Results for “age of em” 17246 found
Initial Impressions: India and Mumbai
Stanley Pignal, the new Mumbai-based South Asia correspondent for The Economist, tweeted:
Having landed two hours ago, I’m upgrading myself from “India novice” to “India watcher”. Tomorrow “expert”, next week “veteran”
#journalism
With that in mind as also applying to me, here are some initial thoughts:
People in India drive on the wrong side of the road and I’m not talking about the fact that they drive on the left.
It’s easier to find a good Indian restaurant in Fairfax than in Bandra.
The quality of the intellectual class relative to GDP per capita is the highest of any country I know.
The quality of the intellectual class at the top is as high as Singapore but in Singapore the intellectual class runs the government.
You can take a 1-hour UBER ride for a $5, A taxi is even cheaper. A 10-minute auto-rickshaw drive is 50 cents.
Google FI worked right off the airplane. If you are coming to India for a week or two it’s great. Oddly, however, all of the Indian apps for food delivery, calling the Indian equivalent of UBER or paying with digital cash only accept an Indian telephone number so I am going to have to get a SIM card. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown, getting a Sim card is a bureaucratic hassle although apparently it’s scheduled to get better.
English is fine for getting around. The surprise is the number of Indians who don’t speak English and yet have to operate in a world in which advertising, signage, operating instructions, and so forth are in English.
Netflix works!
Inequality as measured by a standard Gini index is actually lower in India than in the United States. As measured by what you can see, however, inequality is very high. It’s easy to step out of a Louis-Vuitton boutique and over a child sleeping in the street. Doesn’t appear to be causing a revolution, however.
Crime is low. Much lower than in the United States.
Pollution is high, much higher than in the United States, and at levels that do not seem optimal even give low GDP per capita.
In the developed world you go outside for fresh air. In India you go inside for fresh air. (Many homes and businesses have air purifiers with hepa air filters. I bought two.)
PM Modi wants to bring Elon Musk’s hyperloop technology to India. Delhi to Mumbai in an hour. Mumbai to downtown Mumbai in an hour and a half…on a good day. Start simple!
Retail, one of the largest sectors in many economies including India, is very inefficient. You have to go to a dozen small stores in different parts of town to get half of what you need. I was surprised to see a Walmart in Mumbai on Google maps. Great! I took an Uber. It was fake.
Parts of Mumbai are reminiscent of Havana–elegant buildings put up in earlier times including some art-deco buildings, that are now falling apart and even abandoned due to rent control and poor land use policy. At the same time, Mumbai looks like Miami with much new construction interwoven with the older decay. Capitalist shoots pushing out of socialist pavement.
How to prepare for CRISPR
That is an MR reader request, namely:
One issue that it appears we’ll discuss more in the future is genetic experimentation – the sort heralded by CRISPR. How do you suggest we prepare for this technology? What should be reading? Discussing?
Read my book The Age of the Infovore, to better understand the importance of human diversity, and also ponder my earlier post on whether genetic engineering will lead to excess human conformity. Then investigate what kinds of sperm and eggs are most popular and thus most expensive on the current market; that’s tall, smart people who look a bit like the parents. That might give us an idea of what kind of genetic engineering people are trying to accomplish. Then watch or rewatch Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. If you still have spare time, dip into the New Testament again.
Then read about extensive Chinese efforts in this area. Consider also how slow advances have been in genomics, and how difficult manipulability will be for most issues. Then study Moore’s Law and Big Data. Then read about how unlikely regulation will be able to stop advances in this area (the biggest intellectual gap in this set of instructions). Then read or reread Aldous Huxley and any Greek tragedy centering around the idea of hubris.
Mix together, stir, shake, and sit down and cry.
