This was a thing, yes it was, that was then, this is now
Initially founded in 1962, the Anti-Digit Dialing League quickly became the premiere sensible dialing association organization in the United States of America. Nearly 60 years later, the problems this country’s phone network faces are direr than ever. While we continue to espouse the use of 2L+5N dialing over all-number calling whenever possible, our primary aim today is to publicly oppose the proliferation of 10-digit dialing, which is fast becoming a public nuisance and dialing nightmare for ordinary people everywhere in this country.
Circa 1962-64 (those were the days), here is the web site. Web site? Wait, it still is a thing!:
Although 771 is scheduled to be overlaid on D.C.’s 202 area code in 2021, forcing residents of our nation’s capitol to dial 10 digits forevermore, the A.D.D.L. objected to the use of an overlay as a matter of principle. According to NANPA, splits are unlawful when the majority of the area code is in the same rate center (as is D.C.) (see pg. 12 of Sept. 1 Community Hearing Transcript). That doesn’t mean overlays are inevitable in other areas, though. Overlays continue to remain a public nuisance, and although splits have not been commonplace since 2006, we will continue to urge the use of splits over overlays whenever possible, because splits better serve the public interest, a finding which is well supported by empirical data.
Don’t let them tell you money illusion is not a problem. Via Anecdotal.
Thanksgiving assorted links
1. Suppressing Covid by blocking membrane fusion (Fast Grants funded).
2. Early contagiousness mutation now established (NYT, also Fast Grants funded work).
Best movies and films of 2020
I categorize them on the basis of when I watch them, so there is always some slippage at the beginning and the end of the year, all the more for foreign films, which can come to the U.S. as much as a year or two later than their original release dates. Of course this year was very different and there was hardly anything wonderful from Hollywood. Here is the list, as usual in the order I saw them:
Monos, Spanish-language, Lord of the Flies-type elements.
The Guilty, Danish police story, mainly talk, limited settings, really good.
Just 6.5, Iranian war on drugs movie, brutal at times, culturally fascinating.
The Wedding Plan, a few years older, a Rama Burshtein movie, imagine an Israeli woman setting out to get married by a particular date no matter what.
Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy. I think you need to have a preexisting connection to Mexico and Mexican food to enjoy it. I do.
Graduation, 2016 Romanian movie about trying to cheat on your kid’s exam. Excellent.
An American Pickle, Straussian critique of the Woke.
Tenet, if only to see a blockbuster again.
Cuties, yes it was really good, even if sometimes uncomfortably exploitative in its treatment of the source material, namely dancing young teen girls.
My Octopus Teacher, god-awful sentimental and storified, but everyone loved it.
The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman, set in Cameroon, about cross-cultural differences.
Chez Jolie Coiffure, set in a Brussels hair salon, women from Cameroon and DRC talk to each other, from the same director as Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman, they make a nice set piece and are both quite short.
The Wild Goose Lake, set in Wuhan, a kind of Chinese noir, you have to already like Chinese cinema for this one.
Talking About Trees, Sudanese movie about the reopening of cinema.
Lovers Rock, Small Axe, Jamaican emigres in 1980 London.
Usually I put this list out later in the year, but what is the point of waiting?
Can we have an Operation Warp Speed for green energy?
Probably not, as I argue in my Bloomberg column. One problem is that advance market commitments work best when the output is well-defined, more or less homogeneous, and to be distributed according to very clear principles (one shot in the arm for everybody!). You can’t quite hand out green batteries or small nuclear reactors on the same basis. There is a case for subsidizing those, but not necessarily through advance purchase methods. Here is another part of the column:
Operation Warp Speed was also made easier by the internalization of vaccine research within companies or alliances of companies. The pre-purchase agreement limits risk, and within that framework the companies face strong competitive incentives to create a successful product. In the meantime, the work is removed from the public eye and debate, and at the end there is a definitive yes or no decision from the FDA. It is hardly simple, but it could be a lot more complicated.
In contrast, building a new energy infrastructure requires the cooperation of many companies and institutions, including local governments and regulators. One company can’t simply do everything (recall that the attempts of Alphabet to redesign part of Toronto as a new tech-based city met with local resistance and were ultimately put aside). The greater the number of institutions involved, the slower things get. Note that most of those institutions will not be getting pre-purchase funds from the federal government and they will face their usual bureaucratic and obstructionist incentives. When it comes to green energy policy, there are still too many veto points.
