What is *the best* time zone for global work and Zoom?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and my answer is Ireland and the UK (Portugal too).  Excerpt:

West Coast meetings are trickier. But if you don’t take any past 2 p.m., they’re still manageable. Keep in mind that a lot of technology types start their day at 7 a.m. or earlier, precisely because they are trying to more closely match East Coast hours. So the nominal time difference might be eight hours, but due to work norms you get about an hour and a half of that back, leading to what is in effect a six-and-a-half-hour time difference between your Cotswolds chateau and that conference room in Seattle.

And:

I, for one, prefer to be working in the British time zone, even though most of my commitments are on U.S. East Coast time. For one thing, I have mornings largely to myself. Emails have accumulated while I slept, but there is little pressure to answer most of them right away. Americans on the East Coast are sleeping; if they’re on the West Coast, they will soon be preparing for bed.

Call it an illusion if you wish. But sitting in Dublin with my computer, it feels like I am several hours ahead of everybody else. By the time the email and meeting onslaughts arrive, I’ve already gotten a lot done.

And if you believe in “money illusion,” you might not like that half hour trick they pull in India.  As a side note, you might wish to consider the times global chess tournaments are held (often starting 10 or 11 a.m. EST), or for that matter when pre-written MR posts pop up in the morning, namely between midnight and three a.m. EST.  You will again see a lot of catering to what I view as “the dominant time zone,” that of London.

Herding, Warfare, and a Culture of Honor

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of a new and important paper by Yiming Cao, Benjamin Enke, Armin Falk, Paula Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn, here is the abstract:

According to the widely known ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records, historical folklore information, global data on contemporary conflict events, and large-scale surveys. The data show systematic links between traditional herding practices and a culture of honor. First, the culture of pre-industrial societies that relied on animal herding emphasizes violence, punishment, and revenge-taking. Second, contemporary ethnolinguistic groups that historically subsisted more strongly on herding have more frequent and severe conflict today. Third, the contemporary descendants of herders report being more willing to take revenge and punish unfair behavior in the globally representative Global Preferences Survey. In all, the evidence supports the idea that this form of economic subsistence generated a functional psychology that has persisted until today and plays a role in shaping conflict across the globe.

The appendices, figures, and the like are much longer than the paper itself.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Douglas Irwin on South Korean economic growth and its origins.

2. Interview with a Michelin restaurant inspector.

3. “How Does the World Bank Influence the Development Policy Priorities of Low-Income and Lower-Middle-Income Countries?”

4. Birds took advantage of the lockdown.

5. Sensible take on China and Evergrande.

6. A skeptical take on lab-grown meat.  I have myself long been a skeptic on this one.

7. Does San Francisco need to design its own trash cans?

Saloons of Invention

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I was taken aback by the bottom line of Mike Andrews new working paper Bar Talk: closing the saloons during prohibition reduced patenting by ~15%. At first, I thought that seemed like a very large decline but bear in mind that saloons were the coffeehouses of the day devoted not just to drinking but to meeting, talking and learning. Indeed, they were much more common than coffeehouses today:

Saloons were once everywhere in America, from urban alleys to rural crossroads. They were about more than drinking; from the 1860s through 1920, they dominated social life for the laboring majority building a new industrial nation. By 1897 there were roughly a quarter of a million saloons, or 23 for every Starbucks franchise today.

…Saloons became salons, where survivors of the Industrial Revolution could drink and debate, politick and speechify.

The saloons also often combined social aspects with a mailbox depot, telegraph or telephone, and a payday lender so they were good places to talk shop.

