Straussian Beatles: Baby’s in Black
Here is the song, and yes I know all about Astrid Kirchherr (who often wore black) and the deceased Stu Sutcliffe. The song has yet another meaning, related to the girl chasing of John and Paul, and Liverpool’s longstanding role as a center for English Catholicism, with about half of the population being Catholic in background. Here are some of the lyrics, with commentary from me in brackets, and note I capitalized the “H” for my own purposes:
Oh dear, what can I do?
Baby’s in black and I’m feeling blue [she’s in line to become a nun, and won’t screw me]
Tell me, oh what can I do?She thinks of Him [Jesus, God, etc.]
And so she dresses in black [garb of a nun]
And though he’ll never come back [no second coming!]
She’s dressed in black…[pretty futile this nun thing, isn’t it?]I think of her
But she thinks only of Him
And though it’s only a whim [she doesn’t really believe all that stuff, does she?]
She thinks of HimOh how long will it take
‘Til she sees the mistake she has made?
Dear, what can I do?
Baby’s in black and I’m feeling blue [“blue balls”?]
Tell me, oh what can I do?
One interesting non-lyrical feature of the song is how it features dual melodic lines, one sung by Paul the other by John. As this was 1965, Paul is singing the higher part, as was typically the case in those years. Yet somehow by 1967, John ended up with the much higher vocal parts and Paul the lower. It wasn’t just the helium.
Here is the previous edition of Straussian Beatles.
Saturday assorted links
1. Chad Jones appreciation post, his best papers on growth.
2. Ross Douthat on Catholic stuff.
3. Behavioral economics guide, 2021.
Paul Bloom in The New Yorker on discounting
And also on my Stubborn Attachments, here is part of his discussion:
Cowen, to my mind, glosses over the problem of diminishing returns. Suppose that our prosperity increases a hundredfold. Life would be better, but would our happiness also increase by a multiple of a hundred? After a certain point, it might make sense to worry less about growth. Perhaps the most privileged of us are close to that point now. But these things can be hard to judge. The Babylonian kings might have thought that they were living the best possible lives, not realizing that, in the future, even everyday schmoes would be wiser and more pain-free, living longer, eating better, and travelling more.
I agree with the “everyday schmoes” point, if only because we die at what are still fairly young ages, or may suffer from mental health problems along the way, not to mention pain, as mentioned. But let us say society is at the point where most people live to the possible maximum, mental health problems have been cured, and pain is fixed too. In this unlikely society, human rights would matter much more. If happiness really is broadly fixed, we can welcome the ascent of deontology. One implication of this is that if you fight poverty in poorer countries, you are making some form of Kantianism more true along the way. Think of deontology as a luxury good, or alternatively if everything is doomed to end tomorrow you also should respect rights more, because there are fewer welfare gains from violating them. So I suppose that is a U-shaped function for deontology with respect to wealth, at least if the far left side of the x axis is expressed in drastic enough terms.
Via Barry Brolley.
Alternative Dosing
Alternative dosing is finally getting some attention. This story in Nature recounts some of the recent arguments and evidence:
Two jabs that each contained only one-quarter of the standard dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine gave rise to long-lasting protective antibodies and virus-fighting T cells, according to tests in nearly three dozen people1. The results hint at the possibility of administering fractional doses to stretch limited vaccine supplies and accelerate the global immunization effort.
Since 2016, such a dose-reduction strategy has successfully vaccinated millions of people in Africa and South America against yellow fever2. But no similar approach has been tried in response to COVID-19, despite vaccine shortages in much of the global south.
“There’s a huge status quo bias, and it’s killing people,” says Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “Had we done this starting in January, we could have vaccinated tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions more people.”
…Sarah Cobey, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of Chicago in Illinois and a co-author of a 5 July Nature Medicine commentary supporting dose ‘fractionation’, disagrees about the need for time-consuming data collection.
