What we learned doing Fast Grants
Here is my new piece with Patrick Collison and Patrick Hsu. The title says it all, here is one excerpt:
…we recently ran a survey of Fast Grants recipients, asking how much their Fast Grant accelerated their work. 32% said that Fast Grants accelerated their work by “a few months”, which is roughly what we were hoping for at the outset given that the disease was killing thousands of Americans every single day.
In addition to that, however, 64% of respondents told us that the work in question wouldn’t have happened without receiving a Fast Grant.
For example, SalivaDirect, the highly successful spit test from Yale University, was not able to get timely funding from its own School of Public Health, even though Yale has an endowment of over $30 billion. Fast Grants also made numerous grants to UC Berkeley researchers, and the UC Berkeley press office itself reported in May 2020: “One notably absent funder, however, is the federal government. While federal agencies have announced that researchers can apply to repurpose existing funds toward Covid-19 research and have promised new emergency funds to projects focused on the pandemic, disbursement has been painfully slow. …Despite many UC Berkeley proposals submitted to the National Institutes of Health since the pandemic began, none have been granted.” [Emphasis ours.]
And:
57% of respondents told us that they spend more than one quarter of their time on grant applications. This seems crazy. We spend enormous effort training scientists who are then forced to spend a significant fraction of their time seeking alms instead of focusing on the research they’ve been hired to pursue.
The adverse consequences of our funding apparatus appear to be more insidious than the mere imposition of bureaucratic overhead, however.
In our survey of the scientists who received Fast Grants, 78% said that they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent in an unconstrained fashion. We find this number to be far too high: the current grant funding apparatus does not allow some of the best scientists in the world to pursue the research agendas that they themselves think are best.
And:
Some of the other Fast Grants investments were speculative, and may (or may not) pay dividends in the future, or for the next pandemic. Examples include:
- Work on a possible pan-coronavirus vaccine at Caltech.
- Work on a possible pan-enterovirus (another class of RNA virus) drug at Stanford University that has now raised subsequent funding.
- Multiple grants going to different labs working on CRISPR-based COVID-19 at-home testing. One example is smartphone-based COVID-19 detection, being worked on at UC Berkeley and Gladstone Institutes.
Self-recommending…
A recent common cold may confer partial Covid-19 protection
Initial replication of SARS-CoV-2 in the upper respiratory tract is required to establish infection, and the replication level correlates with the likelihood of viral transmission. Here, we examined the role of host innate immune defenses in restricting early SARS-CoV-2 infection using transcriptomics and biomarker-based tracking in serial patient nasopharyngeal samples and experiments with airway epithelial organoids. SARS-CoV-2 initially replicated exponentially, with a doubling time of ∼6 h, and induced interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs) in the upper respiratory tract, which rose with viral replication and peaked just as viral load began to decline. Rhinovirus infection before SARS-CoV-2 exposure accelerated ISG responses and prevented SARSCoV-2 replication. Conversely, blocking ISG induction during SARS-CoV-2 infection enhanced viral replication from a low infectious dose. These results show that the activity of ISG-mediated defenses at the time of SARS-CoV-2 exposure impacts infection progression and that the heterologous antiviral response induced by a different virus can protect against SARS-CoV-2.
That is a just published paper, supported by Fast Grants, by Nagarjuna R. Cheemarla, Timothy A. Watkins, Valia T. Mihaylova, Bao Wang, Dejian Zhao, Guilin Wang, Marie L. Landry, and Ellen F. Foxman.
Tuesday assorted links
1. What would one-dimensional chess look like?
2. Very high implicit marginal tax rates for poor people (link fixed).
3. Very good Jason Furman thread on inflation uncertainty.
4. The power of median inflation.
5. Buy shares in your favorite musicians?
6. Andreu Mas-Colell is in trouble for secessionary activities. And more from Pol Antras. Hans Peter Grüner says: “It is hard to imagine that someone capable of writing such a wonderful textbook could have done anything that makes him deserve that kind of treatment.”
Incentives for Organ Donation
Lottery tickets for vaccination seems to have been reasonably succesful. What else could we use incentives for? Al Roth sends us to kidney surgeon Arthur Matas’s argument for testing incentives for organ donation:
A regulated system of incentives for donation could provide a sizable increase in the number of kidneys available for transplant. Yet incentives for kidney donation are illegal in the US.
…Initially, the concept of incentives for living donation can be unsettling (some have said “repugnant”4). Yet ethicists worldwide have argued that there is no ethical reason to prohibit incentives. And studies show that the public is in favor of incentives. Additionally, dialysis is more expensive than transplant; a regulated system of incentives would be cost saving to the health care system.We accept kidney donation. Any successful argument against incentivized donation must be able to differentiate it from our currently accepted conventional donation. Notably, incentives are legal for plasma, sperm, and egg donation or surrogate motherhood, and certainly there are risks involved with egg donation and surrogate motherhood. Gill and Sade5 argue that the only difference between donating and selling is monetary self-interest, and monetary self-interest alone does not warrant legal prohibition.
