Wednesday assorted links
1. “Agreeableness positively predicted emotional well-being, while negatively predicting advancing knowledge. We ultimately argue that gender is a crucial, underestimated explanatory factor of the value orientations of American college students.” Link here.
2. How much do India’s new nuclear reactors cost?
3. The geography of retracted papers (China fact of the day). And should Japan defend Taiwan?
4. The new Philip A. Wallach book Why Congress?
What should I ask Peter Singer?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, in honor of the new edition of his Animal Liberation.
Some of you will know I did a much earlier 2009 Bloggingheads.TV with him, but this time I plan on taking very different tacks.
So what should I ask?
From the Comments
The context is that human challenge trials were “ethically fraught” but, Sure writes:
…I think we had more than a few instances in history where restricting movement, shuttering houses of worship, and stratifying the economy into favored and disfavored sectors was considered ethically fraught.
I mean we know that limiting visitation to old folks shortens their lives. We know that child abuse becomes harder to find the fewer the number of folks who lay eyes on them each day. We know that initimate partner violence increases when the housing market gets frozen. And we know that suicides crest when businesses go under.
Yet no such epistemic humility and wariness followed with public health recommendations to be tried on a scale reserved hitherto for literal wars and genocides. And we blindly went ahead full speed.
Or consider even the better defined but wildly more mundane issue: proof of vaccination. For decades health ethicists told us that merely revealing a patient’s name, let alone which medications they have taken, was an unconscionable ethical violation. One which we instituted balkanized medical systems to manage and where the cost has been literal lives lost as we have had untold numbers of patients fall through the cracks thanks to duplicate profiles, failure of providers to communicate, and of course scads and scads of useful data locked away from effective statistical analysis that could spot patterns of medical error.
Yet when the powers that be decided that we needed vaccine passports so we could enjoy dining again? Well, every waiter in the country becomes a safe repository of PHI.
No formal study. No deliberations. Precious little if any publications.
And even then, it went only for what was the most expedient option for the enlightened. No ability to get an antibody titer card for medical equivalence. No ability to substitute PCR results with a physician evaluation of recent disease recovery.
Professional medical ethics are bogus. There is no consistency and the entire profession serves to pander to the prejudices of the educated.
New results on retail productivity
We find: (i) managers affect and explain a large share of the variance of store-level productivity; (ii) negative assortative matching between managers and stores, which may reflect both firms’ decisions and a selection-driven bias that we characterize and argue might apply in other settings using movers designs; (iii) managers who move do so on average from less productive to more productive stores; (iv) female managers are less likely to move stores than male managers; (v) manager quality is generally hard to explain with the observables in our data, but is correlated with the ratio of full-time to part-time workers; (vi) managers who obtain high labor productivity also tend to obtain high energy productivity, revealing some breadth in managers’ skills applicability; (vii) high-performing managers in stable growth times are also high-performing during turbulent times; and (viii) exogenous productivity shocks improve the quality of initially low quality managers, suggesting managers can learn.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Robert D. Metcalfe, Alexandre B. Sollaci, and Chad Syverson.
How to talk on Zoom
In a study last year, people who were face-to-face responded to yes/no questions in 297 milliseconds, on average, while those on Zoom chats took 976 milliseconds. Conversational turns — handing the mic back and forth between speakers, as it were — exhibited similar delays. The researchers hypothesized that something about the scant 30- to 70-millisecond delay in Zoom audio disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags use to get in sync with one another, that magic that creates true dialogue.
And the data:
The result is the largest-ever database of one-on-one Zoom conversations. It’s called CANDOR, short for Conversation: A Naturalistic Dataset of Online Recordings. Reece and his colleagues examined more than 1,600 conversations — some 850 hours and 7 million words total. The researchers paired volunteers, people who had never met each other, and asked them to hop on Zoom for half an hour about any old thing — with Record turned on. Which means that unlike most conversational databases, CANDOR didn’t just encode their words, which were transcribed automatically, by digital algorithms. It also automatically captured things like the tone, volume, and intensity of conversational exchanges, recording everything from facial expressions to head nods to the number of “ums” and “yeahs.”
And some results:
But loudness, it turns out, isn’t as good a metric as intensity — maybe because intensity is more subtle, a combination of the frequencies and sibilance of speech and the emotion conveyed by everything from tone to body language. To help the computer to assess something so ineffable — like, what is this thing you humans call love? — the CANDOR team fed it the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song. That enabled the candorbots to draw on more than 7,000 recordings of 24 actors saying and singing things with different emotional shading, from happy or sad to fearful or disgusted. The machine found that women rated as better Zoom conversationalists tended to be more intense. The differences among men, strangely, were statistically insignificant. (The reverse was true for happiness. Male speakers who appeared to be happier were rated as better conversationalists, while the stats for women didn’t budge.)
