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Economic boom, coronary bust

Panel data econometric methods are used to investigate how the risk of death from acute myocardial infarction (AMI) varies with macroeconomic conditions after controlling for demographic factors, fixed state characteristics, general time effects and state-specific time trends. The sample includes residents of the 20 largest states over the 1979 to 1998 period. A one percentage point reduction in unemployment is predicted to raise AMI mortality by 1.3 percent, with a larger increase in relative risk for 20-44 year olds than older adults, particularly if the economic upturn is sustained. Nevertheless, the much higher absolute AMI fatality rate of senior citizens implies that they account for most of the additional deaths. This suggests the importance of factors like air pollution and traffic congestion that increase with economic activity, are linked to coronary heart disease and may have particularly strong effects on vulnerable segments of the population, such as the frail elderly. AMI mortality risk quickly rises when the economy strengthens and increases further if the favorable economic conditions persist. This is consistent with strong effects of other short-term factors on heart attack risk and with health being a durable capital stock that is affected by flows of lifestyle behaviors and environmental conditions whose effects accumulate over time.

Here is the paper.

Unintended Geoengineering

In my post SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited I noted that regulations requiring ships to reduce sulfur have increased global warming. Science has a new piece on the phenomena and the implications for intended geoengineering:

Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”

By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.

The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.

SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited

Geoengineering first came to much of the public’s attention in Levitt and Dubner’s 2009 book SuperFreakonomics. Levitt and Dubner were heavily criticized and their chapter on geoengineering was called patent nonsense, dangerous and error-ridden, unforgivably wrong and much more. A decade and a half later, it’s become clear that Levitt and Dubner were foresighted and mostly correct.

The good news is that climate change is a solved problem. Solar, wind, nuclear and various synthetic fuels can sustain civilization and put us on a long-term neutral footing. Per capita CO2 emissions are far down in developed countries and total emissions are leveling for the world. The bad news is that 200 years of putting carbon into the atmosphere still puts us on a warming trend for a long time. To deal with the immediate problem there is probably only one realistic and cost-effective solution: geoengineering. Geoengineering remains “fiendishly simple” and “startlingly cheap” and it will almost certainly be necessary. On this score, the world is catching up to Levitt and Dubner.

Fred Pearce: Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look.

“Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.”

King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.”

Similarly, here is climate scientist David Keith in the NYTimes:

The energy infrastructure that powers our civilization must be rebuilt, replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free sources such as solar or nuclear. But even then, zeroing out emissions will not cool the planet. This is a direct consequence of the single most important fact about climate change: Warming is proportional to the cumulative emissions over the industrial era.

Eliminating emissions by about 2050 is a difficult but achievable goal. Suppose it is met. Average temperatures will stop increasing when emissions stop, but cooling will take thousands of years as greenhouse gases slowly dissipate from the atmosphere. Because the world will be a lot hotter by the time emissions reach zero, heat waves and storms will be worse than they are today. And while the heat will stop getting worse, sea level will continue to rise for centuries as polar ice melts in a warmer world. This July was the hottest month ever recorded, but it is likely to be one of the coolest Julys for centuries after emissions reach zero.

Stopping emissions stops making the climate worse. But repairing the damage, insofar as repair is possible, will require more than emissions cuts.

…Geoengineering could also work. The physical scale of intervention is — in some respects — small. Less than two million tons of sulfur per year injected into the stratosphere from a fleet of about a hundred high-flying aircraft would reflect away sunlight and cool the planet by a degree. The sulfur falls out of the stratosphere in about two years, so cooling is inherently short term and could be adjusted based on political decisions about risk and benefit.

Adding two million tons of sulfur to the atmosphere sounds reckless, yet this is only about one-twentieth of the annual sulfur pollution from today’s fossil fuels.

Even the Biden White House has signaled that geoengineering is on the table.

Geoengineering remains absurdly cheap, Casey Handmer calculates:

Indeed, if we want to offset the heat of 1 teraton of CO2, we need to launch 1 million tonnes of SO2 per year, costing just $350m/year. This is about 5% of the US’ annual production of sulfur. This costs less than 0.1% on an annual basis of the 40 year program to sequester a trillion tonnes of CO2.

…Stepping beyond the scolds, the gatekeepers, the fatalists and the “nyet” men, we’re going to have to do something like this if we don’t want to ruin the prospects of humanity for 100 generations, so now is the time to think about it.