“We shouldn’t wait that long,” she says. “People are dying, and we have historical precedent for making very well-reasoned guesses that we think are going to save lives.”
…According to a modelling study published by Tabarrok and other economists, such an approach would reduce infections and COVID-linked deaths more than current policies.
Addendum: The reason for doing the modeling study is precisely to take into account variants like Delta. Our modeling suggests that even with efficacy significantly lower than that suggested by Figure 1 in our paper, alternative doses of more effective vaccines would still provide significant reductions in mortality, even when new variants dominate. The benefits derive from vaccinating more quickly.
The Biden Executive Order on promoting competition
Here is the text, I won’t attempt a summary but here are some running comments:
1. The beginning of the piece suggests that concentration is rising in the American economy. But this probably isn’t true. See also these comments by me.
2. Industry concentration has not driven wages down by “as much as 17%” — that’s a porky! OK, they say “advertised wages,” but come on…
3. I am happy to see the document take on occupational licensing.
4. Contra to the recommendation, we should not ban non-compete agreements outright. Many non-compete agreements are perfectly normal institutions designed to protect corporate assets against IP theft, client lists for instance. We should restrict non-compete agreements in some more sophisticated manner, still to be determined.
5. Lower prescription drug prices? Maybe. Do they estimate the elasticity of supply? No. Thus this discussion would fail my Econ 101 class. We do know, however, that prescription drugs are one of the very cheapest ways our health care system saves lives, so this is not obviously a good idea.
6. Right to repair laws? Again, maybe. But show me the trade-off and cite a cost-benefit analysis. If software gives more consumer surplus to consumers (again, a maybe), should we be wanting to tax it with contractual restrictions? Should we be wanting to tax Tesla right now?
7. Portability of bank account information is a good idea.
8. “Empower family farmers…” — do you even need to know what comes next? Aarghh!!!
9. The order “encourages” the DOJ and FTC to take various actions. I won’t blame Biden for this, but we’ve way overstepped what executive orders should be doing, some time ago. The net feeling the honest reader of this section receives is that our antitrust policies toward the large tech companies are not based in much of a notion of rule of law.
10. Should HHS “standardize plan options” in the NHIM to make price shopping easier? Makes me nervous — diverse market offerings can be good.
11. Lots of tired and not typically true claims and insinuations about concentration in airline markets; see my book Big Business or read Gary Leff. And shouldn’t airlines charge for bags? Maybe yes, maybe no, but prices per item are not in general a bad thing.
12. We are warned that farmers and ranchers take in an ever-smaller share of the food dollar spent — thank goodness! And there are a bunch of other selective, scattered observations about food prices (“corn seed prices have gone up as much as 30% annually…”), but nothing close to systematic or showing an actual market failure (corn prices by the way have been plummeting since 2012).
13. Broadband policy should indeed be improved, but this section reads as messy, should do more to emphasize the notion of competition and common carrier platforms, and how about a mention of StarLink?
14. There’s not really any point in marching through a discussion of the “Big Tech” section.
15. Is there a problem with bank concentration in this country? Not where I live. Maybe in some rural areas?
16. YIMBY > NIMBY would do more to limit market power than just about anything else, by the way.
17. Is there even a peep about this country’s biggest and worst-performing monopoly in K-12? Of course not. It is Amazon you have to worry about!
So overall this is not great economics. It is good to see the Biden administration pick up on a few pro-competition issues, but much of the document is not clearly pro-competition either. The reasoning and evidence are pretty much politicized from start to finish.
*Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation*
By Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, forthcoming in September (with a CWT with them on the way I might add).
Self-recommending.
Friday assorted links
1. Aljoša Jurinić playing Chopin Etudes Op.25.
2. What many people believe, and act on. How much of it is true?
3. Saudi austerity.
4. Zaila Avant-garde. And here is an excellent short video of her true skills, by her own account.
5. Back to normal: the West’s Cultural Revolution is over.
6. Profile of nature writer Dara McAnulty (NYT).
7. Tyler Cowen and Yaron Brook dialogue on science and progress.
Tabarrok on RADVAC, the DIY Vaccine
The RadVac vaccine, as you may recall, is the open-source, do-it-yourself vaccine. Here’s Technology Review from one year ago (July of 2020):
Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval.