Then there’s nodding. Better-rated conversationalists nodded “yes” 4% more often and shook their heads “no” 3% more often. They were not “merely cheerful listeners who nod supportively,” the researchers note, but were instead making “judicious use of nonverbal negations.” Translation: An honest and well-timed no will score you more points than an insincere yes. Good conversationalists are those who appear more engaged in what their partners are saying.
Here is the full Adam Rogers article, and most notably the participants did not dislike talking on Zoom per se. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Hypergamy Revisited: Marriage in England, 1837-2021
There is a new paper by Greg Clark and Neil Cummins:
It is widely believed that women value social status in marital partners more than men, leading to female marital hypergamy, and more female intergenerational social mobility. A recent paper on Norway, for example, reports significant female hypergamy, even today, as measured by parental status of men and women in partnerships. Using evidence from more than 33 million marriages and 67 million births in England and Wales 1837-2022 we show that there was never within this era any period of significant hypergamous marriage by women. The average status of women’s fathers was always close to that of their husbands’ fathers. Consistent with this there was no differential tendency in England of men and women to marry by social status. The evidence is of strong symmetry in marital behaviors between men and women throughout. There is also ancillary evidence that physical attraction cannot have been a very significant factor in marriages in any period 1837-2021, based on the correlation observed in underlying social abilities.
Here is the link, oddly they are charging six pounds for access. Now there is an ungated version.
Tuesday assorted links
Gabriel Zucman wins the John Bates Clark Medal
Here is the announcement.
A Systematic Review of Human Challenge Trials, Designs, and Safety
One of the most bizarre aspects of the COVID era was the institutional unwillingness to perform human challenge trials, which likely would have sped up vaccines and other treatments and saved lives. We let people join the military, indeed we advertise to encourage people to join the military, but for some reason running a human challenge trial is considered ethically fraught.
A new review find that HCTs are quite safe–more evidence that we have too few of these trials.
Human challenge trials (HCTs) are a clinical research method in which volunteers are exposed to a pathogen to derive scientifically useful information about the pathogen and/or an intervention [1]. Such trials have been conducted with ethical oversight since the development of the modern institutional review system of clinical trials in the 1970s. More recently, there has been renewed discussion about the ethical and practical aspects of conducting HCTs, largely fueled by interest in conducting HCTs for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Past reviews of HCTs focused on reporting methods [2] and safety for single pathogens [3–6], but these did not explicitly evaluate the safety of HCTs by assessing reported adverse events (AEs) and serious adverse events (SAEs) across a range of pathogens. Furthermore, many additional HCTs have been performed since the publication of these reviews. To better inform discussions about future uses of HCTs, including during pandemic response, this article presents a systematic review of challenge trials since 1980 and reports on their clinical outcomes, with particular focus on risk of AEs and risk mitigation strategies.
Hat tip: Alec Stapp.
Do higher minimum wages reduce poverty?
Advocates of minimum wage increases have long touted their potential to reduce poverty. This study assesses this claim. Using data spanning nearly four decades from the March Current Population Survey, and a dynamic difference-in-differences approach, we find that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is associated with a (statistically insignificant) 0.17 percent increase in the probability of longer-run poverty among all persons. With 95% confidence, we can rule out long-run poverty elasticities with respect to the minimum wage of less than -0.129, which includes central poverty elasticities reported by Dube (2019). Prior evidence suggesting large poverty-reducing effects of the minimum wage are (i) highly sensitive to researcher’s choice of macroeconomic controls, and (ii) driven by specifications that limit counterfactuals to geographically proximate states (“close controls”), which poorly match treatment states’ pre-treatment poverty trends. Moreover, an examination of the post-Great Recession era — which saw frequent, large increases in state minimum wages — failed to uncover poverty-reducing effects of the minimum wage across a wide set of specifications. Finally, we find that less than 10 percent of workers who would be affected by a newly proposed $15 federal minimum wage live in poor families.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Richard V. Burkhauser, Drew McNichols, and Joseph J. Sabia. Should one believe these new results over the old results, or just be skeptical of the whole line of research entirely?
What I’ve been reading and not having time to read
Marcel Proust, The Seventy-Five Folios & Other Unpublished Manuscripts. Early drafts of In Search of Lost Time, fragments, but still of interest to Proust lovers.
Claire Hughes Johnson, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building is that rare thing — a good and also useful management book. She was COO at Stripe, this is a Stripe Press title, and I was happy to see it make the WSJ bestseller list.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? The authors are skeptical on the actual settlement of space, and so am I, so I am glad this book exists. I hope somebody proves them wrong, but that is not my bet.
Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income, is a good history of ideas on the basic concept.
Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, Superman Brainiac, Superman wins, but is that plausible? Yes. The writers note there is too much that Brainiac cannot control, most of all on Earth.
