Results for “age of em” 16699 found
The new Obama plan to combat antibiotic overuse
The Obama administration on Thursday announced measures to tackle the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, outlining a national strategy that includes incentives to spur the development of new drugs, tighter stewardship of existing ones and a national tracking system for antibiotic-resistant illness. The actions are part of the first major federal effort to confront a public health crisis that takes at least 23,000 lives a year.
The full story is here.
The Hill has more detail. It is an executive order:
The president’s directive creates the Task Force for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, co-chaired by the secretaries of Defense, Agriculture and Health and Human Services.
The group is charged with implementing a plan to track and prevent the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, promote better practices for the use of current drugs and push for a new generation of antibiotic medications.
To that end, the White House on Thursday announced a $20 million prize “to facilitate the development of rapid, point-of-care diagnostic tests for healthcare providers to identify highly resistant bacterial infections.”
The added incentive and the timeframe given to the task force indicate the urgency with which the administration is acting, said Dr. Eric Lander, who co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
“This is a pretty tight timeline to now come up with a national game plan,” Lander said.
There is also this:
In December, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled a plan to phase out the use of antimicrobials for the purpose of fattening chickens, pigs or other animals destined for human consumption. But the plan relies in part on voluntary industry cooperation, and advocates argue the government’s efforts are lagging behind even some industry players.
Here is the new full 78 pp. report to the President on antibiotic resistance (pdf).
This initiative — or its failure — is potentially a more important health issue than Obamacare, yet it will not receive 1/1000th of the attention. Without reliable antibiotics, a lot of now-routine operations would become a kind of lottery.
Here are previous MR posts on antibiotic resistance. I would note it is difficult to judge such a plan at the current level of detail. It is better than nothing, but any initial plan is going to be not nearly enough, relative to an ideal. By the way, Alex tells me there is also a British prize, discussed here.
Assorted links
1. Very unlikely markets in everything (not even sure I should believe it, though perhaps some of you have extreme faith in signaling and adverse selection models).
2. Clive Crook makes the best case for Scottish independence I have seen.
3. Attach your iPad directly to your face (department of why not?).
The agricultural productivity gap
That is the recently published (QJE) paper by Douglas Gollin, David Lagakos, and Michael E. Waugh, the abstract is here:
According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the nonagricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, particularly in developing countries. Taken at face value, this “agricultural productivity gap” suggests that labor is greatly misallocated across sectors. In this article, we draw on new micro evidence to ask to what extent the gap is still present when better measures of sector labor inputs and value added are taken into consideration. We find that even after considering sector differences in hours worked and human capital per worker, as well as alternative measures of sector output constructed from household survey data, a puzzlingly large gap remains.
There are ungated copies here.
I believe there is something “funny” about agriculture. Productivity convergence is also slowest in that sector, especially compared to manufactures. I see a few possible factors at work:
1. Status quo bias keeps a lot of workers living in rural areas and employed in agriculture, lowering productivity in that sector and also hindering the transfer of new ideas and technologies. Wages stay low and approaches remain hidebound and old-fashioned.
2. The influence of “non-rational” culture — in the Weberian sense — is usually stronger in rural and agricultural areas.
4. Liquidity constraints limit movement into urban areas.
5. Fear of loss of status and local friendships also limit the movement into urban areas and prevent an equalization of returns as defined in terms of pecuniary variables only.
Or put agriculture aside, and let’s pose the same question about wage equalization in Puerto Rico and the mainland United States, given that free migration is allowed and wages in the U.S. are considerably higher. In a lot of different settings, factor price equalization isn’t as strong as you might think. Maybe this is just showing that agriculture is in fact a remarkably human activity.
Why don’t we have more free trade?
I remain amazed that we have as much free trade as we do. Here is from a recent Pew poll:
President Barack Obama and other world leaders are having a tough time selling the benefits of the trade agreements they’re negotiating, in part because much of the public thinks all the talk about trade’s benefits is a bunch of baloney.
