Results for “kremer”
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Most Popular Posts of 2019

Here are the top MR posts for 2019, as measured by landing pages. The most popular post was Tyler’s

1. How I practice at what I do

Alas, I don’t think that will help to create more Tylers. Coming in at number two was my post:

2. What is the Probability of a Nuclear War?

Other posts in the top five were 3. Pretty stunning data on dating from Tyler and my posts, 4. One of the Greatest Environmental Crimes of the 20th Century,and 5. The NYTimes is Woke.

My post on The Baumol Effect which introduced my new book Why are the Prices So Damned High (one of Mercatus’s most downloaded items ever) was number 6 and rounding out the top ten were a bunch from Tyler, including 7. Has anyone said this yet?, 8. What is wrong with social justice warriors?, 9. Reading and rabbit holes and my post Is Elon Musk Prepping for State Failure?.

Other big hits from me included

Tyler had some truly great posts in the last few days of 2019 including what I thought was the post of the year (and not just on MR!) Work on these things.

Also important were:

Happy holidays everyone!

Public health is no longer an O-Ring production function

In the bad old days, health care in poor countries was just terrible. It wasn’t only the poverty, lack of hospitals and pharmaceuticals, and unsanitary conditions.  In addition, doctors gave very bad advice and they also didn’t work very hard, as outlined in this paper.  Citizens suffered accordingly.

Those conditions have improved somewhat, but actual health outcomes have improved a lot.  You still can’t trust the local medical advice in Tanzania, but guess what?  You have much better vaccines, greater access to antibiotics, more NGOs running health clinics, and better health care information, sometimes through the internet.  If your kid has diarrhea, let the kid drink water, even unclean water!  As for antibiotics (NYT):

Two doses a year of an antibiotic can sharply cut death rates among infants in poor countries, perhaps by as much as 25 percent among the very young, researchers reported on Wednesday.

In other words, the quality of the most important part of health care treatments bypassed the rest of the problems in poor economies and grew rapidly, even in countries with only so-so economic growth.  The rate of reduction in child mortality has tripled in many countries since the 1990s, and by no means are those locales major economic winners as say Singapore and South Korea were.

Therein lies one of the most important (and under-reported) global changes in the last twenty years.  It is now possible to have a decent public health system in a country with poor or mediocre political and economic institutions.

In other words, public health is no longer such an O-Ring service, an O-Ring service being one where everything has to go right for the service to be of decent quality.  And advances are much, much easier when the O-Ring structure no longer rules.

The O-Ring citation is to a famous Michael Kremer paper — a trip to the moon is definitely an O-Ring process, because if one step is off the whole mission probably is a failure.  But tasty fish curry is not — you can get a splendid version in some pretty dumpy countries, maybe even a better version in poorer places.

Electricity, however, it seems is still an O-Ring service, as evidenced by the recent power blackouts in South Africa.

What else is likely to become less of an O-Ring good or service in the next few decades to come?  And what can we do to hasten such progress?  Is there any chance of quality software production making that same kind of transition?  Or might some goods and services return to a greater connection with the O-Ring model?

For this post I am very much indebted to a conversation with Garett Jones.

More Sex is Safer Sex

I had forgotten that Steven Landsburg’s More Sex is Safer Sex (link to the 1997 NYTimes version, book here) was inspired by a paper by new Nobelist Michael Kremer. Here’s the recap:

You’ve read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.

Consider Martin, a charming and generally prudent young man with a limited sexual history, who has been gently flirting with his coworker Joan. As last week’s office party approached, both Joan and Martin silently and separately entertained the prospect that they just might be going home together. Unfortunately, Fate, through its agents at the Centers for Disease Control, intervened. The morning of the party, Martin happened to notice one of those CDC-sponsored subway ads touting the virtues of abstinence. Chastened, he decided to stay home. In Martin’s absence, Joan hooked up with the equally charming but considerably less prudent Maxwell – and Joan got AIDS.

