How do the NIH and NSF work?
A surprising number of individuals responded to my post last week soliciting books about the NIH and NSF. Thank you to those who did and please do still feel free to reach out on this matter.
It became apparent that a highly complementary effort would be a Substack/blog/podcast/similar about the inner workings of the NIH / NSF, and indeed other institutions relevant to the modern-day administration and practice of science. Think SCOTUSblog or Macro Musings, but focused on the NIH/NSF/etc.
So, if you would like to start such a blog/podcast/newsletter, please email me, and that plan will be considered for financial support.
Judge Richard Neely, RIP
Judge Richard Neely, former head of the WV Supreme Court, held a special place in my heart. I never met the man but early on in my career, Eric Helland and I wrote a paper on elected judges and tort awards (PDF):
We argue that partisan elected judges have an incentive to redistribute wealth from out‐of‐state defendants (nonvoters) to in‐state plaintiffs (voters). We first test the hypothesis by using cross‐state data. We find a significant partisan effect after controlling for differences in injuries, state incomes, poverty levels, selection effects, and other factors. One difference that appears difficult to control for is that each state has its own tort law. In cases involving citizens of different states, federal judges decide disputes by using state law. Using these diversity‐of‐citizenship cases, we conclude that differences in awards are caused by differences in electoral systems, not by differences in state law.
While researching the paper I found this quote from Neely and when I read it I knew we were going to be published in a good journal:
As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to injured in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone’s else money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families, and their friends will reelect me. (Neely 1988, p. 4).
That is what you call anecdotal gold.
To be clear, when Neely was looking for a law clerk he advertised:
“America’s laziest and dumbest judge” seeks “a bright person to keep (the judge) from looking stupid,” and gave preference to University of Virginia law students “who studied interesting but useless subjects at snobby schools.”
Neely spoke brutally honestly to break conventions and reveal underlying truths. Thank you Judge Neely for your candor as it surely helped me in my career.
Free Britney Spears
Jamie Spears was authorized by the California Superior Court to control his daughter’s finances, health care, and aspects of her daily routine. The conservatorship was initially temporary. Twelve years later, it’s still in place. The court documents and hearings—there have been many over the years—have been mostly sealed to the public, so little is known about the actual nature and conditions of the agreement.
Britney’s father can control virtually all of the terms of her life, and Britney is vociferously opposed to having him as her “conservator.” I know very little about the mental condition of Britney Spears, but I would think the case for enslaving her — as we have done — should face a very high bar indeed. She hardly seems totally unable to function:
She released four albums, went on as many world tours and, for her successful Piece of Me residency in Las Vegas, played 248 shows in the span of four years, grossing $500,000 per show.
Guess who controls the money and the terms of employment? The Straussian element shows up on Instagram:
What appears to the uninitiated as a random assortment of selfies, inspirational quotes, and dance videos is, according to supporters of the so-called #FreeBritney movement, a desperate plea for help. First, there was the color of her shirt, which appeared to match commenters’ calls for her to wear yellow (or red, or blue, or white, or anything) if she were in trouble. Then there were the roses, “a symbol of secrecy and silence,” as one user pointed out. In one video, Spears walks back and forth nine times, obviously Morse code for SOS. And then of course there were her eyelashes.
Here is the full article from Vanity Fair. Don’t forget this:
“Conservatorships are very hard to get out of—much, much harder to get out of than to get into, and that’s something many people don’t realize, even people who are seeking conservatorships,” said Zoe Brennan-Krohn, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Disability Rights Project.
Britney’s life matters, free Britney Spears.
Emergent Ventures winners, eleventh cohort
Andrew Dembe of Uganda, working on the “last mile” problem for health care delivery.
Maxwell Dostart-Meers of Harvard, to study Singapore and state capacity, as a Progress Studies fellow.
Markus Strasser of Linz, Austria, now living in London, to pursue a next-generation scientific search and discovery web interface that can answer complex quantitative questions, built on extracted relations from scientific text, such as graph of causations, effects, biomarkers, quantities, etc.
Marc Sidwell of the United Kingdom, to write a book on common sense.
Yuen Yuen Ang, political scientist at the University of Michigan, from Singapore, to write a new book on disruption.
