Results for “age of em” 17259 found
Sunday assorted links
1. Glenn wants to ask it “why should I listen to my parents?”
2. What Soderbergh saw and read in 2023.
3. Hermit crabs are wearing our plastic.
5. Cowen’s Second Law: “Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success.”
6. Why strip malls are having a revival.
7. Hollywood movies losing favor in China (NYT).
8. The new economics of climate change (NYT). A very good piece. I thought one lesson was how much economists are so often slaves to politics — especially Democratic party politics — although I am not sure the author intended that messsage.
Alice Evans on the ideological gender divide
“I suggest,
- Men and women tend to think alike in societies where there is
- Close-knit interdependence, religosity and authoritarianism, or
- Shared cultural production and mixed gendered offline socialising.
- Gendered ideological polarisation appears encouraged by:
- Feminised public culture
- Economic resentment
- Social media filter bubbles
- Cultural entrepreneurs.”
Here is the full piece, currently the best piece on this topic.
What should I ask Benjamin Moser?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is one outdated bit from his home page:
Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize.
I am a big fan of his new book on the Dutch painters, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters. He lives in Utrecht and is also an expert on Brazil. Here is his Wikipedia page. Here are other assorted writings by him.
So what should I ask him?
Saturday assorted links
1. America’s wealthiest metropolitan areas in 1949.
2. Twins stolen at birth reunited by TikTok video.
3. Which immigrants to America end up most right-wing/left-wing?
4. “The [New Zealand] airport has since penguin-proofed its perimeters.” A small blue penguin, of course.
5. Markets in everything those new service sector jobs the culture that is Japan all the servers at this restaurant have dementia, and NPR says it is true.
6. Benjamin Yeoh podcast with Hannah Ritchie on sustainability.
What are the actual dangers of advanced AI?
That is the focus of my latest Bloomberg column, 2x the normal length. I cannot cover all the points, but here is one excerpt:
The larger theme is becoming evident: AI will radically disrupt power relations in society.
AI may severely limit, for instance, the status and earnings of the so-called “wordcel” class. It will displace many jobs that deal with words and symbols, or make them less lucrative, or just make those who hold them less influential. Knowing how to write well won’t be as valuable a skill five years from now, because AI can improve the quality of just about any text. Being bilingual (or tri- or quadrilingual, for that matter) will also be less useful, and that too has been a marker of highly educated status. Even if AIs can’t write better books than human authors, readers may prefer to spend their time talking to AIs rather than reading.
It is worth pausing to note how profound and unprecedented this development would be. For centuries, the Western world has awarded higher status to what I will call ideas people — those who are good at developing, expressing and putting into practice new ways of thinking. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions greatly increased the reach and influence of ideas people.
AI may put that trend into reverse.
And on arms races:
If I were to ask AI to sum up my worries about AI — I am confident it would do it well, but to be clear this is all my own work! — it might sound something like this: When dynamic technologies interact with static institutions, conflict is inevitable, and AI makes social disruption for the wordcel class and a higher-stakes arms race are more likely.
That last is the biggest problem, but it is also the unavoidable result of a world order based on nation-states. It is a race that the Western democracies and their allies have to manage and win. That is true regardless of the new technology in question: Today it is AI, but future arms races could concern solar-powered space weapons, faster missiles and nuclear weapons, or some yet-to-be-invented way of wreaking havoc on this planet and beyond. Yes, the US may lose some of these races, which makes it all the more important that it win this one — so it can use AI technologies as a counterweight to its deficiencies elsewhere.
In closing I will note for the nth time that rationalist and EA philosophies — which tend to downgrade the import of travel and cultural learning — are poorly suited for reasoning about foreign policy and foreign affairs.
Rasheed Griffith podcast with Andrew Mellor
Here is the audio and transcript, Mellor is the author of one of my favorite books in recent years The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music & Culture. Excerpt:
Rasheed: I’m going to jump right into the first question. Why are there no great Swedish composers?
Andrew: That’s a good question. That is one many of us have asked ourselves many times. There’s something about Sweden’s status in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, where it didn’t have this desperation to prove itself and to emancipate itself.
It had been a great nation, and it had been a huge imperial power, and it had lost everything. In a very modern sense, it came to the conclusion that that’s fine. We can exist as a small nation. Again, we don’t need to prove ourselves. We can just focus on a kind of creativity and happiness. And the legacy of that is still felt very much in Sweden today.