Andrew’s compares countries that were forced dry by state prohibition laws with previously dry counties, so the estimates are local and from across the country. He has significant patent data including the location of inventors and a variety of important robustness tests. Women, for example, didn’t typically patronize the saloons but also continued to patent at similar rates in wet and dry counties. After taking it all in the results are large but plausible! Here’s the abstract to the paper:

To understand the importance of informal social interactions for invention, I examine a massive and involuntary disruption of informal social networks from U.S. history: alcohol prohibition. The enactment of state-level prohibition laws differentially treated counties depending on whether those counties were wet or dry prior to prohibition. After the imposition of state-level prohibition, previously wet counties had 8-18% fewer patents per year relative to consistently dry counties. The effect was largest in the first three years after the imposition of prohibition and rebounds thereafter. The effect was smaller for groups that were less likely to frequent saloons, namely women and particular ethnic groups. Next, I use the imposition of prohibition to document the sensitivity of collaboration patterns to shocks to the informal social network. As individuals rebuilt their networks following prohibition, they connected with new individuals and patented in new technology classes. Thus, while prohibition had only a temporary effect on the rate of invention, it had a lasting effect on the direction of inventive activity. Finally, I exploit the imposition of prohibition to show that informal and formal interactions are complements in the invention production function.

How the game of *Life* evolved

by  Tyler Cowen in

The game underwent numerous updates over the years. The early emphasis on money to determine the winner had been “indicative of what sold in that era,” George Burtch, the former vice president of marketing for Hasbro, which acquired Milton Bradley in 1984, said in a phone interview.

As times changed, so did the game, with players encountering midlife crises and being rewarded for good deeds, like recycling the trash and helping homeless people.

“Reuben was very receptive to the changes — in fact he was often the impetus for them — because he was a businessman,” Mr. Burtch said.

“He understood that the Game of Life was not just the game that he invented; it was a brand,” he added. “And for a brand to remain viable, it has to evolve. It has to reflect the market conditions of the time.”

But as Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2007, the redesign teams always had a hard time addressing the fundamental criticism of the game — that the only way to reward a player for virtuous acts was with money: “Save an Endangered Species: Collect $200,000. Solution to Pollution: $250,000. Open Health-Food Chain: $100,000.”

And so the company’s 2007 overhaul, the Game of Life: Twists & Turns, was almost existential. Instead of putting players on a fixed path, it provided multiple ways to start out in life — but nowhere to finish. “This is actually the game’s selling point; it has no goal,” Ms. Lepore wrote. “Life is … aimless.”

That is from an excellent NYT obituary of Reuben Klamer, who invented the game of Life, in addition to numerous other achievements.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Vitalik Buterin fellowships in existential safety.

2. I wanted to send this article to someone, yet no one is really an appropriate recipient, so I am putting it here (NYT).

3. Chess problem of attacking Queens is solved.

4. Memorial to a Swedish life.  Very good (and sad).

5. The rise of the biohacker (FT, the framing is excessively negative, but an interesting piece nonetheless).

6. Yes taxes really do matter (Mankiw).

7. New (free Kindle) book: The Essential UCLA School of Economics.

My Conversation with Amia Srinivasan

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am pleased to have had the chance to do this, as in my view she is one of the thinkers today who has a) super smarts, b) breadth and depth of reading, and c) breadth and depth of thinking.  That combination is rare!  That said, I don’t quite agree with her on everything, so this exchange had more disagreements than perhaps what you are used to sampling from CWT.

Here is the transcript and audio.  Here is part of the CWT summary:

Amia joined Tyler to discuss the importance of context in her vision of feminism, what social conservatives are right about, why she’s skeptical about extrapolating from the experience of women in Nordic countries, the feminist critique of the role of consent in sex, whether disabled individuals should be given sex vouchers, how to address falling fertility rates, what women learned about egalitarianism during the pandemic, why progress requires regress, her thoughts on Susan Sontag, the stroke of fate that stopped her from pursuing a law degree, the “profound dialectic” in Walt Whitman’s poetry, how Hinduism has shaped her metaphysics, how Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit influenced her, the anarchic strain in her philosophy, why she calls herself a socialist, her next book on genealogy, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

SRINIVASAN: No, it really wouldn’t. Part of why I find this whole discourse problematic is because I think we should be suspicious when we find ourselves attracted to data — very, very thin and weak data — that seem to justify beliefs that have held great currency in lots of societies throughout history, in a way that is conducive to the oppression of large segments of the population, in this particular case women.

I also think one error that is consistently made in this discourse, in this kind of conversation about what’s innate or what’s natural, is to think about what’s natural in terms of what’s necessary. This is a point that Shulamith Firestone made a very long time ago, but that very few people register, which is that — and it was actually made again to me recently by a philosopher of biology, which is, “Look what’s natural isn’t what’s necessary.”