A striking feature of vaccine development is just how few social goals are involved. A vaccine should be safe, effective and easy to distribute. In broadly similar fashion, the highly successful Manhattan Project of the 1940s also had a small number of goals, namely a working and deliverable atomic bomb. When it comes to energy, there are already too many goals, and additional ones are often added: job creation, better design and community aesthetics, reductions in secondary pollution, regional economic benefits, and so on.
When I explain Fast Grants to people, and how it worked, it is always striking to me which part of the explanation they understand least. Everybody gets “we had a preexisting team in place, ready to handle accounting, recordkeeping, and payments.” Hardly anyone understands — really understands — “the program has two goals: supporting quality research projects that will feed into stopping Covid, and speed.” On one hand, it sounds self-evident to them, but on the other hand I don’t think they realize how much the intellectual infrastructure of the project really is defined by those goals and no others. Nothing about meeting payroll, or pursuing other meritorious social goals, or getting grant or donor renewal, or raising the stature of the program in the biomedical community, or…? What you choose not to pursue is one of the most radical steps you can take, and often it is so radical that other people don’t even grasp or notice it. They just don’t see you “not doing something.” That can be a good way to innovate!
Wednesday assorted links
1. Russian vaccine reports very good results. Maybe we shouldn’t believe this, but in expected value terms the Russian vaccine still is underrated.
2. Money made people happier but psychotherapy did not.
3. Carrying costs exceed liquidity premium: Lion cheaper than a pedigree kitten in Japan. The lion might cost less than $1000.
4. Arnold Kling isn’t sure how effective the new vaccines will be, more here. I am myself very optimistic, but happy to pass along other points of view.
How good has media coverage of Covid-19 been?
We analyze the tone of COVID-19 related English-language news articles written since January 1, 2020. Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals. The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials. Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience. U.S. major media readers strongly prefer negative stories about COVID-19, and negative stories in general. Stories of increasing COVID-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining. Among U.S. major media outlets, stories discussing President Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine are more numerous than all stories combined that cover companies and individual researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines.
Emphasis added by me. That is the abstract of a new NBER working paper by Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook.
“Mirror, Mirror” (Star Trek classic, spoilers in this post)
I haven’t seen most Star Trek episodes since I was a young teen, so I tried rewatching this one, you know, with the alternate universe and the evil Spock. It was good!
I took away from it the main lesson that our moral behavior — or lack thereof — is one of the most contingent and fragile features of our universe. The possibly happy ending for the bad universe drives this point home, as does the opening speech from the indigenous folk (the Halkans) who won’t sell their dilithium crystals, reminding Kirk that the Federation too might turn bad. Add to that the utter implausibility of their “highly moral” behavior in the bad universe, as the absurdity and unlikelihood of their invited destruction reminds us that virtually everyone is pliable in response to strong enough incentives.
If you think through the plot, to the extent the “good” people are more powerful and effective than the “bad” people, that is because the “good” people are better at deceit. Though the good people can teach deceit to the bad people, as the good Kirk does at the end to the evil Spock, who perhaps will reform. Another embedded lesson is that both the “good” and the “bad” men will sexually harass (both the good and bad) women, with the major differences being those of style not substance. And the “good” men seem to prefer the “bad” women.
If the “bad” universe were safer, would the powerful people find it better or worse to live in? What if you had a Ring of Gyges to help you along?
Overall you can read the whole episode as “the spirits” (God?) sending a Shakespearean-like dream to Kirk, so that he can better understand the perspective of the Halkans, which otherwise he finds baffling. Might the Halkans have sent the dream themselves?
Recommended, it was better and more idea-rich than expected. I will try another episode soon.
My podcast with Darren Lipomi
He is a well-known chemist (and more) at UC San Diego. We started with classic Star Trek and then moved into textiles, chemistry, music vs. sound, nanobots against Covid, how to interview, traveling during a pandemic, art collecting and voodoo flags, the importance of materials science, and much more. Mostly he interviewed me, though it went a bit both ways.
Almost 100% fresh material and topics, and here is the Spotify link.
MIT graduate micro exam, 1961
From the archives of Irwin Collier (I won’t do any extra indentation):
Economics Candidates: Answer any FOUR questions (thirty minutes each).