I just think the Swedish music isn’t that interesting in relation to theirs. It’s not that progressive. It’s very nice, but it didn’t push the envelope like Sibelius and Nielsen did. And therefore, it doesn’t still seem so relevant. I don’t know why.
It must be somehow connected to Sweden’s grand aristocratic history. It’s idea of itself. It’s always been the Nordic nation with nothing to prove almost. Maybe it still enjoys that status today. So yes, I don’t know, maybe, maybe there are more boring reasons for it, like the education system there or the system of progress and patronage was a little more tied up feudally, so talent didn’t necessarily get through. That’s the interesting thing about Carl Nielsen, of course, is that he was an absolute nobody, a working-class poor young man from a nothing family who, succeeded as a classical musician at a time when normally that you would have had to have status and education to have succeeded.
And of course, he had an education, but only because he was pushed into it by his community kind of gathering around him and raising the money for him to study. The short answer is, I don’t know, I haven’t worked it out yet. Maybe you have some thoughts on it.
And:
In the UK, Every BBC orchestra is headed by a Finn.
Recommended.
The Contractual Origins of High-Rent Urban Blight
Have you ever wondered why empty storefronts in major cities stay empty for so long? There is a new and still in the works paper by Daniel Stackman and Erica Moszkowski, and it provides valuable information about one piece of the puzzle. Here is the abstract:
We document the rise of storefront vacancies in prime retail locations, a phenomenon we refer to as high-rent blight, in America’s largest and most expensive urban retail market: Manhattan. We identify a little-known contracting feature between retail landlord and their bankers that generates vacancies in the downstream market for retail space. Specifically, widespread covenants in commercial mortgage agreements impose rent floors for any new leases landlords may sign with tenants, short-circuiting the price mechanism in times of low demand for retail space. Quasi-experimental estimates suggest that binding rent floors imposed by mortgage covenants substantially reduce the probability of occupancy, and we show in counterfactual exercises that covenants may have increased vacancy rates by as much as 14% over the 2016 to 2020 period.
There are some earlier MR posts on this question, though I am not sure of the appropriate key words to find them…
South Dakota is trying to hold on
Map of the TFRs by US state for 2023, based on recently released birth data from January-September 2023. The TFR declined to around 1.62 kids per woman last year, but there are important regional differences. Values range from 1.99 in South Dakota to 1.19 in Washington DC. pic.twitter.com/xXXzKm1kT6
— Birth Gauge (@BirthGauge) January 22, 2024
Bihar is holding on:
Rent Controls
Ryan Bourne has a good rundown on rent controls in Argentina. In 2020 Argentina introduced a relatively mild form of rent control; rent increases during tenancy were capped at a weighted average of inflation and wage growth, tenancy was a minimum of 3 years and it became very difficult to end a tenancy. In ordinary times, this might have had only mild negative effects but in a high inflation rate scenario everything was accelerated (and the controls got worse over time, most notably in 2023 rent increases were capped at the minimum of inflation and wage growth).
….The results of all this were predictable. Around the policy’s introduction, it’s estimated that 45% of landlords stopped renting to instead sell their properties, not least because most home sales were made in dollars [it was illegal to rent in dollars, AT]. A lot of landlords shifted to short-term rentals on AirBnB too. In 2019, Buenos Aires had 10,000 properties listed on AirBnB; now it’s over 29,500. There have thus been no end of stories about a rental housing crisis, with tenants unable to find rental accommodation, despite the Financial Times reporting late last year that energy use implies ‘one in seven homes’ in Buenos Aires, the capital, laid empty.
This supply crunch led to soaring rents. Bloomberg reported that rents jumped sharply after tenancy rent controls were announced, as landlords opted out of the market or front-loaded rent increases to protect against inflation. Having been falling in real terms through 2018 and 2019, and tracking inflation for most of the previous decade, rents in Buenos Aires grew at 1.7 times the pace of inflation in 2020, broadly tracked inflation in 2021 and 2022, and then accelerated much faster than inflation again in 2023 as the rate which rents could be increased within tenancies was tightened further to the lower of wage growth or inflation.
As a result, the average rent for a two bedroom apartment in Buenos Aires has surged from 18,000 pesos per month at the end of 2019 to 334,000 pesos today, far above the 210,000 pesos if prices had merely tracked broader inflation, as used to happen. This relative price hike obviously hurts the poor most, because they cannot easily afford deposits to buy homes, or more expensive shorter-term dollar rentals.
