Results for “age of em” 17229 found
Friday assorted links
1. Claims about pho.
3. How CRISPR actually will prove useful. And “We’re going to see a stream of edited animals coming through because it’s so easy…”
4. A list tracking student demands from around the country.
5. “The study was conducted in the RAND StoreLab (RSL), a life sized replica of a convenience store…”
6. John Wallis on Doug North. And Kevin Bryan. And Martin Sandbu on North.
Do we need a better educated army?
Is it clever or stupid of us to be avoiding the problem of “overeducation” in our Army officer corps?
As shown previously, the higher an officer’s cognitive ability, the lower that officer’s chance at early promotion and battalion command selection. As a curious anecdote, the promotion rate to colonel for officers with PhDs was lower than the Army average from 2011 to 2013. Surprisingly, the Army does not actively invest in advanced civilian education for its personnel managers or OES instructors. In the 1980’s, the Army sent as many of 7,000 officers per year to graduate school. The Army reduced that to 415 in the 1990s. Currently, the Army sends 600- 700. A not-so-long ago discussion at the joint flag officer orientation course, typically referred to as “Capstone,” revolved around how much education “was too much” for senior officers. The quorum of newly selected flag officers from all services concluded that a public school or distance learning masters was fine, but certainly not a PhD or Ivy League masters.
That is from Spain, Mohundro, and Banks (pdf), via Paul Musgrave.
Islamic State as hypermodern, momentum traders
Following up on my earlier post on Syria, Alexander Burns sends me this very interesting email:
Dear Professor Cowen,
Thanks for your reply tweet regarding your Marginal Revolution post on modelling Syria / Islamic State. I enjoy your books and blog.
I’m writing a thesis at Australia’s Monash University that synthesises Jack Snyder’s work on strategic culture / strategic subcultures with Martha Crenshaw and Jacob Shapiro’s work on terrorist organisations. Two recent presentations:
1. Mid-Candidature Review Panel slides: http://www.alexburns.net/Files/MCR.pptx
2. Monash SPS Symposium Presentation on Islamic State: https://t.co/Ju11zvFBSP
Several weeks ago I discussed Islamic State with my Mid-Candidature Review panel whilst also reading Gary Antonacci’s Dual Momentum Investing and the Dan Zanger interview in Mark Minervini’s Momentum Masters interviews book. It struck me that Islamic State were like momentum traders for several reasons:
(1) Islamic State have grown rapidly in foreign mujahideen; control of parts of northern Iraq and Syria; and have grown in power projection capabilities. This dynamic is very much like successful momentum traders have worked in a financial markets context using Jesse Livermore’s trend-following approach, William O’Neil’s CANSLIM system, or Paul Tudor Jones II’s speculative activity in Eurodollar and foreign exchange markets.
(2) Islamic State have to-date survived aerial bombardments and have exploited a range of weaknesses in their enemies (e.g. jihadist beheading videos as psychological warfare against the Iraqi Army; Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Syria; and alliance manoeuvers around the Assad regime and the Syrian civil war).
(3) Events like the capture of Mosul, Iraq; combat experience in the Syrian civil war; involvement in oil black markets; and the proclamation on 29th June 2014 of a worldwide caliphate have momentum-like qualities, particularly in terms of creating the psychological climate for nation-building.
(4) Islamic State has outperformed their peer jihadist groups in their growth and ideological impact.
(5) Islamic State’s use of social media to amplify ideological propaganda is more hypermodern and sophisticated than other terrorist groups.
(6) Their rapid growth has led to spillover effects such as the refugee crisis in Europe.
(7) The Western media’s concerns about Islamic State — and their cultural impact — feel like the 1998-2000 part of the 1995-2000 dotcom speculative bubble, albeit in a counterterrorism context.
(8) Your perspective on Islamic State as hypermodern may also be relevant to the proto-Marxist work on accelerationism and postcapitalism (Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future; Steven Shaviro’s No Speed Limit; and Benjamin Noys’ Malign Velocities): contemporary terrorist groups operate in a different political / technological / ‘average is over’ context.
With his permission I reproduced the email as is, though added in a few extra paragraph breaks for ease of reading.