It’s extraordinary. It’s not even like what’s natural offers a good equilibrium point. Think about how much time you and I spend sitting around. Completely unnatural for humans to sit around, yet we’re in this equilibrium point where vast majority of humans just sit around all day.

So, I think there’s a separate question about what humans — as essentially social, cultured, acculturating creatures — what our world should look like. And that’s distinct from the question of what natural predispositions we might have. It’s not unrelated, but I don’t think any of us think we should just be forming societies that simply allow us to express our most “natural orientations.”

COWEN: Should women’s chess, as a segregated activity, continue to exist? We don’t segregate chess tournaments by race or by anything — sometimes by age — but anything other than gender. Yet women’s chess is a whole separate thing. Should that be offensive to us? Or is that great?

Recommended, engaging throughout.  And again, here is Amia Srinivasan’s new and (in the UK, just published yesterday in the U.S.) bestselling book The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century.

One Billion Vaccinations in a Month!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The news on world vaccinations is good. As of late September of 2021 we have vaccinated 3.43 billion people (2.51 billion people with 2 doses). Even more impressive over the last 30 days the world vaccinated one billion people. That is a tremendous achievement. There are about 7.9 billion people in the world so 44% of the world has had at least one dose and nearly a third of the world population has  had two doses. We are on track to fully vaccinate 70% of all adults in 2021 and most of the world that wants a dose by early 2022. Judging by the US, demand will be more of a constraint than supply as we hit ~60% of the world population.

The NYTimes on the FDA and Rapid Tests

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In July of 2020 I wrote in Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive:

A number of firms have developed cheap, paper-strip tests for coronavirus that report results at-home in about 15 minutes but they have yet to be approved for use by the FDA because the FDA appears to be demanding that all tests reach accuracy levels similar to the PCR test. This is another deadly FDA mistake.

…The PCR tests can discover virus at significantly lower concentration levels than the cheap tests but that extra sensitivity doesn’t matter much in practice. Why not? First, at the lowest levels that the PCR test can detect, the person tested probably isn’t infectious. The cheap test is better at telling whether you are infectious than whether you are infected but the former is what we need to know to open schools and workplaces.

It’s great that other people including the NYTimes are now understanding the problem. Here is the excellent David Leonhardt in Where are the Tests?

Other experts are also criticizing the Biden administration for its failure to expand rapid testing. Even as President Biden has followed a Covid policy much better aligned with scientific evidence than Donald Trump’s, Biden has not broken through some of the bureaucratic rigidity that has hampered the U.S. virus response.

In the case of rapid tests, the F.D.A. has loosened its rules somewhat over the past year, allowing the sale of some antigen tests (which often cost about $12 each). But drugstores, Amazon and other sellers have now largely run out of them. I tried to buy rapid tests this weekend and couldn’t find any.

The F.D.A.’s process for approving rapid tests is “onerous” and “inappropriate,” Daniel Oran and Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Research wrote in Stat News.

For the most part, the F.D.A. still uses the same cumbersome process for approving Covid tests that it uses for high-tech medical devices. To survive that process, the rapid tests must demonstrate that they are nearly as sensitive as P.C.R. tests, which they are not.

But rapid tests do not need to be so sensitive to be effective, experts point out. P.C.R. tests often identify small amounts of the Covid virus in people who had been infected weeks earlier and are no longer contagious. Rapid tests can miss these cases while still identifying about 98 percent of cases in which a person is infectious, according to Dr. Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist who has been advocating for more testing

Identifying anywhere close to 98 percent of infectious cases would sharply curb Covid’s spread. An analysis in the journal Science Advances found that test frequency matters more for reducing Covid cases than test sensitivity.

As I said on twitter what makes the FDA’s failure to approve more rapid antigen tests especially galling is that some of the tests being sold cheaply in Europe are American tests just ones not approved in the United States. If it’s good enough for the Germans it’s good enough for me!