What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer.
Estep swirled together the mixture and spritzed it up his nose.
…Estep and at least 20 other researchers, technologists, or science enthusiasts, many connected to Harvard University and MIT, have volunteered as lab rats for a do-it-yourself inoculation against the coronavirus. They say it’s their only chance to become immune without waiting a year or more for a vaccine to be formally approved.
Among those who’ve taken the DIY vaccine is George Church, the celebrity geneticist at Harvard University, who took two doses a week apart earlier this month. The doses were dropped in his mailbox, and he mixed the ingredients himself.
Church say…he believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his protégés, is extremely safe. “I think we are at much bigger risk from covid considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are,” he says.
I’m a big fan of the RadVac vaccine and was recently asked to give a talk about the vaccine and the pluses and minuses of the open source approach. In my talk I cover patents, when it was rational to take an unapproved vaccine, the FDA, paternal medicine versus the Consumer Reports model and more. I’m especially pleased with this talk.
Addendum: Great set of posts from johnswentworth from LessWrong on making the vaccine and then testing it.
Oaxaca bleg
Your advice is most welcome! I thank you in advance for your wisdom and counsel. My first trip there is now about twenty-five years old, so time to go again.
What I’ve been reading
1. Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes. Among its other virtues, this book is an excellent “in passing” way to learn about British imperialism and also West African economic collapse. One thing I learned from this book is that Nigeria already has one of the very best collection of these bronzes in the world. It does not seem they are being stolen or ruined, but they are not deployed very effectively either. Recommended.
2. Paul Atkinson, A Design History of the Electric Guitar. “Why is it that so many guitars produced today, not only by Gibson and Fender, but by competing companies, still hark back to the classic designs of the 1950s? Why do so many manufacturers produce designs that are very clearly derivative forms of the Les Paul, the Telecaster, the Stratocaster, the Flying V and the Explorer?” There is now a book on this question, and quite a good one.
3. Cass Sunstein, Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It. More people should write books about the most important topics. Have you and your institution done a “sludge audit” lately?
4. Andras Schiff, Music Comes Out of Silence: A Memoir. A well-written and in fact gripping treatment of what makes classical music so wonderful, life as a touring concert pianist, and defecting from Hungary and later being disillusioned by a resurgent European populism. Zoltan Kocsis was at first the more brilliant pianist, but Schiff was more persistent and ended up with a more successful career.
Alex Millmow’s The Gypsy Economist: The Life and Times of Colin Clark covers the now-neglected Australian pioneer of development economics and relative historical optimist.
There is also Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, controversial.
Stripe Atlas update
Five years ago, Marginal Revolution covered a new project, Stripe Atlas, to help founders incorporate their start-ups and thus make them successful realities. There is a one-time fee of $500. Here are the results:
In 2016, we launched Stripe Atlas to help founders turn their ideas into startups, and in turn, collectively grow the GDP of the internet. Since then, over 20,000 businesses have started with Atlas and have generated over $3 billion in revenue. We surveyed over 1,000 Atlas founders to get a snapshot of this generation of entrepreneurs and their needs…
Ninety-one percent of Atlas founders are not in Silicon Valley. In fact, outside of the US, some of the places where we’re seeing the fastest growth are Nigeria (400% year-over-year), United Arab Emirates (165%), and India (66%). Twenty-eight percent of founders told us that they identify as minorities in their country, and 24% are immigrants. Just 12% of founders identified as female. (This is slightly better when compared to the portfolios of major startup accelerators or venture capital firms.) Over time we hope to help more female founders start and scale. Forty-three percent of Atlas founders are building businesses for the first time—nearly 10,000 of them started in just the past year (an indication of an upward trend in entrepreneurship after nearly three decades of decline).