Out of 44 nationalities surveyed this year, only one — Israelis — tends to believe the basic tenet of economists that increased trade will foster competition and deliver lower prices for consumers.
On a broader question of whether increasing trade and business ties with other countries is a good thing, only 68% of Americans agree, compared with 76% worldwide, according to the study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.
The Pew study itself is here and it is interesting throughout. It is in Bangladesh, Uganda, and Lebanon that people are most likely to believe trade raises real wages, and Bangladeshis are most sympathetic to foreign direct investment. Only 28% of Americans believe it is good when foreigners buy up U.S. companies. 58% of Chinese think trade leads to price increases, perhaps a sign of the prevalence of foreign luxury goods in that country.
For the pointer I thank Ray Lopez, who himself benefits from free trade, factor mobility, and foreign direct investment.
Creative ambiguity, Scottish independence, and sudden death
Many political unions subsist on creative ambiguity. That is, if the right question were posed, and the citizenry forced to answer it definitely, political order might spin out of control.
Canada, Belgium, and indeed the entire European Union seem to be organized on this basis. It’s not quite that everyone thinks they are getting their way, but rather explicit concessions are not demanded for each loss of control embodied in the broader system. Certain rights are held in reserve, with the expectation that they probably will not be exercised, but they can nonetheless influence the final bargaining equilibrium.
Most international treaties rely on some degree of creative ambiguity, as do most central banks, with their semi-promises of bailouts but “not too much not too certain you know” as the default. You might like the mandated outcome (or not), but I doubt if it would improve political discourse in the United States to have an explicit thumbs up vs. thumbs down referendum on abortion.
Many partnerships and marriages rely on creative ambiguity too. Should the Beatles have forced Lennon and McCartney to specify who had the final say over each cut? That probably would have led to a split in 1968 and there would be no Abbey Road. Must parties to a marriage specify the entire division of chores and responsibilities in advance?
We find the same in many academic departments. Things can be going along just fine, but once the department has to write out an explicit plan for future growth and the allocation of slots across different fields or methods, all hell breaks loose.
Question posers and agenda setters have great power.
All praises of democracy must be embedded in a broader understanding that a) formal questions can be destructive, and b) we cannot be allowed to pose questions without limit, at least not questions which require explicit, publicly verifiable, and commonly observed answers.
Once a question is posed very explicitly, and in a manner which requires a clear answer, it is hard to take it off the table. There is thus an option value to holding these questions in reserve, which means that the expected return from the question has to be pretty high to justify changing the agenda in a hard-to-revoke manner.
I am thus not impressed by claims that a “yes” vote for Scottish independence would represent “the democratic will of the people.” It might just be a question which should not be asked in such a blatant form.
This article, by the way, argues quite well that the current independence referendum is not really democratic at all. Who gets to vote, and who not, is quite arbitrary. Maybe they first should have held a referendum on that?
Should a restaurant require prepayment for meals?
This I found in a Quora forum on prepaid meals in China:
We’ve actually experimented with prepaid vs postpaid meals in our restaurant. The verdict? Upfront payment increased table turnover by over 80%.
The difference is that customers who haven’t paid can justify their occupation of a table. They surf facebook. They chat away for hours on end. They get comfy. It matters not whether they intend to order more stuff, the mere possibility of them ordering more gives them the moral upper hand.
Customers who have paid up on the other hand, do not have moral justification. They could order more food, but diminishing marginal utility and inertia discourages that act. They get edgy. They feel guilty. They leave.
It all depends on the restaurant’s business model. If it’s a low-end restaurant, this tactic will serve it well. If it’s a high end restaurant, paying $150 for that bottle of wine buys you a little more time.
For the pointer I thank Eduardo Pegurier.
