Results for “tyrone”
66 found

Is the EA movement dead?

No.

To be clear, I am not “an EA person,” though I do have sympathies with considerable parts of the movement.  Most of all it has struck me, as I have remarked in the past, just how much young talent the movement has attracted.  Money enabled the attracting of that talent, but I never had the sense that the money was the reason why the talent was showing up at EA events.  So a less well-funded EA movement still will be potent, at least assuming it gets over the immediate trauma.  That trauma may even help to drive away some of the less serious poseurs who thought EA was the easiest path to polyamory, or whatever..

Intellectual movements can be quite influential on small sums of money.  What exactly was the budget for the Apostles?  Or take libertarianism, which arguably saw peak influence in the last 1970s and early 1980s, when it was much less well funded than in later times.

How much money did the Benthamites have?  Nonetheless they influenced policy a great deal.

As a side note, Open Philanthropy spent over $400 million in 2021.  I know zero about their plans, but I don’t see any reason to think they will be unimportant in the future.  That is plenty of funding right there.

A mere month ago, I witnessed the game of young people sitting around, speculating how many future billionaires will be attracted to EA.  Probably that number has fallen, for reasons related to the current bad publicity, but I don’t see why it has to have fallen to zero.  The next set of billionaires might simply choose a different set of labels.

I do anticipate a boring short-run trend, where most of the EA people scurry to signal their personal association with virtue ethics.  Fine, I understand the reasons for doing that, but at the same time grandma, in her attachment to common sense morality, is not telling you to fly to Africa to save the starving children (though you should finish everything on your plate).  Nor would she sign off on Singer (1972).  While I disagree with the sharper forms of EA, I also find them more useful and interesting than the namby-pamby versions.

Tyrone knocks at the door: “Tyler, you are failing to state the truth about SBF!  He did maximize social welfare!  And sacrificed himself to that end.  What indeed is Christ without Judas?  Judas sacrificed his reputation.  So did SBF.  Now the jump-started EA ideas will live on for eternity.  And those who hold crypto through Caribbean exchanges are about the most deserving losers you can think of.  Those assets did not represent social value anyway.  And isn’t discouraging crypto investment exactly what we should be doing?  (SBF is good for the environment!)  And you need a celebrity example of wrongdoing for that lesson to stick, not just a few random price drops for bitcoin.  He is surely a true angel…”  At which point I had to ask Tyrone to leave the penthouse and shut his dirty mouth…he is not a valid boy!

Crypto’s volatility premium

That is the topic of this week’s Bloomberg column, 2x the usual length, building on earlier work by Tyrone, see also this Megan McArdle column.  As for me, here is a key excerpt:

Much of the primary value of crypto assets is from their price volatility, which is part of their appeal. I raised this possibility some while ago, tongue in cheek, but upon further reflection it seems to me an actually useful (albeit counterintuitive) way of thinking about crypto assets. The general idea of price volatility as a value dates at least as far back as Fischer Black, one of the founders of options price theory.

In standard economic theory, investors are risk-averse, meaning they prefer more stable consumption patterns to less stable ones. That is usually true, but it does not mean investors always prefer more stable investment prices — a crucial distinction.

Consider this hypothetical: You are given an envelope containing one dollar. You are then offered the opportunity to exchange it for an envelope which contains either twice the money (that is, $2) or half the money (50 cents), each with 50% probability. In essence, you are accepting some exchange-rate volatility.

Most people will find this bet a pretty good one. The new expected value of your envelope is (0.5 x $2) + (0.5 x $0.5), or $1.25. That is a higher expected value than your original dollar.

If you are perched at the margin of subsistence, this bet might seem too risky. But for most investors, who have some level of wealth, it is an improvement in prospects, though with some additional risk.

Bitcoin and other crypto assets are essentially offering you a form of this bet. To be sure, this 50-50 bet does not exactly describe the price dynamics of crypto assets. But it is one way of illustrating that crypto prices, relative to the dollar, will either go up a lot or down a lot. The bet helps show that some investors might welcome price volatility — or, if you wish, call it exchange-rate volatility. And with even wilder swings in value, there is more extreme price volatility, which can be even more appealing.