Detractors claim that geoengineering is playing god, fraught with risk and uncertainty. But these arguments are riddled with omission-commission bias. Carbon emissions are, in essence, a form of inadvertent geoengineering. Solar radiation engineering, by comparison, seems far less perilous. Moreover, we are already doing solar radiation engineering just in reverse: International regulations which required shippers to reduce the sulphur content of marine fuels have likely increased global warming! (See also this useful thread.) . Thus, we’re all geoengineers, consciously or not. The only question is whether we are geoengineering to reduce or to increase global warming.

Why the NYC congestion pricing plan is bad

I am seeing some critical comments on my latest column, mostly from people who are not reading it through, or in some cases they are making basic mistakes in economics.  Let me start with part of my conclusion:

I suspect that I could endorse a properly targeted version of congestion pricing for Manhattan, for instance, one that encouraged mass transit without discouraging density.

Many people are responding by making a version of that point and thinking it contradicts me.  Here are a few basic facts about the current proposal:

1. The off-peak price is too high at $17, relative to $23 for peak.

2. There is an odd and unjustified discrete notch at 60th St, which will cause further distortions of its own.

3. There is no difference for cars passing through and cars with passengers spending money or doing something productive in lower Manhattan.

This is not the traffic congestion charge you should be looking to implement.

A second line of responses (Erik B. and Alex) suggests that the congestion charge will not lower the flow of humans into Manhattan.  I am sorry, but demand curves slope downward!  The resulting auto commute does become more predictable and regular, but that holds only because there are fewer trips and to some extent because trips are time-shifted.  (Note that the small gap between the $17 and $23 prices suggests a small benefit from time shifting.)  Fewer outsiders will benefit from Manhattan, and those outsiders will skew richer and older.  The methods for improving the quality of the trip really do lower the number of trip-makers, probably both peak and off-peak.  It is not going to mean higher or even constant throughput for vehicles or humans.  (If you think it does, does that imply a big subsidy to car trips would get us to a carless city?  There are some non-linear scenarios where a congestion charge boosts throughput, such as when otherwise no cars move at all in extreme gridlock.  In reality, it seems cars are moving at about 12 mph in Manhattan.)

The actual possible gain — oddly not cited by the critics — is that a congestion charge might get a given visitor more effective time spent learning from Manhattan.  Though do note an offsetting effect — the higher the traffic problem, the more you will make each trip to Manhattan a grand and elaborate one, and it is your externality-less domestic time in Long Island that will suffer all the more.  So per person learning externalities from effective time spent in Manhattan could go either way, noting the number of visitors still goes down.

You might think such a congestion charge improves welfare (a sounder point than suggesting it will not have a standard price effect), but the whole point is that Manhattan density involves massive positive externalities, including for visitors and note that visitors also finance the  externality-rich activities of the natives:

In some urban settings, the clustering of human talent is of utmost importance. Manhattan is the densest urban area in the US, and it succeeds in large part because it is so crowded. You want to be there because other people want to be there. Even though I don’t live there, I nonetheless benefit from Manhattan, both when I visit and when I consume the television shows, movies, music, and art works that come, either directly or indirectly, out of this urban environment. Manhattan also supports America’s financial center, many tech start-ups, and much more.

I don’t want Manhattan to be less crowded, even though it probably would make many Manhattanites happier and less stressed. I want Manhattan to be efficient for me and others, not just for the residents. If there is any part of America where ideas rubbing together lead to great things, it is Manhattan (and the Bay Area). Arguably, Manhattan should be more crowded, at least if we consider everyone’s interest. That militates against congestion tolls, even though such charges are usually a good idea.

The actually useful solution is to make mass transit, most of all the subway, a reliable and predictable method of getting around.  Right now it is not.  (I doubt if lowering the already low subway prices gets you much.)

If you look at visits into Manhattan, whether by car or not, they already face lots of implicit taxes.  Those include poor roads, mediocre subway performance, high variance public infrastructure including on issues such as trash, pollution issues, some degree of crime, awful connecting infrastructure (NJ Transit anyone?) and much more.  And yet Manhattan is one of the world’s very top TFP factories and we are already taxing entry in so many different ways.

It does not make good economic sense to impose higher yet entry fees into that TFP factory.  Given that multiple externalities are present, the correct mix is to lower many different costs of entry and mobility (including within Manhattan), while shifting the relative use benefits toward mass transit and the subway.  Density really does have positive externalities here, and we all know how much idea makers and distributors are undercompensated.

There are a few more threads of responses on Twitter.  One is to note the noise and pollution costs of vehicles.  That is relevant, but fairly soon we will have lots more electric vehicles, which should be encouraged.  The tolls will become a revenue source that lasts forever and they will not be taken away, but the noise and pollution costs of the vehicles soon will be much lower.

