Results for “alex tabarrok” 208 found
Shower Thoughts on IP
Tim Harford has an excellent column on IP:
There is a broad logic to intellectual property, then. But the specifics can be questioned. For example, just how temporary is the monopoly? F Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925 and died in 1940. The work only entered the public domain in 2021, after several posthumous copyright extensions, none of which can have been much of an incentive for him to write more.
Then there is the question of what deserves protection. At the height of the dotcom boom, an economics professor, Alex Tabarrok, was taking a shower when he dreamed up the idea of using cell phones to scan barcodes in a store, compare prices and order the product online. Alas, someone else had beaten him to the patent office by mere months. The idea, once unthinkable, was by 1999 rather obvious.
But why should society award 20 years of monopoly rights for the kind of idea that an amateur could dream up in the shower? Tabarrok suggests — rightly — that a 20-year patent should be awarded only if the inventor can prove the idea was expensive to develop. Without that, a five-year patent should be sufficient reward — and, more importantly, sufficient incentive.
I agree entirely with Harford’s concluding comments:
…If we are to produce the extra doses we need, we should focus on lifting every constraint. Perhaps patents fall into that category, but it seems more likely that they are a distraction from the expense of subsidising new factories and more doses for low-income countries. We should spend that money willingly, both for moral and for self-interested reasons.
As for intellectual property, the system needs to change in a hundred ways, some of which require the weakening of intellectual property and the strengthening of other incentives such as prizes and targeted subsidies. When we think through those changes, we should spend less time looking for victims and villains in the creative sphere — and more time thinking about where new ideas come from, and how they can be nurtured.
Read my piece on patent reform. Astute readers will note that there’s no contradiction between thinking that the patent system is in general too strong and that pharmaceutical patents increase innovation and that patents are not a major bottleneck to COVID vaccines. It’s all about evaluating tradeoffs in different scenarios.
News You Can Use
1. Popular wisdom says the second cheapest bottle of wine has the biggest markup because no one wants to look like a cheapskate and buy the cheapest bottle and restaurants take advantage of that tendency to markup the second cheapest bottle relatively more so it’s a poor value. Popular wisdom is wrong according to an analysis of wines at London restaurants. Peak markup is near the middle. Buying by the glass is also ok.
2. How to cook cicadas. An entire cookbook, albeit a short one. No word on what wine pairs well with cicada.
3. The Invisible Graveyard: A Conversation with Economist Alex Tabarrok a good podcast with with physicians in training Mitch and Daniel Belkin. You may also be interested in Metformin and the Biology of Aging with Nir Barzilai.
4. 1729–earn Bitcoin for completing tasks & tutorials. Balaji Srinivasan’s newsletter that pays readers. 1729, a very interesting number and an effort to bootstrap the community and technology to eventually deliver online countries. Here’s a good winning entry, a review of Balaji’s essay Founding vs. Inheriting.
Response to Questions from Senator Ted Cruz on Vaccine Passports
In my Congressional testimony I got into a little back and forth with Senator Ted Cruz on vaccine passports. Subsequently, I was asked to respond to a series of follow-up questions of the form:
If a vaccine passport or any other type of vaccine credential is required by individual private companies, do you have any concerns with a [educational institution/airline/grocery store…] refusing service or otherwise discriminating against an individual that:
(a) chooses not to receive the vaccine?
(b) is not a suitable candidate to receive the vaccine for medical reasons?
My response:
During the pandemic it was common for bars and restaurants, churches, gyms, shopping malls, entertainment venues, schools and universities and even parks and beaches in the United States to be closed for everyone. Similarly, international travel has been severely restricted for everyone. I think it an improvement to move from closed-for-all to open-for-some. Thus vaccine passports represent a lifting of restrictions and an increase in freedom on the path back to normality. Greece, for example, is scheduled to open to anyone with a record of vaccination, negative COVID test, or previous infection. This is good for Greece which relies on tourist revenues for a significant share of its economy and good for the world who want to visit sunny beaches and ancient ruins.