So when Bitcoin and other crypto assets come along, they are a new source of expected gain — precisely due to their price volatility. It is like being invited into a casino where the odds favor you rather than the house! You won’t always win, but a lot of people will want to keep playing.

I’ve been pondering that argument since 2013, maybe now is the time to simply accept it.. Fischer Black and Jensen’s Inequality!

Most Popular MR Posts of the Year

Here is a selection of the most popular MR posts of 2020. COVID was a big of course. Let’s start with Tyler’s post warning that herd immunity was fragile because it holds only “for the current configuration of social relations”. Absolutely correct.

The fragility of herd immunity

Tyler also predicted the pandemic yo-yo and Tyler’s post (or was it Tyrone?) What does this economist think of epidemiologists? was popular.

Tyler has an amazing ability to be ahead of the curve. A case in point, What libertarianism has become and will become — State Capacity Libertarianism was written on January 1 of last year, before anyone was talking about pandemics! State capacity libertarianism became my leitmotif for the year. I worked with Kremer on pushing government to use market incentives to increase vaccine supply and at the same repeatedly demanded that the FDA move faster and stop prohibiting people from taking vaccines or using rapid tests. As I put it;

Fake libertarians whine about masks. Real libertarians assert the right to medical self-defense and demand access to vaccines on a right to try basis.

See my 2015 post Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive for a good review of ideas on the FDA. A silver lining of the pandemic may be that more people realize that FDA delay kills.

My historical posts the The Forgotten Recession and Pandemic of 1957 and What Worked in 1918? and the frightening The Lasting Effects of the the 1918 Influenza Pandemic were well linked.

Outside of COVID, Tyler’s 2005 post Why did so many Germans support Hitler? suddenly attracted a lot of interest. I wonder why?

Policing was also popular including my post Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety? which called for unbundling the police and my post Underpoliced and Overprisoned revisited.

Tyler’s great post The economic policy of Elizabeth Warren remains more relevant than I would like. On a more positive note see Tyler’s post Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year.

One of the most popular posts of the year and my most popular post was The Gaslighting of Parasite.

But the post attracting the most page views in 2020 by far, however, was Tyler’s and it was…

  1. John Brennan on UFOs.

You people are weird. Don’t expect more UFO content this year. Unless, well you know.

How to Vaccinate and Continue Clinical Trials

According to Helen Branswell writing at STAT:

There are serious signs the Food and Drug Administration is getting cold feet over the notion of issuing emergency use authorizations to allow for the widespread early deployment of Covid-19 vaccines.

…“We are concerned about the risk that use of a vaccine under an EUA would interfere with long-term assessment of safety and efficacy in ongoing trials and potentially even jeopardize product approval,” Gruber said. “And not only the first vaccine, but maybe even follow-on vaccines.”

This is nonsense. There are many ways to conduct clinical trials while releasing a vaccine—indeed, we can make the clinical trials better by randomizing a phased release. Suppose we decide health care and transit workers should be vaccinated first. No problem–offer the workers the vaccine, put the SSNs of those who wants the vaccine into a hat like draft numbers, vaccine a randomly chosen sub-sample, monitor everyone.This is the well known lottery technique for measuring causal effects often used in the school choice literature. If we use this technique we can greatly increase sample sizes and as we study each wave we will gather more confidence in the data. We won’t have enough vaccine in November to vaccinate everyone or probably even all health care and transit workers so a lottery is an ethically fair as well as statistically useful way to distributed the vaccine. We can also randomize across cities and regions.

Tyrone, never one to mince words, also has good suggestions:

First, they could simply pay people to partake in those trials.  Isn’t that in essence what the NBA did with its Covid testing in the bubble?  If the value of those clinical trials truly is so high, it should be possible to internalize enough of those benefits to encourage participation.  If institutional barriers stand in the way there, let’s obsess over fixing those.

