Results for “age of em” 17236 found
Genetic Insurance
Genetic testing identifies disease risk, enabling individuals to dodge environmental triggers, optimize treatments, and improve planning. Yet, the fear of increased insurance premiums deters many from undergoing tests. Genetic testing offers societal benefits but also presents significant distributional challenges. To address this, my 1994 paper proposed the idea of genetic insurance.
For a small fee genetic insurance would insure against the possibility of a positive test result. If the test came back positive the customer would be paid a large sum of money, enough to cover the expected costs of his disease or equivalently enough to allow him to purchase health insurance at the new risk premium. If the test turns out negative the customer would lose his genetic insurance fee but would gain the results of the test and also lower health insurance premiums. Those who have positive tests results would be paid enough money to pay their health care costs and would also benefit from being able to plan in accord with the test results. Under this proposal average insurance rates will fall and everyone will be made better off.\
Genetic insurance is insurance against changes in the cost of health insurance due to genetic information. John Cochrane would later generalize this idea to show that it’s possible to insure against changes in the cost of health insurance due to any new information. Cochrane called this time-consistent health insurance or health-status insurance; it’s a way of creating long-term health insurance contracts without binding an individual to a firm.
In an interesting paper, Helene Schernberg extends my 1994 paper. Schernberg shows that even if an individual has full-health insurance that can’t be taken away, there are other reasons to want genetic insurance. She focuses on the planning aspect. Genetic insurance could be used to shift consumption earlier, to better health states and thus improve life-time allocation.
Genetic testing could soon be a routine part of your medical journey. It offers insights into inherited disorders or susceptibility to various conditions. For example, if you are a woman with a BRCA mutation, you have a 55 to 72% lifetime risk of breast cancer.
… This suggests that genetic information is valuable while providing a theoretical argument in favor of genetic insurance. The mechanism is described in Tabarrok (1994): Individuals purchase genetic insurance before taking a genetic test, thus receiving a compensation upon being identified as a high-risk. Tabarrok (1994) relates this genetic insurance payment to the need to cover expensive health insurance premia. I show that it also relates to the fact that a temporally risk-averse individual wishes to insure against the lifetime utility losses she may experience when her health prospects deteriorate after taking a genetic test.
Monopolized organ collection
The nation’s 56 organ procurement organizations collect organs — mainly kidneys — from deceased donors at hospitals and arrange for them to be transported to surgeons at the 250 U.S. medical centers that perform transplants. Each procurement group holds a government-guaranteed monopoly over a swath of U.S. territory where it operates.
Some have failed for years to collect enough organs to meet demand, according to government records. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the part of HHS that licenses the nonprofits to operate, has never decertified one. In response to critiques, the CMS issued new benchmarks that will allow the agency to weed out poor performers beginning in 2026.
Now many of these organ collection groups are under investigation for fraud and overbilling the government.
Monday assorted links
1. Sociopaths remain underrated (NYT).
2. Claims about Asian birth rates, speculative but not to be dismissed.
3. The “science is getting less disruptive” paper does not replicate. And the full critique.
4. Why people fail to notice horrors around them (NYT).
5. New paper on supermodular goods, by Divya Siddarth, Matthew Prewitt, Glen Weyl.
The Maniac
I enjoyed Benjamin’s Labatut’s The Maniac. Conventionally regarded as a “biography” of John von Neumann but more accurately a series of short, quick vignettes, recollections, and reconstructions told by people around von Neumann and centered on the many ideas he touched, including the metaphysics of logic, quantum physics, the nuclear bomb, the meaning of rationality, the fundamental structure of life and especially artificial intelligence. The recollections are what might be called creative non-fiction; based on real life interviews but written as if the speaker were a novelist. For example, Feynman uniquely watching the first atomic test without goggles, but told even more vividly than Feynman told the story.
As Tyler noted, many of the stories will be familiar to MR readers, but a few were new to me. Sydney Brenner, for example, the Nobel prize winning molecular biologist who hypothesized and then proved the existence of messenger RNA reports with wonder and astonishment that von Neumann had earlier understood from theory alone how any such system must work.
