Results for “bees” 60 found
Monday assorted links
1. An alternative to the Baumol cost-disease hypothesis (but is it really, isn’t worker allocation across sectors endogenous to, among other things, Baumol-like factors?)
3. Please stop saying that hot drinks cool you down.
4. “…mass shootings are more likely after anniversaries of the most deadly historical mass shootings. Taken together, these results lend support to a behavioral contagion mechanism following the public salience of mass shootings.” Link here.
5. What motivates leaders to invest in nation-building?
Negative-sum games
Now, a new study published in Royal Society Open Science says honeybees have another defense: screaming.
More precisely, the bees in the study produced a noise known as an “antipredator pipe” — not something that comes out of their mouths, but rather a sound they produce by vibrating their wings, raising their abdomens and exposing a gland used to release a certain kind of pheromone.
Here is the full story.
Thursday assorted links
1. Against CBDC.
2. Confirmation of radar data on Tic Tac. And the Navy filmer, now a commander, claims he received “jamming cues” on his data stream. Lots of additional detail in the chat.
3. Cowen’s Second Law: “Beer mats make bad frisbees.” And what’s in the new infrastructure bill (NYT).
4. “The study maintains that the term “rough fish” is pejorative and degrading to native fish.”
5. “Joe Biden is overseeing one of the largest cuts in legal immigration in history.“
6. Buy property in El Salvador? (NYT)
In which ways are Democratic economists Democrats? (or not)
In a series of tweets (try this one), Matt Yglesias has been arguing that academic economists are far more Democratic than the U.S. population as a whole, though less left-wing than most other academics. I agree with his claims, which are backed by plenty of data, but I wish to add some further thoughts.
Very often political views follow our socioeconomic class and the peer groups we are trying to impress or join. Thus those claims from Matt are true for American policies only. If you took a leftish (but not Marxist radical) Democratic U.S. economist, and asked that person what Mexico should do to improve, I think the answers would include the following:
1. Build state capacity to win the drug war, legalize or decriminalize some drugs too.
2. Make it easier for firms in the informal sector to enter the formal, taxed sector, and thus make it easier for them to grow.
3. Invest more in education for underprivileged Mexican youth.
4. End the state monopolies in industrial products.
5. Do something about corruption (but what?).
6. Diversify the economy away from Pemex and fossil fuels.
7. Maintain NAFTA and try to maintain and indeed rebuild the health of the earlier democratization.
Now, that is pretty much the same as my list! To be sure, the rhetoric on some of these proposals, such as #2 and #3, would be different coming from this imaginary leftish Democratic economist. (Lots more talk about “inequality” on #2 and more about the benefits of regulation on #3, for instance, whereas I would stress the benefits of firm growth.) But I don’t think the substance of the proposals would be all that different.
Whether you wish to say the leftish economist has a right-wing perspective on Mexico, or vice versa, is a moot point. Or are we all centrists on Mexico? There is in any case a reasonable coincidence of policy recommendations once you remove people from their immediate socioeconomic environment. And surely that makes the Democratic economists just a little suspicious to the non-economist intellectual Democrats, as you can see from the Twitter fury directed at Matt Y. for what were purely factual claims.
There is a reason why they call it “the Washington Consensus.” I can assure you that the World Bank and IMF economists are not a bunch of Republican wanna-bees. But the Washington Consensus works, at least on average.
If you asked a non-economist Democratic voter what Mexico should do, I am not sure what answers you would get. But it is hardly obvious you would get the above list (I’d love to see this done as a study and compared to the Republican answers). Maybe the non-economist would talk about foreign aid more? Immigration more? I really don’t know. But they probably are not very aware of the dismal productivity performance of Mexican SMEs and what a problem that is, and probably not very aware of the various state monopolies. They probably would mention corruption, however, and also public safety and winning the fight against the drug gangs.
When it comes to U.S. disputes, the Democratic economist probably would be more “off the rails” than the typical Democratic voter (sorry, you’ll have to find your own links here, there are plenty), if only because that person is more aware of the socioeconomic conflicts and more aware of what one is supposed to believe. The more symbolic the dispute, the further from the median voter the Democratic economist is likely to be. But that is the education doing the work, not the economics background.
If you want to get a Democratic economist making sense, just get that person talking about some other country, follow most of the policy advice, and remove the word “inequality” and a few other catch phrases.
Interestingly, there is a subset of Republican economists who don’t talk sense no matter what the country under consideration. For instance, they might think that “income tax cuts for Mexico” would do a lot of good. In this sense they are the more consistent “cosmopolitan ideologues,” taking that phrase as a truly joint concept. Since most economists are Democrats, perhaps examining “the remnant Republicans” is selecting for excessively consistent ideology. The remnant Republicans are less likely to insist that “every country is different,” a’ la Dani Rodrik. If they were so flexible, they probably wouldn’t still be Republicans.