Why should we force so many Americans to be sacrificial lambs, just to subsidize the trial costs?  Let those costs be taken out of grant overhead!  (And admin. salaries, if need be.)

…Second, there is another way to keep the trial up and running.  Approve use of the treatment, but allow the suppliers to charge very high prices!  Better yet, use the law to make them charge high prices and if need be forbid insurance coverage.

Or we could use human challenge trials. The ethical objections to such are now looking more and more like nonsense as thousands of people die weekly.

In short, the idea that releasing a vaccine in phases is a threat to clinical trials is a dangerous and false dichotomy and another example of how our leaders lack vision, imagination, and courage.

What is the single best volume to read on China?

I do not know!  But this is one of the questions I receive most often, after “Can we have more of Tyrone?”, and “What do you mean by “Straussian”?”

I do find that Michael Wood’s new The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilization and its People is a plausible contender for this designation.  Consistently interesting, substantive, and conceptual, but without over-interpreting for the sake of imposing a narrative straitjacket.

Due out November 17, I am pleased I paid the extra shipping costs to get it from the UK.

Might you all have alternative suggestions for a single best book on China?

Friday assorted links

1. What do we know about superspreader events?  And indoor transmission in China.  And what Arnold Kling has come to believe.

2. “We show irradiance and in particular solar zenith angle in combination with cloudopacity explain COVID-19 morbidity and mortality growth better than temperature.”  Interesting, though still more interpretation is needed there.

3. Covid-19 in Haiti.  And what is Wuhan like right now?

4. In Germany, they consult humanities scholars about how to end the lockdown.  And from a French philosopher.  And we need blogs back for the pandemic.

5. “Southern New Hampshire University, known for being on the cutting edge of collegiate learning, plans to slash tuition for incoming freshmen as it drastically revamps how it conducts on-campus learning beginning in the fall.As part of the changes, tuition will be cut 61%, from $31,000 to $10,000 starting in the 2021-2022 academic year.”  Link here.

6. No strong statistical evidence for the BCG vaccine claim.

7. Is the internet economy going to crash as the real economy shrinks?  Several interesting points in that one.

8. de Rugy and Kling on government-backed lines of credit for small business.

9. Bundled insurance markets in everything: “COVID-19 insurance comes free with food delivery in Hong Kong now.”

10. Thread on the meaning of the new NY results.

11. Toward a theory of Tyrone.

12. Test different recovery levers.  And Zeynep speaks sense.

But *when* will you favor a shift in coronavirus strategy? (no Straussians in a pandemic)

I agree with the numerous sentiments, for instance as expressed here by Ezra Klein, that we are not facing a dollars vs. lives trade-off, rather the better solutions will improve both variables.  Also read this Tom Inglesby thread.  Furthermore there is a concrete path forward toward general improvement, for instance read Zeke Emanuel (NYT, I don’t agree with every detail but the overall direction yes).  And don’t forget these costs cited by Noah.

But we are economists, not mood affiliators, and so we must address the classic question of “at what margin?”  At what margin would you favor an actual shift in strategy because the virus already had reached so many people?  And yes, such a margin does exist.  At that margin we would continue some of our defensive responses, but the overall approach would have to change away from the above links.

Let’s say everyone had been exposed to the coronavirus except yours truly.  Should we shut all (non-take out) restaurants just to limit my personal risk?  Clearly not.  And likely I would end up getting exposed sooner or later in any case.  Then you should “let it rip,” and let Tyler decide when he wishes to go outside or not (but of course offer him health care).

So what is the margin of bad outcomes where, after that point, a major change in strategy should set in?  Has to set in?  That is the question we all need to answer.  And what should that strategy change be exactly?

We like to say “speed is of the essence,” but a less frequent spoken corollary of that is “at some point it is too late to stage the defense we had been hoping for.”