Moving in stages, from closed-for-all to open-for-some to fully-open, is reasonable. The aim, of course, is to be open-for-all, an achievable aim if a large enough proportion of the population is vaccinated. As we move to normality we should also make it possible for the non-vaccinated to access as many services as possible on reasonable grounds, for example, through the use of testing and masks.
It bears repeating that the best way to avoid these difficult decisions is for as many people as possible to be vaccinated, thus making social life safe for the unvaccinated as well as the vaccinated. For these reasons I have supported free vaccinations, stretching doses to vaccinate more people quickly through policies such as delaying the second dose and testing fractional doses, using single-shot vaccines, and developing nasal and oral vaccines.
Sincerely,
Alex Tabarrok
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Testing and the NFL
NYTimes: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health announced a new initiative on Wednesday to help determine whether frequent, widespread use of rapid coronavirus tests slows the spread of the virus.
The program will make rapid at-home antigen tests freely available to every resident of two communities, Pitt County, N.C., and Hamilton County, Tenn., enough for a total of 160,000 people to test themselves for the coronavirus three times a week for a month.
“This effort is precisely what I and others have been calling for nearly a year — widespread, accessible rapid tests to help curb transmission,” said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University who has been a vocal proponent of rapid, at-home testing programs.
I guess this is good news it just feels like something that in a different time line, happened long ago. Here is Derek Thompson in an excellent piece making exactly that point:
Imagine a parallel universe where Americans were tested massively, constantly, without care for cost, while those who tested negative continued more or less about their daily life.
In fact, that parallel universe exists. It’s the National Football League.
..After an October outbreak, the NFL moved to daily testing of all its players and instituted new restrictions on player behavior and stricter rules on ventilation and social distancing. The league also used electronic tracking bracelets to trace close contacts of people who tested positive. Throughout the season, the NFL spent about $100 million on more than 900,000 tests performed on more than 11,000 players and staff members. In January, the CDC published an analysis of the league that concluded, “Daily testing allowed early, albeit not immediate, identification of infection,” enabling the league to play the game safely.
You could write off the NFL’s season as the idiosyncratic achievement of a greedy sport with nearly unlimited resources. But I can think of another self-interested institution with nearly unlimited resources: It’s the government of a country with a $20 trillion economy and full control over its own currency. Unlike the NFL, though, the U.S. never made mass testing its institutional priority.
“The NFL was almost like a Korea within the United States,” Alex Tabarrok told me. “And it’s not just the NFL. Many universities have done a fabulous job, like Cornell. They have followed the Korea example, which is repeated testing of students combined with quick isolation in campus dorms. Mass testing is a policy that works in practice, and it works in theory. It’s crazy to me that we didn’t try it.” Tabarrok said we can’t be sure that a Korean or NFL-style approach to national testing would have guaranteed Korean or NFL-style outcomes. After all, that would have meant averting about 500,000 deaths. Rather, he said, comprehensive early testing was our best shot at reducing deaths and getting back to normal faster.
The Marginal Revolution NFT!
Tyler and I are pleased to announce our first NFT on the blockchain. Now you can own a screenshot of the very first Marginal Revolution post!
Marginal Revolution is one of the world’s most popular blogs. Written by the economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok it has been in continuous operation since August 21, 2003. This is a screenshot of the very first post, a book review of Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men. Any media library or museum will want to have this amazing historical record as part of their collection!
The auction (natch) is here and is open for 6 days. Hurry! This is limited time offer for a unique item.
Conversations With The Browser
Browser Sunday Zoom Conversations are an opportunity for relaxed discussion with special guests.
Browser subscribers and friends are warmly invited to join, listen, and if they wish, intervene with comments and questions. Conversations begin at 1pm ET (which is 10am PT and 6pm GMT) and last for 50 minutes.
Our next Conversation, on Sunday 31st January, promises to be an exceptional event centering on Covid and its consequences.
Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and co-founder of the Marginal Revolution blog, will be talking with Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist and now co-director of the Global Commission On Post-Pandemic Policy.