The ambiguities of dual citizenship
You may have read that the recent Executive Order also applied to those who hold dual citizenship in any of the specified nations. I haven’t yet seen it fully explained how pernicious this is. A lot of countries don’t easily let you renounce their citizenship, they may still claim you, or at the very least they will not issue documentation confirming you are not a dual citizen, no matter what the fact of the matter may be. Very often there is no “fact of the matter” as to who is a dual citizen. Say you were born in Iran, and your parents brought you to the United States or Canada at age two. Let’s say the Trump administration then asks you to prove you are not a dual citizen of Iran. How are you supposed to do this? Leave the country and try to get confirmation in Iran itself, noting you might have to prove you have not broken any laws and have paid all back taxes and fees? Who knows?
How do you like these apples?:
Based on Article 41 of the constitution, Iran does not recognize dual citizenship, and if an individual acquires the citizenship of another country, his or her Iranian nationality will be revoked. This, however, requires certain legal procedures that if not pursued will result in the individual’s foreign citizenship not being officially recognized.
Sunday assorted links
1. Um…what if your name is Alexa?
2. Regression models for college earnings.
3. Peter Lawler on me and Charles Murray and other stuff (pdf): “Now, what perplexes Cowen most is that anyone would choose to be brutish rather than be nice.” I still say the modal scenario is that the deplorables end up disengaged. Here is another good passage from Lawler:
The key objection to niceness amounts to the fact that it’s not really a virtue. You can’t rely upon it as the foundation for the duties required of friends, family members, or fellow citizens. A nice person won’t fight for you; a nice person wouldn’t even lie for you, unless there’s something in it for him. A nice person wouldn’t be a Good Samaritan, if it required genuine risk or an undue deployment of time and treasure. A nice person isn’t animated by love or honor or God. Niceness, if you think about it, is the most selfish of virtues, one, as Tocqueville noticed, rooted in a deep indifference to the well-being of others. It’s more selfish than open selfishness, because the latter accords people the respect of letting them know where you stand. I let you do—and even affirm—whatever you do, because I don’t care what you do as long as it doesn’t bother me. Niceness, as Allan Bloom noticed, is the quality connected with flatness of soul, with being unmoved by the relational imperatives grounded in love and death.
I enjoyed this too:
The point of Clint Eastwood’s instant classic American Sniper is our failure to properly respect our guardians, who put their lives on the line for their own. It’s also about the increasing distance between the relatively honorable, violent, and God-fearing South and the rest of the country.
I praise Lawler’s work on Tocqueville in my The Complacent Class.
5. Why hasn’t the dollar appreciated more? And the new Executive Order also calls for exit controls.
Does government need to be based on geographic contiguity?
That is my rewording of this request from Thijs:
At which point does technology allow another model of social organization than that based on shared territory?
I am reminded of Estonia’s e-citizenship model, but taken much further. To flesh this out, imagine EU citizens could choose to which government they would pay their taxes. So you could live in Lyon, but pay taxes to Germany and have your pension set by German policy and your legal disputes settled by German courts and so on.
What can’t be done this way, even say twenty years from now? Well, your water supply, your primary education system, your electricity, your local police, and your roads, to name a few government services. For those you have to deal with Lyon or some other local provider. Germany can’t step in, except perhaps for some on-line parts of education but even then it wouldn’t mesh well with your local face-to-face provider, even putting aside differences of language.
Given all that, should Lyon and Germany let you peel off your potentially portable pension choice to the government provider of your choice? It seems the wealthy people would cluster their fiscal and pension obligations with governments that were not so progressive in their fiscal policies. In this regard it would be like a partial privatization of pension schemes. But it would be a funny privatization rule: “allow pension choice, but only from local infrastructure-producing entities.” You still would have the usual problems of selection, namely that the wealthy would opt for the pension and tax schemes of Luxembourg and Monaco — hey, wait, isn’t that the status quo?
Well, not quite. In essence this plan would be further reducing the residency requirements for locales and tax havens such as Luxembourg, Monaco, the Cayman Islands, and so on. You wouldn’t have to live there at all. I suppose this is a way of privatizing the redistributive services of the state, without having to say you are doing so. Does that make it more politically stable or less?
I suspect a lot of “local” pension schemes would stay in place for reasons of familiarity, nationalism, and the gravity equation. (Just think how long it took many Greeks and Cypriots to withdraw their euros from their domestic banking systems.) So many middle class Danes will stick with the Danish system, which they know and the like, though many of the Danish wealthy would secede from it and opt for Monaco.
