Metaculus should restart its Lab Leak prediction aggregator
Here is the site. The forecast never went above twenty percent, and then fell consistently, with the aggregator being discontinued in May and resolved as ambiguous. I think the chance is below fifty percent, but still I would like to see this reopened, as the question does not seem to be going away. Metaculus, how about it?
Sunday assorted links
Talent Hoarding in Organizations
Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers. However, because managers are evaluated on team performance, they have an incentive to hoard talented workers, thus jeopardizing the efficient allocation of talent within firms. This study provides the first empirical evidence of talent hoarding using a unique combination of personnel records and application data from a large manufacturing firm. When managers rotate to a new position and temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers’ applications for promotions increase by 123%. Marginal applicants,who would not have applied in the absence of manager rotations, are three times as likely as average applicants to land a promotion, and perform well in higher-level positions. By reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers, talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent. Because female workers react more to talent hoarding than males, talent hoarding perpetuates gender inequality in representation and pay at the firm.
That is a new paper by Ingrid Haegele, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The new culture that is Virginia public high school
“I see these people just not wearing a mask, or wearing one pulled down, like, under their chin,” said Swan, “and my brain just immediately goes, ‘That person does not share the same ideals as me. We won’t get along.’ ” She added: “They may not be a bad person. They may just be thinking the same things as their parents.”
…School now feels, Swan said, “like a war zone”: a raging partisan battle that no one can opt out of, because every single student arrives with evidence of their politics — those without masks typically lean right, she said — written across their faces. Swan said she has stopped speaking with students who go maskless because they are dismissive of the decision to mask and unwilling to hear a different opinion.
Here is the full story, which is interesting throughout. Perhaps the French solution would be to ban masks! In the meantime, how about a policy of mandated no-masks for the teachers and administrators, unless they have health exemptions, and mask choice for each student? Or how else might we limit social strife over masking decisions? How can we move closer to the no-school masking equilibria of much of Europe>
As a side note, I believe masks have some effectiveness, but not total effectiveness, and so it is striking to me how much those in real danger think the masked environment is somehow acceptable. Some amount of risk is totally, absolutely fine, as they are not home schooling (which still would involve risk, I might add). But risk beyond that level is somehow a complete no-no — is it that they all have so accurately done the cost-benefit calculations using expected utility theory? Keep in mind that along a great number of the equilibrium paths, masks delay but do not prevent infection.
Saturday assorted links
1. Very nice Spectator coverage of Conversations with Tyler; I believe the author is an undergraduate. My favorite sentence was “He embodies the American work ethic.”
2. The guy who creates the Planet Money economics videos on TikTok (NYT).
3. Ivermectin efficacy continues to completely fail in the more serious studies. Here are further words of wisdom. This one’s a wrap, and has been for some time now.
4. Very close relatives to Covid-19 found in bats in Laos. Lowers the probability of the “gain of function” hypotheses.
5. Good Nathaniel Popper thread on NFTs.
6. The Pfizer pill is now more available (Bloomberg).
Tabarrok on the Ezra Klein Podcast
Late last year I responded to an excellent tweet storm from Ezra Klein by in effect saying he should read Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations. And you know what? He did! Ezra then kindly invited me on to his New York Times podcast to discuss public choice, liberalism, and the rise and decline of nations.
A few good quotes from me:
Japan has caught up to us in slowing down.
And
Let me put it in a way that progressives can understand, there is an inequality of voice and that inequality of voice also goes to the rich and the powerful and the people who can hire lawyers and the people who can use these so-called equitable institutions to their advantage—even the people in the marginalized communities have not benefited.
Ezra asked challenging questions and had lots of interesting things to say. I was especially struck by his argument that people want to tell heroic stories about themselves and so rent seeking comes to be redefined as something heroic. I think that’s an important insight which public choice scholars are likely to overlook–it becomes harder and harder to break out of a rent-seeking equilibrium not just because of transitional gains traps and the like but because the equilibrium comes to be seen as virtuous.
You also get to hear me rant about new hiring procedures at GMU and my HOA.
Ezra asks a good question about why developer interest groups don’t dominate the planning process.
We also talk about crypto and decentralized consensus as well as other topics.
Whether you call it state capacity libertarianism, creating the innovation nation, or supply side progressivism, I think this movement, which Ezra is leading from the left, is one of the most important movements today.
Podcast: Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript here.
The Covid pandemic, circa February 2022
It is widely believed that speaking helps to spread Covid, including in public places. Yet if you try to book a ticket on the Acela (a term also used sarcastically to describe a particular brand of Eastern elites), you can get tickets only in the Quiet Car. The rest of the train is already sold out, because people prefer to be able to talk.
You may not think that is how things should be, but that is how they are. And no, the Acela does not run from Alabama to West Virginia.
