Monday assorted links
1. “Sociable weavers work together to construct large nests in southern Africa, often in acacia trees. The nests can weigh as much as 1 ton and house up to 200 birds in individual chambers. Their cooperative behaviors also include chick rearing and defense against snakes and falcons.” Link here.
2. Why so much regional inequality in Britain (The Economist).
3. Both of these supposed Gauguins look like fakes to me.
4. Shruti on Indian Matchmaking (Bloomberg).
5. A sort of funny tweet stream about cross-national comparisons of corporate tax laws.
6. New and positive results on deworming.
7. “Zombie cicadas” infected with mind-controlling fungus return to West Virginia.
Nursing home networks and Covid-19
We construct network measures of nursing home connectedness and estimate that nursing homes have, on average, connections with 15 other facilities. Controlling for demographic and other factors, a home’s staff-network connections and its centrality within the greater network strongly predict COVID-19 cases. Traditional federal regulatory metrics of nursing home quality are unimportant in predicting outbreaks, consistent with recent research. Results suggest that eliminating staff linkages between nursing homes could reduce COVID-19 infections in nursing homes by 44 percent.
That is from a new NBER working paper by M. Keith Chen, Judith A. Chevalier, and Elisa F. Long, and I am going to nominate this as one of the very best and most important papers of the year.
The Great Psychometric test continues (U.K. fact of the day)
And the results ain’t always pretty:
The number of high-risk drinkers nearly doubled in lockdown and was worst in groups of higher social class, a government report shows.
Here is the (gated) Telegraph article. Part of the mechanism of course may be that the “groups of higher social class” have not experienced the most severe income hits. But I wonder if there is not more at work here. These same “groups of higher social class” are also those who went around to parties to be feted, traveled the world, gave talks at conferences, “did deals,” dominated meetings and grabbed the good seat, and through various other means received big in-person ego boosts in pre-Covid times. Now those ego boosts are gone, and…what do they do? Some of them do very fine things indeed.
*Missing: The Need for Closure after the Great War*
That is the new and excellent book by Richard Van Emden, and it covers how the British bureaucracy handled the reporting and identification of soldier corpses during and after the First World War. Here is the author’s summary:
Here is the story of the army’s hunt for legions of missing men. How were they sought? How many were found and identified and what were the implications for families when that search was wound down? tens of thousands of British people felt compelled to visit France and Belgium to see where their loved ones died; here we will explore what happened to the battlefields of Northern France and Belgium in the immediate post-war years…In telling the story of Britain’s military cemeteries on the western Front, this book will look at their design and horticulture, and examine the extraordinary lengths to which the gardeners of the Imperial War Graves Commission went to create an Eden for their dead comrades.
It turns out the British Army searched for remains for about three years, and after that the efforts pretty much dwindled to zero. I also enjoyed reading about how these efforts, and the building of on-the-site graveyards, intersected with French and Belgium law and property rights. And this:
An important question had been posed: to whom did the dead belong? Did families own them? Or did the bodies of servicemen and women remain in passive, eternal servitude to the army and, by extension, the government? They were, after all, in military service and under military law when they died. Did death release a body from continued service only to be automatically re-enlisted into the ritual of state-organised and state-controlled remembrance?
Among its other virtues, this book is also an interesting look at some of the efficiency properties of the earlier 20th bureaucracies. The fact that they didn’t have the ability to make things too complicated often was a great virtue.
Recommended, you can order the book here.
Sunday assorted links
1. New results on income inequality and the equity premium. The premium should fall with the rise of the super-wealthy, because those people care less about a given level of risk.
2. Those new service sector jobs.
3. Fox in Berlin assembles impressive shoe collection.
5. Cuban (!) paper, small n, but interferon seems to be working.
CEO stress, aging, and death
We show that increased job demands due to takeover threats and industry crises have significant adverse consequences for managers’ long-term health. Using hand-collected data on the dates of birth and death for more than 1,600 CEOs of large, publicly listed U.S. firms, we estimate that CEOs’ lifespan increases by around two years when insulated from market discipline via anti-takeover laws. CEOs also stay on the job longer, with no evidence of a compensating differential in the form of lower pay. In a second analysis, we find diminished longevity arising from increases in job demands caused by industry-wide downturns during a CEO’s tenure. Finally, we utilize machine-learning age-estimation methods to detect visible signs of aging in pictures of CEOs. We estimate that exposure to a distress shock during the Great Recession increases CEOs’ apparent age by roughly one year over the next decade.
Here is the full paper by Mark Borgschulte, Marius Guenzel, Canyao Liu, and Ulrike Malmendier.
