Sunday assorted links
1. Teenage Sonny Rollins had a crush on teenage Faith Ringgold (NYT).
2. GPT trained on MRU takes an MRU exam.
3. Against some recent theories of diet.
4. “The capsule — which is less than a third of an inch long — went missing somewhere along the more than 800-mile stretch of road between Newman and Perth, the department said. It contains cesium-137, a radioactive material used in gauges for mining, one of the main industries in resource-rich Western Australia.” Link here.
The Israeli attack on Iran, possibly on nuclear facilities and drone factories
Somehow MSM doesn’t want to tell you about this, it’s not currently mentioned on the front pages of NYT, WaPo, or the FT. Curious (no, the “Twitter files” did not surprise me in the least, rather they bored me). You can search Twitter for “Iran” and related terms, such as bunker-buster, noting the threads are full of “hallucinations.” The Jerusalem Post, however, did confirm the attacks with some modest coverage.
Okie-dokie, crypto-based fiscal policy edition
This study examines the impact of government financial assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for crypto assets and the effect of crypto interest on the stated goals of stimulus programs. Government lending to small businesses (PPP) significantly increased households’ interest in crypto assets. Using a Bartik instrumental variable for PPP distribution, we find that a one standard deviation increase in PPP disbursement is associated with an increase in crypto-related Google searches. A 100% percent increase in PPP disbursements is also accompanied by a 2% increased number of new wallets, 10% higher trading volume, 23% higher miners’ revenue, and a shift from large to small addresses, suggesting that government assistance increases the demand for cryptos, particularly among new, retail investors. We further find that about 5-14% of PPP loans are diverted to crypto assets, rendering PPP less effective in maintaining employment. Our results are stronger for MSAs with a less educated population, supporting a house money explanation.
That is from a new paper by Jeremy Bertomeu, Xiumin Martin, and Sheryl Zhang. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Medical markets in everything?
Or will they be thwarted?
To Nina McCollum, Cleveland Clinic’s decision to begin billing for some email correspondence between patients and doctors “was a slap in the face.”
She has relied on electronic communications to help care for her ailing 80-year-old mother, Penny Cooke, who is in need of specialized psychiatric treatment from the clinic. “Every 15 or 20 dollars matters, because her money is running out,” she said.
Electronic health communications and telemedicine have exploded in recent years, fueled by the coronavirus pandemic and relaxed federal rules on billing for these types of care. In turn, a growing number of health care organizations, including some of the nation’s major hospital systems like Cleveland Clinic, doctors’ practices and other groups, have begun charging fees for some responses to more time-intensive patient queries via secure electronic portals like MyChart.
…a new study shows that the fees, which some institutions say range from a co-payment of as little as $3 to a charge of $35 to $100, may be discouraging at least a small percentage of patients from getting medical advice via email. Some doctors say they are caught in the middle of the debate over the fees, and others raised concerns about the effects that the charges might have on health equity and access to care.
Demand curves do slope downward. And yet:
But a recent study led by Dr. Holmgren of data from Epic, a dominant electronic health records company, showed that the rate of patient emails to providers had increased by more than 50 percent in the last three years.
Perhaps there is a smidgen of room for AI here? But not under the current legal regime, I suspect. Here is the full Benjamin Ryan NYT article.
*Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes*
The author is Jerry Z. Muller, and I am sorry I did not have the chance to read this book last year when it came out. Taubes is one of the most underrated deep thinkers, and this is the definitive biography of him. Think of Taubes as a mid-twentieth century Germanic-Jewish but also partly Christian thinker who tried to integrate philosophy, theology, and science, yet without ever committing to a serious enough level of written investigation to have a chance of pulling that off. He nonetheless was capable of depth, and pearls of insight, that few other thinkers can pull off. From the biography, here is one of the more personal excerpts:
Some of Margherita’s friends wondered at the pairing. Some thought her more attracted to women than to men. The partners seemed so different. She had a fashion sense that Jacob lacked. She drove a white Alfa Romeo, while after his move to Berlin, Jacob did not drive at all. She was proper and reserved. Jacob was neither. Jacob was ironic, skeptical, and witty; Margherita more strict and earnest. Jacob had a mind that was explorative and associative, while Margherita did not. She was a dog lover, a not unusual taste among Germans of her background, but foreign to Jacob’s. She owned a small house in the Black Forest, to which she withdrew from time to time, a practice Jacob scorned as “Heideggerei.”