Another thread is to argue that most of the people who drive will switch to mass transit if there is a congestion cost.  Some will, but we are asked to believe that a) current traffic congestion is so awful, b) people put up with it anyway, and c) they nonetheless can be easily nudged into taking mass transit.  That is an uncomfortable blend of views that fails to understand the initial motivations behind the car trips.  There are plenty of people with young kids, or elderly relatives, or multiple packages, or multiple stops, or unreliable mass transportation for getting back home at the end of the evening.  Many of those people cannot feasibly switch to mass transit and that is precisely why they put up with the bad traffic.  Say you finish your Manhattan doings at 10:45 p.m., and have to get back to your New Jersey home in a timely and safe manner.  The PATH train will work for some, but a lot of these people really do need cars to consummate the trip.

(It is a theoretically defensible argument to claim that this congestion tax is the only way of financing mass transit improvements. That may or may not be true, but if it is one should still “regret” the plan, which is not the attitude people are taking.  And are there guarantees this will lead to a refurbishment of the subway?  It has proven remarkably difficult to improve the system, and that is with rising NYC budgets.  Another argument that might work is if non-car visitors so hate seeing cars in Manhattan that the net human inflow, due to auto trips, goes down rather than up.  Do note however that the car trips are still helping to finance retail and cultural infrastructure that attracts the non-car visitors, so don’t just take complaints about cars at face value.  Furthermore this car hatred factor also should become less serious as we transition to electric vehicles.)

On net, do you think our most important cities should be more or less dense?  If you support YIMBYism, which surely does make traffic worse, have you not already answered that question?  So either become a NIMBY or — better yet — be a little more consistent applying your intuitions about the net positive externality from Manhattan density.  A simple way to put the point is that an export tax on your TFP factory is unlikely to be the best way to reduce congestion.

Emergent Ventures India, fourth cohort

Here is the latest EV India cohort, and I am delighted to see more applications from young women and teenagers.  I note also that a lot of the applicants for EV India are increasingly from smaller towns, or were raised in small towns before moving to larger cities for their projects.

EV India now has 75 winners!  And I met most of them in Udaipur this last weekend.  Here is the list of new winners:

Siddharth Kanungo is a chemical engineer by training and founder of Primer, an interactive conversational learning platform. Primer is designed for self-learners to learn subjects like mathematics, physics, computer science, that are usually offered in a university-level setting.

Keertana Subramani is a 23-year-old educator and social entrepreneur who wants to provide high-quality, accessible learning experiences. She received her EV grant to build SUVY Classes, a platform that vets and trains tutors for quality, and offers engaging, live classes for any learning need, and at twenty cents a day.

Arun Iyyanarappan is a 28-year-old electrical and software engineer passionate about creating alternate systems for electric power consumption. He received his EV grant to build a cost-effective solar powered house to show proof of concept for electrifying homes in rural areas at low-cost.

Gowtham Tummeda is a 21-year-old student interested in biology and programming and views biology as a software problem.  He received his EV grant to build an end-to-end AI platform for biological data analysis. His larger ambition is to use the platform to model, design and simulate changes to strands of DNA at protein level using Deep Mind’s Alpha Fold.

Tejas Sidnal is an architect and researcher from Mumbai. He is the founder of CarbonCraft, a design and material innovation startup converting carbon emissions into building materials by fusing material knowledge of clean technologies with traditional techniques. He received an EV grant to reduce the curing process for Carbon Tiles from 28 days to under four hours for tiles that store captured carbon.

Hiya Jain is an 18-year-old interested in using EdTech to make education equitable. She received her EV grant to travel to San Francisco and better understand the EdTech space. She is currently working on UnMold, a project connecting high-school students in developing countries to PhD students running high information, low pressure, cohort-based courses to inject inspiration into a system.

Shruti Karandikar is a 16-year-old high school student from Bangalore. She has started ‘Screens for the Unscreened’ to collect phones, tablets, and laptops and donate them to underprivileged students. This is being converted into a non-governmental organization called ‘Mobilize’.

Sainadh Chityala  is a 22-year-old engineering student. He received the EV grant to develop software to power self-driving cars in unpredictable and chaotic driving environments in urban India.

Samarth Bansal  is a 28-year-old independent journalist and programmer in India. His reporting has appeared in Indian and foreign press like the The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Mint, and HuffPost, etc. He writes The Interval, a fortnightly newsletter. He received his EV grant to merge his two interests – developing AI platforms for journalism and serve the news at higher speed and lower cost.