Matthew Clancy, Iowa State University, Progress Studies fellow. To build out his newsletter on recent research on innovation.
Samarth Athreya, Ontario: “I’m a 17 year old who is incredibly passionate about the advent of biomaterials and its potential to push humanity forward in a variety of industries. I’ve been speaking about my vision and some of my research on the progress of material science and nanotechnology specifically at various events like C2 Montreal, SXSW, and Elevate Tech Festival!”
Applied Divinity Studies, this anonymously written blog has won an award for his or her writing and blogging. We are paying in bitcoin.
Jordan Mafumbo, a Ugandan autodidact and civil engineer studying Heidegger and the foundations of liberalism. He also has won an award for blogging.
Sweden Covid-19 update
Do not judge Sweden until the autumn. That was the message from its state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell in May and through the summer as he argued that Sweden’s initial high death toll from Covid-19 would be followed in the second wave by “a high level of immunity and the number of cases will probably be quite low”.
Now the autumn is here, and hospitalisations from Covid-19 are currently rising faster in Sweden than in any other country in Europe, while in Stockholm — the centre for both the first and second waves in the country — one in every five tests is positive, suggesting the virus is even more widespread than official figures suggest.
Even Sweden’s public health agency admits its earlier prediction that the country’s Nordic neighbours such as Finland and Norway would suffer more in the autumn appears wrong. Sweden is currently faring worse than Denmark, Finland and Norway on cases, hospitalisations and deaths relative to the size of their population.
…The number of patients hospitalised with Covid-19 is doubling in Sweden every eight days currently, the fastest rate for any European country for which data is available. Its cases per capita have sextupled in the past month to more than 300 new daily infections per million people, close to the UK and way ahead of its Nordic neighbours.
Here is more from Richard Milne at the FT. To be clear, it seems that many of the Swedish deaths are due to a “dry tinder” effect, so in relative terms they are not doing as much worse than you might think. Other parts of Europe may well catch up to them, at least on a “tinder-adjusted” basis. But if you are just asking which predictions of which model are being vindicated here, it is that the herd immunity obtained through a partial neutralization of super-spreaders is temporary rather than permanent.
Source here. And Swedish deaths seem to be 40% of the U.S. equivalent.
To be clear, I did not predict this (or its opposite), but rather for many months I have been saying we need more data from Sweden to draw a conclusion. Now we have more data.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Adjusted seroprevalence across Karnataka was 46.7% (95% CI: 43.3-50.0), including 44.1% (95% CI: 40.0-48.2) in rural and 53.8% (95% CI: 48.4-59.2) in urban areas.” And speculative results on whether Indians have strong Covid immunity. And Kenya was at about five percent seroprevalence as of May-June.
2. The Neo Rauch dispute over right-wing art (NYT).
3. I have been neglecting to cover synthetic nanobodies, merely out of sloth, but in fact they hold great potential, both against Covid-19 and more generally. And have we discovered protection against HIV acquisition in women? It seems so. What an incredible year for biomedicine.
4. A review of Where is My Flying Car?
5. My Salem Center (UT Austin) talk and podcast on the ethics of current vaccine choices.
6. How Azerbaijan won. Drones! And Bruno on the decline of Russian power in the region.
UAE China fact of the day
Rochelle Crossley has been working as a flight attendant in the UAE and received a COVID-19 vaccination after thousands of injections were rolled out to frontline workers.
“The fear of getting the virus outweighed the fear of having the vaccination,” Ms Crossley told 9News.
I am glad to see somebody computing expected value. By the way, that is Sinopharm, not Sinovac. And:
More than 30,000 people in the UAE have received injections as part of phase three trials.
Here is the article, via Air Genius Gary Leff.
Paige Harden on Genetic Differences and the Left
Paige Harden, the left-leaning behavioral geneticist, brings the fire in comments on an AEON article about her work:
In this article, Erik Parens urges me and other scientists working in the field of social genomics to “curb [our] optimism” regarding how genetic discoveries could be used to advance progressive and egalitarian social goals. In my view, however, it is Parens and other critics of social genomics who need to curb their optimism, in two ways.
