Tuesday assorted links
1. Facts about research registries.
3. Bryan is right about many but not all of these claims. And here is more from Bryan. I would note that the five percent or so of (non-fatal) cases who react very badly to Covid-19 do not seem to be obviously correlated with the comorbidities that drive mortality risk so strongly. Bryan should take this piece and related results more seriously.
4. Scott Galloway on the future of college. Good and vivid piece, except for the end.
5. Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog comes to an end.
6. Grindr will remove ethnicity filters in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
8. Star Wars stormtroopers to enforce social distancing measures at Disney properties.
Model this New York City police force
Last night, and some previous nights, many storefronts in Manhattan were trashed, there was looting in Soho, or how about this description from Rachel Olding at The Daily Beast?:
Hard to describe how rampant the looting was tonight in Midtown Manhattan and how lawless it was. Complete anarchy. Literally hundreds of stores up and down Broadway, Fifth Ave, Sixth Ave. Kids ruling the streets like it was a party.
Now, those are among the most visible and “high value” spots in the whole city and the NYPD has over 38,000 police to draw upon. So what is the best model of why all that trouble happened and indeed was allowed to happen? I see a few candidates:
1. Those police are not sufficiently well trained.
2. Those police are trained but they are afraid of confronting protestors and so they don’t do it.
3. The mayor de facto doesn’t want the police to be too involved, as that might be unpopular with swing voters in the primaries or even the general election.
4. The police union insists, de facto, that not many police be sent directly into such confrontations.
5. There is a general lack of accountability, and so there is failure at multiple levels, and so many good things simply do not happen, but for reasons which are not always entirely concrete.
6. The police do not have the right technology to handle these kinds of problems.
Which is it, and which other hypotheses am I neglecting?
As a more general observation, if this problem cannot be solved, complaining about Trump holding the Bible and the tear gas on the way to the church ultimately will fall upon deaf ears. Ultimately the American public are not going to side against “the thin blue line” (i.e., the police), so to win all those important civil liberties victories you also need the police doing the proper job effectively. Maybe I picked the wrong Google terms but “why didn’t New York police stop rioters” does not in fact yield anything substantive on the question I am asking. How can that be? While you’re at it, model that too!
Addendum: One reader hypothesis is to send a signal to the mayor for criticizing them. Another is here: “Similar to Baltimore, the police in Minneapolis will make it clear that looting and widespread private property destruction will be tolerated for the remainder of the protests as a way to conflate protesters and looters and “teach a lesson to” their liberal civilian bosses“
Police Union Privileges Revisited
The post below, Police Union Privileges, from 2018 is worth revisiting. As I wrote in a follow-up, police union privileges are only one part of a system and reform requires system-thinking. Nevertheless, getting rid of these special privileges, including so-called qualified immunity and restoring the equal rule of law are good places to start. Need I also mention that police should not keep fines and forfeitures–the negative consequences of which I documented in To Serve and Collect, my paper with Makowsky and Stratmann.
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Earlier I wrote about how police unions in some parts of the country (especially common in NJ and NY, yet a firing offense in some other jurisdictions, edit 2020) give to every officer dozens of “get out of jail” cards to give to friends, family, politicians, lawyers, judges and other connected people. The cards let police on the street know that the subject is to be given “professional courtesy” and they can be used to get out of speeding tickets and other infractions. Today, drawing on the Police Union Contracting Project, I discuss how union contracts and Law Officer “Bill of Rights” give police legal privileges that regular people don’t get.
In 50 cities and 13 states, for example, union contracts “restrict interrogations by limiting how long an officer can be interrogated, who can interrogate them, the types of questions that can be asked, and when an interrogation can take place.” In Virginia police officers have a right to at least a five-day delay before being interrogated. In Louisiana police officers have up to 30 days during which no questioning is allowed and they cannot be questioned for sustained periods of time or without breaks. In some cities, police officers can only be interrogated during work hours. Regular people do not get these privileges.
The key to a good interrogation is that the suspect doesn’t know what the interrogator knows so the suspect can be caught in a lie which unravels their story. Thus, the Florida Police Bill of Rights is stunning in what it allows police officers:
The law enforcement officer or correctional officer under investigation must be informed of the nature of the investigation before any interrogation begins, and he or she must be informed of the names of all complainants. All identifiable witnesses shall be interviewed, whenever possible, prior to the beginning of the investigative interview of the accused officer. The complaint, all witness statements, including all other existing subject officer statements, and all other existing evidence, including, but not limited to, incident reports, GPS locator information, and audio or video recordings relating to the incident under investigation, must be provided to each officer who is the subject of the complaint before the beginning of any investigative interview of that officer.