Apurwa Masook is a 23-year-old structural engineer who graduated and cofounded and spearheaded India’s first Indigenous Student Rocketry Mission. He is the founder of Space Fields, a team of hustlers, engineers and space aficionados working towards affordable access to space. He received his EV grant to support Space Fields’s efforts in developing a low-cost high-performance green compositepellant to power next generation of Launch Vehicles.

Snigdha Poonam  is a 38-year-old journalist and author from Delhi. She has written about identity politics, income inequality, tech culture, and crime.  Her first book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World, won 2018’s Crossword Award for nonfiction. She received an EV grant to travel across India to for her investigative work on scams and fraud in the contemporary Indian political economy.

Aniruddha Kenge is a 20-year-old student of industrial design with an interest in carbon-based materials, especially graphene. He is working towards decarbonizing plastics and making their use, reuse, and production sustainable, swiftly. He received his EV grant to develop hemp fiber-based bio-composites in India that can replace multi-use plastics.

Keya Krishna is a 16-year-old high school student in Washington DC interested in the intersection of science, technology, and public policy. She received her EV grant to measure pollution exposures at a hyper-local level with a high level of spatial and temporal granularity, specifically focusing on the pollution exposure of school-going youth.

Abhilash Mishra is the Founder and Chief Science Officer of EquiTech Futures. He trained as a physicist and holds an M.Phys from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Astrophysics from Caltech. EquiTech Futures is a network of innovators from around the world using data science and AI to tackle societal challenges. Abhilash received his EV grant to develop and scale cohort-based courses, research residencies, and educational networking, through their programs EquiTech Scholars, EquiTech Residency, and EquiTech Institutes.

Reuben Abraham is the founding CEO of Artha Global, a new Mumbai and London based policy research and consulting organization that provides the scaffolding for efforts aimed at building state capacity. He was named ‘Think Tanker of the Year 2022’ by Prospect Magazine for putting together a large platform that enabled inter-disciplinary work to tackle the Covid-19 crisis in India.

Zi Cheng “Sam” Huang is a 26-year-old ethnographic researcher interested in elite spaces and cultural replication. Currently, they are assisting on a project about the beliefs of AI researchers. In their free time, they coach Peking University in competitive debating, effective altruism, and started a fellowship for talented young debaters to engage in effective altruism. With their EV grant, they seek to understand scaling education programs in India especially IITs.

Mohammad Ruhul Kader is an entrepreneur and writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He founded Future Startup, a digital publication covering the startup and technology scene in Dhaka with an ambition to transform Bangladesh through entrepreneurship and innovation. He writes about internet business, strategy, technology, and society. He is the author of Rethinking Failure: A short guide to living an entrepreneurial life. He received his EV grant to scale Future Startup into a leading destination to learn about entrepreneurship, tech, and business in Bangladesh.

Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy (21) and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky (22) are data scientists from Chennai and Davis with backgrounds in computational social science research and government. They founded Jhana, a Bangalore-based artificial intelligence lab, and are interested in simplifying and democratizing legal processes and information, and in building alignment and ethics tools for back-checking deployed AI systems. They are building a state-of-the-art, automatic legal search interface for lawyers and students. 

Tushar Khandelwal (24), is a former investment banker turned social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Sigma91 – a career accelerator for ambitious teens, and has built a community of over 400 highly talented teenagers.

Akash Kulgod is a 22-year-old researcher, writer, and techno-optimist from Belagavi, with a degree in cognitive science from UC Berkeley. He is the founder of Dogluk — a startup-DAO aiming to augment the ability of dogs to detect disease by transforming their olfactory perceptual abilities into digital and multidimensional signatures. He is also a team member of the Rajalakshmi Children Foundation. You can follow his substack for his writing and podcasts about Dogluk, effective altruism, and the psychedelic revival.

Raghav Gupta  is a 24-year-old industrial engineer and the founder of EquiDEI, a crypto-fintech startup. EquiDEI is a blockchain based protocol designed to monetize unbanked supply chain assets of small and medium sized enterprises in India, to provide low risk liquidity options. His ambition is to use his startup to generate wealth and liquidity and jobs for the SME ecosystem.

SealXX is a bioplastic solution to replace single-use plastics based on the concept of biomimicry, and it is founded and run by five teenagers across the world. At SealXX, they want to make the everyday products by mimicking protein-based natural processes by reducing the need for plastic reliance. Chandhana, Nithi, Roy, Nathan, and Elly, cofounders of SealXX were awarded an EV grant to develop and scale their biomimicry process.