First, Parens is overly optimistic that social science can ever hope to be successful without genetics. In reality, social scientists have failed, time and time again, to produce interventions that bring about lasting improvements in people’s lives. There are many reasons for that failure. But one reason is that many scientists continue to engage in what the sociologist Jeremy Freese has called a “tacit collusion” to avoid reckoning, in their research designs and in their causal inferences, with the fact that people are genetically different from one another.
All interventions and policies are built on a model of how the world works: “If I change x, then y will happen.” A model of the world that pretends all people are genetically the same, or that the only thing people inherit from their parents is their environment, is a wrong model of how the world works. The more often our models of the world are wrong, the more often we will continue to fail in designing interventions and policies that do what they intend to do. The goal of integrating genetics into the social sciences is not to design boutique educational interventions tailored for children’s genotypes. It is to help rescue us from our current situation, where most educational interventions tested don’t work for anyone. This track record of failure plays directly into the hands of a right-wing that touts the ineffectiveness of intervention as evidence for its false narrative of genetic determinism.
Second, Parens and other critics are overly optimistic that their strategy of disapproval, discouragement, and disavowal of genetic research will be effective in neutralizing the pernicious ideologies of the far-right. What is the evidence that this strategy actually works? Herrnstein and Murray published “The Bell Curve” when I was 12 years old; Murray published “Human Diversity” when I was 37 years old; and in all that time, the predominant response from the political left has remained pretty much exactly the same – emphasize people’s genetic sameness, question the wisdom of doing genetic research at all, urge caution. Yet, the far-right is ascendant. In my view, the left’s response to genetic science simply preaches to its own choir. Meanwhile, this strategy of minimization allows right-wing ideologues to offer to “red-pill” people with the “forbidden knowledge” of genetic results.
What the left hasn’t done (yet) is formulate a messaging strategy that (a) reconciles the existence of human genetic differences with people’s moral and political commitments to human equality, and (b) is readily comprehensible outside the confines of the ivory tower. Reminding people that genes are a source of luck in their lives has the potential to be that message. Parens characterizes me as making a “generous hearted but large leap” to expect that portraying genes as luck will change people’s minds, but economic research suggests that reminding people of the role of luck in their lives does, in fact, make them more supportive of redistribution.
Overall, this article portrays me and others working in this space as “soft-pedaling” the dangers of social genomics being appropriated by the far right. But I am fully cognizant of the dangers. Parens is the one who is soft-pedaling. He is soft-pedaling the enormous damage done to progress in psychology, sociology, and other social sciences – fields that are tasked with improving people’s lives – by their refusal to engage with genetics. And, he is soft-pedaling the danger of simply continuing the left’s decades-old, easily-“red-pilled” rhetorical strategy at a time with right-wing ideologies are on the rise globally.
Toward a universal medical test?
UC San Francisco scientists have developed a single clinical laboratory test capable of zeroing in on the microbial miscreant afflicting a patient in as little as six hours – irrespective of what body fluid is sampled, the type or species of infectious agent, or whether physicians start out with any clue as to what the culprit may be.
The test will be a lifesaver, speeding appropriate drug treatment for the seriously ill, and should transform the way infectious diseases are diagnosed, said the authors of the study, published Nov. 9 in Nature Medicine.
The advance here is that we can detect any infection from any body fluid, without special handling or processing for each distinct body fluid,” said study corresponding author Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, a professor in the UCSF Department of Laboratory Medicine and director of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center.
Here is the full story, via David Lim.
That was then, this is now, wartime casualties edition
U.S. Civil War combat deaths per day: 449
World War II U.S. combat deaths per day: 297
Covid-19 U.S. deaths per day: > 1,000
And rising, 1500 per day seems baked in, 2000 per day might also be within reach. I just don’t get you people who say this isn’t a big deal.
By the way, deaths as a percentage of population isn’t the right metric here. Losing 320,000 lives (including excess deaths) has about the same moral import, whether or not there are a billion Morlocks living under the earth’s surface, though that fact would change the loss greatly as measured in percentage terms and of course make it look much smaller.
If one thousand lives (and more) per day is not a big deal, then what is? The global toll is much larger of course, and most of the gdp contraction has come from fear rather than lockdowns per se — see for instance Sweden.
