of subsidies mean for uninsured Covid care?
4. Ezra Klein and Larry Summers (NYT).
5. New and relatively rigorous study of social media and well-being. Small negative effects, highly dependent on age, somewhat dependent on gender. Evidence consistent with causality running in both directions. This is not a zero negative effect, stronger than usual for girls 12-14, and for men 26-29, but overall not consistent with the doomsaying accounts. Here is NYT coverage. Note this from the NYT: ““There’s been absolutely hundreds of these studies, almost all showing pretty small effects,” said Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University who has conducted a meta-analysis of 226 such studies.”
Humor and citations
The data are taken from ecology and evolution papers:
Self-citation data suggest that authors give funnier titles to papers they consider less important. After correction for this confound, papers with funny titles have significantly higher citation rates, suggesting that humour recruits readers. We also examined associations between citation rates and several other features of titles. Inclusion of acronyms and taxonomic names was associated with lower citation rates, while assertive-statement phrasing and presence of colons, question marks, and political regions were associated with somewhat higher citation rates. Title length had no effect on citation. Our results suggest that scientists can use creativity with titles without having their work condemned to obscurity.
The authors of this paper are , , . Via Michelle Dawson. p.s. The paper has a (modestly) funny title — “If this title is funny, will you cite me?”
Marijuana fact of the day
In California, three years into the era of legalization under the Proposition 64 ballot initiative, data indicate that only about one-quarter of weed sold and consumed in the state is legally licensed and that the remaining three-quarters is produced outside legal market channels.
And from a later chapter:
And that is why some people say, and we consider it plausible, that the so-called legalization of weed in some North American markets has illegalized more weed than it legalized.
That is from the new and excellent Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics, by Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner.
The complexities of feminization
One of them concerns happiness:
Using data across countries and over time we show that women are unhappier than men in unhappiness and negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used – anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger – and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep. Women are also less satisfied with many aspects of their lives such as democracy, the economy, the state of education and health services. They are also less happy in the moment in terms of peace and calm, cheerfulness, feeling active, vigorous, fresh and rested. However, prior evidence on gender differences in global wellbeing metrics – happiness and life satisfaction – is less clear cut. Differences vary over time, location, and with model specification and the inclusion of controls especially marital status. We also show that there are significant variations by month in happiness data regarding whether males are happier than females but find little variation by month in unhappiness data. It matters which months are sampled when measuring positive affect but not with negative affect. These monthly data reveal that women’s happiness was more adversely affected by the COVID shock than men’s, but also that women’s happiness rebounded more quickly suggesting resilience. As a result, we now find strong evidence that males have higher levels of both happiness and life satisfaction in recent years even before the onset of pandemic. As in the past they continue to have lower levels of unhappiness. A detailed analysis of several data files, with various metrics, for the UK confirms that men now are happier than women.
Here is the full NBER paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson.
Monday assorted links
1. The book that predicted the creator economy (hint: it is by me).
2. “In contrast to official statistics that suggest medical care prices increased by 0.53 percent per year relative to economy-wide inflation from 2000 to 2017, we find that quality-adjusted medical care prices declined by 1.33 percent per year over the same period.” Link here.
3. Good New York profile of Adam Tooze. (And my earlier CWT with Tooze.)
5. MIT restores the SAT/ACT requirement.
6. If Putin tries to poison you, do you get your money back?
Guyana petrodollar fact of the day
The economy grew 20% last year and 44% in 2020.
Economic growth this year is expected to reach 48%. Here is more from The Economist.
Far UVC Sanitization Kills COVID
A new type of ultraviolet light that is safe for people took less than five minutes to reduce the level of indoor airborne microbes by more than 98%, a joint study by scientists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and in the U.K. has found.
…Far-UVC light has a shorter wavelength than conventional germicidal UVC, so it can’t penetrate into living human skin cells or eye cells. But it is equally efficient at killing bacteria and viruses, which are much smaller than human cells.
In the past decade, many studies around the world have shown that far-UVC is both efficient at destroying airborne bacteria and viruses without causing damage to living tissue. But until now these studies had only been conducted in small experimental chambers, not in full-sized rooms mimicking real-world conditions.