Peter Attia, with Bill Gifford, has now published Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity.
I have only browsed Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism, but it seems to be a very good and serious treatment of its chosen topics.
Lionel Page, Optimally Irrational: The Good Reasons We Behave the Way We Do, argues that many behavioral “imperfections” in economics are in fact rational in a broader perspective.
Simone and Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, the authors lay out what their version of a pro-natalist world and philosophy would have to look like.
There is Shanker A. Singham and Alden F. Abbott, Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy: Trade Liberalisation, Competitive Markets and Property Rights Protection.
I will not have time to read Chris Wickham’s massive tome The Donkey & the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180, but surely it is worthy of note and it appears to be a major achievement.
And Is Social Justice Just?, edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne.
Should we limit capital flows from America to China?
I am not thrilled with these policy proposals:
President Joe Biden is expected to issue an executive order next month restricting US investment in China, in part over concerns about US national security. Those concerns are valid, but the move would cede far too much arbitrary power to the federal government over capital flows and economic activity.
The policy will reportedly cover semiconductors, AI and quantum computing, and on the supply side it applies to venture capital, private equity and some technology transfers and joint ventures. It’s reminiscent of the proposed ban on TikTok. You can debate whether a bill that said “Ban TikTok” — and little else — would be a good idea. In reality, what was proposed would potentially criminalize a broad swath of internet activity in America.
Restrictions on capital flows to China would run into similar problems. On the surface, they would be addressing commonsensical national-security issues. Underneath, they would give the executive branch carte blanche to both punish foreign nations economically and to restrict domestic investors.
And this:
All said, it would be better for the US to devote resources to limiting Chinese espionage, or upgrading US supply chains and weapons systems. When it comes to relations with China, blocking its access to key weapons systems should be the priority.
Here is the full Bloomberg column.
Monday assorted links
Diamond arbitrage!
That diamond ring your newly engaged friend is showing off? It may not be a traditional diamond.
More than a third of all engagement rings with center stones purchased last year were created in a lab, according to an online survey of nearly 12,000 U.S. couples by wedding-planning website The Knot. That’s double the number from 2020.
A natural diamond takes billions of years to form deep within the earth. The diamond industry, it seems, evolves almost as slowly. But a major shift seems to be under way.
As the technology to make lab-grown diamonds has improved, production has increased and retail prices are falling. Their growing popularity, especially among younger consumers, has caught the attention of jewelers and watchmakers — and is challenging traditional diamonds that are mined from the earth.
It’s not just engagement rings. Diamonds grown in a lab accounted for 13.6% of the $88.6 billion in diamond jewelry sold globally in 2022, up from less than 1% in 2015 where they had hovered since the early 2000s, according to Paul Zimnisky, a diamond industry analyst.
Here is more from the WSJ, and the article is interesting throughout. Here is my 2004 post on diamonds. Didn’t Alex once have a long post on this as well? (I can’t find it in the MR search function.)
*The Chile Project*
An excellent book, the author is Sebastian Edwards, and the subtitle is The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism. This is the only book on this topic where I feel I am finally getting to the bottom of what happened. Here are a few points:
1. The Chicago School ties to Chile go as far back as 1955, when Theodore Schultz, Earl Hamilton, Arnold Harberger, and Simon Rottenberg visited to strike up an agreement with Catholic University in Santiago.
2. The same year Chilean students started arriving at U. Chicago for graduate study.
3. Edwards himself, at the age of 19, worked on price controls under the Allende regime.
4. Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the (left-wing) Austrian economist, was critical of the Allende regime for deviating from true socialism.
5. The Allende regime was a disaster, with for instance real wages falling by almost 40 percent (this one I knew).
6. Pinochet’s much-heralded private pension reform really did not work (I may do a whole post on this).
7. Milton Friedman’s famed visit really was quite modest, contrary to what you sometimes hear. Nonetheless he was so persuasive he really did convince Pinochet to proceed with the shock therapy version of reform. He had mixed feelings about this for the rest of his life, and did not like to talk about it: “But deep inside, Friedman was bothered by the Chilean episode.”
8. You may know that pegging the exchange rate was one of the major Chilean mistakes during the reform era. Friedman, although usually a strict advocate of floating exchange rates, did not take the opportunity to criticize that decision, and in fact made some remarks that suggested a possible willingness to tolerate a moving peg regime for the Chilean exchange rate.
9. Friedman underestimated how long Chilean unemployment would last, following shock therapy.
10. Arnold Harberger “…prided himself in not being doctrinaire and not being a Milton Friedman clone.”
11. Much more recently, Chile turned to the Left, in part because Chilean market-oriented economists retreated from public debates.
Strongly recommended, one of the must-reads of the year. You can buy it here.