What if we made no further progress against Covid-19 after two more weeks?  Three more weeks?  How about a bit of progress on testing across the next month and a modest increase in mask capacity?  How much longer is the cut-off?  Given how rapidly the virus spreads, it can’t be that long from now.  It cannot honestly be “four months from now.”

(For the record, I am still optimistic, but not at p = 0.8, so this eventuality is by no means purely hypothetical.  And it is perfectly correct to note that Trump’s own incompetence is to some extent making the whole dilemma come true, and that itself is deeply unsettling.  Agree!  We should have “gone Singapore” months ago.  But the dilemma is now here nonetheless, noting that we are hardly the only country in this bucket.  You can’t just condemn Trump and stop thinking about it.)

Or what if New York and seven other regions are hopeless but the rest of the country is not?

I am fine if you agree with me, Ezra, Tom Inglesby, Zeke Emanuel, and many others, including most of the Democratic Party public health establishment.  We all favor “speed is of the essence.”

But the next part of the message never quite gets delivered.  And no one wants to talk about what the next strategic stage — if we fail — should look like.

It is imperative that you consider where your line lies — if only mentally — when you would jump ship and indeed…confess a significant degree of defeat and then formulate and push for a new strategy.

Addendum: Straussian Tyler is not entirely comfortable with this post, as he, like his brother Tyrone, prefers to tell the Noble Lie and maintain the illusion that the preexisting struggle must continue across all margins and at all times.  But perhaps, these days, there are no Straussians in foxholes.  So pick your “no return” point, write it down, and then get back to me.  The honesty of our policy response requires this, yes?  I’m not even making you say it out loud.

And don’t you find it strange that no one has been willing to raise this point before?  Could it be that we are not being told the entire truth?  Or are people not telling the entire truth to themselves?  Isn’t that the same mistake we’ve been making all along?

Is the trade war with China a carbon tax?

I know that in my Twitter feed I am told a “carbon tax is GOOD” and the “Trumpian trade war with China is BAD.”  But isn’t Trump’s trade war, at least indirectly, a tax on carbon emissions?

Most Chinese exports are manufactured goods, and they are produced in a fairly carbon-intensive manner.  Furthermore, it doesn’t seem that Vietnam is able to pick up the slack, so it is not just a case of substituting from one dirty carbon emitter to another.  It seems the trade war is genuinely restricting trade, and over time it will restrict the consumption and production of carbon-intensive goods.  China is by far the exporter with the most to lose.

Of course the targeting of these new taxes is far from ideal from an environmental point of view, nor are they contingent on emissions in the proper manner (still, China is hardly on the verge of being able to switch into clean manufacturing, and in that sense contingent may not matter so much).  And it is hardly the case that Trump has “green motives.”

Still, put aside all the imperfections — don’t we finally have a carbon tax — and a framework for improving it — that so many commentators have been wanting all along?  Won’t this give Elizabeth Warren the chance to really fine-tune the apparatus?

On these points I am indebted to some remarks from Ray Lopez.  And here is my earlier 2016 post “Tyrone on why Democrats should vote for Donald Trump.

The excellent David C. Wright podcasts me on *Stubborn Attachments*, and on other things

It starts with an extended discussion of Tyrone and more or less ends with a take on the meaning of Straussianism and the Straussian reading of my own books.  (If you read the transcript, the sentence in the middle about my believing in God as a teenager is a transcription error, it will be corrected.)  David is one of the best, and best prepared, interviewers I have interacted with.  Here is the audio and transcript.

Here is one bit from the middle:

David: …should academics or people who seek to influence the world, and according to your value system should they try and boost economic growth more? I’m thinking of in your podcast, you’ve had venture capitalists. I think of these in some ways as public intellectuals who are trying to boost economic growth.

[00:39:12] Tyler: They think very conceptually venture capitalists.

[00:39:14] David: They do.

[00:39:15] Tyler: They’re generalists.

[00:39:15] David: They are. Are they similar to university professors?

[00:39:19] Tyler: Well, they’re much better.