I had not known Susan Sontag was his research assistant. I am less surprised that he hung out with Cioran and Hans Blumenberg (both insufficiently read in the English-speaking world as well). This book is not for everyone (500 + pp. about a thinker you probably have not read), but it is for some people.
Saturday assorted links
1. Forthcoming Netflix movie: “They Cloned Tyrone.”
2. “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” by Roald Dahl 1954.
3. One account of how GPTs hallucinate.
4. More on MusicLM from Google. Yet Google won’t release the model.
5. An AI-generated image? This one is marginally not safe for work, though not at the very extreme.
6. In which Peter Thiel speaks to the Oxford Union and calls Greta Thunberg “complacent.” Good Q&A.
Text-to-4D dynamic scene generation
Find it here, via Ryan Watkins. Further improvement is required, but the pace of current breakthroughs is remarkable.
The voice of monetary policy
As I mentioned recently, a new version of the surveillance society is on its way:
We develop a deep learning model to detect emotions embedded in press conferences after the Federal Open Market Committee meetings and examine the influence of the detected emotions on financial markets. We find that, after controlling for the Federal Reserve’s actions and the sentiment in policy texts, a positive tone in the voices of Federal Reserve chairs leads to significant increases in share prices. Other financial variables also respond to vocal cues from the chairs. Hence, how policy messages are communicated can move the financial market. Our results provide implications for improving the effectiveness of central bank communications.
That is by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Tho Pham, and Oleksandr Talavera, and it is a new piece in the American Economic Review. This game of course has just started, and countermeasures will at some point arrive. You may recall I discussed exactly these possibilities in my 2013 book Average is Over.
The educational culture that is New Jersey
For four days, a 29-year-old woman pretended to be a student at a New Jersey public high school. She attended classes, spent time in the guidance office and collected phone numbers from teenagers who helped her find her way through the maze of hallways, according to students and a school official.
She continued to text former classmates days after the ruse was discovered last week, students said.
The woman, identified by the police as Hyejeong Shin, was arrested Tuesday and charged with providing documents that falsified her age to officials at New Brunswick Public Schools, a district with nearly 10,000 students in central New Jersey.
The incident, first reported by New Brunswick Today, has raised concerns about the safety protocols in place to verify student identities — and the woman’s reason for sneaking into a school that enrolls children as young as 15 in the first place.
Aubrey A. Johnson, the school superintendent, told board members Tuesday night that the district would be evaluating “how to better look for fake documentation and other things,” according to a video of the meeting shared on Twitter. Neither school nor police officials offered any information about a possible motive for her behavior.
Here is the full story, via tekl.
Friday assorted links
1. How much can economics explain medieval warfare?
2. Will India lose its oldest Chinatown?
3. What if you could talk to the Bible? (What again does the first Commandment say?)
5. An argument for Effective Altruism, maybe the best one?
6. Generating music from text commands? I know there is a lot of this b.s. going around, but this one is receiving positive reviews.
The medical culture that is Britain
Universities have been told they must limit the number of medical school places this year or risk fines, a move attacked as “extraordinary” when the NHS is struggling with staff shortages.
Medical schools have been told to curtail offers to ensure that there is “no risk” of them accepting more would-be doctors than permitted by a government cap, with universities saying they are likely to offer fewer places than normal to sixth-formers this year.
Ministers have been criticised for holding firm to a 7,500 cap on new medical students in England while also acknowledging that a chronic shortage of doctors and nurses is contributing to long delays for NHS treatment.
Robert Halfon, the universities minister, wrote to vice-chancellors last week telling them to limit their offers to sixth-formers, causing frustration among universities, which face fines of £100,000 per student for persistent over-recruitment. Universities say that in the summer, they were forced to reject students for administrative reasons such as submitting vaccine certificates late to stay within permitted numbers.
Here is more from the Times of London (gated). Perhaps Tyrone approves!
Indoor Air Quality and Learning
More on the surprisingly large effects of air pollution on cognition from Palacios, Eichholtz, Kok and Duran:
Governments devote a large share of public budgets to construct, repair, and modernize school facilities. However, evidence on whether investments in the physical state of schools translate into better student outcomes is scant. In this study, we report the results of a large field study on the implications of poor air quality inside classrooms − a key performance measure of school mechanical ventilation systems. We continuously monitor the air quality (i.e., CO2), together with a rich set of indoor environmental parameters in 216 classrooms in the Netherlands. We link indoor air quality conditions to the outcomes on semi-annual nationally standardized tests of 5,500 children, during a period of five school terms (from 2018 to 2020). Using a fixed-effects strategy, relying on within-pupil changes in air quality conditions and test results, we document that exposure to poor indoor air quality during the school term preceding a test is associated with significantly lower test results: a one standard deviation increase in the school-term average daily peak of CO2 leads to a 0.11 standard deviation decrease in subsequent test scores. The estimates based on plausibly exogenous variation driven by mechanical ventilation system breakdown events confirm the robustness of the results. Our results add to the ongoing debate on the determinants of student human capital accumulation, highlighting the role of school infrastructure in shaping learning outcomes.