Controls on rents within tenancies also soured landlord-tenant relations, incentivising landlords to forgo expensive maintenance (thus allowing the value of the property to fall towards its regulated price or to encourage tenants to leave). Misallocation of properties was rife. Reports in Buenos Aires described friends having to share apartments further out of the city centre, meaning cramped conditions and longer commutes. Under such controls, people enjoying sub-market rents are incentivized to stay in properties ill-suited for them, while others must leave properties they can afford prematurely when rents adjust sharply before their wages rise.
Milei’s Decree 70/2023, translated as ‘Foundations for the Reconstruction of the Argentine Economy,’ eliminated rent controls, including allowing contracting in dollars. Even though it has been only a matter of months, early signs are very positive:
Already the reduced risks to landlords is leading a rebound in the rental supply. Broker Soledad Balayan has shown a 50% rise in notices for traditional rentals since the decree. A host of other sources, including the Argentine Real Estate Chamber, have confirmed large supply jumps. Perhaps unsurprisingly, reports show new rental prices falling, by between 20 and 30% so far.
*The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America*
By Coleman Hughes, coming soon!
Dose Optimization Trials Enable Fractional Dosing of Scarce Drugs
During the pandemic, when vaccines doses were scarce, I argued for fractional dosing to speed vaccination and maximize social benefits. But what dose? In my latest paper, just published in PNAS, with Phillip Boonstra and Garth Strohbehn, I look at optimal trial design when you want to quickly discover a fractional dose with good properties while not endangering patients in the trial.
[D]ose fractionation, rations the amount of a divisible scarce resource that is allocated to each individual recipient [3–6]. Fractionation is a utilitarian attempt to produce “the greatest good for the greatest number” by increasing the number of recipients who can gain access to a scarce resource by reducing the amount that each person receives, acknowledging that individuals who receive lower doses may be worse off than they would be had they received the “full” dose. If, for example, an effective intervention is so scarce that the vast majority of the population lacks access, then halving the dose in order to double the number of treated individuals can be socially valuable, provided the effectiveness of the treatment falls by less than half. For variable motivations, vaccine dose fractionation has previously been explored in diverse contexts, including Yellow Fever, tuberculosis, influenza, and, most recently, monkeypox [7–12]. Modeling studies strongly suggest that vaccine dose fractionation strategies, had they been implemented, would have meaningfully reduced COVID-19 infections and deaths [13], and perhaps limited the emergence of downstream SARS-CoV-2 variants [6].
…Confident employment of fractionation requires knowledge of a drug’s dose-response relationship [6, 13], but direct observation of both that relationship and MDSE, rather than pharmacokinetic modeling, appears necessary for regulatory and public health authorities to adopt fractionation [15, 16]. Oftentimes, however, early-phase trials of a drug develop only coarse and limited dose-response information, either intentionally or unintentionally. A speed-focused approach to drug development, which is common for at least two reasons, tends to preclude dose-response studies. The first reason is a strong financial incentive to be “first to market.” The majority of marketed cancer drugs, for example, have never been subjected to randomized, dose-ranging studies [17, 18]. The absence of dose optimization may raise patients’ risk. Further, in an industry sponsored study, there is a clear incentive to test the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) in order to observe a treatment effect, if one exists. The second reason, observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, is a focus on speed for public health. Due to ethical and logistical challenges, previously developed methods to estimate dose-response and MDSE have not routinely been pursued during COVID-19 [19]. The primary motivation of COVID-19 clinical trial infrastructure has been to identify any drug with any efficacy rather than maximize the benefits that can be generated from each individual drug [3, 18, 20, 21]. Conditional upon a therapy already having demonstrated efficacy, there is limited desire on the part of firms, funders, or participants to possibly be exposed to suboptimal dosages of an efficacious drug, even if the lower dose meaningfully reduced risk or extended benefits [16]. Taken together, then, post-marketing dose optimization is a commonly encountered, high-stakes problem–the best approach for which is unknown.
…With that motivation, we present in this manuscript the development an efficient trial design and treatment arm allocation strategy that quickly de-escalates the dose of a drug that is known to be efficacious to a dose that more efficiently expands societal benefits.
The basic idea is to begin near the known efficacious dose level and then deescalate dose levels but what is the best de-escalation strategy given that we want to quickly find an optimal dosage level but also don’t want to go so low that we endanger patients? Based on Bayesian trials under a variety of plausible conditions we conclude that the best strategy is Targeted Randomization (TR). At each stage, TR identifies the dose-level most likely to be optimal but randomizes the next subject(s) to either it or one of the two dose-levels immediately below it. The probability of randomization across three dose-levels explored in TR is proportional to the posterior probability that each is optimal. This strategy balances speed of optimization while reducing danger to patients.