Overall I think of this policy as one way to improve the lot of the wealthy. Is it the way and the framing that will most induce additional effort and creativity from them? I don’t see that case has been made.
What accounts for misery?
Sarah Flèche and Richard Layard have a new paper on this topic, and they suggest a focus on mental illness:
Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and mental illness. The largest proportion suffers from mental illness. Multiple regression shows that mental illness is not highly correlated with poverty or unemployment, and that it contributes more to explaining the presence of misery than is explained by either poverty or unemployment. This holds both with and without fixed effects.
I don’t like the term “mental illness,” yet at the same time I reject the Szaszian rejection of the concept. I would say that mental processes can deviate from procedural rationality in especially disadvantageous (and sometimes systematic) ways, and that this is something above and beyond merely having “different preferences.”
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The top bestsellers of 1916
- Seventeen by Booth Tarkington
- When a Man’s a Man by Harold Bell Wright
- Just David by Eleanor H. Porter
- Mr. Britling Sees It Through by H. G. Wells
- Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow
- The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster
- Bars of Iron by Ethel M. Dell
- Nan of Music Mountain by Frank H. Spearman
- Dear Enemy by Jean Webster
- The Heart of Rachael by Kathleen Norris
Here is further information, a very interesting discussion of the works, hat tip goes to Ted Gioia.
Criminal Politicians
In India, a whopping 21% of the Members of Parliament have serious criminal cases against them. Why are criminals successful in politics? Writing in the FT, David Keohane reviews Milan Vaishnava’s excellent new book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.
Vaishnav’s main explanation for the continued electoral success of criminally tainted politicians is quite simple: They provide services the state does not.
In short, the state has failed to keep up with its voters’ expectations and that failure — of the rule of law along with many basic services — has allowed criminal politicians to serve in lieu of the state: providing protection, social welfare of a sort since the state makes it hard to get even a drivers license without paying a bribe, dispute resolution in the absence of a functioning court system etc. As Vaishnav says, the corrupt politician becomes “the crutch that helps the poor navigate a system that gives them so little access” in the first place….
In no time, Dagdi Chawl became ground zero for Mumbai’s notorious underworld. From his fortress-like compound, Daddy dispensed patronage, protection, and even justice to local residents. Journalists who came to interview Gawli wrote of the hundreds of men and women — unemployed youth, ageing widows, aspiring gangsters, and established politicians — who queued up on a daily basis in front of the iron gates of Gawli’s compound just for a few minutes of face time in the hopes of being showered with Daddy’s munificence. They came seeking building permits, ration cards, welfare payments, employment — a things the state was meant to provide but was either unable or unwilling to.
So, “a reputation as a matabhare (literally, ‘heavy handed’) person is considered to be an asset” in India because the state is so absent in so many ways.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Might facial recognition systems replace passports in Australian airports by 2020?
2. John Arnold’s war on bad science.
3. Peter Thiel now a New Zealand citizen (NYT).
4. Arbitrage?: “B.C. stamp collectors reap benefits of unique Canada Post stamp machine”
5. Has DC already reached “peak restaurant”?
Frances Kelsey Syndrome
Occasionally I have been told that FDA reform is something that only a few libertarian economists support. But in fact, there is strong support for reform in much of the medical community. See, for example, the survey that Dan Klein and I did on off-label prescribing and FDA reform or the many surveys of physicians done by CEI.
I mentioned Dr. Vincent DeVita in my post, Will Trump Appoint a Great FDA Commissioner? It’s worthwhile exploring DeVita’s views at greater length because he is a prominent figure in the field of oncology. Here, from Wikipedia, is some background on DeVita:
Vincent Theodore DeVita, Jr., MD is an internationally recognized pioneer physician in the field of oncology. DeVita spent the early part of his career at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). In 1980, the president of the United States appointed him as director of the NCI and the National Cancer Program, a position he held until 1988. While at the NCI, he was instrumental in developing combination chemotherapy programs that ultimately led to an effective regimen of curative chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease and diffuse large cell lymphomas. Along with colleagues at the NCI, he developed the four-drug combination, known by the acronym MOPP, which increased the cure rate for patients with advanced Hodgkin’s disease from nearly zero to over 70%.
