What should I ask Will MacAskill?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
William MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford,[ and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research.
MacAskill is also the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, the co-founder and vice-president of Giving What We Can, and the co-founder and president of the Centre for Effective Altruism.
Here is Will’s home page. Will also has an exciting new book coming out, namely What We Owe the Future. So what should I ask him?
Monday assorted links
1. Introduction to Tanner Greer.
2. Are wild animals evolving faster than we had thought?
3. A new Fast Grants-inspired program for climate-related grants.
4. New geothermal energy project.
5. Africa’s Covid vaccine factory might close due to lack of demand (FT).
Making shootings more salient makes gun laws weaker
There have been dozens of high-profile mass shootings in recent decades. This paper presents three main findings about the impact of mass shootings on gun policy. First, mass shootings evoke large policy responses. A single mass shooting leads to a 15% increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state in the year after a mass shooting. This effect increases with the extent of media coverage. Second, mass shootings account for a small portion of all gun deaths but have an outsized influence relative to other homicides. Third, when looking at bills that were actually enacted into law, the impact of mass shootings depends on the party in power. The annual number of laws that loosen gun restrictions doubles in the year following a mass shooting in states with Republican-controlled legislatures. We find no significant effect of mass shootings on laws enacted when there is a Democrat-controlled legislature, nor do we find a significant effect of mass shootings on the enactment of laws that tighten gun restrictions.
That is from Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra, and Christopher Poliquin, via Matt Yglesias. Many on Twitter and social media would do well to heed this point. On a related point, I agree with Chris Hayes’s point that the shooter drills and the like probably should be stopped, as they too make school shootings more salient for the potential shooters. My contribution to the salience is not going to go much beyond this blog post. I also find this topic makes many people stupid.
A new take on “defund the police”
There is less to the idea than meets the eye, do not forget the counties:
This paper finds that disbanding police departments leads to fewer police-related deaths, fewer reported crimes, and lower law enforcement expenditures. However, the number of crimes reported by the sheriff for the entire county increases by an amount commensurate to the decrease in the number of crimes reported by cities that disbanded their police department. Furthermore, disbanding police departments is associated with an increase in county sheriffs spending which offsets the city savings. Thus, disbanding police departments does not appear to impact overall crime, shifts responsibility for law enforcement onto other governments, and reduces the available information about cities’ crimes.
That is from a new paper by Richard T. Boylan, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Sunday assorted links
1. My conversation with High Alpha about Talent, and other matters.
2. David Perell and Johnathan Bi present Rene Girard, transcript here.
3. How cockroach sex is evolving (NYT).
4. Contra an earlier report, there are still payphones in NYC (New Yorker).
7. Ezra on state capacity and the left (NYT).
The FDA should make Paxlovid easier to get
Pharmacists still cannot prescribe the medication themselves, a step that would cut the time it takes patients to secure the drug.
The Food and Drug Administration “is looking at this and thinking about it,” Dr. Jha said. “Whether they’re going to make a change, when and how, etc., is totally in their wheelhouse.”
Many patients are still handling the sometimes-cumbersome steps on their own: locating a virus test, then securing a Paxlovid prescription from a health provider, then finding a pharmacy that carries the pill, all within days of first showing symptoms.
Dr. Jha described being frustrated by physician colleagues who have told him they still limit Paxlovid to patients 65 years and older.
But no they still will not do this. I repeat myself, but you need to keep in mind the only time panel members have resigned from the FDA is when the Biden administration pushed through the booster shots.
Here is the full NYT article, via Rich Berger.
Bribe-Switching
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits US firms from paying bribes to foreign public officials. We show that FCPA enforcement has no positive effect on the GDP per capita of the countries of these officials but, rather, increases their countries shadow economy. When public officials take bribes both from legal and illegal markets, corruption enforcement in legal markets induces them to make up for lost rents by taking more bribes from illegal markets. In equilibrium, they enforce less against illegal producers, thereby increasing the size of illegal markets. We find that one case of FCPA enforcement alone increases the shadow economy by as much as 0.25 percentage points (pp), homicide rates by 0.02 pp, and trade misinvoicing by 0.5 pp.
That is a new paper by Jamie Bologna Pavlik and Desiree Desierto. I am very pleased to now have Desiree as my colleague at George Mason University.
What I’ve been reading
1. Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle. She covered 3000 miles in the 1960s, and as she notes in the introduction: “Epictetus put it in a nutshell when he said, “For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.” Self-recommending. But don’t be fooled by the title — hardly any of the narrative takes place in India.
2. David E. Bernstein, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America . A scathing and unfortunately spot-on indictment of America’s schemes of racial classification. So often those schemes turn out to be racist themselves. The Hmong cannot count as an “underrepresented group” because they are Asian!? Come on, people. There is no good way to do this work, and I am pleased to see David pointing this out so effectively.
3. Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis, Poems. A lovely bilingual edition, covering her less-known post-Holocaust poetry. The quality is still very high and the page display is excellent.
Serhi Plokhy, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters is exactly what the subtitle promises.
Fernanda Melchor, Paradais is a new Mexican novel that has received a lot of attention. I thought English was “not good enough for it,” though the slang and format would challenge my Spanish. If you can read this properly in Spanish, I suspect it is excellent.
Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson is a good book about the Enlightenment publisher who interacted with Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, Priestly, Fuseli, and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others.
Halik Kochanski, Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945. So far I have had time only to browse it, but it appears to be both excellent and definitive.