When the cautious Martin withdraws from the mating game, he makes it easier for the reckless Maxwell to prey on the hapless Joan. If those subway ads are more effective against Martin than against Maxwell, they are a threat to Joan’s safety. This is especially so when they displace Calvin Klein ads, which might have put Martin in a more socially beneficent mood.

If the Martins of the world would loosen up a little, we could slow the spread of AIDS. Of course, we wouldn’t want to push this too far: if Martin loosens up too much, he becomes as dangerous as Maxwell. But when sexual conservatives increase their activity by moderate amounts, they do the rest of us a lot of good. Harvard professor Michael Kremer estimates that the spread of AIDS in England could plausibly be retarded if everyone with fewer than about 2.25 partners per year were to take additional partners more frequently.

And here is Kremer’s original paper (with Charles Morcom). Landsburg suggests that a subsidy for condoms would be optimal in this situation. Read the whole thing.

Addendum: I later pointed out that the Kremer model appears to fit what happened in Thailand quite well.

The O-Ring Model of Development

Michael Kremer’s Nobel prize (with Duflo and Banerjee) reminded me of his important paper The O-Ring Theory of Development. I also rewatched my video on this paper from Tyler’s and my online class, Development Economics. This was from our powerpoint and iPad days so there are no fancy graphics but the video holds up! Mostly because it’s a great model with lots of interesting implications not just for development but also for the structure of the US economy. See also Jason Collins on Garett Jones’s extension of the model.

Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990

That is an older paper by the excellent Michael Kremer, worth keeping in mind, here is the abstract:

The nonrivalry of technology, as modeled in the endogenous growth literature, implies that high population spurs technological change. This paper constructs and empirically tests a model of long-run world population growth combining this implication with the Malthusian assumption that technology limits population. The model predicts that over most of history, the growth rate of population will be proportional to its level. Empirical tests support this prediction and show that historically, among societies with no possibility for technological contact, those with larger initial populations have had faster technological change and population growth.

This bears on my earlier Bloomberg column, today cited by Mike Lee, suggesting that having more children is likely to help out on the climate change issue.

Who will win the Nobel Prize in economics this year?

I’ve never once gotten it right, at least not for exact timing, so my apologies to anyone I pick (sorry Bill Baumol!).  Nonetheless this year I am in for Esther Duflo and Abihijit Banerjee, possibly with Michael Kremer, for randomized control trials in development economics.

Maybe they are too young, as Tim Harford points out, so my back-up pick remains an environmental prize for Bill Nordhaus, Partha Dasgupta, and Marty Weitzman.

What do you all predict?

Who will win the Nobel Prize in Economics this coming Monday?

I’ve never once nailed the timing, but I have two predictions.

The first is William Baumol, who is I believe ninety-four years old.  His cost-disease hypothesis is very important for understanding the productivity slowdown, see this recent empirical update.  Oddly, the hypothesis is most likely false for the sector where Baumol pushed it hardest — music and the arts.

Baumol has many other contributions, but the next most significant is probably his theory of contestable markets, plus his writings on entrepreneurship.

The other option is a joint prize for environmental economics, perhaps to William Nordhaus, Partha Dasgupta, and Martin Weitzman.  A prize in that direction is long overdue.

The “Web of Science” predicts Lazear, Blanchard, or Marc Melitz, based on citation counts.  Other reasonable possibilities include Robert Barro, Paul Romer, Banerjee and Duflo and Kremer (joint?), David Hendry, Diamond and Dybvig, and Bernanke, Woodford, and Svensson, arguably joint.  I still am of the opinion that Martin Feldstein is deserving, don’t forget he did empirical public finance, was a pioneer in health care economics, and built the NBER.  For a dark horse pick, how about Joseph Newhouse (RCTs and the Rand health care study)?

There are other options — what is your prediction?

Who will win the economics Nobel Prize this year?

Diane Coyle mentions some possible picks:

Environmental economics: Partha Dasgupta, William Nordhaus

Update: Twitter folks strongly recommend adding Martin Weitzman in this category.

Growth: Paul Romer, Robert Barro

Inequality: Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton

Innovation (and much else): Will Baumol (now 93!)