Note that the authors have data on the same students in high and low pollution episodes, allowing them to control for a wide variety of other factors.
Here are previous MR posts on air pollution including Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible and our MRU video on the Hidden Costs of Air Pollution. Note that you can take lower bounds of these effects and still think we are not paying enough attention to the costs of air pollution.
What should I ask Jess Wade?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, and here is her work:
Wade, a research fellow at Imperial College London, centers her work on Raman spectroscopy, a technique often employed in chemistry to identify molecules, among other uses. She has received several awards for her scientific contributions, and her Wikipedia page is robust with her many achievements.
Here is a good interview with her. And from The Washington Post:
Since 2017, Wade has written more than 1,750 Wikipedia pages for female and minority scientists and engineers whose accomplishments were not documented on the site.
Here is her own Wikipedia page. So what should I ask her?
Are macroeconomic models true only “locally”?
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It is possible, contrary to the predictions of most economists, that the US will get through this disinflationary period and make the proverbial “soft landing.” This should prompt a more general reconsideration of macroeconomic forecasts.
The lesson is that they have a disturbing tendency to go wrong. It is striking that Larry Summers was right two years ago to warn about pending inflationary pressures in the US economy, when most of his colleagues were wrong. Yet Summers may yet prove to be wrong about his current warning about the looming threat of a recession. The point is that both his inflation and recession predictions stem from the same underlying aggregate demand model.
You will note that yesterday’s gdp report came in at 2.9%, hardly a poor performance. And more:
It is understandable when a model is wrong because of some big and unexpected shock, such as the war in Ukraine. But that is not the case here. The US might sidestep a recession for mysterious reasons specific to the aggregate demand model. The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy has indeed been tighter, and disinflations usually bring high economic costs.
It gets more curious yet. Maybe Summers will turn out to be right about a recession. When recessions arrive, it is often quite suddenly. Consulting every possible macroeconomic theory may be of no help.
Or consider the 1990s. President Bill Clinton believed that federal deficits were too high and were crowding out private investment. The Treasury Department worked with a Republican Congress on a package of fiscal consolidation. Real interest rates fell, and the economy boomed — but that is only the observed correlation. The true causal story remains murky.
Two of the economists behind the Clinton package, Summers and Bradford DeLong, later argued against fiscal consolidation, even during the years of full employment under President Donald Trump [and much higher national debt]. The new worry instead was secular stagnation based on insufficient demand, even though the latter years of the Trump presidency saw debt and deficits well beyond Clinton-era levels.
The point here is not to criticize Summers and DeLong as inconsistent. Rather, it is to note they might have been right both times.
And what about that idea of secular stagnation — the notion that the world is headed for a period of little to no economic growth? The theory was based in part on the premise that global savings were high relative to investment opportunities. Have all those savings gone away? In most places, measured savings rose during the pandemic. Yet the problem of insufficient demand has vanished, and so secular stagnation theories no longer seem to apply.
To be clear, the theory of secular stagnation might have been true pre-pandemic. And it may yet return as a valid concern if inflation and interest rates return to pre-pandemic levels. The simple answer is that no one knows.
Note that Olivier Blanchard just wrote a piece “Secular Stagnation is Not Over,” well-argued as usual. Summers, however, has opined: “we’ll not return to the era of secular stagnation.” I was not present, but I can assume this too was well-argued as usual!
Erika Fatland’s *High*
The subtitle is A Journey Across the Himalaya Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China. This is the first great book of 2023, at least that I have seen. Bravo! Travel books are hard to summarize, but I will note that most of them are bad or at best mediocre. They assume you care about the author’s adjectives, or that the interesting nature of experienced events will translate automatically to the page. This work, in contrast, is a wonderful blend of fact, history, political observation, and narrative. I read every page, and it would likely make my list of my favorite thirty travel books of all time. Here is the author’s home page, she is by background a Norwegian anthropologist who speaks eight languages.