Three areas where you never run out of great books to read
Those three areas are:
1. The history of the British Isles
2. The history of the Jews, and
3. The history of World War II
Each area has attracted remarkable talent, mostly in English I should add, and you can always read yet another great book in these areas, even if you already have consumed many stellar offerings.
Whether you should double down in these areas, or strike out and diversify into the many other areas with lower quality expected return, is in fact a key question when it comes to how to read.
(Of course, a small number of books cover all three areas, though I would not suggest that they get triple credit.)
Are there any other such areas I am missing? Somehow American history does not do it for me — too much stupidity, repetition, and needlessly “clampdown patriotic” perspectives.
“Israel Versus Anyone”
That is the title of a new research paper by Kenneth S. Brower, focusing on the capabilities of the Israeli military against various potential adversaries. I do not myself have particular opinions on these questions, but I found this piece interesting throughout. Here is one excerpt:
The simple and unarguable truth is that for decades the US military has lacked the ability to quickly project conventional ground and air forces into the Middle East that would be able to successfully defend Israel. This has been true for about 50 years.
The US Army and US Marine Corps combined now have an active force structure of just 39 maneuver brigades, of which only about 13 are combat ready. It would require many weeks to bring a portion of the remaining 26 active maneuver brigades to combat ready status. Achieving this would require cannibalization of about 25% of the remaining active units in order to bring the others to full strength. US reserve National Guard maneuver brigades would each require about five months for mobilization, retraining, and deployment. These National Guard reserve units are thus irrelevant to any Israeli rescue scenario.
The ability of the US military to deploy forces over long distances has declined in the last 30 years because of a lack of investment in large specialized roll-on roll-off ships. Many of the existing US reserve merchant marine ships dedicated to military use are overage and have been poorly maintained. Based on the deployment times achieved during Operation Desert Storm, it is estimated that within about three weeks the US could project two light infantry paratroop brigades into Israel by air, plus one Marine infantry brigade transferred by forward deployed USN amphibious ships and pre-loaded forward-based maritime ships. Given about nine weeks, the US would likely be able to field nine maneuver brigades in the Middle East consisting of three paratroop, three Marine, and three heavy armored brigades. Consequently, it would require about nine weeks for the US military to generate roughly 15% of the IDF’s ground force mobilizable order of battle. These US forces would only deploy about 10% of the number of armored fighting vehicles the IDF can field.
The USAF has a very limited number of combat aircraft currently deployed in Europe. With air-to-air refueling, it is estimated that these aircraft might be able to sustain the generation of about 90 sorties a day in support of Israel. But these few sorties, which only 14 I Israel Versus Anyone: A Military Net Assessment of the Middle East represent 5% of Israeli wartime capability, could only be generated if the host country where these aircraft are based were to allow them to be operated in support of Israel. In the past, this approval has not always been provided. Neither the USN nor USMC currently have any operational combat aircraft based on aircraft carriers or large amphibious ships that are normally deployed in the Mediterranean within range of Israel.
Via Adam K.
Sunday assorted links
1. Scathing but insightful piece about “the Right,” by Julius Krein.
2. Further results on cross-immunities. And coverage from the NYT. And another new paper.
3. Scale of Lebanon blast (photo).
4. Contrafreeloading and cats.
5. How much do the Chinese favor income inequality?
6. Bernard Bailyn obituary (NYT).
Claims about Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir
Viking society wasn’t homogeneous. They had dealings with many different cultures and they lived in varied environments, from Danish and Swedish pasture to the sub-Arctic tundra of Norway and Iceland. In the early 11th century the best-travelled woman in the world must have been Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, whose remarkable journeys demonstrate the great distances the Vikings covered. She gave birth to a child in North America, met people of the First Nations and ate grapes in Vinland, made a pilgrimage to Rome and drank wine in Italy, and died as a nun in Iceland. Vikings lived in close contact with the Sámi people, whom they called Finns. In his earlier book, The Viking Way, Price pointed out that Norwegians and Swedes, at least, might be regarded as in some ways similar to the ‘circumpolar’ cultures which stretch from Greenland to Siberia, notably in what looks like shamanistic behaviour.
That is from Tom Shippey’s excellent LRB Vikings book review, interesting throughout.
No brain drain for Filipino nurses
We exploit changes in U.S. visa policies for nurses to measure brain drain versus gain. Combining data on all migrant departures and postsecondary institutions in the Philippines, we show that nursing enrollment and graduation increased substantially in response to greater U.S. demand for nurses. The supply of nursing programs expanded to accommodate this increase. Nurse quality, measured by licensure exam pass rates, declined. Despite this, for each nurse migrant, 10 additional nurses were licensed. New nurses switched from other degree types, but graduated at higher rates than they would have otherwise, thus increasing the human capital stock in the Philippines.