Fear and awe in the presence of great intelligence is a running theme of the book. Polya famously described fearing von Neumann after seeing him solve a problem in minutes that he had worked on for decades (again the story is jeujed up in The Maniac to great effect.) Eugene Wigner who knew him from childhood and who himself won a Nobel prize in physics is “quoted” (recall this is fictionalized but based on the record):
It was a burden growing up so close to him. I often wonder if my horrific inferiority complex, which not even the Nobel prize has diminished in the slightest, is a product of having known von Neumann for the better part of my life.
…I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg, Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me.
Only he was fully awake.
Another theme is the seemingly close relationship between rationality and insanity–Labatut develops this both in theory around Godel’s theorem but also in practice with the many rationalists who went crazy. What does this mean for artificial intelligence?
The MANIAC refers not to von Neumann but to von Neumann’s creation the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model, the first computer built using von Neumann’s architecture, which all computers use today. From the MANIAC we get to artificial intelligence and again the awe and fear. After Gary Kasparov loses to Deep Blue he become despondent and fearful, thinking that there must have been a human in the machine. Lee Sedol losing to AlphaGo and soon retiring thereafter. Ke Jie being annihilated by Master, the successor to AlphaGo and reporting “he is a god of Go. A god that can crush all who defy him.” And then the creators of AlphaGo take off the training wheels, they remove all the human games that constrained the earlier models to a foundation built on thousands of years of human knowledge and the result crushes the human-limited model.
We are reminded of what von Neumann said on his death bed when asked what would it take for a computer to begin to think and behave like a human being.
He took a very long time before answering, in a voice that was no louder than a whisper.
He said that it would have to understand language, to read, to write, to speak.
And he said that it would have to play, like a child.
The Maniac is a good read.
What should I ask Fareed Zakaria?
Here is Fareed’s home page, here is Wikipedia:
Fareed Rafiq Zakaria…is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.
He was managing editor of Foreign Affairs at age 28, briefly a wine columnist for Slate, and much more. His new book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present is very classically liberal, and in my terms “Progress Studies”-oriented.
So what should I ask him?
Shruti Rajagopalan interviews Doug Irwin
Doug of course is one of the top trade economists. Here is the audio, video, and transcript, from the same wonderful Mercatus team that brings you CWT. Here is one excerpt:
RAJAGOPALAN: I have a different question on Adam Smith. We’re all taught Adam Smith’s division of labor, specialization, economies of scale, the cliff notes version of that. Then, we learn about absolute advantage in about five minutes. Then, we set it aside and start thinking about comparative advantage.The first question I have is does Adam Smith’s basic model of division of labor, specialization, and economies of scale anticipate the comparative advantage trade models, or does it actually undermine the comparative advantage trade models in the way that Krugman wrote about or something else?IRWIN: I think that Adam Smith has a broader view of trade, a much richer view of trade than what I would think is of the narrower David Ricardo theory of comparative advantage. If you have to read one of the two, read Adam Smith because it’s much more fun to read. Reading David Ricardo is more like reading a textbook in the sense that he doesn’t have this broad historical sense and these new rich ideas and how they’re interacting that leaves a lot to the imagination and leaves a lot to future research to flesh out.He’s saying, “England can produce wine and cloth. Here are the labor coefficients, and we’re going to do this static comparison between England and Portugal.” That’s a very narrow way of thinking about trade.RAJAGOPALAN: So badly written, you want the wine by the end of it.IRWIN: There’s a wonderful quote by George Stigler saying: “the only thing that someone will take away from reading Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is that they need a bottle of wine to get through it,” or something along those lines.RAJAGOPALAN: I agree.IRWIN: Adam Smith isn’t technically as sophisticated if you will, but in terms of the ideas, they’re very sophisticated. Obviously, he wasn’t thinking in terms of an economic model directly, but it’s a much richer overall discussion of trade that I think you can learn a lot from, even reading today.RAJAGOPALAN: When you see the world today, what do you think the world looks like more? Does it look more like Ricardian comparative advantage and the more recent models like Heckscher–Ohlin, and those things that came about? Do you think it really looks like the Adam Smith story, which is much more nuanced, pay attention to what’s happening in the domestic economy in terms of division of labor, specialization, and that is the lead-in to foreign trade, which is so deeply entangled with domestic trade?IRWIN: Well, I hate to waffle, but I think you need a little bit of both. It depends on the question, depends on the country, depends on the issue that you’re examining. These are just tools that you draw to help out your understanding of a particular situation. I will confess I’m a little bit more in favor of Adam Smith. I’ve always said that his theory of trade, and in particular his analysis of trade policy, which I think is underrated, is very sophisticated, and very wise, and has a lot to say to us today.RAJAGOPALAN: Beautifully written, if I may add.