Saturday assorted links
1. Predictions for Britain in 2050.
2. A skeptical case on fusion.
3. Swiss woman fined for feeding her neighbor’s cat.
4. “Although most individuals with IQs ≤ 90 did not have a college degree, the rate at which they completed college had increased approximately 6-fold in men and 10-fold in women relative to rates in the previous generation.” And it seems to be good for them.
The magnitude of depolicing
Using a time regression discontinuity design, we estimate a 72.7 percent decrease in lower-level “quality of life” arrests, and a 69 percent decrease in non-index crime arrests in Minneapolis following George Floyd’s death. Our results also show that the decrease in arrests is driven by a 69 percent decrease in police-initiated calls for service. Using the same approach, we find a much smaller decrease of 2.7 percent in arrests and a 1.5 percent decrease in police calls following police-involved shootings. Our results, thus, suggest that the Ferguson Effect exists, and it is much larger following highly publicized events of police violence such as George Floyd’s death.
That is from the new AER, by Maya Mikdash and Reem Zaiour, “Does (All) Police Violence Cause De-policing? Evidence from George Floyd and Police Shootings in Minneapolis.” The title I find slightly Straussian, I hope not outright naive.
The paradox of auction happiness
If you win something at auction, even if you end up paying your full bid, you are typically quite happy, rather than just a smidgen happy.
Then why didn’t you bid more in the first place?
Is your mistake being too happy, or is your mistake having bid too low?
Do you become happy only by winning discrete, decent-sized lumps of happiness, rather than smidgens of happiness? Does that even make sense?
Or is it just the value of winning per se, in which case there might be some other artificial way of manufacturing the same feeling?
Note this all runs a bit counter to winner’s curse arguments, which suggest you should be a smidgen unhappy when you win, not when you lose.
How should we best model this?
Friday assorted links
The Unfairness Doctrine
The great George Will hits another one out of the ballpark with some useful reminders:
Government pratfalls such as the Disinformation Governance Board are doubly useful, as reminders of government’s embrace of even preposterous ideas if they will expand its power, and as occasions for progressives to demonstrate that there is no government expansion they will not embrace.
…Using radio spectrum scarcity as an excuse, even before the Fairness Doctrine was created, Republicans running Washington in the late 1920s pressured a New York station owned by the Socialist Party to show “due regard” for other opinions. What regard was “due”? The government knew. So, it prevented the Chicago Federation of Labor from buying a station, saying all stations should serve “the general public.”
In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration conditioned one station’s license renewal on ending anti-FDR editorials. (Tulane Law School professor Amy Gajda’s new book, “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,” reports that earlier, FDR had “unsuccessfully pushed for a code of conduct for newspapers as part of the Depression-era National Recovery Act and had envisioned bestowing on compliant newspapers an image of a blue eagle as a sort of presidential seal of approval.”)
John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission harassed conservative radio, and when a conservative broadcaster said Lyndon B. Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 as an excuse for Vietnam escalation, the Fairness Doctrine was wielded to force the broadcaster to air a response.
Hat tip: Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.
“NAIMBY” goes beyond just belling the cat
In April, Akureyri—the largest municipality in the country’s north, with a population of 19,000 people and some 2,000 to 3,000 cats—decided to ban their feline residents from night roaming outside. Neighboring Húsavík banned cats several years ago from going outdoors day and night. Other Icelandic towns are considering bans as the issue of free-roaming cats increasingly makes its way from online forums to local politics, with the arguments generally falling into two categories. Some people—the “no animals in my backyard” or NAIMBY-ists—proclaim free-roaming cats are nuisances that should be confined like any other pet. Others think beyond the anthropocentric: cats kill birds and disrupt ecosystems.
And:
Surveys suggest Icelanders’ support for cat curfews is highest in regions with private homes and private gardens. Their reasoning is predominantly idiosyncratic, likening roaming cats to visits from rowdy town drunks. To paraphrase some online comments about cat visitations: “cat urine sprayed the patio,” “challenged another cat to a 3:00 a.m. duel and killed the yellow daffodils,” “last week he came into the house, and the pharmacy is out of pet-allergy drugs.” Cat supporters reply along the lines of, “Get a life and try to tolerate the outside world; cats are a delight and have roamed Iceland as long as we have.”
Here is the full Icelandic story, from the always excellent The Browser. Is there a corresponding YAIMBY movement?
The fall of Sri Lanka
After the end of a devastating 26-year civil war in 2009, the island of 22mn had the makings of an Asian economic success story. Under governments run by the powerful Rajapaksa family, annual economic growth peaked at 9 per cent. By 2019, the World Bank had classified the island as an upper-middle income country. Sri Lankans enjoyed a per capita income double that of neighbours such as India, along with longer lifespans thanks to strong social services such as healthcare and education. The country tapped international debt lenders to rebuild, becoming a key private Asian bond issuer and participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
And yet now everything is in tatters (that passage is from a very good FT piece). Here is one bit:
Sri Lanka’s reserves have fallen from $7.5bn in November 2019 to the point where finding $1mn is “a challenge”, Wickremesinghe, the new prime minister, said in an address last week. This has meant shortages of not only fuel but food and medicine, with hospitals forced to postpone surgeries. The country has the worst inflation in Asia at about 30 per cent in April and the currency has almost halved in value since it was floated in March. The UN Development Programme says that nearly half the population is in danger of falling below the poverty line, and warns of a looming humanitarian crisis as the urban poor and former middle class begin to cut back on meals.
And:
“Most people are down to one meal a day”, says her neighbour, Mohammad Akram, “but are embarrassed to admit it.”
I believe we have not yet internalized how rapidly a middle income country can fall from grace and into utter chaos.