Read the whole thing.
Will Milei succeed in Argentina?
I give him a 30-40% chance, which is perhaps generous because I am rooting for him. Bryan Caplan, who is more optimistic, offers some analysis and estimates that Milei needs to close a fiscal gap of about five percent of gdp.
I have two major worries. First, if Milei approaches fiscal success, the opposing parties will think long and hard about whether they wish to enable further success. Or will they instead prefer to see the Milei reforms crash and burn for fiscal reasons? I don’t think they know themselves, but the history of politics in Argentina does not give special reason to be super-optimistic here. You don’t have to believe the opposition will deliberately flush their country down the toilet, they just not might be convinced that further fiscal consolidation is needed, even if it is (surely they gotten this wrong a lot in the past).
Second, Argentina has not succeeded in obtaining fiscal stability in the past, not for a long time. I disagree with this passage of Bryan’s:
The monetary and fiscal stabilization is very likely to work. Argentina has faced far worse crises before: The hyperinflations of the 70s to the 90s multiplied prices 100 billion times. That’s like turning a billion dollars into a penny. Yet Argentinians ultimately overcame all these problems and more using the orthodox medicines of monetary restraint and fiscal responsibility. Since even politicians who ideologically opposed these treatments ultimately endured their short-run costs, it is a safe bet that a libertarian economics professor will do the same.
That is a misread of the history. One common tactic, for instance, is to do enough stabilization so that Argentina is “fiscally sound enough” at the peak of a commodity super-cycle. Most recently, that super-cycle has been China buying lots from Argentina (no such positive wave from China will be coming again, not anytime soon at least). When the positive real shocks subside, Argentina goes back into the fiscal hole.
In reality, past reforms never put the country on a sound fiscal footing, even if inflation rates were low for a while.
One scenario for now is that Argentina does enough so that it appears fiscally stable, and the recent discoveries of oil and gas — which will translate into government revenue — kick in to support a temporary status quo. But within ten years the whole thing falls apart again. Even if Milei wants to do more on the fiscal front to get past that point, it is not obvious that either voters or the legislature would support such further moves.
Those are two “pretty likely” scenarios in which Milei fails, and in neither case is it the fault of Milei. As I mentioned above, the chances of success remain below fifty percent.
Boosting fertility by subsidizing child-bearing for *young* women
From Vidya Mahambare:
Several countries have grappled with a longstanding dilemma – how to reverse the trend of falling fertility rates. In 2019, eighty-one countries had fertility rates below the population replacement threshold. The replacement fertility rate, estimated at 2.1 births per woman, represents the level required to sustain a stable population over the long run, assuming mortality and migration remain constant.
Is it now time, at least in some countries, to implement policies targeted at lowering the age at which women have their first child?
Perhaps, yes. Here is why.
While most countries in Europe, Northern America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and China have had low fertility rate for years, India, the most populous country, joined them in 2021. Countries such as Greece, Italy, Japan, and Spain have had very low fertility levels below 1.5 births per woman for decades. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate, with 0.8 births per woman.
Countries have tried several policies to raise the fertility rates, with only sporadic and local success. A commonly adopted measure is maternity leave, paid or unpaid, with job security. Other policies include subsidised childcare, child or family allowances, paid or unpaid paternity leave, flexible or part-time work hours for parents, and tax credits for dependent children.
These measures are appropriate, but miss one point.
The age at which a mother gives birth to her first child can impact her likelihood of having a second child. In several developed countries, the mean age of mothers at the birth of their first child has surpassed or is close to 30 years. Since 2000, many countries have seen the mean age at first birth increase by at least two years. Even in China, reports indicate that the age at which new mothers give birth to their first child now exceeds 30 years in Shanghai.
Until 2010, the largest number of new births in developed countries occurred among mothers aged 25 to 29. Presently, the highest number of first-time mothers falls within the 30-34 age group. Women can and do have successful deliveries in their late thirties and early forties. For many, it is a deliberate decision to start a family late.
The point however, is this – even if a woman desires to reconsider her choice of having a single child, there is less time and inclination to reverse the course if the first childbirth occurs after the mother reaches the age of 30.
Studies often report decreased happiness and life satisfaction during the early stages of parenthood, and younger parents may be unhappier. This is not the same as saying children don’t make parents happy. Parenthood by itself can have a substantial positive effect on life satisfaction but time and monetary cost offsets it. That is why the negative association between fertility and happiness is weaker in countries with higher public support for families.