Unbundling the Police in Kentucky
In Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety? I argued for unbundling the police:
Don’t use a hammer if you don’t need to pound a nail…the police have no expertise in dealing with the mentally ill or with the homeless–jobs like that should be farmed out to other agencies. Notice that we have lots of other safety issues that are not handled by the police. Restaurant inspectors, for example, do over a million restaurant inspectors annually but they don’t investigate murder or drug charges and they are not armed. Perhaps not coincidentally, restaurant inspectors are not often accused of inspector brutality, “Your honor, I swear I thought he was reaching for a knife….”.
A small experiment was started several years ago in Alexandria, Kentucky.
Faced with a tight budget and rising demands on its 17 officer police department, the City of Alexandria in Campbell County tried something different. Instead of hiring an additional officer and taking on the added expenses of equipping that officer, the police chief at the time hired a social worker to respond in tandem with officers.
Anecdotally the results appear good:
“It was close to a $45,000 to $50,000 annual savings from hiring a police officer the first time to hiring a social worker,” [former Alexandria Police Department chief] Ward said. “They (police social workers) started solving problems for people in our community and for our agency that we’ve never been able to solve before.”
Ward believes the results in Alexandria, a city of less than 10,000, could be replicated in larger cities like Louisville, where officers respond to calls involving mental health, domestic disturbances, and homelessness an average of once every 10 minutes.
“Louisville is very big with services,” Pompilio said. “They have lots of things to offer families. It’s just a matter of a social worker connecting.”
Alexandria doubled down on its commitment and now employs two full-time social workers to work and respond with its 17 officers.
Hat tip: NextDraft.
How not to fight modern-day slavery
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The Slave-Free Business Certification Act of 2020, introduced last week by Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, sounds unobjectionable, maybe even worthy. As the U.S. engages in a worthwhile and necessary reassessment of the role of slavery in its history, the bill would force large companies to investigate and report on forced labor in their supply chains.
In fact, the net effect of the bill — contrary to its stated intent — might be to increase slavery worldwide.
As a general principle, companies should cut off commercial relations with any known sources of slavery. Yet this law calls for mandatory corporate investigation and auditing, backed by CEO certification and with significant penalties for non-compliance. The investigatory process is supposed to include interviews of both workers and management in the supply chain.
Such a get-tough approach has a superficial appeal. Yet placing an investigative burden on companies may not lead to better outcomes.
Consider the hypothetical case of a U.S. retailer buying a shipment of seafood routed through Vietnam. It fears that some of the seafood may have come from Thailand, where there are credible reports of (temporary) slavery in the supply chain. How does it find out if those reports are true? Asking its Vietnamese business partner, who may not even know the truth and might be reluctant to say if it did, is unlikely to resolve matters.
It is unlikely that businesses, even larger and profitable ones, will be in a position to hire teams of investigative journalists for their international inputs. Either they will ignore the law, or they will stop dealing with poorer and less transparent countries. So rather than buying shrimp from Southeast Asia, that retailer might place an order for more salmon from Norway, where it is quite sure there is no slavery going on.
…for every instance of slavery today there are many more opaque supply chains that will be damaged and disrupted if the burden is on large companies to root out labor abuses.
Here are a few points of relevance:
1. The law penalizes opaque supply chains rather than slavery per se. That is unlikely to be an efficient target.
2. Judgments about slavery are put in the hands of businesses rather than the government. Why not just have the U.S. government issue sanctions against slavery-supporting countries when sanctions are appropriate and likely to be effective? What is the extra gain from taxing businesses in this way?
3. There are many forms of coerced and exploited labor, and it is not clear this legislation will target slavery as opposed to simply low wages and poor working conditions as might result from extreme poverty. You also don’t want the law to tax poor working conditions per se, since FDI, or purchasing flows from a supply chain, can help improve those working conditions. You might however wish to target employment instances where, due to the nature of the law, additional financial flows toward the product will never rebound to the benefit of foreign labor. This law (which I have read all of) does not seem to grasp that important distinction.
Infected versus Infectious
As I said in my post Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive we shouldn’t be comparing virus tests head-to-head, as if all tests serve the same purpose. Instead, we should recognize that tests have comparative advantages and a cheap, fast, frequent testing regime can be better in some respects than a slow, infrequent but more sensitive testing regime. Both regimes can be useful when used appropriately and especially when they are used in combination.
Eric Topol has a good graphic.
As Topol also notes:
In order to get this done, we need a reboot at @US_FDA, which currently requires rapid tests to perform like PCR tests. That’s wrong. This is a new diagnostic category for the *infectious* endpoint, requiring new standards and prospective validation.
The FDA has sort-of indicated that they might be open to this.
Much, much too slow, of course. Matching a virus that grows exponentially against a risk-averse, overly-cautious FDA has been a recipe for disaster.
How to restart the baseball season sustainably
You may have read that a number of early games in the season have been cancelled due to many of the players testing positive for Covid-19. There is talk of the season being unsustainable, but it seems a simple remedy has not yet been tried — dock a player 30 percent of his salary if he tests positive. That should limit the degree of nightclubbing and carousing, keeping in mind that the already-infected are probably some of the worst offenders and they have been “taken care of.” Furthermore, the players would have a strong incentive to monitor each other, not wanting to be on the receiving end of an infection from a teammate.