That is from Edwin Wee. The core lesson, at the meta-level, is that business services for an internet age remain drastically underprovided. But on the bright side, entrepreneurs are starting to remedy this…
Why are some recoveries short and others long?
Because of real factors, in a nutshell:
Using the recession recovery point equal to the month when private payrolls first exceeded their previous peak level, this paper argues that it was the negative secular trend in manufacturing jobs that was the most important determinant of the length and depth of the last three recessions/recoveries. This negative secular trend changed the layoff/recall pattern of jobs in manufacturing into permanent displacements, a malady that lengthened the recovery periods and that is not the explicit target of either traditional monetary policy or traditional fiscal policy. Using the ideas gathered from an examination of the US two-digit sectoral data for the US overall, attention turns to the recession/recoveries of the 50 US states in the last three national recession periods. Regressions that explain the lengths and depths of the recessions in 50 US states reveal the importance of construction jobs, but the most important predictor was manufacturing jobs: the greater the share of manufacturing jobs prior to the recession, the worse was the recession/recovery.
That is a new NBER working paper by Ed Leamer. This of course bears on current monetary policy debates. A very firmly held view on Twitter is that our post-2012 (or so) recovery could have been quicker, had the Fed been more aggressive, and thus we cannot afford to make the same mistake again. Yet after a certain point it was real factors responsible for the recovery problems, and this new Leamer paper shows that (money still should be have been looser earlier on, in my view). See also my previous coverage of papers by Marianna Kudylak (and co-authors), and Bob Hall directs my attention to this recent paper on why employment right now is recovering as fast as it is. The evidence really is piling up very rapidly and decisively that mainly real factors are/were the problem after a certain point.
Thursday assorted links
1. Nine-minute podcast with NPR, beach reads for NPR readers. And Kramnik vs. Anand no-castling match in the works.
2. Long Blanchard and Tirole report on the economic challenges facing France, and here in French.
3. The distillery tour culture that is Scottish (short video).
4. Davis Kedrosky on what was the Industrial Revolution.
On poems
William Carlos Williams (from Asphodel):
“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”
For the pointer I thank Tim T.
What should be taught more in the first-year graduate sequence in economics?
Or maybe just taught more period? For microeconomics, I have two very definite picks:
1. Price discrimination. They do it to you more and more! Or perhaps you are striving to do it to others. This is typically covered in a first-year sequence, but how many second-year students really have mastered when it is welfare-improving or not? How it relates to product tying? When it is sustainable against entry or not?
This seems like a highly relevant real world topic covered only in passing, noting that at the Principles level Cowen and Tabarrok give it full attention.
2. Tax incidence. Covered thoroughly in public finance sequences, but usually only in passing in first-year sequences. But just about everything is a problem in tax incidence! Any change in relative prices gives rise to tax incidence issues, and aren’t relative price changes central to economics?
How can you analyze minimum wage economics, for instance, without a strong background in tax incidence theory (and empirics)? What if someone says “that minimum wage hike — the associated gains are just captured by the landlords!” Right or wrong? Under what conditions? Good luck!
Grad students these days aren’t learning enough micro theory.
And for macroeconomics? I have a definite nomination:
3. Say’s Law. Yes I have read Keynes, and furthermore John Stuart Mill understood as early as 1829 that Say’s Law doesn’t hold if there is a big increase in money hoardings. But often there isn’t a big increase in money hoardings! And then what people call “increases in aggregate demand” very often are more fundamentally “increases in aggregate supply.” Long-, medium- and short-term considerations to be tossed in as further complexities. Ngdp boosts can come through either nominal or real variables, etc.
There are still lots and lots of people — at all levels — who don’t have a firm handle on these matters. And Twitter has made this worse.
Which topics do you think should be given additional coverage?