  • Nithi Byreddy is a 17-year-old innovator and author researching the applications of carbon capture in climate science. She has worked on creating a blockchain-based solution to reduce people’s carbon footprint and has worked with IKEA to create sustainable innovations to reduce their carbon emissions.
  • Roy Kim is a 16-year-old innovator and environmentalist interested in mimicking the mechanisms and designs of nature to create sustainable environments, mainly cities. In addition to working alongside Walmart, he is currently developing a theoretical ecological urban utopia and further exploring the applications of biomimicry in our society.
  • Nathan Park is a 17-year-old entrepreneur who is interested in economics and business management. He is currently doing research on the economics of the housing market, and running a student-led, scientific publication called MIND Magazines that seeks to make science universally accessible to everyone.

Nexteen is an innovation accelerator program for 13-19 years-old students with programs aimed at exposing students to exponential tech to work on global challenges. Here are some of their ambitious students:

  • Vedanth Nath,16, is is a high schooler, football enthusiast, and the creative engine at Nexteen. Prior to Nexteen, ran Media House, and has worked in in the WASH Sector. He also leads Tech and Youth at LooCafe helping them become the largest Toilet-WASH Company in the country.
  • Karthik Nagapuri, 22, is an innovator, Defi developer, and student getting his completing the last year of his undergraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence. At Nexteen, he’s building the tech infrastructure that would be useful for innovators who are part of the program. He also worked on Safe Block, a crypto wallet nominee system. He is also the winner of a separate EV grant for building open API framework and tech for LooCafe.
  • Ayush Srivastava,19, is a serial entrepreneur who likes to work on operations of new startups to help them grow. He has helped operationalize several startups before Nexteen.
  • Anvitha Kollipara,16, is an entrepreneur. She works on scaling, bringing international accreditation, and acquiring partnerships with companies such as Adobe for the non-profits she founded. She was named one of the top three teen change-makers by Forbes for her work with CareGood Foundation.
  • Harsh Vardhan Shukla,19, is a YouTuber turned entrepreneur, completing his undergraduate degree in business development while working on the side on nanotech projects. He works on content production (videos) and podcasts.

Emergent Ventures India is now large enough for top-up grants and repeat winners! Some familiar names below:

  • Nilay Kulkarni, a 22-year-old software developer from Nashik, for his fintech start up.
  • Swasthik Padma to scale his start-up TrashTrap to scale Plascrete – a high strength building material made by converting non-recyclable plastic waste – for commercial use.
  • Chandra Bhan Prasad to continue his excellent scholarship on Dalit capitalism and Dalit dignity.
  • Naman Pushp, co-founder of Airbound, for his early efforts to explore sustainable on-ground mobility.
  • Onkar Singh to continue developing his open-source CubeSat.

Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort and third cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.

If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].

A Foreign Policy Disaster in the Making

NYTimes: A lethal, fast-paced second wave of the coronavirus pandemic has brought India’s health care systems to the verge of collapse and is putting millions of lives and livelihoods at risk.

On Sunday and Monday, the country recorded more than 270,000 and 259,000 cases, respectively, of Covid-19, a staggering increase from about 11,000 cases per day in the second week of February. Reported coronavirus infections shot up from about 20,000 per day in mid-March to more than 200,000 by mid-April.

The newspapers and social media are scrolls of horror and failure of the health system. There are reports of lines of ambulances with patients waiting outside the largest Covid facility in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat because ventilator beds and oxygen had run out.

On Friday in the northern city of Lucknow, Vinay Srivastava, a 65-year-old journalist, shared his falling oxygen levels on Twitter, tagging government authorities for help. Overburdened hospitals and laboratories wouldn’t take calls from his family. The last tweet from Mr. Srivastava’s handle described his oxygen saturation level at 52, way below the 95 percent, which is considered normal. Nobody helped. He died on Saturday.

When I left India in February of 2020 I feared that COVID would rip through its dense, urban populations which were already under stress from some of the world’s worst air and water pollution. I feared that COVID would overwhelm India’s weak public health care system and leave its low-capacity state flailing. As it happened, I should have worried more about America’s poorly cared for nursing home populations, its high obesity rate, and its low state-capacity. It was the US state that ended up flailing, as it and the public became absorbed by media spectacles, impeachments and scandals du jour even as thousands died daily. The virus mocks us all.