While that arrangement presumably runs counter to the collective bargaining agreement, that agreement can and should be revised if season cancellation is the true alternative.
If need be, the fines can be redistributed to the players who never test positive, thus keeping total compensation constant.
Incentives don’t always work, but if you haven’t even tried them something is amiss. Do I hear “35 percent”? “Forty”? “Thirty-seven percent and three lashes”?
The Power of Vaccines
Most people understand the basic idea of a traditional live-attenuated or killed vaccine–the vaccine gives the body’s immune system a sneak peek at the virus so that when a wild type attacks, the body’s immune system has been trained to fight. It’s less well understood, however, that the newer, designed vaccines, can be better than traditional vaccines and better even than immunity from exposure to the wild virus because a vaccine can now be designed to target the immune system on the weakest part of the virus:
NYTimes: One beauty of vaccines — and one of their great advantages over our body’s natural reaction to infections — is that their antigens can be designed to focus the immune response on a virus’s Achilles heel (whatever that may be).
…The immune response generated against a virus during natural infection is, to some degree, at the mercy of the virus itself. Not so with vaccines.
Since many viruses evade the innate immune system, natural infections sometimes do not result in robust or long-lasting immunity. The human papillomavirus is one of them, which is why it can cause chronic infections. The papillomavirus vaccine triggers a far better antibody response to its viral antigen than does a natural HPV infection: It is almost 100 percent effective in preventing HPV infection and disease.
Two Washington Post headlines about “Big Tech”
The second is:
Big Tech is worth even more the day after congressional grilling
Furthermore, the tech companies have been rising in popularity. I am going to “call” that the “war against Big Tech” essentially is over, and that the critics have failed. The new debate will be about ensuring universal access to various internet services (which will involve further regulation of some kind), not splitting up the major companies or eliminating their basic functions. You might also try this National Journal headline:
Hopes for antitrust reform fade after blockbuster tech hearing
It is striking just how much that “blockbuster tech hearing” has not become an enduring story for people to talk about.
Why was modernism for so long so inexhaustibly creative?
Piet Mondrian moved to Hampstead on 20 September and lived in a studio opposite Ben [Nicholson] and Barbara [Hepworth] for almost two years. Mondrian’s studio in Paris had become a kind of pilgrimage site for modern artists across Europe in the 1930s. With no means of viewing art unless it was exhibited, the way to see new work was to visit the artist. Alexander Calder moved to Paris from New York in 1926, aged twenty-seven, and his visit to Mondrian’s studio gave him what he described as the ‘shock that started things’. He likened it to being slapped like a baby to get its lungs working.
That is from Caroline Maclean’s new and noteworthy Circles & Squares: The Lives & Art of the Hampstead Modernists, a good book to read to think about the roots of artistic creativity. Creators back then, by contemporary standards, had so few “means,” and yet they — perhaps unlike us?? — were quite capable of being shocked by new styles and thus revolutionized and awoken from their slumbers. Is there any way to recreate those feelings? Or will that happen only in tech areas and not so much in the arts? What in music today could possibly shock you at this point? Or in painting?
There is plenty of gossip in the book as well, in this case a plus.
Friday assorted links
1. “Known as the Dairy State, Wisconsin is also a paper state. The industry in Wisconsin sells more paper, employs more people and has more paper mills than any other state…But the paper market, like everything, has been rocked by the novel coronavirus.” Link here.
2. Malcolm Gladwell rediscovers religion.
3. Joe Lonsdale on libertarianism.
4. Alec Stapp on antitrust and competition.
6. GPT-3 responds to the philosophers. Recommended, for instance: “I quickly dismissed these thoughts. I was a computer, and no amount of self-reflection would change that fact.”
Cross-immunities at work again?
Health care workers may be less susceptible to COVID-19 infection than people in the communities they serve, according to surprising early data from an ongoing study at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian.
Of some 3,000 workers tested in May and June, only 1% had antibodies to the novel coronavirus in their blood, despite the fact that the Newport Beach hospital has cared for hundreds of COVID-19 patients.
That 1% is far lower than what has been found in wider communities. Some 4-6% of residents in Los Angeles, Santa Clara and Riverside counties had COVID antibodies when surveillance testing was done there over recent weeks and months.
“This is what surprises some people,” said Dr. Michael Brant-Zawadzki, principal investigator. “Despite the headlines you see saying health care workers are at higher risk of contracting the disease, we haven’t seen that. In fact, we’re seeing the reverse of that. The question is, why?”
Obviously some of this is PPE, mask-wearing, and the like. But all of it? Here is the Teri Sforza story, via Amihai Glazer.