The Case for Open Borders
Dylan Matthews summarizes the The Case for Open Borders drawing on an excellent interview with Bryan Caplan. Here is one bit from the interview:
Letting someone get a job is not a kind of charity. It’s not a welfare program. It’s just the government leaving people alone to go and make something out of their lives. When most people are on earth are dealt such a bad hand, to try to stop them from bettering their condition seems a very cruel thing to do to someone.
My elevator pitch has no economics in it, because the economics is actually too subtle to really explain in an elevator pitch. If I had a little bit more time, I would say, “What do you think the effects for men have been of more women in the workforce?”
Are there some men who are worse off? Sure. But would we really be a richer society if we kept half the population stuck at home? Isn’t it better to take people who have useful skills and let them do something with it, than to just keep them locked up someplace where their skills go to waste?
Isn’t that not just better for them, but better for people in general, if we allow people to use their skills to contribute to the world instead of keeping them shut up someplace where they just twiddle their thumbs or do subsistence agriculture or whatever?
On the economics, David Roodman has a characteristically careful and comprehensive review written for Givewell of the evidence on the effect of immigration on native wages. He writes, “the available evidence paints a fairly consistent and plausible picture”:
- There is almost no evidence of anything close to one-to-one crowding out by new immigrant arrivals to the job market in industrial countries. Most studies find that 10% growth in the immigrant “stock” changes natives’ earnings by between –2% and +2% (@Longhi, Nijkamp, and Poot 2005@, Fig 1; @Peri 2014@, Pg 1). Although serious questions can be raised about the reliability of most studies, the scarcity of evidence for great pessimism stands as a fact (emphasis added, AT)….
- One factor dampening the economic side effects of immigration is that immigrants are consumers as well as producers. They increase domestic demand for goods and services, perhaps even more quickly than they increase domestic production (@Hercowitz and Yashiv 2002@), since they must consume as soon as they arrive. They expand the economic pie even as they compete for a slice. This is not to suggest that the market mechanism is perfect—adjustment to new arrivals is not instantaneous and may be incomplete—but the mechanism does operate.
- A second dampener is that in industrial economies, the capital supply tends to expand along with the workforce. More workers leads to more offices and more factories. Were receiving economies not flexible in this way, they would not be rich. This mechanism too may not be complete or immediate, but it is substantial in the long run: since the industrial revolution, population has doubled many times in the US and other now-wealthy nations, and the capital stock has kept pace, so that today there is more capital per worker than 200 years ago.
- A third dampener is that while workers who are similar compete, ones who are different complement. An expansion in the diligent manual labor available to the home renovation business can spur that industry to grow, which will increase its demand for other kinds of workers, from skilled general contractors who can manage complex projects for English-speaking clients to scientists who develop new materials for home building. Symmetrically, an influx of high-skill workers can increase demand for low-skill ones. More computer programmers means more tech businesses, which means more need for janitors and security guards. Again, the effect is certain, though its speed and size are not.
- …one way to cushion the impact of low-skill migration on low-skill workers already present is to increase skilled immigration in tandem.
Plaudits are due to Givewell. While others are focused on giving cows, Givewell is going after the really big gains.
Black ebola markets in everything
A black market for an Ebola treatment derived from the blood of survivors is emerging in the West African countries experiencing the worst outbreak of the virus on record, the World Health Organization said.
The United Nations health agency will work with governments to stamp out the illicit trade in convalescent serum, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told reporters today in Geneva, where the organization is based. There is a danger that such serums could contain other infections and wouldn’t be administered properly, Chan said.
The WHO is encouraging the use of properly obtained serum to treat current patients and said last week it should be a priority. A third U.S. missionary worker who was infected with Ebola in Liberia and flown to the U.S. for medical care was treated with blood transfusions from another American who recovered from the virus last month. Doctors hope the virus-fighting antibodies in the blood help the 51-year-old physician, Rick Sacra.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank John Chilton.