All of this will require some rethinking. Today, however, I want to point to a foreign policy disaster in the making. America’s role as the guarantor of a globalized, mostly peaceful, and orderly world–already deeply hurt by four years of “America First,”–is now under further threat by an increasing perception that we are vaccine hoarders. Conspiracy theories are running wild in India on WhatsApp and elsewhere that we have hundreds of millions of spare doses. It isn’t true, of course. We ordered more doses than we needed because we didn’t know which vaccine would work and so we smartly placed multiple bets. Our advance-purchases from Pfizer and big investments in Moderna and related parts of the vaccine supply chain have paid off big time. As the US is vaccinated, our investments will benefit the entire world. Our investments in Novavax, AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson were also smart investments but those bets have yet to pay off in a big way. We don’t have hundreds of millions of doses stockpiled but maybe tens of millions of some AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson vaccines.

We have, however, used the Defense Production Act to prioritize American vaccine manufacturing at potentially great cost to India. As The Economist reports:

Production lines in India, making at least 160m doses of covid vaccine a month, will come to a halt in the coming weeks unless America supplies 37 critical items.

A shutdown of vaccine production in India would be a disaster for India and also for the United States. Our image in Asia will be tarnished at a time when we want to be making allies to counter Chinese influence. Moreover, the US benefits tremendously from a globalized world. Indeed, the US cannot supply its own vaccine needs without inputs from the rest of the world so flouting the rules will boomerang, leaving us and everyone else worse off. Autarchy is very bad for vaccine production.

The Biden Administration has some leeway. We have over 60 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines on hand and more arriving every day. We do not need to pause our own vaccination efforts to help others. We can donate what AstraZeneca stockpiles remain at no cost to us. A I said in my testimony to Congress, forget being humanitarians, there are health, economic and political reasons to vaccinate the world.

So let’s make it clear that we have an American plan to vaccinate the world before perceptions solidify that we are the villain and not the hero of the story.

The age of polarization ended some while ago

The coronavirus-relief bill racing through Congress contains a fair amount of economic relief as well as a wide array of unrelated measures that were thrown into the bill with little or no public debate. Included in the latter category is something shocking: a huge package of energy reforms that will result in major greenhouse-gas reductions.

How big a deal are the climate provisions? The World Resources Institute has called the bill “one of the most significant pieces of climate legislation that Congress has passed in its history.” Grant Carlisle, a senior policy adviser at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, “This is perhaps the most significant climate legislation Congress has ever passed.”

To be sure, the “most significant climate legislation Congress has ever passed” designation is a little bit misleading. Congress hasn’t passed much climate legislation. The climate provisions in the coronavirus-relief bill might add up to more than President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, which included $90 billion in green-energy subsidies and helped seed the boom in wind, solar, batteries, and other tech over the past decade. They likely won’t be as significant as the 1970 Clean Air Act, which created the regulatory authority that does most of the heavy lifting in reducing carbon pollution.

But the amount of good climate policy in this bill is shocking, especially given the fact that it is about to be signed by Donald J. Trump. The major provisions include: a $35 billion investment in new zero-emission energy technology (including solar, wind, nuclear, and carbon-capture storage); an extension of tax credits for wind and solar energy, which were set to expire; and, most significantly, a plan for phasing out hydrofluorocarbons, a small but extremely potent greenhouse gas used as a coolant.

The rhetoric, however, will continue.  That article is from Jonathan Chait.  And here is my March 2019 Bloomberg column on polarization:

If I had to describe 2019 so far, I would characterize it as The Year Political Polarization Started to Erode. I know that sounds counterintuitive — aren’t partisans at each other’s throats on social media all the time? — but bear with me.

There is some data to support my point. A recent poll about regulating the tech industry, an issue which could prove to be one of the most important of our time, asked: “Do you agree or disagree that tech companies have too much power and should be more regulated?” Some 16 percent of Republicans said they “strongly agree,” while 13 percent of Democrats did. And combining those who “strongly agree” and “somewhat agree” gives an identical figure for both parties — 46 percent. This is the near-opposite of polarization.

More generally, both parties also seem to have converged in thinking that fiscal deficits are fine and more government spending is a good thing.

Ahem.

Progress on Nuclear Power

In the last year two new nuclear reactor designs have been approved, the first time this has happened in a generation. In September, the NRC approved NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) and a few days ago they approved GE-Hitachi’s SMR. The Trump administration has also invested billions in nuclear power research and in 2018 passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act.

President Donald Trump signed into a law new legislation that will speed up the development of advanced reactors in the United States.

The Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (NEICA) eliminates some of the financial and technological barriers standing in the way of nuclear innovation.

It also represents a strong commitment by the government to support the commercial nuclear sector, ensuring that the U.S. maintains its leadership around the globe.

Nuclear pairs extremely well with hydrogen, a carbon-free near pollution-free fuel, and nuclear also works great with solar (to smooth out capacity).