Thanksgiving assorted links
1. Robust monetary rules. And American Airlines stops accepting Argentine pesos.
2. Can France integrate its Muslims?
3. Dr. Seuss and comparative advantage.
5. John Cochrane on health insurance churn.
6. Why Turkey shot down the plane and who will be the biggest losers (good, analytical piece, NYT).
We truly live in an insane world
I can’t say I understand this FT article so well, but I suppose that is the point. Which are two groups/persons implicated in buying oil from ISIS, or otherwise enabling such trades to take place?
First, Syria. Or is that “Syria.”
Second, the head of the world chess federation, namely Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: “he is best known for his belief in aliens — he has repeatedly recounted an instance when he was abducted in 1997 by “people in yellow spacesuits”.” And this:
Mr Ilyumzhinov has a diverse business empire, stretching from sugar to banking, and a network of contacts to match. He regularly meets the Dalai Lama, and he played chess with Libyan president Muammer Gaddafi shortly before his overthrow.
He also has been working with the Syrian central bank. Here is NYT coverage, here are other sources. As the old Haitian proverb states, if you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on…
Wednesday assorted links
1. Book hotel in Japan. That is book used as a noun, not a verb. And good photos of Porto, Portugal. Zach Lowe: how small can the NBA go?
2. The world’s largest cloning factory, guess where? Yesterday my paper copy of the FT printed on its front page the pun “Factory to turn out 1m cows a year as China raises steaks in cloning research,” though I cannot find it on-line. And “Biologists induce flatworms to grow heads and brains of other species.”
3. “Why, then, is 29-year-old Laurence the only full-time forensic pollen analyst in the United States?”
4. Schmalensee and Stavins survey the history of cap and trade programs (NBER).
5. What do we know about ultra high net worth individuals? And Republicans prefer politicians with deep voices.
A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Government Compensation of Kidney Donors
The latest issue of the American Journal of Transplantation has an excellent and comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of paying kidney donors by Held, McCormick, Ojo, and Roberts. Earlier, Becker and Elias estimated that a payment of $15,000 per living donor would be sufficient to eliminate the US waiting list. The authors adopt a larger figure of $45,000 for living donors and $10,000 for deceased donors and find that even at these rates paying donors generates benefits far in excess of costs.
In particular, a program of government compensation of kidney donors would provide the following benefits (quoting from the article):
- Transplant kidneys would be readily available to all patients who had a medical need for them, which would prevent 5000 to 10 000 premature deaths each year and significantly reduce the suffering of 100 000 more receiving dialysis.
- This would be particularly beneficial to patients who are poor and African American because they are considerably overrepresented on the transplant waiting list. Indeed, it would be a boon to poor kidney recipients because it would enable them to reap the great benefits of transplantation at very little expense to themselves.
- Because transplant candidates would no longer have to spend almost 5 years receiving dialysis while waiting for a transplant kidney, they would be younger and healthier when they receive their transplant, increasing the chances of a successful transplantation.
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With a large number of transplant kidneys available, it would be much easier to ensure the medical compatibility of donors and recipients, which would increase the success rate of transplantation.
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Taxpayers would save about $12 billion each year. Dialysis is not only an inferior therapy for end-stage renal disease (ESRD), it is also almost 4 times as expensive per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) gained as a transplant.
Douglass North links
10. Check Barry Weingast’s Facebook page, I believe the post on Doug is open.
11. John Nye on Doug North. And yet another take from Nye.
If there are new good links on North, I’ll addend them tomorrow morning, so check back if you are interested. He was a frequent visitor at George Mason and also at Mercatus, so many of us will miss him very much.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Interview with James Poterba.
2. South Korean zombie companies? And good WSJ survey piece on premature deindustrialization., and the Dani Rodrik paper again, revised (pdf).
3. How agriculture shaped human DNA (NYT)
4. The market-oriented reformist wins in Argentina.
5. Anne-Marie Slaughter on the Wilson School renaming controversy (not my views, by the way, but she has run the Wilson School and worth reading how she sees the world).
Opioids for the masses?
This has long seemed to me an understudied topic, so I was interested to read the job market paper of Angela E. Kilby, who is on the market this year from MIT. And she does what I like to see in a paper, namely try to figure out whether some practice or institution is actually worth it.