As parents gain experience and adjust to the demands of parenthood, they may become more adept at managing stress and finding joy in parenthood. They may begin to recognise that loosening the intensive parenting norm relieves stress and raises happiness. Also, recently a study shows that the reported results about the trade-off between happiness and children require strong assumptions about how individuals report happiness and their beliefs about its distribution in society.
Rising female education and employment, women’s delayed entry into the labour market, high monetary and time cost of raising kids, and rising real estate prices have all played a role in declining fertility. In societies where marriage is culturally deemed essential for starting a family, the rising age at marriage and a declining marriage rate also contribute to a postponement in having the first child. For example, In South Korea, a country where only 2% of childbirth is outside marriage, the marriage rate has slid to a record low.
Countries need to contemplate whether they should promote more women having their first child in their twenties. Historically, several countries have had official policies to raise women’s age at marriage and the age at their first child. Is it time to shift gears?
Should countries that aim to boost fertility consider offering increased financial incentives or tax concessions for specific age brackets? Is it time for countries, including Canada and the United States of America, which currently have below-replacement level fertility and lack official policies to influence fertility levels, to initiate strategies aimed at reducing the average age of women with their first child?
Further, several countries facing fertility crises continue to subsidise family planning services directly through public programs or indirectly through non-governmental organisations. Indeed, the option for family planning should be accessible to all adults, but is there a necessity to offer public support for it in countries facing below-replacement-level fertility rates?
A word of caution. The above suggestions do not apply to all countries with fertility rates below the replacement level. An example is India, where the mother’s mean age at first birth is still less than 22 years, with the median age at first marriage less than 20 years in 2019-21 for women in 25-29 age cohort.
What may go wrong with a policy that aims to lower women’s age at first child? Could it be that women would still prefer to have only one child but at a younger age? Yes, that is possible, but that’s no different from today and, hence, not a worse outcome. Would women end up compromising their education and employment? Not really, if we are targeting the whole age group of twenties. Can couples afford to have children 2-3 years earlier than now? That’s tough to answer, but it may be feasible with childcare subsidies and workplace support.
To be clear, child support should be available for women of all ages. Exploring increased incremental support tailored to specific age groups might be worthwhile in a race to raise fertility rates.
What I’ve been reading
1. Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. An excellent book with sound conclusions, think of it as moderate Julian Simon-like optimism on environmental issues, but with left-coded rhetoric.
2. Colin Elliott, Pox Romana: The Plague that Shook the Roman World. Think of this as a sequel to Kyle Harper’s tract on Roman plagues and their political import, this look at the Antonine plague and its impact has both good history and good economics. It is also highly readable.
3. Carrie Sheffield, Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness. A highly effective and harrowing tale of a lifetime journey from abuse to Christianity: “Carrie attended 17 public schools and homeschool, all while performing classical music on the streets and passing out fire-and-insurance religious pamphlets — at times while child custody workers loomed.” The author is well known in finance, ex-LDS circles, public policy, and right-leaning media, and she has a Master’s from Harvard. This story isn’t over.
4. Charles Freeman,
5. Erin Accampo Hern, Explaining Successes in Africa: Things Don’t Always Fall Apart. I found this book highly readable and instructive, but I find it more convincing if you reverse the central conclusion. There is too much talk of the Seychelles and Mauritius, and is Gabon the big success story on the Continent? Population is 2.3 million, the country ranks 112th in the Human Development Index, and almost half the government budget is oil revenue. Still, this book “tells you how things actually are,” and that is more important than any objections one might lodge.
Recent and noteworthy is Peter Jackson, From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia. You may recall that the Mongol empire at its peak was much larger than the Roman empire at its peak, but how many young men think about it every day?
Then there is Jian Chen’s Zhou Enlai: A Life, which seems like a major achievement. I’ve only had time to read small amounts of it…is it “too soon to tell”? I say no!
Who feels the pinch of status competition?
Here is one interesting hypothesis:
Despite the persistence of anti-Black racism, White Americans report feeling worse off than Black Americans. We suggest that some White Americans may report low well-being despite high group-level status because of perceptions that they are falling behind their in-group. Using census-based quota sampling, we measured status comparisons and health among Black (N = 452, Wave 1) and White (N = 439, Wave 1) American adults over a period of 6 to 7 weeks. We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants.
That is from a new paper by Nava Calouri, Erin Cooley, Lauren E. Philbrook. Via excellence.