That is from a new paper by Paolo Abarcar and Caroline Theoharides, via Chris Blattman.
From the comments, on coronavirus and humidity
I am not convinced by the humidity hypothesis, as I don’t see it having much macro explanatory power globally, but I find the questions very important. On New York City, I tend to blame all those cramped indoor spaces combined with bad ventilation systems, but that too is an unconfirmed hypothesis. Anyway, here are the words of Daniel Hess:
Don’t mention the fake news
Even exposure to the ill-defined term “fake news” and claims about its prevalence can be harmful. In an experimental study among respondents from Mechanical Turk, Van Duyn, and Collier (2019) find that when people are exposed to tweets containing the term “fake news,” they become less able to discern real from fraudulent news stories. Similarly, Clayton et al. (2019) find that participants from Mechanical Turk who are exposed to a general warning about the prevalence of misleading information on social media then tend to rate headlines from both legitimate and untrustworthy news sources as less accurate, suggesting that the warning causes an indiscriminate form of skepticism.
That is from Brendah Nyhan’s good new JEP survey article on how misperceptions come about and persist.
Saturday assorted links
1. The polity that is Germany: “Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors, while searchlights and sky spotlights would be outlawed from dusk to dawn for ten months of the year.’
2. The new Eisenhower Memorial, by Frank Gehry, recommended, I am keen to see it.
4. Is the precautionary principle being applied to herd immunity claims? And other interesting points on related matters.
5. Canadians taking revenge against visiting Americans (NYT).
6. Peptide antidotes, another promising treatment area.
Bill Gates is Angry
But people aren’t getting their tests back quickly enough.
Well, that’s just stupidity. The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.
Gates is correct. If companies were paid for speed they would increase capacity and move immediately to a stack processing (LIFO) model, as I described yesterday.
The whole interview is worth reading. Gates is restrained but you can tell he is angry. Bill has had it with the FDA, Trump, Mark Zukerberg, stupid anti-vaxxers like Robert Kennedy (who he was forced to listen to to get access to Trump), Congress and much more. I don’t blame him one bit. I am angry too.
Beware of coronavirus moralizing
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Then there is the Swedish experiment, which has been the subject of a raging controversy. Here again, most moralizing is premature, even though the Swedes did make some clear mistakes, such as not protecting their nursing homes well enough. Sweden had a high level of early deaths, but both cases and deaths have since fallen to a very low level, even though Sweden never locked down. In the meantime, the Swedish economy has been among the least badly hit in Europe.
If the rest of Europe is badly hit by a second or third wave, and Sweden is not, Swedish policy suddenly will look much better. Alternatively, if Sweden experiences a second wave of infections as big as or bigger than those of its neighbors, it will look far worse.
In other words, it is too soon to tell. I love to moralize about the moralizers! Which I do more of at the link.
Are pre-docs in economics a good idea?
Formal pre-doc programmes have burgeoned, especially in elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Yale. Participants clean and analyse data, write papers and do administrative tasks. In exchange they may receive free or subsidised classes, a salary in the region of $50,000, potential co-authorship of the papers they work on, and, most prized of all, a letter of recommendation to a top programme.
In part pre-docs show how economic research has changed. “Economics has become more like the sciences in terms of both the methods and the production process,” says Raj Chetty of Harvard, who directs the Opportunity Insights team, a group with a reputation for working its pre-docs hard. When analysing tax records that gave access only to a certain number of people, he switched away from using part-time research assistants to a lab-like team, inspired by his own family of scientists. As bigger data sets, new techniques and generous funding made such collaboration worthwhile, others followed.
Here is much more on pre-docs from Soumaya Keynes at The Economist. I suspect this development is inevitable, but I see at least two things going on here. First, letter writers are internalizing the very high value of those letters in the form of personal services received. Second, this will push out “weirdos” and make the profession more homogenized, more obedient, more elite, more dependent on school of origin, and less interesting. I do understand the value of the training received, and don’t propose any mechanism to “stop this,” but overall it does not make me an entirely happy camper.
Friday assorted links
Ideas Of India
Ideas Of India is Shruti Rajagopalan’s new podcast about India. This is going to be an excellent podcast, well worth subscribing to. Shruti’s first guest is Ajay Shah discussing his book with Vijay Kelkar, In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy. As you may recall, I called In Service, the new Arthashastra, the book every policy maker and future policy maker should be given while being told, “before you do anything, read this!”