Will President Trump be remembered as the environmental president? Probably not. You can read dozens of pieces on Trump’s environmental policies (“rollbacks,” “reversals”) including this long Wikipedia article that never once mention nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear remains a leading technology for making progress on climate change.

Emergent Ventures India

Thanks to a special grant, there is now a devoted tranche of Emergent Ventures India. In the last two years, EV has received excellent applications related to India, both from residents in India and entrepreneurs and academics around the world working on India-related projects. This is not surprising because India has exceptional young talent with great ideas, but its traditional educational and philanthropic institutions have not always identified and nurtured these ideas and individuals. And given the size of the opportunity in India, a successful idea can change the lives of a very large number of people. In this sense, EV India is our attempt at a moonshot.

And a given dollar goes much further there!

Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here.

EV India will provide grants and micro grants to jump-start high-reward ideas that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and the well-being of Indians. We encourage unorthodox ideas and also requests that are too small to attract interest from the traditional models of funding and philanthropy.

Shruti Rajagopalan (also an Emergent Ventures Winner) joined Mercatus in the fall of 2019 as a senior research fellow studying Indian political economy and economic development. Shruti and I (Tyler) are already working together to evaluate applications for EV India.  And note we are now working on some Covid-19-related grants!

To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.

Here is a list of past grants and fellowships made to India related projects:

Harshita Arora (first EV cohort), an 18-year-old Indian prodigy from Saharanpur, in addition to her work in the sciences, she recently co-founded AtoB, a startup building a sustainable transportation network for intercity commuters using buses.

Neil Deshmukh, high school student in Pennsylvania, for general career support and also to support his work on smartphone apps for helping Indian farmers identify, diagnose, and recommend treatment options for crop diseases (PlantumAI) and for helping the blind and visually impaired interpret images through sound (VocalEyes).

Paul Novosad, at Dartmouth, with Sam Asher, at Johns Hopkins, to enable the construction of a scalable platform for the integration and dissemination of socioeconomic data in India, ideally to cover every town and village, toward the end of informing actionable improvements. The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset on India (SHRUG) is available here.

Tejas Subramaniam, a high schooler from Chennai, for prospective work on disseminating information about the prevalence of sexual violence, the harm it does, and effective tools to reduce its incidence. Tejas (with his team) won the World Schools Debating Championships (WSDC) in August 2019.

Namrata Narain, Harvard Ph.D student in economics, for work on “What happens to the ability of firms to write contracts when courts are dysfunctional?”

Samarth Jajoo, a high school student in Ahmedabad, India, to assist in his purchase of study materials for math, computer science, and tutoring. He has developed a project called read.gift, which is a new book gifting project.

Himanshu Dhingra, an entrepreneurial Indian law student, to support his travel and internship at Project Arizona.

Ashish Kulkarni, an economics professor at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, to support a podcast on asynchronous mentoring.

Shrirang Karandikar, to support an Indian project to get the kits to measure and understand local pollution.

If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].

A Coasean solution for New Delhi?

If the late Ronald Coase could be called upon to advise the Delhi government, he would persuade chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to pay farmers in Punjab and Haryana to stop burning crop residue.

In recent times, air quality in Delhi has remained poor throughout the year for various reasons, including the rapid loss of green cover, construction of homes and infrastructure projects, and vehicular as well as industrial pollution. But for a few weeks every November, it gets almost impossible to breathe. The last straw has been the crop residue burning (CRB) by farmers in Punjab and Haryana, which causes a heavy smog to settle over Delhi…

The good news is that these [health] costs—avoidable by Delhi residents if CRB were eliminated—are about 10 times the cost that would be incurred by farmers in adopting substitutes to crop burning. Where policymakers see costs, Coase saw potential for gains from trade.

Here is more from Shruti Rajagopalan.

What I’ve been reading and browsing

1. Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.  I read this one straight through, it does more to bring the Aztecs (a misnomer, by the way, as it is technically the name of the military alliance…a bit like referring to “NATO people”) to life than any other book I know.

2. Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics.  I don’t need this, but I suspect useful for many.

3. Thomas O. McGarity, Pollution, Politics, and Power: The Struggle for Sustainable Electricity.  A very useful of the last four decades of transformation in the electricity industry.

4. Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1847-1947.  An informative and engaging account of what the title promises (you can learn more about Heine and Alkan and Moholy-Nagy).  Nonetheless the author never really addresses the question of why that period was quite so remarkable for Jewish achievement, relative to the rest of world history.

5. Edmund Morris, Edison.  Lots of impressive research, but this book didn’t have the emphasis on innovation and institutions that I was looking for.