The background is this: “…In the face of concerns that undertreatment of pain was a “serious public health issue,” medically indicated use of these drugs over the past 15 years has increased dramatically, and attitudes have liberalized towards the use of opioids for chronic non-cancer pain.”
When it comes to the increased use of opioids, she finds the following trade-offs:
1. Since 1999, there has been a fourfold increase in drug overdose deaths linked to opiod pain relievers. In 2013, the number of opiate-linked overdose deaths was 25,117, a higher number than I was expecting. (But note that most of these can no longer be reduced by the feasible interventions under consideration.)
2. The increased use of opioids seems to pass a cost-benefit test, compared to the passage of a tougher Prescription Monitoring Plan. With a host of caveats and qualifiers, she measures the pain reduction and other benefits from looser regulation at $12.1 billion a year and the costs of higher addiction rates, again from looser regulation, at $7.3 billion per year.
There is much more to it than what I am reporting, and in general I believe economists do not devote enough attention to studying the topic of pain.
*The Midas Paradox*
That is the forthcoming book by Scott Sumner, and the subtitle is Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression. Here is one of Scott’s brief capsule descriptions of the book:
I will show that if we take the gold market seriously we can explain much more about the Great Depression than anyone had thought possible. Three types of gold market shocks generated much of the variation shown in Table 1.1: changes in central bank demand for gold, private sector gold hoarding, and changes in the price of gold. The remaining output shocks are linked to five wage shocks that resulted from the New Deal. This is the first study to provide a comprehensive and detailed look at all high frequency macro shocks during the Great Depression.
I would stress that Scott devotes far more attention to asset price reactions than do many other studies of economic history; that is perhaps his main methodological innovation, in addition to the economics.
Scott also insists — correctly in my view — that the artificially engineered real wage increases of the New Deal were a true disaster. This point is underemphasized in most competing accounts, or perhaps even actively denied by many Keynesians. Yet the evidence here is overwhelming.
This is a very good book, one of the best on the economics of the Great Depression ever written.
Monday assorted links
1. Liquidity premium > carrying costs, all of a sudden.
2. Debt to gdg ratios, and the distribution of how they change (China fact of the day).
3. The aging of the NPR audience.
4. Why doesn’t NYC know where its subway trains are?
5. “Lord’s Prayer advert banned before ‘Star Wars’…In a snub to the Church of England, an advert that was planned to coincide with the new film “The Force Awakens,” has been rejected by most UK cinemas due to fears it could be offensive.” I call that one Ross Douthat bait…
Best non-fiction books of 2015
These are in the order I read them, more or less, not in terms of preference. And I would say this year had more good entries than ever before. Here goes, noting that most of the links go to my earlier reviews of them:
First, here are the economics books:
Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect, by Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn Steffen-Pischke, technically late 2014 but it was too late to make that list.
Dani Rodrik, Economics Rules.
Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. Self-recommending.
Garett Jones, The Hive Mind. Why national IQ matters.
Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox. Boo to the gold standard during the Great Depression.
Greg Ip, Foolproof: Why Safety Can be Dangerous, and How Danger Makes Us Safe.
And the rest, more or less the non-economics books:
Robert Tombs, The English and Their History.
R. Taggart Murphy, Japan and the Shackles of the Past. The last section is brilliant on current Japanese politics.
Michael Meyer, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China. Adam Minter has a very good and useful review of a good book.
Ian Bostridge, Schubert’s Winter Journey. Will improve your listening.
The Mahabarata, by Carole Satyamurti. Rewritten and edited to be easier to digest, intelligible and rewarding. As “an achievement,” this book does have some claim to be number one.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers. You can never read enough commentary on the Torah.
Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, North Korea Confidential, how things really work there (speculative), rain boots for instance are a fashion item and black markets are rife.
Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, a good general history of the country.
Guantánamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi. He’s a very smart guy.
Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.
Sebastian Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia. Goes deep into a place most people are ignoring.
Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People. The Nordics, that is.
Timothy Snyder, Black Earth. He succeeded in writing an original book about the Holocaust, which is hard to do.
Emmanuel Todd, Who is Charlie? Background on France being screwed up.