There are now 100 episodes of Ideas of India, here is a link to all of them. And here is my own earlier CWT with Doug.
Friday assorted links
1. Is dancing the best treatment for depression? Limited data, speculative.
2. Tom Cruise will use new deal to do more “auteur” movies.
3. Ginevra Lily Davis on women, good piece.
4. A look inside a nuclear submarine.
5. The project of trying to make yourself more agentic.
6. Niklaus Wirth, RIP (NYT).
Access to Medical Data Saves Lives
ProPublica: In January, the Biden administration pledged to increase public access to a wide array of Medicare information to improve health care for America’s most sick and vulnerable.
…So researchers across the country were flummoxed this week when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a proposal that will increase fees and diminish access to claims data that has informed thousands of health care studies and influenced major public health reforms.
Using big Medicare databases has never been cheap or easy. Under the current system, researchers could have the data transferred to secure university computers for about $20,000–that’s a lot but once the data was on the university computers it could be accessed by multiple researchers, cutting costs. A professor could buy the data and their PhD students, for example, wouldn’t have to pay again. Under the new system it will cost $35,000 for one researcher to access the data which will be held on government (CMS) computers. Moreover, it’s unclear how complex statistical analysis will be performed or how congested the CMS systems may become.
Research teams on complex projects can include dozens of people and take years to complete. “The costs will grow exponentially and make access infeasible except for the very best resourced organizations,” said Joshua Gottlieb, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.
Public data should be open access to researchers, with appropriate anonymization. We know from IP law that barriers to access reduce research and innovation; and in the medical sphere research and innovation saves lives. Open access is also a check on how governments spends taxpayer money and the effectiveness of such spending. I also worry that raising the dollar cost of access is a prelude to other restrictions. The NIH, for example, is restricting access to genetic data if it thinks the researcher will be asking forbidden questions. Even without such explicit restrictions, there is a chilling effect when researchers are beholden for access to the government and indeed to the very agencies they may be researching.
I place a high value on privacy but I get suspicious when governments invoke privacy to block citizen access to government data but not to block government access to citizen data. Medicare databases have always been appropriately anonymized and care is taken so the data are secured but the dangers of these databases in anyone’s hand, let alone researchers, is far less than anti-money laundering, KYC laws and suspicious transaction reports in banking, automated license plate readers that the police us to scan billions of license plates or mass surveillance of the communications of US citizens under FISA. Sadly, this list could easily be extended. Liberty thrives on the people’s privacy and the government’s transparency.
Nixonian Politics and Student Debt Cancellations
In the political economy chapter of our textbook, Modern Principles of Economics, Tyler and I discuss how voters appear especially responsive to economic conditions in the year of an election. Politicians who want to be reelected, therefore, are wise to do whatever they can to increase personal disposable income and reduce inflation in the year of an election even if this means decreases in income and increases in inflation at other times.
One of the most brazen examples comes from President Richard Nixon. Just two weeks before the 1972 election, he sent a letter to more than 24 million recipients of Social Security benefits. President Nixon’s letter read:
Higher Social Security Payments
Your social security payment has been increased by 20 percent, starting with this month’s check, by a new statute enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon on July 1, 1972.
The President also signed into law a provision that will allow your social security benefits to increase automatically if the cost of living goes up. Automatic benefit increases will be added to your check in future years according to the conditions set out in the law.
