Friday assorted links
*The Address Book*
The author is Deirdre Mask and the subtitle is What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power. The opening bit would have fit under “New York City fact of the day”:
In some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes.
I guess that is because garbage collection, education, and policing are running so smoothly. Does any other fact so well sum up the pathology of our time?
In Paris, only 2.6 percent of the street names commemorate women, and this is expected to be a “growth sector,” as they say. I liked this sentence:
Tantner is perhaps the world’s leading expert on house numbers.
House numbers were in fact one of the more important results of the 18th century Enlightenment. For all their benefits in enabling mail, or finding your way, there was a dark side because they also made it easier to tax or imprison you, sometimes a good thing but not always.
Number streets are an especially American phenomenon, and today “every American city with more than a half million people has numerical street names. Second Street is the most common street name in America…”
Recommended, you can order it here.
U.S.A. fact of the day — the dental-led recovery
To put it another way: dentist offices account for a full 10 percent of the jobs gained last month across the entire American economy.
That is from Sarah Kliff, via Justin Wolfers.
Operation Warp Speed Needs to Go to Warp 10
Operation Warp Speed is following the right plan by paying for vaccine capacity to be built even before clinical trials are completed. OWS, however, should be bigger and should have more diverse vaccine candidates. OWS has spent well under $5 billion. At current rates, the US economy is losing about $40 billion a week. Thus, if $20 billion could advance a vaccine by just one week that would be a good deal. As I said in the LA Times, “It might seem expensive to invest in capacity for a vaccine that is never approved, but it’s even more expensive to delay a vaccine that could end the pandemic.”
I am also concerned that OWS is narrowing down the list of candidates too early:
NYTimes: Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and the Oxford-AstraZeneca group have already received a total of $2.2 billion in federal funding to support their vaccine programs. Their selection as finalists, along with Merck and Pfizer, will give all five companies access to additional government money, help in running clinical trials and financial and logistical support for a manufacturing base that is being built even before it is clear which if any of the vaccines in development will work.
These are all good programs and one of them will probably be successful but we also want to support some long-shots because a small probability of a very big gain is still a big gain.
The five candidates also all use new technologies and are less diverse than I would prefer. There are a lot of different vaccine platforms, Live-Attenuated, Deactivated, Protein Subunit, Viral Vector, DNA and mRNA among others. The Accelerating Health Technologies team that I am a part of collected data on over 100 vaccine candidates and their characteristics. We then created a model to compute an optimal portfolio. We estimated that it’s necessary to have 15-20 candidates in the portfolio to get to a 80-90% chance of at least one success and that you want diverse candidates because the second candidate from the same platform probably fails if the first candidate from that platform fails. Moderna and Pfrizer are both mRNA vaccines–a platform that has never been used before–while AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson and Merck are using somewhat different viral vector platforms (Adenovirus for AstraZeneca and J & J and measles for Merck) which is also a relatively novel approach. I think it would be better if there were some tried and true platforms such as a Deactivated or Protein Subunit vaccine in the mix. As Larry Summers said, “if you will die of starvation if you don’t get a pizza in two hours, order 5 pizzas”. I would change that to order 10 pizzas and order from different companies!
One way to diversify the portfolio is to make deals with other countries to avoid the prisoner’s dilemma of vaccine portfolios. The prisoner’s dilemma is that each country has an incentive to invest in the vaccine most likely to succeed but if every country does this the world has put all its eggs in one basket. To avoid that, you need some global coordination. One country invests in Vaccine A, the other invests in Vaccine B and they agree to share capacity regardless of which vaccine works.
So my critique is that OWS is good policy but it would be even better if more vaccine candidates and more diverse vaccine candidates were part of the program. In contrast, the critiques being offered in Congress are ridiculous and dangerous.
Democrats in Congress are already seeking details about the contracts with the companies, many of which are still wrapped in secrecy. They are asking how much Americans will have to pay to be vaccinated and whether the firms, or American taxpayers, will retain the profits and intellectual property.
How much will Americans have to pay to be vaccinated??? A lot less than they are paying for not being vaccinated! The worry about profits is entirely backwards. The problem is that the profits of vaccine manufacturers are far too small to give them the correct social incentives not that the profits are too large. The stupidity of this is aggravating.
Skepticism about Trump administration policies is understandable but I am concerned that one of the best things the Trump administration is doing to combat the virus will be impeded and undermined by politics.
New Emergent Ventures winners, ninth cohort
Mikko Packalen, with co-authors, fellow in Progress Studies, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Waterloo, to improve science, in particular to study superior methods for improving systems of science citation. Here is some previous MR coverage of his work.
Daniel Gallardo Albarrán, post doc at Wageningen University, Netherlands, for historical research on European and other policy responses to plagues.
Anna Steingold, Barnard College, general career support and to investigate small business successes and failure in New York City.
Fasih Zulfiqar, Karachi, Pakistan, home schooled and #1 economics student on the Pakistan national exam. For the study of economics in college and general career support.
Dylan White, living in Dubai, philosophy and tutor background, to start a podcast on travel and tourism during pandemic times.