Alex is a leading voice in America’s national debate about policy responses to Covid. Bill is bringing together experts in diverse fields to look globally at the changes Covid is forcing upon our economies and societies.
If you are a Browser subscriber and would like to join this Conversation, please reserve simply by entering your email address here.
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How Rapidly ‘First Doses First’ Came to Britain
Tim Harford writes about the whiplash he experienced from the debate over delaying second doses in Britain.
What a difference a couple of weeks makes. In mid-December, I asked a collection of wise guests on my BBC radio programme How to Vaccinate the World about the importance of second doses. At that stage, Scott Gottlieb, former head of the US Food and Drug Administration, had warned against stockpiling doses just to be sure that second doses were certain to be available, Economists such as Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University had gone further: what if we gave people single doses of a vaccine instead of the recommended pair of doses, and thus reached twice as many people in the short term? This radical concept was roundly rejected by my panel
…. “This is an easy one, Tim, because we’ve got to go with the scientific evidence,” said Nick Jackson of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “And the scientific evidence is that two doses is going to provide the best protection.”
My other guests agreed, and no wonder: Jackson’s view was firmly in the scientific mainstream three weeks ago. But in the face of a shortage of doses and a rapidly spreading strain of “Super-Covid”, the scientific mainstream appears to have drifted. The UK’s new policy is to prioritise the first dose and to deliver the second one within three months rather than three weeks…..the recommendation comes not from ministers but from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
Strikingly, many scientists have given the move their approval.
See also Tyler’s previous post on this theme.
By the way, if the J&J single-dose vaccine comes in at say 80% effective it is going to be interesting to see how people go from ‘a single-dose at 80% effective is too dangerous to allow for 8-12 weeks’ to ‘isn’t it great we have a single-dose 80% effective vaccine!’.
The Tony Blair “one dose” idea
Here is the source, of course Alex Tabarrok was there first. For now give everyone one dose rather than two, and enjoy the partial but more broadly spread protection. Here are the reactions from two epidemiologists:
Professor Wendy Barclay, from the department of infectious disease at Imperial College London, said Mr Blair’s idea was interesting but agreed it was “too risky” to try without further evidence.
And Professor Neil Ferguson, also from Imperial, added that the UK regulator had authorised the vaccine on the basis that people would receive two doses.
Administering one dose only would require “an entirely different regulatory submission”, he told a Commons committee.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “Over the coming weeks and months, the rate of vaccinations will increase as more doses become available and the programme continues to expand.”
Where are their cost-benefit analyses? Letting people get infected at current and indeed accelerating rates is also “too risky,” yes? Is there an epidemiologist or public health expert out there willing to show his or her work, either for or against this idea? A genuine query, and of course comments are open. How about one dose for Moderna only? If we are to defer to their expertise, they do actually have to step up and be the experts, right?
How to conduct clinical trials while releasing a vaccine
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.
That is from a recent post by Alex Tabarrok, on the blog Marginal Revolution, and there is more at the link. Of course I don’t have to tell you what Alex’s brother thinks of all this.
Addendum: Anup Malani notes:
BTW, those worried about ethics here should note that most product markets, even many dangerous ones (including non-FDA regulated medical care) use the population testing approach. Drugs are the exception. Elsewhere handle risk via exclusively via ex post tort liability.
So please don’t offer some kind of passive, under-argued Twitter comment on how unacceptably unethical it is — do some analysis and empirics on the trade-offs! And read up on surgical procedures while you are at it.
Who is my favorite public intellectual?
Over the weekend I sat in on Anna Gát’s Interintellect Salon, which I enjoyed. Many of the participants were asked who is their favorite public intellectual. My answer was something like:
Alex Tabarrok, he’d better be, I’ve been working with him for thirty years! There would be something wrong if he wasn’t. And I always look forward to reading what he writes.
So there you go. None of the other answers, worthy though they were, had equivalent support in demonstrated preference.