DeVita was the Director of Yale Cancer Center from 1993 to 2003. He is currently the chair of the Yale Cancer Center advisory board and is professor of internal medicine and of epidemiology and public health at Yale’s medical school.
DeVita currently serves on the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals and is the author or co-author of more than 450 scientific articles. He is one of the three editors of the popular textbook (also available online) Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology and serves as the editor-in-chief of The Cancer Journal.
In his book, The Death of Cancer, DeVita has a chapter on the FDA. The title of that chapter? Frances Kelsey Syndrome. He writes:
The thalidomide episode sent the message to those who worked at the FDA that the way to do right by people was to say no. Saying yes would prove perilous–not only to patients, but to the careers of a reviewer. As a result, the agency tends to reward those who say no, not yes. (In fact, there’s an annual Frances Kelsey award. But there are no awards for getting a good drug quickly into the public domain.)
Exactly right. Later he discusses another problem that he sees with FDA evaluation procedures:
We are approaching what we might have considered nirvana years ago. We can design drugs that will hit a specific target, and by being so specific, they have fewer side effects. But because effective treatments almost always require hitting more than one target at the same time, some very good and relatively safe cancer drugs show no evidence of effectiveness when used alone.
What a dilemma. After spending millions of dollars developing a drug, a company may be forced to abandon it for lack of efficacy, when, if approved, it would be another exciting tool for clinical investigators who want to explore combinations of targeted therapies in post-market research trials. Compound that with the FDA’s insistence on testing them first on patients with very advanced, resistant disease, and many potentially useful drugs don’t look so good. As a result, drug companies are reluctant to invest money in new cancer drugs, because they might never make it past the FDA’s hurdles.
DeVita may be wrong but he’s certainly not uninformed.
“I Didn’t Read Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class Because Things Are Going Pretty OK for Me”
Got an advance copy. Between my non-manual-labor job, Netflix’s excellent recommendations (The OA is so good), and virtue-signaling to my in-group on Twitter, I guess I just wasn’t feeling it.
Besides, if I did read The Complacent Class, I’d have to write a review. The review would introduce readers to a bunch of new and challenging ideas about how Americans are losing the desire to embrace rapid change, and then I would explore some of the unexpected ways our complacency hurts us as a country, possibly challenging the author, or adding to his thesis with my own insights. Oh, people say they want new and challenging ideas, but they don’t. They’re happy with their current ideas, and why should I make anyone unhappy? No one ever considers whether the boat wants to be rocked.
Or is that Cowen’s game? To point out that our lack of urgency and general NIMBY-ism have led to less migration, more segregation, more inequality, dulled creativity, increased conformity, and faded activism, all of which portends a coming unavoidable chaos? What’s he after? Is Cowen trying to jolt us out of our zombie states so we can live in the sci-fi future of no diseases and flying cars and robot monkey butlers we all dreamed about when we were kids? I don’t know, man. Maybe. Anything’s possible, right? I literally didn’t read the book.
Here is the link. The terms from the previous promotion still hold, you don’t even have to read it.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Jacob Levy on the importance of the party system.
2. Poll of economists on Trump and share prices.
3. Is the passion of sports fading, and ESPN along with it?
4. Firms with higher leverage have more flexible prices.
5. Libertarian Bob Luddy builds low-cost private schools for the masses (video). I visited not long ago and was very impressed, I hope this can work out.
6. There is now a Marginal Revolution community on CommonLounge, I hope this can work out.
DIY Gene Therapy
As I noted in yesterday’s post, Will Trump Appoint a Great FDA Commissioner?, personalized medicine is a challenge to the FDA. Technology Review has an excellent piece on an extreme version of personalized medicine, DIY gene therapy:
Hanley, 60, is the founder of a one-man company called Butterfly Sciences, also in Davis. After encountering little interest from investors for his ideas about using DNA injections to help strengthen AIDS patients, he determined that he should be the first to try it. “I wanted to prove it, I wanted to do it for myself, and I wanted to make progress,” says Hanley.