S.I.M. Candidates: Answer any TWO questions (thirty minutes each).
- Within the framework of static, partial-equilibrium theory, indicate under what circumstances advertising will reduce product prices in the long run, (a) if the advertiser is a simple monopolist, (b) if the advertisers are members of a large, perfectly symmetrical, Chamberlinian group of suppliers of differentiated products (the number of firms being large enough to rule out oligopolistic relationships, and variable in accordance with a long-run-equilibrium condition of zero profit for all firms).
- How is a firm’s demand schedule for a particular factor of production derived (a) when that factor is the only variable one, and (b) when the quantities of all factors are variable? Show which of these demands is, if anything, the more elastic.
- The demands for two products are: q1 = q2 = 54 – p1 -p2. How would you characterize their relationship? If they are produced by separate sellers at constant average costs of c1 = 12 and c2 = 6, respectively, calculate each man’s equilibrium price, quantity, and profit under each of the following conditions:
- Each seller assumes that the other’s price is a constant;
- The second seller behaves that way and the first seller realizes that he does;
- Both sellers maximize their joint profit and share it equally.
- Two countries can produce food (F) and clothing (C) with labor (L) as the only factor of production. Country A has 20 billion units of L, each of which can produce either 5 units of F or 2 units of C. Country B has 10 billion units of L, each of which can produce either 8 units of F or 6 units of C. Everyone always spends half of his income on F and the other half on C. In a purely competitive equilibrium with balanced trade between the two countries (and no transportation costs), what is the effect on the quantities of F and C produced and consumed in each country? Could either country benefit by imposing a tariff on the imported good?
- What are the various reasons why a free-private-enterprise economy may fail to allocate its resources in an optimally efficient way? Explain.
- Discuss the roles of “real” and “monetary” elements in a satisfactory theory of interest. Is it logically possible to fashion an interest theory exclusively in terms of one or the other of those elements? Explain.
TC again: I don’t think current graduate students (outside of MIT and a few other places) would do very well on #1, nor do I think they would understand what is being asked on #6, much less have a good answer. On #5, I wonder how many would give a sufficiently analytical answer rather than just repeating a bunch of cliches from media and social media?
Edward Lazear has passed away
He was one of the true microeconomists, from Wikipedia:
Edward Paul Lazear…an American economist, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Davies Family Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Lazear served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors from 2006 to 2009, replacing Ben Bernanke. As Chairman, he was the chief economic advisor to President George W. Bush holding a cabinet-level post as part of the White House team that led the response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Lazear has been called the founder of personnel economics a subfield of economics that applies economic models to the study of the management of human resources in the firm. His research advances new models of employee incentives, promotions, compensation and productivity in firms. He is also credited with developing a theory of entrepreneurship and leadership that emphasizes skill acquisition. In addition to personnel economics, Lazear is a labor economist known for his work on the educational production function, teaching to the test, and the importance of culture and language in explaining the rise of multiculturalism.
Tuesday assorted links
1. What Vietnam has been like. And the Katya Simon recommendations.
2. Leopold Aschenbrenner is now blogging.
3. Don Boudreaux on “Tyler vs. Tyler.” (Usually a rich topic, I might add.) In my view, the mobility data and cross-comparative data show that most of the real resource costs have come from fear and risk avoidance, not from lockdowns per se. See this work, or visit your local movie theatre.
4. All the good writing about Substack.
6. AI to sum up research papers in a sentence.
7. John Lott update.
Why is bitcoin at $18,000?
We can all admit now that it isn’t a bubble, right? Of course you still might think the current price is too high, as returns are a (near) random walk.
This WSJ article ably surveys the current landscape. I put the least stock on “inflation hedge” arguments, and the most on ordinary factors such as these:
In October, PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL 4.23% unveiled a service that allows its users to buy and sell bitcoin directly in their accounts. It became available to all U.S. users on Nov. 12 and will expand to Venmo and some international markets next year.
You don’t have to believe that PayPal per se is moving the market. Rather the normalization of bitcoin raises the ongoing probability that it will become a normal albeit small part of various financial and corporate portfolios. And that in turn raises its equilibrium value. The mere continuing existence of bitcoin — illustrating that it won’t disappear anytime soon — can have a broadly similar effect.