And as Scott Gottlieb tweeted:
This is not a question of lockdowns vs no lockdowns. The question is how do we take targeted measures, get broader compliance to prudent steps like masks, distancing, avoiding large gatherings; to reduce, slow spread so that the healthcare system doesn’t risk getting overwhelmed.
You won’t do a bit of restraint to stem these losses, and shift infections into the future, while a good vaccine is coming not to mention other therapeutics? Or try this simple question: If you are a limited government libertarian, then when would you deploy government action if not now?
Speaking of “that was then, this is now,” here is Jeffrey Tucker of AIER (of GBD fame) predicting, circa October 14, that there will never be a vaccine.
A love letter to law and economics education
“Quantifying Economic Reasoning in Court: Judge Economic Sophistication and Pro-business Orientation” (draft coming soon)
Abstract: By applying computational linguistics tools to the analysis of US federal district courts’ decisions from 1932 to 2016, this paper quantifies the rise of economic reasoning in court cases, ranging from securities regulation to antitrust law. I then relate judges’ level of economic reasoning to their training. I find that the significant judge heterogeneity in economic sophistication can be explained by attendance at law schools with a large presence of the law and economics faculty. Finally, for all regulatory cases from 1970 to 2016 I hand code whether the judge ruled in favor of the business or the government. I find that judge economic sophistication is positively correlated with a higher frequency of pro-business decisions even after controlling for political ideology and a rich set of other judge covariates.
That is the job market paper of Siying Cao, who is on the job market from the University of Chicago. Here is her home page.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Lewis Jackson on money in politics.
2. Cowen’s Second Law: “Criminal cannibalism: An examination of patterns and styles.”
3. “Black Churches still comprise the majority of the church chapter 11 filings.”
4. Laura Deming mental models for science and other things. And short history of the mRNA vaccine. And maybe the vaccine is 97% effective. And caveat lector out the wazoo, but here is a new report on the Sputnik vaccine. You will note the Russians are in any case having big problems scaling production.
5. Data on diversity and hiring practices in Silicon Valley.
Right-thinking Henry Olsen on Trump voter fraud
None of these early warning signs of fraud appear in the results.
There is much more detail and argument at the link. Via Ross Douthat.
*Religion and the Rise of Capitalism*
That is the new, forthcoming book by Benjamin M. Friedman, due out in January, you can pre-order here. I will be inviting him to do a CWT, he was also an excellent macro professor way back when.
Via Henry C. Clark.
Predictions of the herd immunity theorists
If you are still pondering the Great Barrington Declaration and related matters, let us try a simple empirical test about predictions. Start with this from one of the authors of the Declaration:
…the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, Sunetra Gupta. In May she declared: “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on the way out in this country.”
Link here. The UK just hit 500 deaths a day, highest since May and about 2x the current U.S. rate.
She also said:
“So I think the [infection fatality rate, or IFR] would be definitely less than one in 1,000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000. That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.”
Dominic Lawson continues:
As Sam Bowman, of the free-market Adam Smith Institute — and therefore far from an illiberal interventionist — observed: “By this point, 36,000 had died of Covid in the UK. If 100% of the UK’s population had had Covid by then, the UK would have had to have a population of 360 million people for her low-end IFR to be right.”
Or why not read that august institution The Otago Times?:
Sweden’s former top virus expert says lockdowns are just a way of delaying the inevitable and warns that New Zealand could face years of quarantining foreigners entering the country, even after wiping out Covid-19.
Johan Giesecke has defended his country’s coronavirus strategy, saying lockdowns do not prevent surges in cases or deaths, but merely delay them.
Giesecke believes it is “futile” to attempt to stop the spread and says most countries will end up in a similar position, regardless of their strategy, until treatment can be found.
He believes Denmark, Norway and Finland, which are in full lockdown, will end up with the same number of cases as Sweden, which isn’t, as soon as their restrictions ease.
He also says New Zealand will begin importing cases from overseas, after successfully suppressing the virus during lockdown.
To avoid that, quarantine measures will have to stay in place until a vaccine is developed – something he says could take a decade, or longer.
Come on people, you were wrong. By the way, “Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States hit an all-time high of 61,964 on Tuesday,” and deaths running about 1,300 a day. Not a nothingburger. p.s. One in five survivors end up diagnosed with a mental illness.