How economists use gdp to think

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one bit:

An appreciation of GDP helps keep things in perspective. Say there is some social or economic trend you dislike or think dangerous. One inclination would be to try to visualize that trend as a share of GDP. Most things are a pretty small fraction of GDP, reflecting the scope and the robustness of the U.S. economy. In one sense America is a vast and sprawling system of shopping malls, restaurants, factories, coffee shops, construction sites, art galleries, and much, much more.

So even if the social or economic trend you find disturbing is in fact a bad thing, America — as defined by its GDP — will proceed unperturbed. People who get annoyed at small changes in America tend not to appreciate the true magnitude of America’s GDP. This also works the other way: The latest positive trend may also take a long time to truly affect GDP.

And more concretely:

The GDP comparison is especially apt for large changes which will cost a noticeable percentage of GDP. Consider climate change. The instinct of the economist is to try to pin down exactly what these costs are as a percentage of global and national GDP.

One recent estimate suggests that climate change is likely to destroy about 10% of global welfare (a GDP effect plus an amenities effect) by the year 2200. To the economist, that is a truly significant quantity of resources. Furthermore, the distribution of those losses may be unfair — and just how unfair is more easily judged if one has a sense of the magnitudes involved.

The upshot is that, all of a sudden, it is pretty easy to see that a system of carbon pricing and R&D subsidies is very likely to more than pay for itself, at least if the policies are executed with reasonable competence.

Climate change is a difficult topic to study and predict, and I am far from sure that percentage estimate is the right number. Nonetheless, it is an important step in mapping some structure onto the problem. As an economist, I am skeptical of analysis that doesn’t try to produce any number at all. Once you understand the size and scope of GDP, you understand that any list of climate disasters that destroyed 10% of GDP would be a very long list of disasters.

I was struck by a recent 10-country study showing the fears of young people about climate change. Four in 10 are afraid to have children. Almost half said that fears about climate change caused them stress and anxiety in their daily lives.

Economics also helps to put these worries in perspective. If the costs of climate change are 10% of global welfare, that is roughly equal to a few years of (non-pandemic) global economic growth. The world economy plausibly can be expected to grow about 3% a year. These kinds of simple points are missing from most climate change debates, again noting the need for better estimates of the actual forthcoming costs.

Overall thinking in terms of gdp I consider to be relatively scarce.

Claims about columns

by  Tyler Cowen in

Like I said, I never wanted to be a columnist, but no one did when I started back in 2000. Sure, there were columnists around then, some of whom still write for the Guardian (Jonathan Freedland, Martin Kettle, Polly Toynbee), some of whom sadly don’t (Martin Wollacott, Hugo Young). But column-writing was seen as something of a private members’ club: elitist, dusty and distant. Back then, young journalists wanted the fun, scrappy jobs: investigative reporter, music reviewer, features writer. But ever since the rise of blogging culture in the 2000s, when anyone with an Apple PowerBook (RIP) could knock out a column, pretty much every aspiring journalist I’ve met has told me they want to be a columnist. Stating your opinion online has become the definitive way of saying who you are, so of course more people want columns. Yet, here’s a funny thing: I can’t recall a single day – and there were thousands – that I spent sitting at my desk writing a column. I can, however, recall going to the Oscars to cover them, or the weekend I spent with Judy Blume to interview her. Columns pump up the ego, but going out and finding stories is a lot more fun.

That is from Hadley Freeman at The Guardian, who it seems is quitting…as a columnist but not as a writer.  I also would stress the role of social media in this.  Everyone can have an opinion about a column, so this makes the Opinion section far more central to a newspaper, and not necessarily for the better.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Comprehensive look at why the labor share of income is declining.

2. “Our results indicate that higher education liberalizes moral concerns for most students, but it also departs from the standard liberal profile by promoting moral absolutism rather than relativism. These effects are strongest for individuals majoring in the humanities, arts, or social sciences, and for students pursuing graduate studies.”  Link here.

3. New evidence of continuing vaccine effectiveness.  And the very good sense of Ross Douthat on Covid (NYT).

4. Learning through Substack.

5. Valerio Olgiati, architect (and Kanye West).

6. Balding on submarines and Evergrande.

7. Democrats’ agenda continuing to shrink.