Chitmahals
I had not known of these:
The Indo-Bangladesh enclaves, also known as the chitmahals (Bengali: ছিটমহল chitmôhol), sometimes called pasha enclaves, are the enclaves along the Bangladesh–India border, in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.
There are 106 Indian enclaves and 92 Bangladeshi enclaves. Inside the main part of Bangladesh, 102 of these are first-order Indian enclaves, while inside the main part of India, 71 of these are Bangladeshi first-order enclaves. Further inside these enclaves are an additional 24 second order- or counter-enclaves (21 Bangladeshi, 3 Indian) and one Indian counter-counter-enclave, called Dahala Khagrabari #51. They have an estimated combined population between 50,000 and 100,000.
In September 2011, the Prime Ministers of the two countries (Manmohan Singh of India and Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh) signed an accord on border demarcation and exchange of adversely held enclaves; however, the Indian parliament has yet to ratify it. Under this intended agreement, the enclave residents could continue to reside at their present location or move to the country of their choice.
Here is the Wikipedia entry. It now seems the ruling BJP party seems to want to take that 2011 agreement back.
Alastair Bonnett, in his new and excellent Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and other Inscrutable Geographies, notes that these enclaves are usually not supplied with public goods. Furthermore:
In order to leave these tiny enclaves, the inhabitants have to obtain a visa to travel through the foreign territory that surrounds them. But in order to obtain a visa they have to leave their enclave, since visas can only be obtained in cities many miles away.
And:
The Indian Enclave Refugees’ Association has been formed to lobby for the right to “return” to India.
Many of them are denied the right to settle in what is ostensibly their home country, namely India.
Does economics imply a narrowing gender gap?
In my latest New York Times column for The Upshot, I look at some evidence on the gender gap. Here is the bad news:
In one set of these experiments, called the dictator game, women were found to be more generous than men. Players were given $10 and allowed but not required to hand out some of it to a hidden and anonymous partner. Women, on average, gave away $1.61 of the $10, whereas men gave away only 82 cents.
In another test, called the ultimatum game, one player received $10 and then decided how much of it to offer to a partner. (Let’s say the first player suggests, “$8 for me, $2 for you.” If the respondent accepts the offer, that’s what each gets. If the respondent is offended by the unequal division or dislikes it for any other reason, he or she may refuse, and then no one gets anything.)
The depressing news was this: Both men and women made lower offers, on average, when the responder was female. Male proposers offered an average of $4.73 to male respondents, but only $4.43 to women. More painful yet was the behavior of female proposers, who, on average, offered $5.13 to men but only $4.31 to women. It seems that women were seen as softies who were willing to settle for less — and the discrimination was worse coming from the women themselves.
I am nonetheless optimistic about longer-term trends, and here is one specific example I give:
As a former chess player, I am struck by the growing achievements of women in this great game — one in which men were once said to have an overwhelming intrinsic advantage. (Among the unproven contentions was that men were better at pattern recognition.) Although women were never barred from touching the chess pieces, strong female players were few in number.
These days, many more women play very well, and the gap between the top men and women in the game is narrowing. The main driver of the change appears to be that more and more women are playing chess, creating a cycle of positive reinforcement that encourages ever more women to excel. We’ve seen a similar dynamic in the workplace, as more women have made great strides in the areas of law, medicine and academia. And this process may spread to other sectors of the economy as well, such as technology industries.
Do read the whole thing.
*Party Man, Company Man*
The author is Joe Zhang and the subtitle is Is China’s State Capitalism Doomed? Here is the summary of his conclusions:
1. The state sector remains the dominant part of the Chinese economy.
2. In the past decade, China has erased most (if not all) of the liberalization of the previous two decades. As a result, the state sector has become more dominant than it was a decade ago.
3. The state sector enjoys widespread public support in China, contrary to perceptions in the West. there are political, social and cultural reasons for this “strange” situation.