Sarvasv Kulpati, Singapore, about to start UC Berkeley (if possible), interested in education and technology.
Bekhzod Khoshimov, Ph.d. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin School of Business, for the study of entrepreneurship and to develop his podcast matters related to political economy and also Uzbekistan and Russia. Here is his interview with James Robinson.
The return to studying economics is fairly high
Selection bias may confound the identification of field-specific returns to higher education. This study investigates the wage return to studying economics by leveraging a policy that prevented students with low introductory grades from declaring the major. Regression discontinuity estimates show that policy-complying economics majors — who appear representative on observables — earned $22,000 (58%) higher annual early-career wages than they would have with their second-choice majors, despite otherwise-unchanged educational investment and attainment. Cross-industry wage variation explains half of the return, with economics majors channeled towards high-wage economics-related industries. Differences between institution-specific or nationally-representative average wages by major well-approximate the estimated causal return.
That is from a new paper by Zachary Bleemer and Aashish Mehta, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Solve for the equilibrium
The clock has hit midnight in Las Vegas! Here’s the crowd waiting to get into @theDlasvegas in #DTLV. 🎰 pic.twitter.com/sp6gNwsVPz
— FOX5 Las Vegas (@FOX5Vegas) June 4, 2020
What might be some alternate (if possibly slightly unfair) titles? How about
“A Swede by Any Other Name” or “America > Sweden”?
“Refuting Friedman-Savage, convexity all over”
“Their capitalist bosses made them turn out”
“They all supported lockdown in the poll”
What else?
Thursday assorted links
1. Karl Friston responds on immunological dark matter. And more on Friston, again highly speculative, use with caution.
2. From a well-known epidemiologist — yikes. And yes I fully grant you can find comparable sins from economists. Of course it is easy enough to pick on such egregious statements, the broader worry is that hardly anyone will admit the more prosaic and less scandalous but no less relevant: “My initial lockdown recommendations were not sustainable and I did not realize it at the time.” Ferguson, Cummings, people on the Florida beach, and now the demonstrations and also the rioters all reflect that. The “what do the people really want?” debate has been settled, in US and UK at least, and the results should make us feel uncomfortable. That said, on the bright side the authorities claim no new cases from the Lake of the Ozarks frolic. Now let’s hope it is actually true.
3. Over forty percent of companies are not paying their rents.
4. Norwegian mudslide video, recommended.
5. Mexican students design low-cost solar lamps from waste materials.
That was then, this is now, *Mayday 1971* edition
That forthcoming book is authored by Lawrence Roberts, and the subtitle is A White House at War, A Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest. Here is one excerpt:
The president had made his wishes clear. That was why Kleindienst was pushing a military solution. The police chief made one last attempt to dissuade him. Let’s just suppose the crowd is big enough to shut down the government, Jerry said. Wouldn’t it be better for us, he gently suggested, if the militants could crow only that they had defeated the police, rather than the mighty U.S. military? An army official chimed in on Jerry’s side. Why not wait a day, see if the troops were really necessary?
Recommended.
Chesapeake travel notes
Now is an ideal time to visit Maryland’s Eastern Shore, if only for a few days. There are open vistas, water birds, charming old homes, and plenty of signs of Revolutionary and 19th century history. (At that time the Chesapeake was a focal area with important water access, now it is a literal “backwater.”) None of those features are diminished by opening restrictions or social distancing. Most of the restaurants you want to eat in were serving outside anyway. Mask observance I would describe as “not below average.” On Tilghman island, you can see one of the old Navy research stations where they worked to make radar operational, plus there is a nice 19th century church. The whole “white guys with boats” thing I find boring, however.
St. Michael’s is one of the nicest small towns in all of America. It is also where Frederick Douglass spent some of his early life as a slave and downtown you can see the above plaque.
What should I ask Rachel Harmon?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, and she is a professor of law at the University of Virginia with a specialty in policing. From her home page:
Rachel Harmon’s scholarship focuses on policing and its legal regulation, and her work has appeared recently in the NYU, Michigan and Stanford law reviews, among others. She teaches in the areas of criminal law and procedure, policing and civil rights. Harmon often advises nonprofit organizations and police departments on legal issues involving the police. She is currently associate reporter for the American Law Institute’s project on policing, and in fall 2017, she served as a law enforcement expert for the Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Here is her scholar.google.com profile. So what should I ask her?
Our regulatory state is broken, installment #1837
Americans returning from China landed at U.S. airports by the thousands in early February, potential carriers of a deadly virus who had been diverted to a handful of cities for screening by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Their arrival prompted a frantic scramble by local and state officials to press the travelers to self-quarantine, and to monitor whether anyone fell ill. It was one of the earliest tests of whether the public health system in the United States could contain the contagion.
But the effort was frustrated as the C.D.C.’s decades-old notification system delivered information collected at the airports that was riddled with duplicative records, bad phone numbers and incomplete addresses. For weeks, officials tried to track passengers using lists sent by the C.D.C., scouring information about each flight in separate spreadsheets.
“It was insane,” said Dr. Sharon Balter, a director at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. When the system went offline in mid-February, briefly halting the flow of passenger data, local officials listened in disbelief on a conference call as the C.D.C. responded to the possibility that infected travelers might slip away.
