Sunday assorted links
Falling prices prediction bleg
Over the next six to nine months, which things in the American economy will see falling nominal prices?
Don’t count goods and services for which the current price is de facto infinity, such as a cruise or a twenty-block of seats at an NBA game.
What are your predictions? And what is your underlying model for that sector of the economy?
Will used car prices be falling by then?
At a dinner table discussion, one person I know picked “the price of TV streaming services” (falling viewing time plus excess capacity?), but this was much disputed.
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
Newark fact of the day
Newark Police officers did not fire a single shot during the calendar year 2020, and the city didn’t pay a single dime to settle police brutality cases. That’s never happened, at least in the city’s modern history.
At the same time, crime is dropping, and police recovered almost 500 illegal guns from the street during the year.
Here is the longer story.
Yascha Mounk interviews me for his podcast
I give him a hard time about populism, he gives me a hard time about complacency. We cover politics and geopolitics as well. Here is the link.
Garett Jones sentences to ponder
UCSD’s Valerie Ramey, advisor to CBO and member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, notes the puzzling result reported by multiple researchers: *More* infrastructure spending predicts *no change or a decline* in jobs:
…Have wonks widely discussed the finding that U.S. infrastructure spending appears to have no positive short-term effect on jobs?
Here is the link, including to research by Valerie Ramey.
Saturday assorted links
1. At #6 and #7 you can read AIER on vaccines. C’mon people, this particular debate is over.
2. Long Covid is real. And U.S. excess deaths in 2020 more elevated in relative terms than during the 1918 pandemic (NYT). And “BREAKING: Israel reports no new coronavirus deaths for second day in a row.”
3. Highly effective software to help you find a vaccine, vaccinatethestates.com.
4. Wyoming will recognize DAOs as a new form of LLC.
5. The fiscal polity that is Illinois: “Winners of lottery jackpots of $25,000 or more have been denied payment by the lottery commission until the state balances the budget.”
6. “Ontario Parks cracking down on people reselling camping bookings for profit.“
India’s Pandemic and the World
Shruti Rajagopalan is right, helping India isn’t just about India.
India’s role in the global pandemic is unique. The developing world is counting on affordable Indian vaccine-makers such as Serum Institute of India Pvt. Ltd. for their supplies. With India now reserving virtually all its doses for domestic use, those countries will have to wait even longer to be vaccinated. And if the pandemic disrupts production at Indian pharmaceutical companies, it could affect crucial non-Covid medications as well. Half the world’s children have been vaccinated by Serum Institute.
The Biden administration can do two things to help. The first is to ease restrictions on critical exports, imposed under the Defense Production Act to prioritize the needs of U.S. companies.
Vaccine production requires very specific, medically approved inputs, which are difficult to substitute quickly in the middle of a pandemic. Currently, U.S. producers must secure permission before exporting such things as special sterile filters, disposable bags for cell cultures, cell culture media and single-use tubing. The embargo has led to major bottlenecks. Serum Institute says that without those inputs, it may not be able to deliver the 160 million vaccine doses it had planned to produce next month.
Second, the U.S. should immediately share doses from its own supply of Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
I have three things to add. First, I have already noted the foreign policy implications which weigh strongly in favor of taking a more active role in the world pandemic.
Second, India should move immediately to delay the second dose of the AZ vaccine to 12 weeks. The federal government has already recommended a 6-8 week schedule, as this improves efficiency of the AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccine, but many people so fear shortages that they are getting a less-effective second dose at four weeks. An enforced 12 week schedule would improve efficiency and might also reassure people that there will be supplies in 12 weeks.
Third, and this is more speculative, but the rising pandemic in India provides an opportunity to test fractional dosing of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in a real world setting. There is currently a small-scale Belgian trial testing Moderna at 50 mcg and Pfizer at 20 mcg. We already have reasonable information that 50 mcg of Moderna induces a robust immune response in adults. The mRNA vaccines wouldn’t work in all of India but would be fine in the cities and perhaps there is an opportunity for an exchange similar to what Israel promised to get early supplies.
Periodicals to know about
There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
That is from David Brooks (NYT).
