Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients

by  Tyler Cowen in

Long-term complications after coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are common in hospitalized patients, but the spectrum of symptoms in milder cases needs further investigation. We conducted a long-term follow-up in a prospective cohort study of 312 patients—247 home-isolated and 65 hospitalized—comprising 82% of total cases in Bergen during the first pandemic wave in Norway. At 6 months, 61% (189/312) of all patients had persistent symptoms, which were independently associated with severity of initial illness, increased convalescent antibody titers and pre-existing chronic lung disease. We found that 52% (32/61) of home-isolated young adults, aged 16–30 years, had symptoms at 6 months, including loss of taste and/or smell (28%, 17/61), fatigue (21%, 13/61), dyspnea (13%, 8/61), impaired concentration (13%, 8/61) and memory problems (11%, 7/61). Our findings that young, home-isolated adults with mild COVID-19 are at risk of long-lasting dyspnea and cognitive symptoms highlight the importance of infection control measures, such as vaccination.

That is from a new Nature paper by Bjørn Blomberg, et.al. Via SK.  On vaccinating the young, here are further relevant observations from Francois Balloux.

The economics of peer review

by  Tyler Cowen in

Springer-Nature, the Anglo-German publisher of the world’s leading scientific journal Nature, announced in 2017 that in some of its publications it was censoring articles that used words like “Taiwan”, “Tibet” and “cultural revolution”, when printing in China.

In April 2020 Nature ran an editorial apologising for its “error” in “associating the virus with Wuhan” in its news coverage.

…The magazines that publish scientific papers have become increasingly dependent on the fees that Chinese scientists pay to publish in them, plus advertisements from Chinese firms and subscriptions from Chinese institutions. In recent years observers have noticed that the news coverage of China in these magazines has begun to look a little less objective than it once did.

Here is the full Matt Ridley piece.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Noah Smith interviews @pmarca.

2. Glad to see so many economists waking up to the potential tyranny of administrative law (in Spanish).  If there should be a jury trial for anything, it is sedition.

3. Early days of the comic book industry.  And the rise of the $10 million disc golf celebrity.

4.  Way back when, the major Keynesians endorsed Nixon’s wage and price controls.  Sigh…

5. Free Britney Spears!  Really (NYT).  “Ms. Spears, 39, expressed serious opposition to the conservatorship earlier and more often than had previously been known, and said that it restricted everything from whom she dated to the color of her kitchen cabinets.”  Now imagine being in this same position without her fame and her (only partially controlled) resources.  I find it remarkable how little our world cares about this issue.

6. “This looks like a post-apocalyptic scene from a Cinderella nightmare, but these faux chateaux are real!“

How and why is Conquest’s Second Law true?

by  Tyler Cowen in

“Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Additional forces strengthen Conquest’s Second Law. Educational polarization increasingly characterizes U.S. politics, with more educated Americans more likely to vote Democratic. Those same Americans are also likely to run nonprofits or major corporations, which would partially explain the ideological migration of those institutions.

There are, of course, numerous U.S. institutions that have maintained or even extended a largely right-wing slant, including many police forces, significant parts of the military, and many Protestant Evangelical churches. Those institutions tend to have lower educational requirements, and so they are not always so influential in the media, compared to many left-wing institutions.

Furthermore, the military and police are supposed to keep out of politics, and so their slant to the right is less noticeable, although no less real. The left is simply more prominent in mass media, so Conquest’s Second Law appears to be truer than it really is. (Note that by definition the law excludes explicitly right-wing media.)

And:

The common thread to these explanations is that left-wing views find it easier to win in spheres of reporting, talk and rhetoric — and that those tendencies strengthen over time.

It follows that, if Conquest’s Second Law is true, societies are more right-wing than they appear. Furthermore, it is the intelligentsia itself that is most likely to deluded about this, living as it does in the world of statements and proclamations. It is destined to be repeatedly surprised at how “barbarian” American society is.

There is also a significant strand of right-wing thought, most notably in opposition to Marxism, that stresses the immutable realities of human nature, and that people change only so much in response to their environments. So all that left-wing talk doesn’t have to result in an entirely left-wing society.

Conservatives thus should be able to take some comfort in Conquest’s Second Law. They may find the discourse suffocating at times. But there is more to life than just talk — and that, for liberals as well as conservatives, should be counted as one of life’s saving graces.

Racial segregation is increasing in many parts of America

by  Tyler Cowen in

Some of the nation’s largest metropolitan regions have become increasingly segregated in the last 30 years, underscoring racial inequalities that have led to poorer life outcomes in Black and brown neighborhoods, according to a study released Monday by the University of California Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute.

The study found that 81% of regions with more than 200,000 residents were more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990, despite fair housing laws and policies created to promote integration.

Some of the most segregated areas included Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit in the Midwest and New York, northern New Jersey and Philadelphia in the mid-Atlantic.

Conversely, large metropolitan regions that saw the biggest decrease in segregation included Savannah, Georgia, San Antonio and Miami.