Parasite and Burning
I was asked by Russell Hogg to join him on his movie podcast with Agnes Callard and Abe Callard. We discussed Parasite and Burning. Russell labeled the podcast Alex Tabarrok Versus the People, although there was much agreement among the panel with my controversial analysis of Parasite! I also threw in a reactionary reading of Snowpiercer at the end. We also had a fine discussion of Burning and whether the orange peeling is a hint about the meaning of the ending.
Comparative Institutional Failure
The common element to our twin crises is that many of the government agencies we thought were keeping us safe and secure—the CDC, the FDA, the Police–have either failed or, worse, have been revealed to be active creators of danger and insecurity. Alex Tabarrok.
Derek Thompson writing at The Atlantic uses my quote as a jumping off point for a good piece on the failure of American institutions. He does a good job of covering the failures of the CDC, the FDA and the police but most interestingly asks why the FED has acted very differently.
While too many American police are escalating encounters like it’s 1990, and the FDA is slow-playing regulatory approval as if these are normal times, and the CDC is somehow still using fax machines, the Federal Reserve has junked old shibboleths about inflation and deficit spending and embraced a policy that might have scandalized mainstream economists in the 1990s. Rejecting the status-quo bias that plagues so many institutions, this 106-year-old is still changing with the world.
Why haven’t other American institutions done the same? Perhaps America’s dependency on old leadership makes our institutions exquisitely responsive to the anxieties and illusions of old Americans. Perhaps the nature of large bureaucracies is to become lost in the labyrinth of mission-creeping path dependency. Perhaps years of political polarization and right-wing anti-science, anti-expertise sentiments have wrung all of the fast-twitch smarts out of the government. Or perhaps we should just blame Trump, that sub-institutional creature summoned from the bilious id of an electorate that lost faith in elites when elites lost their grip on reality.
Whatever the true cause for our failure, when I look at the twin catastrophes of this annus horribilis, the plague and the police protests, what strikes me is that America’s safekeeping institutions have forgotten how to properly see the threats of the 21st century and move quickly to respond to them. Those who deny history may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed.
I see three reasons why the FED may have been different. First, the FED is one of the most independent agencies which may help to explain its faster and more adaptive behavior ala Garett Jones’s 10% Less Democracy. Second, and relatedly, the FED pulls a lot of leadership and staff from academia. That gives FED staff an affiliation goal and clique outside of politics which creates mental independence as well as political independence. Third, the FED was also tested in the last crisis and experience with crises helps as we have also seen in Asia tested by H1N1, SARS and MERS more than the US was.
I am not sure which, if any, of these explanations is the most important but I do think that we have a lot more to learn from comparative institutional analysis not just within the US but across countries as well.
Fight the Virus!
I was asked by the LATimes to contribute to a panel on economic and pandemic policy. The other contributors are Joseph E. Stiglitz, Christina Romer, Alicia H. Munnell, Jason Furman, Anat R. Admati, James Doti, Simon Johnson, Ayse Imrohoroglu and Shanthi Nataraj. Here’s my contribution:
If an invader rained missiles down on cities across the United States killing thousands of people, we would fight back. Yet despite spending trillions on unemployment insurance and relief to deal with the economic consequences of COVID-19, we have spent comparatively little fighting the virus directly.
Testing capacity has slowly increased, but where is the national program to create a dozen labs each running 200,000 tests a day? It’s technologically feasible but months into the crisis, we have only just begun to spend serious money on testing.
We haven’t even fixed billing procedures so we can use the testing capacity that already exists. That’s right, labs that could be running tests are idle because of billing procedures. And while some parts of our government are slow, the Food and Drug Administration seems intent on reducing America’s ability to fight the virus by demanding business-as-usual paperwork.
Operation Warp Speed is one of the few bright spots. Potential vaccines often fail and so firms will typically not build manufacturing capacity, let alone produce doses until after a vaccine has been approved. But if we follow the usual procedure, getting shots in arms could be delayed by months or even years.