Covid markets in everything, foreign intelligence edition
A government-approved Covid testing firm is being investigated by the UK’s data privacy watchdog after it emerged that it plans to sell customers’ DNA to third parties.
Cignpost Diagnostics, which trades as ExpressTest and offers £35 tests for holidaymakers, said it holds the right to analyse samples from seals to “learn more about human health” – and sell information on to third parties.
Individuals are required to give informed consent for their sensitive medical data to be used – but customers’ consent for their DNA to be sold now as buried in Cignpost’s online documents.
When buying tests, customers were asked to tick a box agreeing to a 4,876 privacy policy which links to a separate document outlining the research programme, The Sunday Times reported…
Cignpost was founded last year and is believed to have sold as many as three million tests. It supplies pre-departure and arrival tests for travellers, with walk-in centres at sites including Gatwick and Heathrow.
Here is the full story, via Michael J.
Friday assorted links
Wokeism has peaked
Virginia has gone Republican (temporarily, because of school-related issues), San Francisco recalled its school board by a decisive margin, Joe Rogan wasn’t cancelled, and there may be a significant war in Ukraine. That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt:
The turning point for the fortunes of the woke may be this week’s school board election in San Francisco, where three members were recalled by a margin of more than 70%. Voters were upset that the school board spent time trying to rename some schools in a more politically correct manner, rather than focusing on reopening all the schools. There was also considerable opposition to the board’s introduction of a lottery admissions system for a prestigious high school, in lieu of the previous use of grades and exam scores.
And:
Another trend is how relatively few immigrants are woke. Latinos in particular seem more open to the Republican Party, or at least don’t seem to have strong partisan attachments. More generally, immigrant political views are more diverse than many people think, even within the Democratic Party.
And:
Wokeism is likely to evolve into a subculture that is highly educated, highly White and fairly feminine. That is still a large mass of people, but not enough to run the country or all its major institutions. In the San Francisco school board recall, for instance, the role of Asian Americans was especially prominent.
In addition:
The woke also are likely to achieve an even greater hold over American universities. Due to the tenure system, personnel turnover is low, and currently newer and younger faculty are more left-wing than are older faculty, including in my field of economics. The simple march of retirements is going to make universities even more left-wing — and even more out of touch with mainstream America.
I hereby inscribe this prediction in The Book of Tetlock.
*The Invention of Power*
The author is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and the subtitle is Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West. Here is the main thesis:
Why Europe became distinct after the year 1000 and not before can be reduced to this surprisingly simple reason: in Europe, the head of religion and the head(s) of state were different people who faced off against one another in long-standing, long-lasting, intense competition for political control. Certainly, the rulers of China and Japan were thought to be gods.
I consider this broadly consistent with my own views, although I see many other significant factors in the broader history, including natural geography and political fragmentation. Nor can you dismiss the role of imperialism entirely, plus that the growth of the West came “at the right time” (for the West at least). I like this book, but I don’t think it quite has the knockdown proof of its thesis that it pretends to. And the book is oddly silent about Christianity as a general phenomenon. There is talk of popes and churches on almost every page, and yet Christianity as an intellectual innovation, helping to make liberalism more likely, does not play much of a role in the narrative. And given how general and deeply rooted some of the mechanisms are, I don’t quite understand why so much stress is placed on the 1122 Concordat of Worms — surely that is endogenous too? It is an odd philosophy of history in which so much hinges on a single event and then for almost a thousand years the rest that follows is locked in.
Jessica Flanigan interviews me and I interview her back
She teaches at University of Richmond, and writes philosophy from perspectives that are broadly libertarian and also Christian. We spoke about many different matters, as she interviewed me as I interview guests on CWT. Some of the chat focused on my views on higher education. When I interview her back, it is mostly about the scope and limits of paternalism.
It was very nice to do another public event with a live audience. And ignore the talk title, it was about only five percent of the session.
There will be three JPEs
We are pleased to announce that the Journal of Political Economy is launching two new journals under the JPE umbrella. The Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics and Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics will broaden the scope of high-quality theoretical and empirical papers published by the JPE journals.
That is from my email. One meta-lesson is that to date brand names in academic journals have been underexploited for a long time!
Thursday assorted links
1. MicroRNAs and the complex octopus brain.
3. How many Covid deaths in Kenya?
4. “Stunning stat from the latest issue of @TheEconomist: Chicago police clear (roughly, “solve”) around 45% of murders. By comparison, London police solve around 98% of murders.” Link here.
A simple model of Putin and the Ukraine crisis
I think the correct model here is “Putin has put down so many chips, he can’t walk away with nothing. He wants to wreck Ukraine (more than taking territory per se). He will do the minimum amount he can that leaves him with a strong probability of having wrecked Ukraine, and no more.”
That still leaves a broad range of possible outcomes, but at the moment that is my mental model for updating with new information.