4. The state sector and SOEs are constantly adapting to the public demand for transparency and efficiency. As a whole, they do not necessarily underperform the private sector. Indeed, due to systematic discrimination against the private sector, there is evidence to the contrary: the state sector has had a better financial track record in the past three decades. Indeed, it is not fair to make comparisons given the unleveled playing field.
5. The many challenges China faces today need a robust and well-funded state sector. At least that is, in my judgment, what the Chinese government and most members of the public think. These challenges include social inequality, overpopulation, environmental damage, and the depletion of global resources.
I do not agree with every claim in this book, especially the normative ones, but this is one of the better places to go for a look at how the Chinese economy actually works. Or doesn’t, as the case may be.
Co-opting Regulation for Profit
Regulations often increase monopoly power. Indeed, increasing monopoly power is often why regulations are enacted. In other cases, however, ostensibly neutral regulations are co-opted by entrepreneurs who spot an opportunity to leverage the regulation for profit. Derek Lowe points us to an interesting case of the latter involving drug pricing and the FDA.
Retrophin recently purchased the marketing rights to the drug Thiola and they are increasing the price from $1.50 per pill to over $30 per pill. Surprisingly, Thiola is off-patent. Ordinarily, we would expect such a large price increase to be met with entry and price pushed to marginal cost. To enter into the market, however, a generic producer must prove bio-equivalence which requires that the generic producer obtain a small quantity of the branded drug. Branded drug firms don’t like competition from generics and they try to impede the process but it’s typically not a big deal for a generic producer to obtain some of the branded drug for their bio-equivalence trials.
In 2007, however, the FDA was officially authorized to approve drugs conditional on the firm implementing a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS). The FDA approved thalidomide, for example, only if physicians signed a patient-physician agreement and enrolled each of their patient’s directly with the producer. Indeed, a unique prescription authorization number was required for each prescription which could be filled only at specially authorized pharmacies. The idea, of course, was to prevent anyone from taking thalidomide during pregnancy. The purpose of the regulation was probably not to create monopoly power but it didn’t take firms long to realize that REMS regulations could be co-opted. Simply put, a REMS agreement can make it illegal for generic firms to obtain a sample of the branded drug through ordinary channels. In the thalidomide agreement, for example, it’s even the case that all unused thalidomide must be returned to the producer! Retrophin is hoping to use a similar REMS strategy to keep generic competitors out of the market for Thiola.
Addendum: Derek’s post aroused the ire of the CEO of Retrophin and may have gotten him banned from reddit.
Javier Cercas, *Outlaws: A Novel*
This is so far my favorite novel in what I consider to be a very weak year for fiction. Set in and near Barcelona, this story of a gang member and his confrontations with the law, as seen through the eyes of one not totally reliable narrator, reminds me a bit of Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios. Here is one excerpt from the novel:
Let’s go, she said. Where?, I asked, following her: she was wearing jeans, a white shirt, sneakers and her handbag strap across her chest, like twenty years ago when we’d meet up in La Font to go out and steal cars, snatch old ladies’ handbags and rob banks on the coast.
I also quite liked “Talking to Ourselves,” by Andrés Neuman: “Women who know what they want never want anything interesting.”
I am surprised this was admitted so quickly
The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population.
There is more here, all of it a bit gruesome.
Further evidence for The Great Reset
Matt Yglesias writes:
…the Kaiser Family Foundation is out today with new reporting on employer benefit costs that reveals the slowdown is visible in this slice of the market. Premium costs rose by just 3 percent, a number much lower than they routinely rose by in the recent past. So how about those wage rises? Well — let’s just say there’s no evidence that they’re happening.
In other words, there is still downward pressure on real wages, even when we don’t always see real wage cuts.
This also means that the monetary policy argument “there can’t be a build up inflationary pressures because we don’t see real wages rising” is highly unreliable or at the very least a non sequitur (NB: I am not in fact extremely worried about inflationary pressures these days).