Niall Ferguson, Henry Kissinger, vol. I. Background on America being screwed up.
Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane. How to talk, think, and write about the British countryside.
Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. The best of the various recent books on Humboldt.
Frank McLynn, Genghis Khan. Background on a whole bunch of other places being screwed up.
Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science. I didn’t have time to read all of this book, but it seemed very good in the fifth or so I was able to read. By the way, the whole salivating dog at the bell story is a fiction.
Pierre Razoux, The Iran-Iraq War, readable and useful.
Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: At her Zenith: In London, Washington, and Moscow, vol.2 of the biography, 1984-1987. This one I haven’t finished yet. I ordered my copy advance from UK Amazon, it doesn’t come out in the U.S. until early January. There is some chance this is the very best book of the year.
I don’t quite see a clear first prize. If I had to pick, I would opt for a joint prize to the biographies of Musk, Kissinger, Thatcher, and Genghis Khan. This was the year of the biography.
Sorry if I forgot yours, this list is imperfect in various ways! And the year isn’t over yet, so I’ll post an update on the very good books I read between now and the end of the year, probably on December 31.
What can be named after whom?
There is an ongoing controversy at Princeton over whether it should still be called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. Wilson was a notorious racist and segregationist, bad even by the standards of his time, plus he was a terrible President to boot. At Yale there are murmurings about a house named after John Calhoun.
Of course there is a slippery slope. There are plenty of American institutions named after slaveholders, and for that matter was Amerigo Vespucci such a great guy? For one thing, he helped Columbus commit genocide by provisioning one of his voyages.
Should George Washington stay on the dollar bill? If you’ve decided that no university or other positive-sum institution should be named “School of Simon LeGree Satan,” it seems hard to draw a line in a meaningful, non-arbitrary manner. Most famous people, especially in politics, have some pretty significant blemishes. Yet we cannot open every can of worms in this regard, or so it seems.
No one seems to mind that the Nazi Party is called…the Nazi Party. No one says “we can’t call the party that, those Nazis were the people who killed the Jews. Can’t name anything after them. Not even their own party.” In fact calling them Nazis is designed to remind people of what they did, appropriately I would add.
I don’t mind if an institution names itself after a person of mixed moral quality, or allows such a name to persist, provided the institution, in both its framing of the name and its pursuit of its broader mission, is self-conscious about that person’s drawbacks and invests resources toward that self-consciousness beyond the usual rhetorical statements. That said, others may mind more than I do, so it would be nice if we had a graceful way out of a slightly complicated situation.
I also would not be disturbed if they had kept the city names at Leningrad and Stalingrad. Lenin and Stalin were evil guys, but it seems appropriate to remind people what a big role they played in the histories of those cities. (At least for another hundred years, probably not forever.) Of course if the citizens of the cities don’t want those names, I would not force the matter.
Perhaps in the longer run everything, including the Woodrow Wilson School, will be named after donors.
Why do we name things after people at all?
When I look at countries which are periodically renaming buildings, cities, and institutions, I get a little uncomfortable. The renaming probably isn’t causing their bad or unstable qualities, but pushing for a world of constant renaming does not strike me as a useful goal. It is not governed by a desirable feedback process, too much voice and not enough exit and competitive constraints.
There should be some kind of intermediate process where institutions can indicate that they take very seriously the moral failings of their namesakes, and publicize that message. And then over time they can try to raise enough money so as to have a convenient excuse to rename the Wilson School after a wealthy donor, taking constructive action but not ending up in an endless game of renaming.
A simple concrete step would be to cut the price of the naming rights on the Wilson School by fifty percent.
That also could prove an efficient form of price discrimination, by selling the naming rights to one school for less, yet with a special circumstance so donors do not feel that every naming right now should sell for less.
Saturday assorted links
1. Is there hope for America in men’s tennis?
2. Mary Gaitskill by the book. I am enjoying her new novel The Mare.
3. Hardball questions for the next debate. And Corey Robin on Woodrow Wilson.
4. American landlords seem to prefer refugee tenants.
5. 13 women who transformed the world of economics.
6. How breweries survived the age of Prohibition (pdf, job market paper from UCLA).
7. Why recent productivity growth is taking a scary form, shedding inputs rather than increasing outputs.