Under Operation Warp Speed, the government is paying for capacity to be built now so that the instant one of 14 vaccine candidates is proven safe and effective, production will be ready to go. That’s exactly what Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Kremer, Susan Athey, Chris Snyder and I have recommended. It might seem expensive to invest in capacity for a vaccine that is never approved, but it’s even more expensive to delay a vaccine that could end the pandemic.
Relief payments can go on forever, but money spent on testing and vaccines has the potential to more than pay for itself. It’s time to fight back.
Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a member of the Accelerating Health Technologies With Incentive Design team.
My point about not fighting the virus directly was illustrated by many of the other panelists. Joseph Stiglitz, Christina Romer, Alicia Munnell, Jason Furman, James Doti, and Shanthi Nataraj say nothing or next to nothing about viruses. Only Anat Admati, Simon Johnson, Ayse Imrohoroglu get it.
Admati supports a Paul Romer-style testing program:
Until effective vaccines and therapies are available, which may be many months away, our best approach is to invest heavily in increasing the capacity for testing many more people and isolating those infected.
Simon Johnson argues, in addition, for antibody tests (not the usual PCR tests):
Policymakers should go all-in on ramping up antibody testing, to determine who has been exposed to COVID-19. Such tests are not yet accurate enough to determine precise immunity levels, but the work of Michael Mina, an immunologist and epidemiologist at Harvard, and others demonstrates that using such tests in the right way generates not just information about what has happened but, because of what can be inferred about underlying disease dynamics, also the information we need to understand where the disease will likely next impact various local communities.
Imrohoroglu advocates for targeted lockdown:
In addition to CDC recommendations about social distancing and public health strategies for all, I believe that as we reopen, we should keep a targeted lockdown policy in place for at-risk groups.
Does coronavirus mean the end of traditional education?
I will debating/discussing the topic “Does coronavirus mean the end of traditional education?” @ the Cambridge Union. A bit disappointing not to be in the hallowed hall but should be interesting nonetheless. The debate will be live-streamed at 2pm ET on Wednesday.
Will a move towards digital, decentralised teaching transform a model that once seemed so entrenched? Will the loss of exams become permanent for many? In an online panel with the Cambridge Union, four world-renowned figures share their perspective on what the future holds for education in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Speakers:
Justine Greening served as Secretary of State for Education under Theresa May, following stints at International Development and Transport. Having left Parliament, Greening now chairs the Social Mobility Pledge.
Stephen Toope is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He previously held the same position at the University of British Columbia, and is perhaps best known for his regular emails to the Cambridge student body.
Alex Tabarrok is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Together with Tyler Cowen, he is best known as the co-founder of Marginal Revolution University, a free online platform for studying economics.
Shirley M. Tilghman was the nineteenth President of Princeton University, serving for twelve years until 2013. She is globally recognised for her scholarship in molecular biology.
Lord David Willetts, former Minister of State for Universities and Science under David Cameron in the UK.
Spock’s Brain
The Santa Monica Observer noted the death of soap opera actress Marj Dusay who also appeared as the alien thief in the classic Start Trek episode “Spock’s Brain”:
…The episode is generally regarded by most fans, and those who took part in its production, as the worst episode of the series. William Shatner called this one of the series’ worst episodes, calling the episode’s plot a “tribute” to NBC executives who slashed the show’s budget and placed it in a bad time slot.
Leonard Nimoy wrote: “Frankly, during the entire shooting of that episode, I was embarrassed – a feeling that overcame me many times during the final season of Star Trek.”
…In his book What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History, author David Hofstede ranked the episode at #71 on the list.
The rock band Phish performs a song entitled “Spock’s Brain”
So what? Well here is the part that caught my attention:
The episode was referenced in Modern Principles: Microeconomics by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University as an example of how it is virtually impossible to have a command economy; in that not even Spock’s brain could run an economy.
In other words, we also thought it was one of the worst episodes ever because of the bad economics. Econ instructors should use our textbook! Where else can you learn about Spock’s Brain and the command economy?
By the way, I’m pretty sure the obit was AI generated but heh the AI did a good job! I am aware of the irony.