Here’s one bit from Ajay in the podcast:
[S]tate capacity is very hard to change. It evolved very slowly, but it is something you learn. There’s a learning by doing for a republic to learn to achieve state capacity. So we would tell a more constructive story of saying,” Pick a few battles, do a few things, learn how to do them well.” Then maybe in the future you might like to creep out, while understanding that these are 20-year, 40-year, 80-year, hundred-year journeys. Don’t think that these things can be solved in two years.
…There’s a quote in the book from Kaushik Basu where he said that we have libertarianism of necessity, and we have libertarianism of choice. In India, we have to do libertarianism of necessity because we every day confront the malfunctioning state institutions. We’ve always got to think, can this work? Would it go wrong? We’re surrounded by unchecked coercive power in the hands of very frail state institutions, and that creates limits on state capacity. So I think that’s the way our lived experience in India has brought us.
Exactly right and very consistent with the argument that Rajagopalan and I make in Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State:
In the alternative view put forward here…presumptive laissez-faire is the optimal form of government for states with limited capacity and also the optimal learning environment for states to grow capacity.
Much more of interest. You can (and should!) subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or the podcast app of your choice.
Stack-Push-Pop COVID Testing
A COVID test that doesn’t come back in a few days is close to useless and PCR tests are taking a long time to process:
NYTimes: Most people who are tested for the virus do not receive results within the 24 to 48 hours recommended by public health experts to effectively stall the virus’s spread and quickly conduct contact tracing, according to a new national survey by researchers from Harvard University, Northeastern University, Northwestern University and Rutgers University….People who had been tested for the virus in July reported an average wait time of about four days. That is about the same wait time for those who reported taking a test in April. Over all, about 10 percent of people reported waiting 10 days or more.
…“A test result that comes back in seven or eight days is worthless for everybody — it shouldn’t even be counted,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security and a physician in Pittsburgh. “It’s not a test in any kind of effective manner because it’s not actionable.”
One seemingly severe but potential solution is to change how tests are processed. Right now it’s mostly first come, first-served but this means we can easily have a situation where everyone eventually gets a test result but all the results are useless because they take a week or more to process. I propose instead that any test that can’t be reported back in 3-4 days be thrown out immediately. Labs should focus only on processing tests that can be reported back quickly.
One way of thinking about this is to use a stack or last-in first-out (LIFO) model for testing. In a stack model the newest test request is pushed onto the top of the stack and the next test to be processed is popped off the top of the stack. One disadvantage of this model is that some test requests will never be processed (they should be removed from the bottom of the stack and returned as null results). Some people will be angry.
But the stack model of testing has a huge advantage over first-come, first-served. Namely, just as many tests will be completed as under the current model but the tests results will all come back faster and be much more useful. What would you rather have, guaranteed stale test results or fresh results with some possibility of a null return? Since a stale result is not much better than a null it seems obvious that the stack system is superior. Most importantly, faster, more useful tests will help to end the crisis by reducing the number of infections.
Addendum: See also my posts Pooled Testing is Super-Beneficial and Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive on other methods to improve testing.
What I’ve been reading
My local public library has reopened! From the library and from elsewhere, I have been enjoying:
1. Orlando Figes, The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. The three lives are Turgenev, his mistress Pauline Viardot, and the husband of his mistress, Louis Viardot, a noted financier and activist. Consistently interesting, even if you are not looking to read about those three particular figures.
2. John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World. Although it has a stereotypically bad subtitle, this is an excellent book. It clarifies exactly where the Freemasons came from (dissident thought connected to James II), its connection to actual masons, how the movement got routed through Scotland, its prominence to the Enlightenment, its African-American component (Martin Delany), how it influenced Joseph Smith and Mormonism, why Castro tolerated it and the Shah of Iran encouraged it, and much more. Not in the book, but did you know that the Freemasons claim Shaquille O’Neal? Shaq confirms.
3. Callum Williams, The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives. A clear, well-written, and useful introduction to the lives and thought of some of the leading classical economists. The “unusual picks,” by the way, are Harriet Martineau, Rosa Luxemburg, and Dadabhai Naoroji. The author is a senior economics writer for The Economist.
4. Michael Hunter, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment. “Though it is often thought that the scientists of the early Royal Society tested magic and found it wanting, this is a misconception. In fact, the society avoided the issue because its members’ views on the subject were so divided, and it was only in retrospect that this silence was interpreted as judgmental.”
Forthcoming from Marc Levinson, the author of The Box, is a new book Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas, a more general history of globalization.
Here is Alex’s source post, and there are a few interesting responses in the ensuing discussion.