There is also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

How to travel to India

From a reader:

I have really enjoyed your travel posts on various countries, and am currently planning a trip to India for the month of November. However, I have struggled to find much writing of yours on the country. Perhaps a post on tips/places/cities/culture is in order? It would be much appreciated.

I have only a few India tips, but I can recommend them very, very strongly.  Here goes:

1. You can’t just walk around all day and deal with the pollution, the bad sidewalks, and dodging the traffic.  This ain’t Paris.  Plan accordingly.

2. When Alex set off to live in India, I said to him: “Alex, after a few weeks there, I want you to email me “the number.”  The number is how many consecutive hours you can circulate in an Indian city without having to stop and resort to a comfortable version of the indoors.”  You too will figure out pretty quickly what your number is, and it won’t take you a few weeks.

3. India is one of the very best and most memorable trips you can take.  You should go repeatedly.

4. Every single part of India is interesting and worth visiting, as far as I can tell after five trips.  That said, I find Bangalore quite over-visited relative to its level of interest.

5. My favorite places in India are Mumbai, Chennai, Rajasthan, and Kolkaata.  Still, I could imagine a rational person with interests broadly similar to my own having a quite different list.

6. India has the best food in the world.  It is not only permissible but indeed recommended to take all of your meals in fancy hotel restaurants.  Do not eat the street food in India (and I eat it virtually everywhere else).  It is also permissible to find two or three very good hotel restaurants — or even one — and simply run through their menus.  You won’t be disappointed.

7. Invest in a very, very good hotel.  It is affordable, and you will need it, and it will be a special memory all its own.

8. Being driven around in the Indian countryside is terrifying (and I have low standards here, I do this all the time in other non-rich countries).  If it were safer, I would see many more parts of India.  But it isn’t.  So I don’t.

9. If you go during monsoon season, your trip will be quite memorable.  I cannot say I recommend this (I don’t), but I am myself glad I did it once, in Goa, when monsoon season started early.  I got a lot of work done.

10. Do not expect punctuality.

11. Most of the sights in India, including the very famous ones, are overrated.  The main sight is India itself, and that is underrated.

12. “In religion, every Indian is a millionaire.”

I thank Yana and Dan Wang and Alex for discussions relevant to this post.

Which cities have people-watching street cafes?

D. asks me that question, citing Morocco, BA, and Paris.  Here are a few factors militating in favor of such cafes:

1. The weather should be reasonable.  This militates in favor of Mediterranean climates, with Paris eking through nonetheless.  It hurts much of Asia.

2. The broad highways and thoroughfares should be removed from where the cafes might go.  This factor harms Los Angeles, which otherwise has excellent weather, and helps La Jolla.  Note that BA and some of the larger Moroccan cities were designed and built up around the same time, based on broadly European models, and to fit early 20th century technologies.

3. Street crime must be acceptably low.  Bye bye Brazil.

4. Pollution should be fairly low, otherwise sitting outside is unpleasant.  This harm many Indian and Chinese cities.

5. Streets must not be too steep.  Sorry La Paz, and yes here at MR we adjust steepness coefficients by altitude.

6. Skyscrapers must not be too plentiful.  This harms Manhattan, because the sunlight is mostly blocked.

7. Explicit or implicit marginal tax rates on labor should be relatively high.  Another boost for the Mediterranean.  And is cafe culture therefore correlated with smoking culture?

7b. Explicit or implicit land rents should be “low enough.”  After all, they have to be willing to let you sit there all day.  Just try that in midtown Manhattan.

8. The cities should have mixed-use neighborhoods, well-connected to each other by foot, conducive to many diverse groups of people walking through.  This hurts many parts of the United States and also some parts of Latin America.  It is a big gain for Paris.

9. The city dwellers need some tradition of “being alone,” so that these individuals use the cafe to connect to the outside.  You will note that in many parts of Italy, the people-watching street cafe is outcompeted by the “stationary street conference, five guys who know each other really well yelling at each other about who knows what?”  They never get around to that cafe chair.  So the city needs some degree of anonymity, but not too much.  This harms some of the more traditional societies found around the Mediterranean.  On the other side of the distribution, too strong a tradition of television-watching hurts cafe life too.

10. Another competitor to the people-watching street cafe is the zócalo town square tradition of Mexico.  I myself prefer the centralization of the zócalo (though admittedly it does not scale well fractally).  So the city also has to fail in providing just the right kind of parks and park benches and focality in its very center.  Surprise, surprise, but dysfunctional local public goods are by no means unheard of around the Mediterranean, Paris too, BA, and cities such as Casablanca.

What else?

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”

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.