It is time to move past the feelings that incentives are wrong to the reality that as a result of a potentially preventable shortage of organs, patients on the waiting list are dying or becoming too sick to transplant….It is time for professional societies and patient groups to advocate for changing the law to allow trials of incentives for donation.
See many previous posts at MR on organ donation and blood donation.
Roger Scruton Hungarian coffee shop markets in everything
When the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton died last year Boris Johnson called him “the greatest modern conservative thinker”.
It seems that he had an even greater admirer in Viktor Orban, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary, whose allies have poured £1.5 million into a chain of coffee shops in Scruton’s memory. The first opened in November in Budapest and is filled with Scruton memorabilia donated by his widow, Sophie.
More cafés will follow, says John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher who now chairs a Hungarian think tank. The £1.5 million investment comes from the state-sponsored Batthyany foundation, which also paid for the historian Norman Stone to write a history of Hungary that praised Orban’s leadership.
Here is the full link from the London Times (gated). For the pointer I thank Jason D.
Has Uncovered Interest Parity been resolved?
For a long time it was wondered whether excess returns were available from investing in the higher nominal interest rate albeit riskier currencies. After all, what was truly the population rather than the sample risk? Perhaps this is the closest we will come to answering those questions:
We document five novel facts about Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP) deviations vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar for 34 currencies of advanced economies and emerging markets. First, the UIP premium co-moves with global risk aversion (VIX) for all currencies, whereas only for emerging market currencies there is a negative comovement between the UIP premium and capital inflows. Second, the comovement of the UIP premium and the VIX is explained by changes in interest rate differentials in emerging markets, and by expected changes in exchange rates in advanced countries. Third, country risk measured by the degree of policy uncertainty can explain both the negative comovement of the UIP premium with capital inflows and the positive comovement of the UIP premium with VIX going through interest rate differentials in emerging markets. Fourth, there are no overshooting and predictability reversal puzzles—for any currency—when using exchange rate expectations to calculate the UIP premium. Fifth, the classical Fama puzzle disappears in advanced economies in expectations, but it remains for emerging markets. As a result, while global investors expect zero excess returns and earn positive returns in the short-run and negative returns in the long-run by investing in advanced country currencies, the same global investors always expect and earn positive excess returns from emerging market currencies. These results imply that in advanced countries the UIP premium is largely due to deviations from rational expectations and full information, whereas in emerging markets, the UIP premium is a risk premium. Global investors charge an “excess” premium to compensate for policy uncertainty in emerging markets —a premium that is over and above the expected and actual depreciation of these currencies.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Ṣebnem Kalemli-Özcan and Liliana Varela.
Fully public tax information?
Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages. A key insight is that employers credibly refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others under transparency.
Here is the paper by Zoe B. Cullen and Bobak Paksad-Hurson, which focuses on pay transparency, not taxes per se.
Monday assorted links
Mission Protocol
Business is the most important way in which human beings cooperate. In his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire explained to his French compatriots how the British had achieved religious toleration by focusing on business:
Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.
What Voltaire understood is that if diverse people are to cooperate they must focus on their common interest and leave other (important) predilections like religion at home. Unfortunately, the woke movement is bringing religion back into business (and every other aspect of life). The religions have changed but Voltaire would not have been surprised at the consequences, a break down of cooperation and amity. That’s why I am very pleased to see how Brian Armstrong’s mission-focused company principles is growing rapidly:
A handful of founders and CEOs—Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jason Fried of Basecamp, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, Medium’s Ev Williams—have said the unsayable. In the face of shop-floor social-justice activism, they’ve decided, business owners should resolve to stick to business.
No hashtag coders. No message-board threads about anti-racism or neo-pronouns. No open letters meant to get someone fired for a decade-old tweet. No politics. As Armstrong put it in his famous (or infamous) September 27th, 2020 blog post, business should be “mission focused.” A software developer explained that the conciliatory approach has become too costly: “The Slack shit, the company-wide emails, it definitely spills out into real life, and it’s a huge productivity drag.”
In October, a pseudonymous group inspired by Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong came together under the banner “Mission Protocol,” with the aim of getting other companies to start “putting aside activities and conversations” outside the scope of their professional missions. (“Mission focus doesn’t mean being apolitical,” they note. “It means being political about the mission. This mission is what you came together to accomplish, and this mission is what you’re fighting for in your work on the project.”) Paul Graham, a famed venture capitalist and “hacker philosopher,” tweeted his support to 1.3 million followers. Melia Russell, who covers the startup beat for Business Insider, noted that startups were jumping into the Mission Protocol threads “with a hell yes.”
One of the great achievements of the enlightenment was taking religion off the table. The result was peace, prosperity and the industrial revolution. In a similar way, sustaining cooperation among a diverse group of people, operating at a high level of performance is the task of great leaders and it means being mission focused.