In other news:
President Joe Biden on Wednesday will announce $1.2 billion of student debt relief for nearly 153,000 borrowers — and he’s sending emails to make sure they know whom to thank for it.
…“Congratulations—all or a portion of your federal student loans will be forgiven because you qualify for early loan forgiveness under my Administration’s SAVE Plan,” says the email message from Biden that the Education Department plans to send on Wednesday to the latest group of borrowers receiving loan forgiveness.
“I hope this relief gives you a little more breathing room,” Biden writes in the message.
Note also:
…The administration says that it has now approved loan discharges totaling nearly $138 billion for nearly 3.9 million borrowers through dozens of administrative actions since coming into office.
“Administrative actions,” in other words without Congress passing a law. You may recall that the Supreme Court ruled that the administration did not have the authority to cancel student debt under the HEROES Act (which it obviously didn’t). However:
Hours after the Court issued its decisions in Nebraska and Brown, the Biden Administration announced that it was beginning a regulatory process, called negotiated rulemaking, to consider providing loan cancellation under the HEA rather than the HEROES Act.
Addendum: Do also read my previous post where I noted “…the student loan program, as currently written, is looking to be one of the most costly, inefficient and unwise government programs of the 21st century.”
Israel facts of the day
GDP declined by an annualised 19.4 per cent compared with the third quarter. On a pure quarter-by-quarter basis, the economy contracted 5.2 per cent compared with the previous three months.
The sharp drop was caused in part by the call-up of 300,000 reservists, who had to leave behind their workplaces and businesses to embark on months of army service, the Central Bureau of Statistics said.
Other factors to hit the economy included the government’s sponsorship of housing for more than 120,000 Israelis evacuated from the northern and southern border areas of the country.
Following the October 7 attack, Israel also imposed tough restrictions on the movement of Palestinian workers from the West Bank into the country. The move hit the construction sector, causing labour shortages that became an additional drag on economic growth, the bureau said.
Overall, Israel still closed the year with a growing economy, with GDP up 2 per cent in 2023 from 2022. But that compared with an increase of 6.5 per cent a year earlier.
The war has triggered a steep increase in government spending, which rose 88 per cent in the three months after the outbreak of war compared with the preceding quarter. Consumers, meanwhile, were spending 27 per cent less. Imports of goods and services fell 42 per cent, the report said, while exports dropped 18 per cent.
Sentences to ponder
We find that standard population growth projections imply larger reductions in [per capita] income than even the most extreme widely-adopted climate change scenario.
Note these results are referring to population growth, not shrinkage. Of course those of you who remember Paul Ehrlich and his “population bomb” campaign may be skeptical. Still, if you think there are countries or regions that are just not going to grow much in absolute terms, exactly why is this wrong? Ehrlich was clearly wrong about countries that were set to grow — is that everyone?
Should per capita or total income be the standard here?
That sentence is from a macroeconomics paper, here is more, via Robin Hanson.
ChatGPT as a predictor of corporate investment
We create a firm-level ChatGPT investment score, based on conference calls, that measures managers’ anticipated changes in capital expenditures. We validate the score with interpretable textual content and its strong correlation with CFO survey responses. The investment score predicts future capital expenditure for up to nine quarters, controlling for Tobin’s q and other determinants, implying the investment score provides incremental information about firms’ future investment opportunities. The investment score also separately forecasts future total, intangible, and R&D investments. High-investment-score firms experience significant negative future abnormal returns. We demonstrate ChatGPT’s applicability to measure other policies, such as dividends and employment.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Manish Jia, Jialin Qian, Michael Weber, and Baozhong Yang.
Avoiding Repugnance
Works in Progress has a good review of the state of compensating organ donors, especially doing so with nudges or non-price factors to avoid backlash from those who find mixing money and organs to be repugnant. My own idea for this, first expressed in Entrepreneurial Economics, but many times since is a no-give, no-take rule. Under no-give, no-take, people who sign their organ donor cards get priority should they one day need an organ. The great virtue of no-give, no-take is that it provides an incentive to sign one’s organ donor card but one that strikes most people as fair and just and not repugnant. Israel introduced a no-give, no-take policy in 2008 and it appears to have worked well.