By knowing what the interrogators know, the suspect can craft a story that fits the known facts–and the time privilege gives them the opportunity to do so.
Moreover, how do you think complainants feel knowing that the police officer they are complaining about “must be informed of the names of all complainants.” I respect and admire police officers but frankly I think this rule is dangerous. Would you come forward?
How effective would criminal interrogations be if the following rules held for ordinary citizens?
The law enforcement officer or correctional officer under interrogation may not be subjected to offensive language or be threatened with transfer, dismissal, or disciplinary action. A promise or reward may not be made as an inducement to answer any questions.
What does it say about our justice system that the police don’t want their own tactics used against them?
In the United States if you are arrested–even for a misdemeanor or minor crime, even if the charges are dropped, even if you are found not guilty–you will likely be burdened with an arrest record that can increase the difficulty of getting a job, an occupational license, or housing. But even in the unlikely event that a police officer is officially reprimanded many states and cities require that such information is automatically erased after a year or two. The automatic erasure of complaints makes it difficult to identify problem officers or a pattern of abuse.
Louisiana’s Police Officer Bill of Rights is one of the most extreme. It states that police have the right to expunge any violation of criminal battery and assault and any violation of criminal laws involving an “obvious domestic abuse.” Truly this is hard to believe but here is the law (note that sections (2)(a) and (b) do not appear, as I read it, to be limited to anonymous or unsubstantiated complaints).
A law enforcement officer, upon written request, shall have any record of a formal complaint made against the officer for any violation of a municipal or parish ordinance or state criminal statute listed in Paragraph (2) of this Subsection involving domestic violence expunged from his personnel file, if the complaint was made anonymously to the police department and the charges are not substantiated within twelve months of the lodging of the complaint. (2)(a) Any violation of a municipal or parish ordinance or state statute defining criminal battery and assault. (b) Any violation of other municipal or parish ordinances or state statutes including criminal trespass, criminal damage to property, or disturbing the peace if the incident occurred at either the home of the victim or the officer or the violation was the result of an obvious domestic dispute.
In an excellent post on get out of free jail cards, Julian Sanchez writes:
…beyond being an affront to the ideal of the rule of law in the abstract, it seems plausible that these “get out of jail free” cards help to reinforce the sort of us-against-them mentality that alienates so many communities from their police forces. Police departments that want to demonstrate they’re serious about the principle of equality under the law shouldn’t be debating how many of these cards an average cop gets to hand out; they should be scrapping them entirely.
Equality under the law also requires that privileges and immunities extend to all citizens equally.
What do economists believe about infrastructure?
Support for massive investments in transportation infrastructure, possibly with a change in the share of spending on transit, seems widespread. Such proposals are often motivated by the belief that our infrastructure is crumbling, that infrastructure causes economic growth, that current funding regimes disadvantage rural drivers at the expense of urban public transit, or that capacity expansions will reduce congestion. In fact, most US transportation infrastructure is not deteriorating and the existing scientific literature and does not show that infrastructure creates growth or reduces congestion. However, current annual expenditure on public transit buses exceeds that on interstate construction and maintenance. The evidence suggests the importance of an examination of how funding is allocated across modes but not of massive new expenditures.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Matthew Turner, Gilles Duranton, and Geetika Nagpal.
Karl Friston on “immunological dark matter”
We’ve been comparing the UK and Germany to try to explain the comparatively low fatality rates in Germany. The answers are sometimes counterintuitive. For example, it looks as if the low German fatality rate is not due to their superior testing capacity, but rather to the fact that the average German is less likely to get infected and die than the average Brit. Why? There are various possible explanations, but one that looks increasingly likely is that Germany has more immunological “dark matter” – people who are impervious to infection, perhaps because they are geographically isolated or have some kind of natural resistance. This is like dark matter in the universe: we can’t see it, but we know it must be there to account for what we can see. Knowing it exists is useful for our preparations for any second wave, because it suggests that targeted testing of those at high risk of exposure to Covid-19 might be a better approach than non-selective testing of the whole population.
Speculative, and here is the full article, mostly about other matters epidemiological. Via Michelle Dawson.
The contents of this article may well be wrong, as many on Twitter are suggesting, that link makes two renowned researchers/commentators or here is Kai Kupferschmidt. I am less impressed by passing potshots at the author and more interested in reading a short blog post. I say write out 500 words (with links) comparing different methods of accounting for the unexplained residuals and heterogeneities with Covid-19 (not it is not all policy, and how much of it is sheer luck and/or timing?). Also discuss the circulating notion that previous exposure to (some) other coronaviruses, or perhaps weak doses of Covid-19, might be giving some individuals partial immunity (an idea being batted around but not verified as far as I know. And what do we know about how much geographic isolation might matter (a concept cited by Friston in contradistinction to the Twitter claims that he is simply talking about ghosts)? Then tweet the post, you still can start a blog for free and write just a single post, more over time if you wish. I would very gladly link to it.