Econometrics: David Hendry

All good guesses.  I’ll add Diamond and Dybvig for banking, and possibly an early grant to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer for development and RCTs.  That would make economics look scientific, for a year at least.  I expect Bernanke, Woodford, and Svensson to get a prize as well for monetary economics, although probably not right now.  It is too close to Bernanke’s memoir and Svensson’s tenure at the Swedish central bank.

Here is a WSJ list.  What do you think?  Since I’ve never once been right about a particular year, trying to pick someone would only curse them.  The award will come this Monday of course.

Saturday assorted links

1. Profile of Terry Tao.

2. Did Medicare D affect outcomes?

3. Is drinking a countercyclical asset in Greece?

4. Drug testing is coming to e-Gaming.

5. Interview with William Vollmann.  I still think the “By the Book” series in the NYT is the single best thing on the web these days.

6. One billion earths in our galaxy alone?  Uh-oh.  I don’t regard all that frozen water on Pluto as good news either.

7. Kremer and Miguel respond on the worm wars (pdf).

A simple theory of some current basketball surprises

Apply a dose of science and big data to a team sport such as basketball.  The big gains will come in cooperation.  Who should take the next shot?, when is a “corner three” worthwhile?, who should play with the second unit, how good is the pick and roll against this opponent?, and so on.  Big data also will bring some gains at the individual level, such as from better training regimens, but those moves were easier to spot in the first place.  The issues involving cooperation are those where simple intuitive observation, of the old school style, will miss a lot of potential improvements.

Cooperative gains are more fragile, however, because everyone has to get the strategy right to reap the benefits (think of Michael Kremer’s O-Ring model).  So the previous champion, San Antonio, has fallen off dramatically because Leonard is injured and Tony Parker is playing like his age (32).  Atlanta suddenly had all the pieces gel, and they now, to the surprise of almost everyone, have the best record in the East.  (They have learned the ball movement and shooting style which San Antonio perfected last year during their championship run, but Atlanta has no big stars.)  Golden State is a positive surprise too, with the best record in the league.  Cleveland has attempted to do “cooperation” (ha) on the terms of its stars, not on the terms of the data, and that experiment has fallen flat.

In Panama I watched an old Lakers game from the 1980s (vs. Portland) and was struck by how tall everyone was, compared to today.  There were fewer surprises that year, and I believe those facts are related.  The three-point shot has made players shorter and more cooperative and arguably increased the value of the coach and his assistants.

Some of these arguments should apply to areas other than basketball, so perhaps a higher value for data-driven cooperation will mean more surprises in the world in general.

Should the U.S. destroy its stockpile of ivory?

Here is one of the latest developments in economic policy:

The US government hopes to send a crushing message to anyone involved in the illegal ivory trade — by decimating a 6-ton stockpile of seized elephant ivory.

In an announcement posted online, the US Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) describes plans to “pulverize” a cache of ivory on November 14th. All of the ivory was obtained, the agency notes, from law enforcement efforts to crack down on trafficking over the last two decades. “Destroying this ivory tells criminals who engage in poaching and trafficking that the United States will take all available measures to disrupt and prosecute those who prey on, and profit from, the deaths of these magnificent animals,” reads a statement on the FWS website.

There is more here, via Viktor Brech and Bruce Ryan and Kaushal Desai.

Bruce suggests the government announce it has created an artificial form of ivory, to lower expected prices and discourage future poaching.  If they can get away with that lie, great.  Otherwise, we all know the 2000 Kremer and Morcom piece entitled simply “Elephants”:

Many open-access resources, such as elephants, are used to produce storable goods. Anticipated future scarcity of these resources will increase current prices and poaching. This implies that, for given initial conditions, there may be rational expectations equilibria leading to both extinction and survival. The cheapest way for governments to eliminate extinction equilibria may be to commit to tough antipoaching measures if the population falls below a threshold. For governments without credibility, the cheapest way to eliminate extinction equilibria may be to accumulate a sufficient stockpile of the storable good and threaten to sell it should the population fall.