In March 2008, to increase donations, the Israeli government implemented a ‘priority allocation’ policy to encourage more people to sign up to donate organs after their deaths. Once someone has been registered as a donor for three years, they receive priority allocation if they themselves need a transplant. If a donor dies and their organs are usable, their close family members also get higher priority for transplants if they need them – which also means that families are more inclined to give their consent for their deceased relatives’ organs to be used.
In its first year, the scheme led to 70,000 additional sign-ups. The momentum continued, with 11.1 percent of all potential organ donors being registered in the five years after the scheme was introduced, compared to 7.7 percent before. According to a 2017 study, when presented with the decision to authorize the donation of their dead relative’s organs, 55 percent of families decided to donate after the priority scheme, compared to 45 percent before.
Is some deterrence being restored?
When U.S. forces launched strikes this month on Iranian-backed groups in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, Tehran publicly warned that its military was ready to respond to any threat. But in private, senior leaders are urging caution, according to Lebanese and Iraqi officials who were briefed on the talks. They spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive conversations.
U.S. officials say the message might be having some effect. As of Saturday, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria hadn’t attacked U.S. forces in more than 13 days, an unusual lull since the war in Gaza began in October. The militants held their fire even after a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad killed a senior Kataib Hezbollah official.
“Iran may have realized their interests are not served by allowing their proxies unrestricted ability to attack U.S. and coalition forces,” one U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Here is the full WaPo story, via Christian.
My view of *Casablanca* (with spoilers, but you’ve seen it already?)
Paul Wall asks about my Casablanca comment:
When Rick won’t give Laszlo the letters of transit, and Laszlo asks him why, Rick says “I suggest your ask your wife.” In essence he is forcing Laszlo to force Ilsa to confess to their earlier Paris affair in as humiliating a way as possible. Ilsa has to tell not only of the affair, but that she promised Rick eternal fealty, and treated Rick so badly that he now would be so vindictive.
When Ilsa visits Rick in his room that one night toward the end of the movie, he “takes” her again, and gets her to fall in love with him again, or so it seems. But is Ilsa only acting, and playing to Rick’s vanity to get the letters of transit? You can debate that point, but either way Rick seems happy enough to sleep with her on that basis. That is one of his ways of humiliating her again, and it enables him to be psychologically free enough to let her go in the movie’s final scene.
[Interjection: I view her recurring attachment to Rick as real, and her love for Laszlo as somewhat daughterly, and that she is self-deceiving throughout with both men. That said, what she most loves about Rick is that she can partake in the relationship without having to be known, without having to be anybody at all. She and Rick, as a couple in ordinary life running errands at the Five and Dime in Cleveland, probably would not do so well. Ilsa is a woman who never has found herself and is somehow always in transition, always on the run. It is no surprise she attaches to two men with broadly similar tendencies.]
At the movie’s end, Rick gives Ilsa back and insists she leave Casablanca with Laszlo. What a hell their marriage is going to be. Stuck in America, where neither has much to do, though he lives for his work. Laszlo now knows she loved Rick more, knows she just fell for Rick again and slept with him the night before (women willing to prostitute themselves is a recurring theme in the film), and knows she has been lying to him in various ways throughout their relationship. Ilsa knows these things too, and now knows that Laszlo knows. But what really is Laszlo’s choice or Ilsa’s choice other than to proceed? They end up playing the roles of puppets in Rick’s little planned charade.
Rick gets to wander off with Louis (“this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”), into the Free French garrisons in the desert, facing struggles but also enjoying a true freedom, including a freedom from Ilsa because he humiliated and punished her so much, and because that punishment will be so enduring. He had been waiting around in Casablanca to punish her, and now he really cannot punish her any more. Life can go on.
If you recall the scene where Rick helps the young husband win at the roulette table, so his wife doesn’t have to prostitute herself to get exit visas, we know that the more sentimental side of Rick regards such prostitution as an ultimate humiliation, not as a mere transaction to be digested in Benthamite fashion and then forgotten.
A more Benthamite Rick might have been a happier and better-adjusted guy.