“Just let them go,” two of the health officials recall being told.
Here is the full NYT piece, thorough, excellent, and scary throughout, and it shows a first-rate understanding of bureaucracy. Don’t forget the CDC budget has risen steadily in real terms.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Charmaine Lee — The Quarantine Concerts.
2. Tracking down all of Isaac Asimov’s work.
3. Canadians’ top pick for a national lichen: “Canada has spoken.”
4. Urban foxes may be self-domesticating in our midst.
5. Scott Alexander on Julian Jaynes. And split brain does not lead to split consciousness.
6. Me, writing in The Complacent Class.
7. What it’s like to fly to China.
9. Alexander Chizhevsky. And why Russians have trouble with social distancing.
10. The unraveling of the Surgisphere coronavirus papers. Politics, insider trading, or something altogether different?
My excellent Conversation with Ashley Mears
Tired of lockdown, pandemic, and rioting? Here is a podcast on some of their polar opposites, conducted by “a bridge and tunnel guy” with an accomplished sociologist. Here is the audio and transcript, here is the summary:
Ashley Mears is a former fashion model turned academic sociologist, and her book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit is one of Tyler’s favorites of the year. The book, the result of eighteen months of field research, describes how young women exchange “bodily capital” for free drinks and access to glamorous events, boosting the status of the big-spending men they accompany.
Ashley joined Tyler to discuss her book and experience as a model, including the economics of bottle service, which kinds of men seek the club experience (and which can’t get in), why Tyler is right to be suspicious of restaurants filled with beautiful women, why club music is so loud, the surprising reason party girls don’t want to be paid, what it’s like to be scouted, why fashion models don’t smile, the truths contained in Zoolander, how her own beauty and glamour have influenced her academic career, how Barbara Ehrenreich inspired her work, her unique tip for staying focused while writing, and more.
Here is one excerpt especially dear to my heart:
COWEN: Let’s say I had a rule not to eat food in restaurants that were full of beautiful women, thinking that the food will be worse. Is that a good rule or a bad rule?
MEARS: I know this rule, because I was reading that when you published that book. It was when I was doing the field work in 2012, 2013. And I remember reading it and laughing, because you were saying avoid trendy restaurants with beautiful women. And I was like, “Yeah, I’m one of those people that’s actually ruining the food but creating value in these other forms because being a part of this scene and producing status.” So yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct.
And:
COWEN: I have so many naive, uninformed questions, but why is the music so loud in these clubs? Who benefits from that?
MEARS: Who benefits?
COWEN: I find the music too loud in McDonald’s, right?
MEARS: Clubs are also in this business of trying to manufacture and experience what Emile Durkheim would call this collective effervescence, like losing yourself in the moment. And that’s really possible when you’re able to tune out the other things, like if somebody is feeling insecure about the way they dance or if somebody is not sure of what to say.
Having really loud music that has a beat where everybody just does the same thing, which is nod to the beat — that helps to tune people into one another, and it helps build up a vibe and a kind of energy, so the point is to lose yourself in the music in these spaces.
And:
COWEN: Let’s say you sat down with one of these 20-year-old young women, and you taught them everything you know from your studies, what you know about bodily capital, sociological theories of exploitation. You could throw at them whatever you wanted. They would read the book. They would listen to your video, talk with you. Would that change their behavior any?
MEARS: I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so. They might not be too surprised even to learn that this is a job for promoters, and the promoters make money doing this. Most of them know that. They didn’t know how much money promoters are making. They don’t know how much money the clubs are making, but they know that they’re contributing to those profits, and they know that there’s this inequality built into it.
…in this world, there’s a widespread assumption that everybody uses everybody else. The women are using the club for the pleasures that they can get from it. They’re using the promoter for the pleasures they can get from him, the access. The promoters are using the young women. The clients are using the promoters.
The drawing line is when there’s a perception of abuse. People have a clear sense that lying about being exclusively romantic would be a clear violation, so that would be abusive. But use is okay. Mutual exploitation is okay.
Definitely recommended, a unique and fascinating episode. And again, I strongly recommend Ashley’s new book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, one of my favorite books of the year.
Is this why budget deficits might prove sustainable?
By Adrien Auclert, Hannes Malmberg, Frederic Martenet, and Matthew Rognlie:
We use a shift-share approach to quantify the general equilibrium effects of population aging on wealth accumulation, real interest rates, and capital flows. Combining population projections with household survey data from the US and 24 other countries,we project the evolution of wealth-to-GDP ratios by changing the age distribution,holding life-cycle asset and income profiles constant. We find that this compositional effect of aging is large and heterogeneous across countries, ranging from 85 percent-age points in Japan to 310 percentage points in India over the rest of the twenty-first century. In a general equilibrium overlapping generations model, our shift-share provides a very good approximation to the evolution of the wealth-to-GDP ratio due to demographic change when interest rates remain constant. In an integrated world economy, aging generates large global imbalances in the twenty-first century, pushing net foreign asset positions to levels several times larger than those observed until today.
Via Steven Bogden. This is very likely an important piece.