…The efficacy of different approaches to reducing indoor virus levels is usually measured in terms of equivalent air changes per hour. In this study, far-UVC lamps produced the equivalent of 184 equivalent air exchanges per hour. This surpasses any other approach to disinfecting occupied indoor spaces, where five to 20 equivalent air changes per hour is the best that can be achieved practically.
“Our trials produced spectacular results, far exceeding what is possible with ventilation alone,” says Kenneth Wood, PhD, lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews and senior author of the study. “In terms of preventing airborne disease transmission, far-UVC lights could make indoor places as safe as being outside on the golf course on a breezy day at St. Andrews.”
Here and here and here are my previous posts on UV-C sanitization. We are moving slower than I would like but the picture is of a UVC robot being used at Pittsburgh airport so kudos to them.
Peru facts of the day
When Félix Chero knelt before Peru’s president Pedro Castillo last Sunday and swore to serve as the country’s justice minister he became the 46th minister in the Castillo government in just eight months. Since taking office last July, the president has rattled through four cabinets, four prime ministers, three foreign ministers and two finance ministers. Chero is his third justice minister…
On average, Castillo has changed a minister every nine days.
Here is much more from Gideon Long at the FT.
The benefits of educational migration
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, and I offer up a very concrete proposal:
The educational migration idea also has potential for the U.S., though with additional hurdles. American universities typically offer some tuition aid to foreign students, but they could pledge to do more. Imagine if every school in America offered 10 additional zero-tuition slots a year to students from very poor countries. The strain on the facilities of most schools would be minimal, yet with about 5,000 institutions of higher education in America, that could amount to tens of thousands of new slots for educational migrants.
Given the great and justified interest in helping emigrants from Ukraine, the U.S. and other countries might also consider special programs for Ukrainian students. Millions are leaving Ukraine, and while the charitable response has been impressive, over the longer term these individuals will need to find good jobs. Education is one major step toward this end.
And some caveats:
It remains to be seen how readily educational migration can be scaled. Not all students from poor countries have the linguistic and cultural preparation to study in the West. They may require mentoring, and they may have difficulties navigating the university application process. Universities, and the charities working with them, may have to work harder to create admissions tests that are relevant, challenging and secure. Still, they may get better at those tasks the more they try to make educational migration work.
For the original pointer I thank Richard Nerland.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Tobacco ties hinder WHO authorization of Canada’s coronavirus vaccine.” Is there a word for this?
2. Limitations on children innovating.
3. A nuclear expert offers some commentary on nuclear risks.
4. Four Best Picture Contenders are Remakes (NYT).
6. Does misery love company? Oddly perhaps, this study yielded the opposite result that for the general population “happiness hates company.”
How to Get Tough on Crime
Republicans attack judges for being soft on crime but judges mostly determine sentence lengths and as Jason Willick argues in the Washington Post, sentences lengths are long and making them longer probably won’t help.
A comprehensive 2013 review of the literature by Carnegie Mellon criminologist Daniel Nagin found that “there is little evidence that increasing already long prison sentences has a material deterrence effect.”…A 2021 analysis by economists Evan K. Rose of the University of Chicago and Yohan Shem-Tov of UCLA found that while serving time behind bars reduces the likelihood that someone will reoffend in North Carolina, there are diminishing returns to longer sentences.
So what can be done?
George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok, in reviewing some of the evidence on crime deterrence in 2016, wrote: “We need to change what it means to be ‘tough on crime.’ Instead of longer sentences let’s make ‘tough on crime’ mean increasing the probability of capture for those who commit crimes.”
Six years on, we appear headed in the opposite direction. Just 50 percent of murders were solved in 2020 — the lowest rate in at least 40 years. Efforts to beef up police forces, at least in progressive jurisdictions, are likely to face political resistance.
Longer sentences for convicted criminals, meanwhile, remain difficult to oppose on the merits (except perhaps for drug crimes). That was evident during the Jackson hearings, when Republicans attacked her sentences in certain child-pornography cases as too lenient. Democrats shied away from defending the sentences themselves, instead simply explaining that they were within the mainstream.
The Jackson hearings showed that the GOP perceives a political advantage on crime. The key to actually bringing rates down, however, is not a more punitive judiciary, but more effective prosecutors and police. Republicans’ political messaging would pack more policy punch if they focused their attention there.
My hour on Danish TV
And here is the podcast version.