That emphasis is added.  Sell it, not destroy.

The (gated) AER version of the paper is here.  The Montclair State version is here.  A few comments and responses are here.

In other words, our government is pursuing symbolic value but at the same time implementing the wrong incentives.

Here is a piece on elephant music-making.

Thomson Reuters predicts the 2013 Nobel Laureate in economics

Their leading candidates are:

Joshua D. Angrist, David E. Card, Alan B. Krueger, Sir David F. Hendry, M. Hashem Pesaran, Peter C.B. Phillips, Sam Peltzman, and Richard A. Posner, all very good possible picks in my view.

My personal prediction (which never once has been correct, at least not in the proper year) is for an early “shock” prize to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer, in part to show (try to show?) that economics really is an actual science.

In any case the above link offers Reuters picks for the science prizes as well.  Here are some other speculations for the science prizes as well.

For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.

Pandemics and public goods, and why we are failing at both

Here is my latest New York Times column, which has a specific part on how to address pandemics and a more general section on the evolving role of government in American society.  In neither area are matters running especially well.

Here is one initial point, namely that it is difficult to commit to allow high prices upfront:

Research and development grants are a way to pay potential innovators up front — an important move, as an innovator can’t always charge high-enough prices for the value of its remedies when they’re actually needed.

That will lead to institutional failure, rooted in a mix of government and market failure.  Therefore other rewards are needed, since the prospect of high prices does not adequately motivate.  I thus call for some key drugs to be rewarded with prizes and for government to buy out the patent rights, if need be:

If anyone doubted a government pledge to pay big money for the rights to remedies, the patent’s value could be established by a competitive auction. Michael Kremer, a Harvard economics professor, outlined the procedure for such an auction in his research paper “Patent Buyouts.”

The larger problem is this:

OVER all, the American government seems to be turning its back on its traditional role of producing and investing in national public goods. If there is any consistent tendency in recent government spending, it is that spending on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare — which provide mostly private benefits — is rising and that investment and spending on national public goods is falling.

Do read the whole thing.  I also suggest that (non-paternalistic) public health could be a suitable health care issue for Republicans, who presumably should be looking for alternatives to the status quo.

There are by the way two points which did not make the final cut for reasons of space.  First, the current coronavirus in Saudi Arabia has not gone away as a source of potential problems.  Second, the Bush Administration (43) did take some notable steps to return vaccine capacity to the United States, through both regulatory forbearance and HHS procurement.  These are likely good policies since in a pandemic one cannot expect to rely on free international trade in a remedy but rather export controls are to be expected.

Handicapping the 2012 Nobel

This article mentions Alvin Roth, Bob Shiller, Richard Thaler, Robert Barro, Lars Hansen, Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton, Jean Tirole, Stephen Ross, and William Nordhaus.

I’ll predict a triple prize to Shiller, Thaler, and Eugene Fama.  Fama clearly deserves it, can’t win it solo (too strongly EMH in an age of financial crisis), but can be bundled with two people from behavioral finance and irrational exuberance theories.

Barro will get it, but not in an election year.  Hansen and Ross are good picks but I don’t see them getting it before Fama does.  Paul Romer deserves mention but this is probably not his year because of politics in Honduras.

William Baumol cannot be ruled out.  A neat idea — but unlikely — is Martin Feldstein and Joseph Newhouse for their pioneering work in health care economics, plus for Feldstein there is public finance too.

Tirole and Nordhaus are deserving perennials, with various bundlings (e.g., Oliver Hart, or for Nordhaus other names in environmental).  I hope the Krueger-Tullock idea is not dead but I would bet against it, same with Armen Alchian and Albert Hirschman.  Dale Jorgensen has a shot.

I believe Duflo and Banerjee (and possibly Michael Kremer too, maybe even Robert Townsend) will get it sooner than people are expecting, though not this year as they just presented in Stockholm.  Next year I think.

Not once in the past have I been right about this.

Addendum: Here is the talk from Northwestern.