Here is the full story, exactly as I argued in my earlier book The Complacent Class.  Via Ilya Novak.  And from the study, don’t forget this:

Southern states have lower overall levels of segregation, and the Mountain West and Plains states have the least

Ouch…!

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Updated data on unicorns, including Chinese numbers.

2. Those new Indian service sector jobs: A CCTV Company Is Paying Remote Workers in India to Yell at Armed Robbers.  And Stalin’s Economic Council.

3. NYT profile of Emily Oster.

4. What is ranked-choice voting, and why is NYC using it?

5. More arguments about Tether and crypto stability.

6. Why are so many people writing about social epistemology?

7. Happiness researcher Edward Diener has passed away (NYT).

New York Fact of the Day

by  Alex Tabarrok in

NYTimes: New York City built only 163,000 units of housing in the 2010s, fewer than the 205,000 created in the 1930s, during and after the Great Depression, according to a city report. From 2009 to 2018, the New York metro region added 0.5 units of housing for every new job, down from 2.2 units per job in the previous decade.

The article continues:

In December, a New York Supreme Court judge annulled the city’s rezoning plan for Inwood…The Inwood plan would have increased the allowable height and density in parts of the neighborhood, which could have brought 3,900 new units to the area, including 1,600 below-market apartments, according to the Department of City Planning. The city is appealing the decision.

The judge agreed that the city’s environmental review process, which aims to measure the impact of development, did not adequately study a number of concerns, including the risk of racial displacement and the effect of speculative development on local businesses, many of which can be more valuable to landlords as land sales.

This is another illustration of how collective decision making impedes innovation. Neither judges nor regulators should be making these “balancing” decisions which politicizes and creates veto players who can dam innovation at low-cost to themselves. Decisions about when and where to build should by left to the spontaneous order operating under the principles of private property and the rule of law.

Look at this nonsense and imagine if every decision had to be so studied for every group and interest that one could possibly imagine:

“They don’t have to study the racial impact? That’s ridiculous,” said Michael Sussman, the petitioners’ attorney, who argued that speculation would have an outsize impact on minority residents in the area, many of whom live in rent-regulated apartments.

Milton Friedman was once a Keynesian

by  Tyler Cowen in

In the early 1940s, Friedman’s own analysis of monetary policy adhered closely to the dismissive tone prevalent in much other Keynesian literature of that vintage.  His solo-authored contribution to 1943’s Taxing to Prevent Inflation, written while he was at the Treasury, plotted growth rates of the nominal money stock and nominal income for the United States for the period 1899-1929.  To the modern reader, the scatter plot in Friedman’s paper indicates that the monetary growth/income relationship is clearly positive, and reasonably tight by the standards of rate-of-change data.  That was not, however, the judgment Friedman reached in his 1943 paper, in which he concluded instead that the relationship was “extremely unstable.”

That is from p.95 of the recent Edward Nelson two-volume set on Milton Friedman — one of the best books written on any economist!

USA fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen

The average U.S. customer loses power for 214 minutes per year. That compares to 70 in the United Kingdom, 53 in France, 29 in the Netherlands, 6 in Japan, and 2 minutes per year in Singapore. These outage durations tell only part of the story. In Japan, the average customer loses power once every 20 years. In the United States, it is once every 9 months, excluding hurricanes and other strong storms.

Here is the full article, via Ray Lopez.

What crypto people get wrong

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

If anything, crypto is more likely to hurt the currencies of countries that are doing very poorly, such as Venezuela. Fiat currency won’t just go away, so over the long run crypto could actually boost the value of the dollar by stifling the rise of potential competitors.

A second point, oft neglected in the crypto community, is that crypto prices won’t continue to go up forever at high rates. It doesn’t matter whether money supply deflation is built into a crypto system, or that new and valuable uses will be discovered each year. At some point the market will figure out the value of crypto and incorporate that information into a high level of price for those assets. From then on, expected rates of return will be — dare I say — normal.

Compare the crypto market to the art market, which for a long time didn’t grasp the potential value of an Andy Warhol painting. For years, prices went up a lot. At this point, however, a liquid market remains, and the expected value of an investment in Warhol is not necessarily better or worse than the value of an investment in other well-known works of art.

It is an entirely defensible (albeit contested) view that the market still hasn’t appreciated the full value of crypto. This state of affairs may yet endure for some while, but it will not last for decades.

The irony is that so many of the arguments made by crypto types imply especially low pecuniary rates of return on crypto. To the extent crypto is useful as collateral or for liquidity purposes, people will be more willing to hold crypto at lower pecuniary rates of return, just as they are willing to hold cash, or just as the collateral uses for U.S. Treasury bonds raise their price and lower their expected rates of return.

If we eventually arrive at a world in which equities are expected to rise by say 5% to 7% a year, and Bitcoin by say 1%, then that will be a sign crypto has made it. The more general point is that while crypto has been a highly unusual asset class for its entire history, it won’t act like an unusual asset class forever.

And this:

Satoshi and Vitalik Buterin are not only significant innovators, but also the two most important monetary economists of our time.

Recommended.