[00:39:20] David: Better at?

[00:39:21] Tyler: Almost everything. They’re smarter than we are. They’re playing with real stakes. They understand more different things, they’re better at judging people, they’ve created better for the world in most cases, and so we should feel ashamed of ourselves if we sit down with venture capitalists.

[00:39:35] David: Yet they don’t win a Nobel Prize, and they can’t become call it historically famous or much less so. Obviously–

[00:39:41] Tyler: I think they will become historically famous.

[00:39:43] David: Do you?

[00:39:43] Tyler: Well, they already. Well, like Mike Moritz or Marc Andreessen or Sam Altman Y Combinator. I think they will go down in history as major figures of great import.

Definitely recommended.

Saturday assorted links

1. A Christian responds to my earlier post on God, but I don’t see many actual arguments for the existence of God in there (criticizing “metaphysical nominalism” doesn’t count).  The testimony argument is offered, but I considered that in my original post, and I don’t see a rebuttal to what I wrote.

2. Good short overview on indirect costs and federal overhead payments.

3. Very good Yuval Levin short essay on the CBO and health care policy scoring.

4. James Wood appreciation of W.G. Sebald.

5. January 2016 Tyrone take on why Democrats should support Donald Trump for reasons of climate change.

6. Is it Randal Quarles and Marvin Goodfriend to the two open Fed seats? (NYT)  Here is Goodfriend’s 2016 paper on dealing with the zero lower bound (pdf).

Wednesday assorted links

1. Heartlessness as a female intellectual strategy?  (The article seems like odd framing to me, still the content is interesting.)

2. Do even misanthropes believe that human beings are good deep down?  And the stock price of United airlines has recovered.

3. Some U. Chicago professors list their favorite books.

4. The great cat and dog massacre.

5. Tyrone makes a guest appearance in this new MRU video on sticky wages.

6. Guy makes money farming in other people’s yards.

Friday assorted links

1. Who’s complacent?  Not St. George, Utah.

2. Review of David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere, quite an interesting book, most of all for the UK.

3. Kenneth Arrow was right about information being a public good: “David Pogue tested 47 pill-reminder apps to find the best.”  And two-year fellowships at Brookings.

4. Poor Russian families berate a store owner for handing out free bread.

5. Has Tinderization of the NBA improved road records?

6. Tyrone in 2006 on single-payer health insurance.

7. Glow sticks, yell leader, Rick Perry, Aggies, etc.

What3Words Mongolia

Earlier this year I wrote that every 3m*3m place on the face of the planet can now been addressed by just three words:

what3words has identified every one of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares on the entire planet with just three, easy to remember, words. My office, for example, not my building but my office, is token.oyster.whispering. Tyler’s office just down the hall is barons.huts.sneaky. (Especially easy to remember if you recall this is Tyrone’s office as well.)

Every location on the earth now has a fixed, easily-accessible and memorable address. Unpopulated places have addresses for the first time ever, of course, but now so do heavily populated places like favelas in Brazil where there are no roads or numbered houses. In principle, addressing could be done with latitude and longitude but that’s like trying to direct people to web sites with IP addresses–not good for humans.

The post office of Mongolia has just announced that they will use the system.

Mongolians will be the first to use the system for government mail delivery, but organizations including the United Nations, courier companies, and mapping firms like Navmii already use What3Words’ system.

Mongol Post is switching to the What3Words system because there are too few named streets in its territory. The mail network provides service over 1.5 million square km (580,000 square miles), an area that’s three times the size of Spain, though much of that area is uninhabited. Mongolia is among the world’s most sparsely populated countries, and about a quarter of its population is nomadic, according to the World Bank.

Even in the capital city of Ulaanbataar, not all streets are named. When people don’t have a street address, the current solution is for them to travel to a collection point to pick up their post, says Chris Sheldrick, the co-founder and chief executive of What3Words. People have to write a series of detailed directions, in addition to the address, so that mail-delivery people know where to drop off letters, Sheldrick say.