How equity ownership shapes values
How does engagement with markets affect socioeconomic values and political preferences? A long line of thinkers has debated the nature and direction of such effects, but claims are difficult to assess empirically because market engagement is endogenous. We designed a large field experiment to evaluate the impact of financial markets, which have grown dramatically in recent decades. Participants from a national sample in England received substantial sums they could invest over a 6‐week period. We assigned them into several treatments designed to distinguish between different theoretical channels of influence. Results show that investment in stocks led to a more right‐leaning outlook on issues such as merit and deservingness, personal responsibility, and equality. Subjects also shifted to the right on policy questions. These results appear to be driven by growing familiarity with, and decreasing distrust of markets. The spread of financial markets thus has important and underappreciated political ramifications.
That is from a newly published paper by Yotam Margalit and Moses Shayo, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Monday assorted links
1. Death threats against German virologists. And “His perception of fishes’ features was so refined, she added, that he could distinguish individual faces, the way humans recognize one another.” (NYT)
2. Does altitude matter for Covid-19?
3. Police violence thread, excellent, scholarly.
4. Thread on police unions. Very good.
5. Model this, Samantha Shader edition. And Scholar’s Stage on rioting. And the lawyers are now throwing Molotov cocktails at the police (NYT)
6. Toward a further economics of gossip.
Fight the Virus!
I was asked by the LATimes to contribute to a panel on economic and pandemic policy. The other contributors are Joseph E. Stiglitz, Christina Romer, Alicia H. Munnell, Jason Furman, Anat R. Admati, James Doti, Simon Johnson, Ayse Imrohoroglu and Shanthi Nataraj. Here’s my contribution:
If an invader rained missiles down on cities across the United States killing thousands of people, we would fight back. Yet despite spending trillions on unemployment insurance and relief to deal with the economic consequences of COVID-19, we have spent comparatively little fighting the virus directly.
Testing capacity has slowly increased, but where is the national program to create a dozen labs each running 200,000 tests a day? It’s technologically feasible but months into the crisis, we have only just begun to spend serious money on testing.
We haven’t even fixed billing procedures so we can use the testing capacity that already exists. That’s right, labs that could be running tests are idle because of billing procedures. And while some parts of our government are slow, the Food and Drug Administration seems intent on reducing America’s ability to fight the virus by demanding business-as-usual paperwork.
Operation Warp Speed is one of the few bright spots. Potential vaccines often fail and so firms will typically not build manufacturing capacity, let alone produce doses until after a vaccine has been approved. But if we follow the usual procedure, getting shots in arms could be delayed by months or even years.
Under Operation Warp Speed, the government is paying for capacity to be built now so that the instant one of 14 vaccine candidates is proven safe and effective, production will be ready to go. That’s exactly what Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Kremer, Susan Athey, Chris Snyder and I have recommended. 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.
Relief payments can go on forever, but money spent on testing and vaccines has the potential to more than pay for itself. It’s time to fight back.
Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a member of the Accelerating Health Technologies With Incentive Design team.
My point about not fighting the virus directly was illustrated by many of the other panelists. Joseph Stiglitz, Christina Romer, Alicia Munnell, Jason Furman, James Doti, and Shanthi Nataraj say nothing or next to nothing about viruses. Only Anat Admati, Simon Johnson, Ayse Imrohoroglu get it.
Admati supports a Paul Romer-style testing program:
Until effective vaccines and therapies are available, which may be many months away, our best approach is to invest heavily in increasing the capacity for testing many more people and isolating those infected.
Simon Johnson argues, in addition, for antibody tests (not the usual PCR tests):
Policymakers should go all-in on ramping up antibody testing, to determine who has been exposed to COVID-19. Such tests are not yet accurate enough to determine precise immunity levels, but the work of Michael Mina, an immunologist and epidemiologist at Harvard, and others demonstrates that using such tests in the right way generates not just information about what has happened but, because of what can be inferred about underlying disease dynamics, also the information we need to understand where the disease will likely next impact various local communities.
Imrohoroglu advocates for targeted lockdown:
In addition to CDC recommendations about social distancing and public health strategies for all, I believe that as we reopen, we should keep a targeted lockdown policy in place for at-risk groups.