Most gene therapy involves high-tech, multimillion-dollar experiments carried out by large teams at top medical centers, with an eye to correcting rare illnesses like hemophilia. But Hanley showed that gene therapy can be also carried out on the cheap in the same setting as liposuction or a nose job, and might one day be easily accessed by anyone.
…Hanley opted instead for a simpler method called electroporation. In this procedure, circular rings of DNA, called plasmids, are passed into cells using an electrical current. Once inside, they don’t become a permanent part of person’s chromosomes. Instead, they float inside the nucleus. And if a gene is coded into the plasmid, it will start to manufacture proteins. The effect of plasmids is temporary, lasting weeks to a few months.
Hanley’s method is painful and doesn’t last long but it’s remarkable that it can be done at all.
At least one additional person who underwent self-administered gene therapy is a U.S. biotech executive who did not want his experience publicly known because he is dealing with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on other matters.
Hanley says he did not secure the approval of the FDA before carrying out his experiment either. The agency requires companies to seek an authorization called an investigational new drug application, or IND, before administering any novel drug or gene therapy to people. “They said ‘You need an IND’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t,’” recalls Hanley, who traded e-mails with officials at the federal agency. He argued that self-experiments should be exempt, in part because they don’t pose any risk to the public.
Hat tip: Samir Varma.
“Why isn’t your way of eating and dining more popular?”
That is a request from an MR reader. Getting past the “because I am weird” answer, I will offer a few observations:
1. I think my view, or broadly speaking some version of it, is in fact pretty popular,though far from dominant.
2. The eating and dining of many people is geared toward socializing and also drinking. So when I write “go where the diners look grim, not smiling and happy,” or “avoid the beautiful women and the riverfront views,” many people don’t listen. They like beautiful women, too much perhaps, and they like being surrounded by smiling others. I have more of a single-minded obsession on the food, at least when I am seeking food. So you can think of my methods as a form of extreme compartmentalization and unbundling of quests.
Of course there may be other methods related to beautiful women, and yes you should hold a diverse portfolio of methods, so think of me as someone who is suspicious of “method-blending,” as instead I prefer an intertemporal substitution of methods for different goals. The time for food is a time for food, not for pursuing some weighted average of goals summed into a mediocre total, “…and a time to every purpose under heaven.” Call it the Ecclesiastes approach. Ultimately this may involve preferring a certain kind of focus over indiscriminate attention-switching.
NB: This hypothesis also may imply that those who are good at intertemporal substitution may miss out on some of life’s integrative experiences, such as riding a bicycle along a bridge with the wind blowing in your hair; “intertemporal substitution” and “integration” may in some ways stand in tension, and perhaps developing a propensity for one limits our ability to engage in the other.
3. My dining methods are in fact wonderful for socializing, but only if you are with either a) the oblivious, b) those who lexically prefer food quality, or c) those who enjoy talking analytically about food. Most of my friends fall into one of these categories, but that is not the case for most people.
The culture that is San Francisco
San Francisco, population 865,000, has roughly the same number of dogs as children: 120,000. In many areas of the city, pet grooming shops seem more common than schools.
There is also this:
San Francisco’s public school system has around 53,000 students, a sharp drop from 90,000 in 1970.
The decline is a reflection both of families leaving the city and wealthier parents sending their children to private schools. Around 30 percent of San Francisco children attend private school, the highest rate among large American cities.
More than 10 private schools have opened in San Francisco since 2009, according to a tally by Elizabeth Weise, a journalist who writes a blog on the subject.
What percentage of those people also support the idea of further experimentation with school vouchers? And do they require proof that private schools will raise their children’s test scores, before becoming emotionally committed to sending them there?
That is from Thomas Fuller at the NYT. You will note that some angles in that article may require revision, here is a good comment from Medium.