The petty narcissism of small vaccine differences
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
My survey of the cultural vaccine landscape in the U.S. includes the four major vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
Pfizer, distributed by one of the largest U.S. pharmaceutical firms, is the establishment vaccine. Since it initially had a significant “cold chain” requirement, it was given out at established institutions such as big hospitals and public-health centers with large freezers. It is plentiful, highly effective and largely uncontroversial.
Moderna — the very name suggests something new — is the intellectual vaccine. The company had no product or major revenue source until the vaccine itself, so it is harder to link Moderna to “Big Pharma,” which gives it a kind of anti-establishment vibe. Note also that the last three letters of Moderna are “rna,” referring to the mRNA technology that makes the vaccine work. It is the vaccine for people in the know.
Moderna was also, for a while anyway, the American vaccine. It was available primarily in the U.S. at a time when Pfizer was being handed out liberally in the U.K. and Israel. As a recipient of two Moderna doses myself, I feel just a wee bit special for this reason. You had to be an American to get my vaccine. Yes, the European Union had also approved it, but it failed to procure it in a timely manner. So the availability of Moderna reflects the greater wealth and efficiency of the U.S.
Then there are the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines…
And:
To the extent vaccines turn into markers for a cultural club, vaccine hesitancy may persist.
It might be better, all things considered, if vaccines were viewed more like paper clips — that is, a useful and even necessary product entirely shorn of cultural significance. Few people refuse to deploy paper clips in order to “own the libs” or because they do not trust the establishment. They are just a way to hold two pieces of paper together.
To be clear, the primary blame here lies with those who hesitate to get vaccinated. But behind big mistakes are many small ones — and we vaccinated Americans, with our all-too-human tendency to create hierarchies for everything, are surely contributing to the mess.
Recommended!
Do career disruptions matter for the top five percent?
How resilient are high-skilled, white collar workers? We exploit a uniquely comprehensive dataset of individual-level resumes of bank employees and the setting of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to estimate the effect of an unanticipated shock on the career paths of mobile and high skilled labor. We find evidence of short-term effects that largely dissipate over the course of the decade and that touch only the senior-most employees. We match each employee of Lehman Brothers in January 2008 to the most similar employees at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and UBS based on job positions, skills, education, and demographics. By 2019, the former Lehman Brothers employees are 2% more likely to have experienced at least a six-months-long break from reported employment and 3% more likely to have left the financial services industry. However, these effects concentrate among the senior individuals such as vice presidents and managing directors and are absent for junior employees such as analysts and associates. Furthermore, in terms of subsequent career growth, junior employees of Lehman Brothers fare no worse than their counterparts at the other banks. Analysts and associates employed at Lehman Brothers in January 2008 have equal or greater likelihoods of achieving senior roles such as managing director in existing enterprises by January 2019 and are more likely to found their own businesses.
That is from a new paper by Anastassia Fedyk and James Hodson. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
2. A funny kind of Taiwanese marriage arbitrage.
3. Solve for the lovely biscuit equilibrium.
4. Oxford malaria vaccine looking good in (small) Burkina Faso trial.
5. Ranked-choice voting for the New York mayor (NYT).
6. Greece reopens to American tourists.
7. EU proposing to regulate the use of Bayesian estimation. What’s the chance of that actually happening?
From the comments, Zaua on capital gains tax hikes
Canada (oil sands) fact of the day
Between Mr. Trudeau’s election in 2015 and 2019, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by 1 percent, despite decreases in other rich nations during the same period, according to government data released last week. In fact, Canada is the only Group of 7 country whose emissions have risen since the Paris climate agreement was signed six years ago.
Here is more from the NYT.
What are the limits of economies of scope?
Amazon is launching its first high-tech hair salon, as the online retailer makes a surprise move into the beauty sector.
The salon, in Spitalfields, east London, will have an augmented-reality mirror showing clients different colours and styles before treatments.
The venue will also have magazines loaded on to tablets, for browsing.
Traditional services including cuts, blow-dries and colour treatments will also be available.
Here is the full story, via Michelle Dawson.
Here is the link.