Coronavirus travel insurance markets in everything
Moral hazard — forget about it!:
In the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus, government leaders have pledged to cover all costs for any traveler who tests positive for the coronavirus while on vacation, according to the Associated Press. In a letter sent out to governments, airlines and tour operators, Cypriot officials said they would cover “lodging, food, drink and medication for covid-19 patients and their families” while on the island.
Tourism accounts for 13 percent of Cyprus’s economy, according to the AP, and with one of the lowest coronavirus ratios per capita in Europe, tourism ministers plan to restart international air travel on June 9.
Here is the full story, which includes other examples.
Alex Armlovich on blood plasma donors and markets
From my email:
I saw your post about COVID blood brokers–My girlfriend and I had it in March and finally got antibody tests last week when the city opened the free clinics.
I inquired on a national plasma donor site, was directed to CSL Plasma in Clifton NJ, and a donor concierge from LeapCure reached out. They didn’t tell me what the compensation is (the CSL website says it’s usually ~$50 for normal plasma) but they’re calling a roundtrip Uber from my apartment near Ridgewood, Queens all the way to NJ, which is $108 one-way. The concierge said to reach out if there are any concerns with the first trip next week because they’re hoping for up to 2x weekly donations.
What I don’t understand is, why doesn’t the city’s antibody testing program directly link up to plasma donation? I had to go through a bunch of hassle to find out where to donate, and I think the information & coordination friction is a bigger deterrent than anything else. And why isn’t there more collection capacity in the city itself; the long commute seems unnecessary. If this is scientifically important enough to merit real donor spending from biotech, it seems like the city should make even a minimal investment in reducing process friction.
Maybe an integrated, frictionless testing & plasma donation infrastructure should be a permanent strategy for future “zero-day viruses” where convalescent antibodies are the only thing we have to treat first responders…
Here is Alex Armlovich on Twitter.
Christo, RIP
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, true visionaries among many fakes.
Why does Minneapolis have such extreme educational disparities?
A correspondent writes me:
I live in Minneapolis and have worked in education policy here for a few years. With all of the unrest going on here, I feel increasing urgency to learn more about a question that’s been puzzling me for many years, and which I can’t seem to find a satisfactory answer to: why is Minnesota one of the worst states in the nation for disparities between black and white students, both in education and other outcomes such as employment and income?
Of course, most of my liberal colleagues and friends will say something like, “structural racism”, which isn’t really an explanation. That doesn’t explain why we to do so poorly in disparities, when other somewhat similar states such as Michigan and Illinois do better than us in their educational disparities.
All of this makes me think – there must be a study of disparities among minority or historically marginalized groups that looks across countries and cultural contexts, to try and understand what specifically causes students from those communities to perform poorly in school. And surely there must be cases where poor minority groups perform better in school than would be expected.
Do you have any suggestions for reading that could start me on the path to figuring this out?
The comments section is open, please leave your thoughtful suggestions there. And read this for general background on the economic side, and this.
Sunday assorted links
The plans for Greece’s reopening to tourists
In the European Union Greece is moving the quickest, but still this does not sound so appealing:
Phase 1 – Until 15 June
International flights are allowed only into Athens airport.
All visitors are tested upon arrival and are required to stay overnight at a designated hotel. If the test is negative, then the passenger self-quarantines for 7 days. If the test is positive, the passenger is quarantined under supervision for 14 days.Phase 2 – Bridge phase- 15 June to 30 June
International flights are allowed into Athens and Thessaloniki airports.
If your travel originated from an airport not in the EASA affected area list (https://www.easa.europa.eu/SD-2020-01/Airports#group-easa-downloads), then you are only subject to random tests upon arrival.
If you originate from an airport on the EASA affected area list, then you will be tested upon arrival. An overnight stay at a designated hotel is required. If the test is negative then the passenger self-quarantines for 7 days. If the test is positive, the passenger is quarantined under supervision for 14 days.
Here is much more detail. Via Yannikouts.
Social Planners Do Not Exist
Enrico Spolaore on his friend, co-author, and mentor Alberto Alesina:
I first met Alberto thirty years ago at Harvard, where he had received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1986, and had returned as faculty, after a couple of years at Carnegie-Mellon. He was already deservedly famous. In 1988, The Economist had presciently picked him as one of the decade’s eight best young economists, as he was transforming the way we approach macroeconomics and economic policy by explicitly bringing politics into the analysis. In his influential contribution to the NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1988, he had forcefully stated that “social planners do not exist.” Economists should not just assume that governments would implement optimal policies (presumably following the economists’ own recommendations). Instead, we should strive to understand actual policies as resulting from the strategic interactions of partisan politicians with each other and with the public, and often leading to socially inefficient outcomes.
Exactly right. Alesina was one of the most important scholars extending and integrating public choice, especially to macroeconomic questions.