Intertemporal substitution isn’t always good
“Because of the lockdown, we couldn’t have invited many people and therefore wouldn’t have needed to spend too much money. We would have saved the money that is ordinarily spent on paying for the tents, halwai (caterer), band baja. We would have been able to save a few lakhs. Because of the lockdown, we could have had a simple wedding for a few thousand rupees,” she explained, adding, “There’s no way we can afford a normal wedding in regular times.”
The second Covid surge and the accompanying lockdown has brought with it a spike in the number of cases of attempted child marriages across Madhya Pradesh.
According to figures shared by the Madhya Pradesh Women and Child Development ministry, a total of 710 child marriages were attempted between April 2020 and March 2021. But as soon as the second lockdown hit this year, the number of attempted child marriages shot up to 391 between April and May this year. This is more than half the figure reported in the past one year.
While ministry officials said the weddings were stopped “just in time”, families forwarded varying reasons for the attempted nuptials — from the lure of a “cheap” ceremony, to a fear of who will look after the child if the parents succumb to Covid, and therefore an attempt to find an alternative family.
Here is the full story, via Sheerwan.
Markets in everything Japanese melon pan mask edition
Melon pan is not only delicious, but one Japanese company also thinks it can make a good mask.
Osaka-based experimental think tank Goku no Kimochi The Labo has created “Mask Pan” or “Mask Bread” after college students from Fukuoka and Okinawa decided they want to sniff the smell of bread all the time. What better way to do that than wearing melon pan on your face?
FNN reports that Goku no Kimochi The Labo roped in famed melon pan specialty shop Melon de Melon to bake the bread. For each Mask Pan, the middle is carved out, making space for the wearer’s mouth and nose. As silly as this might seem (and goodness does it ever), the melon pan’s signature crunchy outside supposedly has a degree of effectiveness.
Here is the full story, via Shaffin Shariff.
The Iconoclastic culture that is Dutch?
One of the delightful characteristics of the Dutch is their frankness, and this comes through in the tales—which are far from bland.
As the exhibition texts explain, “the debate about the bare bottom in this Degas pastel dominated the art pages of the [Dutch] newspapers for weeks”. The question being asked was “whether in this day and age it is still possible to acquire and exhibit a female nude drawn by a man”.
Roos Rosa de Carvalho recalls that she received a letter from a painters’ model describing how posing nude is her profession, in which she takes pride. This made the museum curator think about Degas, concluding that “if we assume without question that she [Degas’s model] was the unwilling victim of a sex-obsessed artist, then perhaps we are not only failing Degas but her as well”.
Emilie Gordenker, the director of the Van Gogh Museum, was inevitably drawn into the controversy. She admits that “we had an internal discussion about the fact that some visitors might be offended by seeing a female nude”.
Here is more from The Art Newspaper. And here in good ol’ USA, people are worried about TV wives being too attractive, relative to their husbands (NYT). And here is another museum article, again American: “Menstrual Cups in Museums? It’s Time.” (NYT)
Sunday assorted links
Why was pre-Covid unemployment so low?
Here is a recent paper by Andreas Hornstein and Marianna Kudlyak, noting that when the authors write “current” they are (were) referring to pre-Covid times:
Current unemployment, as of 2019Q4, is so low not because of unusually high job finding rates out of unemployment, but because of unusually low entry rates into unemployment. The unusually low entry rates, both from employment and from out of the labor force, reflect a long-run downward trend, and have lowered the unemployment rate trend over the recent decade. In fact, the difference between the current unemployment rate and unemployment rates at the two previous cyclical peaks in 2000 and 2007 is more than fully accounted for by the decline in its trend. This suggests that the current low unemployment rate does not indicate a labor market that is tighter than in 2000 or 2007.
Of course these results have significance for the common view that we need to “run the labor market hot” to get back to a desirable state of affairs. What we need is for the necessary adjustments to take place to restore a new and sustainable equilibrium.
Emergent Ventures winners, 15th cohort
Emily Oster, Brown University, in support of her COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and the related “Data Hub” proposal, to ease and improve school reopenings, project here.
Kathleen Harward, to write and market a series of children’s books based on classical liberal values.
William Zhang, a high school junior on Long Island, NY, for general career development and to popularize machine learning and computation.
Kyle Schiller, to study possibilities for nuclear fusion.
Aaryan Harshith, 15 year old in Ontario, for general career development and “LightIR is the world’s first device that can instantly detect cancer cells during cancer surgery, preventing the disease from coming back and keeping patients healthier for longer.”
Anna Harvey, New York University and Social Science Research Council, to bring evidence-based law and economics research to practitioners in police departments and legal systems.
EconomistsWritingEveryDay blog, here is one recent good Michael Makowsky post.
Richard Hanania, Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, to pursue their new mission.
Jeremy Horpedahl, for his work on social media to combat misinformation, including (but not only) Covid misinformation.
Congratulations! Here are previous Emergent Ventures winners.