The Flat Tax Increases Growth
There is something to be said for tearing it all down and starting again. The flat tax, for example, has long been debated but has never been fully adopted in the United States. After the end of communism, however, many countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia adopted flat taxes. Brian Wheaton, on the market from Harvard, has a very nice paper which, somewhat surprisingly, is one of the first to really dig into this series of natural experiments.
Between 1994 and 2011,twenty post-communist countries introduced such a tax at varying—but typically quite low—rates as a percentage of income.At their peak, nearly all Eastern European and Central Asian countries had a flat tax in effect.Since 2011, on the other hand, some of these countries have repealed their flat taxes and reverted to a progressive system of income taxation.These policy changes represent an ideal natural experiment through which to test the multitude of claims pertaining to flat taxation.
Using quarterly GDP data on this panel of flat-tax adopters and a difference-in-differences identification strategy, I find that the adoption of a flat tax structure has a strongly significant positive effect of 1.36 percentage points on GDP growth…[lasting about a decade].
Wheaton finds that it wasn’t just lower average tax rates which mattered, holding average rates constant a flatter tax-structure also led to more capital investment and moderately greater labor supply.
Wheaton has many other interesting papers.
Do pandemics boost public faith in science?
No, according to Barry Eichengreen, Cevat Giray Aksoy, and Orkun Saka:
It is sometimes said that an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic will be heightened appreciation of the importance of scientific research and expertise. We test this hypothesis by examining how exposure to previous epidemics affected trust in science and scientists. Building on the “impressionable years hypothesis” that attitudes are durably formed during the ages 18 to 25, we focus on individuals exposed to epidemics in their country of residence at this particular stage of the life course. Combining data from a 2018 Wellcome Trust survey of more than 75,000 individuals in 138 countries with data on global epidemics since 1970, we show that such exposure has no impact on views of science as an endeavor but that it significantly reduces trust in scientists and in the benefits of their work. We also illustrate that the decline in trust is driven by the individuals with little previous training in science subjects. Finally, our evidence suggests that epidemic-induced distrust translates into lower compliance with health-related policies in the form of negative views towards vaccines and lower rates of child vaccination.
Here is the link to the NBER working paper.
The case for geographically concentrated vaccine doses
Here goes:
A central yet neglected point is that vaccines should not be sent to each and every part of the U.S. Instead, it would be better to concentrate distribution in a small number of places where the vaccines can have a greater impact.
Say, for the purposes of argument, that you had 20,000 vaccine doses to distribute. There are about 20,000 cities and towns in America. Would you send one dose to each location? That might sound fair, but such a distribution would limit the overall effect. Many of those 20,000 recipients would be safer, but your plan would not meaningfully reduce community transmission in any of those places, nor would it allow any public events to restart or schools to reopen.
Alternatively, say you chose one town or well-defined area and distributed all 20,000 doses there. Not only would you protect 20,000 people with the vaccine, but the surrounding area would be much safer, too. Children could go to school, for instance, knowing that most of the other people in the building had been vaccinated. Shopping and dining would boom as well.
Here is one qualifier, but in fact it pushes one further along the road to geographic concentration:
Over time, mobility, migration and mixing would undo some of the initial benefits of the geographically concentrated dose of vaccines. That’s why the second round of vaccine distribution should go exactly to those people who are most likely to mix with the first targeted area. This plan reaps two benefits: protecting the people in the newly chosen second area, and limiting the ability of those people to disrupt the benefits already gained in the first area.
In other words, if the first doses went (to choose a random example) to Wilmington, Delaware, the next batch of doses should go to the suburbs of Wilmington. In economics language [behind this link is a highly useful Michael Kremer paper], one can say that Covid-19 infections (and protections) have externalities, and there are increasing returns to those externalities. That implies a geographically concentrated approach to vaccine distribution, whether at the federal or state level.
Here is another qualifier:
…there will be practical limits on a fully concentrated geographic distribution of vaccines. Too many vaccines sent to too few places will result in long waits and trouble with storage. Nonetheless, at the margin the U.S. should still consider a more geographically concentrated distribution than what it is likely to do.
Do you think that travel restrictions have stopped the spread of the coronavirus? (Doesn’t mean you have to favor them, all things considered.) Probably yes. If so, you probably ought to favor a geographically concentrated initial distribution of the vaccine as well — can you see why it is the same logic? Just imagine it spreading out like stones on a Go board.
Of course we are not likely to do any of this. Here is my full Bloomberg column.