As a final note, I fear we are entering a world so “well-informed” about affective polarization, and with Woke concepts so globalized, that at some point the majority of the Democratic economists won’t talk sense on Mexico any more either. But we are not yet there — maybe in five to ten years? Maybe never? And where will the Republican remnant end up?
What I’ve been reading
1. David Thomson, A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors. One of the best attempts to make the auteur notion intelligible to the modern viewer, he surveys major directors such as Welles, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard and others. Stephen Frears is the dark horse pick, and he recommends the Netflix show Ozark. I always find Thomson worth reading.
2. Wenfei Tong, Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds. Now this is a great book, wonderful photos, superb analytics and bottom-line approach throughout. By the way, “Superb fairywrens are particularly adept at avoiding incest.”
3. William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. Ignore the subtitle (which itself illustrates a theme of the book), this is the best book on the economics of the arts — circa 2021 — in a long time. “The good news is, you can do it yourself. The bad news is, you have to.” Every aspiring internet creator, whether “artist” or not, should read this book. If you don’t think of your career itself as a creative product — bye-bye!
I very much enjoyed Richard Thompson (with Scott Timberg), Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975, still smarter than the competition and you don’t even have to know much about Thompson.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality is a serious and thorough yet readable account of what the title promises, with a minimum of mood affiliation.
Joanne Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit. A history of antipoverty efforts, with an emphasis on the shift toward “enterprise” in the 1980s, with the microcredit treatment being mostly pre-Yunus.
Mathilde Fasting has edited After the End of History: Conversations with Frank Fukuyama.
Julian Baggini’s The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well is not written for me, but it is a lively and useful introduction to one of humanity’s greatest minds.
Don’t forget Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science.
Arrived in my pile there is William D. Nordhaus, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World, and in September Adam Tooze is publishing Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, and also for September there is Gregg Easterbrook’s Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity — And Why We’re in Danger of Losing It.
Have you noticed there are lots of books coming out now? How many were held over from the pandemic?
Friday assorted links
1. “Unlike some of these contests, the winner isn’t chosen at random. Instead, “your level of enthusiasm for watching home improvement shows will be a strong factor in the selection process,” according to the contest website.” Link here.
2. Inequality amongst children.
4. Which incentives for vaccines are most effective for which groups? (NYT)
5. Magnus Carlsen edition: That was then, and this is now (link fixed).
Monday assorted links
Betting and Bonding with the Kids
Jeff Kaufman has some good parenting tips:
A few weeks ago Anna (4y) wanted to play with some packing material. It looked very messy to me, I didn’t expect she would clean it up, and I didn’t want to fight with her about cleaning it up. I considered saying no, but after thinking about how things like this are handled in the real world I had an idea. If you want to do a hazardous activity, and we think you might go bankrupt and not clean up, we make you post a bond. This money is held in escrow to fund the cleanup if you disappear. I explained how this worked, and she went and got a dollar:
When she was done playing, she cleaned it up without complaint and got her dollar back. If she hadn’t cleaned it up, I would have, and kept the dollar.
Some situations are more complicated, and call for bets. I wanted to go to a park, but Lily (6y) didn’t want to go to that park because the last time we had been there there’d been lots of bees. I remembered that had been a summer with unusually many bees, and it no longer being that summer or, in fact, summer at all, I was not worried. Since I was so confident, I offered my $1 to her $0.10 that we would not run into bees at the park. This seemed fair to her, and when there were no bees she was happy to pay up.
Over time, they’ve learned that my being willing to bet, especially at large odds, is pretty informative, and often all I need to do is offer. Lily was having a rough morning, crying by herself about a project not working out. I suggested some things that might be fun to do together, and she rejected them angrily. I told her that often when people are feeling that way, going outside can help a lot, and when she didn’t seem to believe me I offered to bet. Once she heard the 10:1 odds I was offering her I think she just started expecting that I was right, and she decided we should go ride bikes. (She didn’t actually cheer up when we got outside: she cheered up as soon as she made this decision.)
I do think there is some risk with this approach that the child will have a bad time just to get the money, or say they are having a bad time and they are actually not, but this isn’t something we’ve run into. Another risk, if we were to wager large amounts, would be that the child would end up less happy than if I hadn’t interacted with them at all. I handle this by making sure not to offer a bet I think they would regret losing, and while this is not a courtesy I expect people to make later in life, I think it’s appropriate at their ages.
I also recommend the board game Wits and Wagers. In the game you make bets based on questions like “In what year was the computer game Pong released? or “How many ridges are on the outside of a dime.” It’s a clever and fun game because it teaches you not only to estimate and bet accordingly but also to adjust your bets based on seeing how other people bet. Thus, it often happens that a player will less background knowledge can win, precisely because they are less confident and so pay more attention to the information available in other people’s bets. Aumann would approve.
Hat tip: Julia Galef.
Bee Fact of the Day
Murder hornets are in the news. Japanese honey bees have an amazing defense:
Wikipedia: Beekeepers in Japan attempted to introduce western honey bees (Apis mellifera) for the sake of their high productivity. Western honey bees have no innate defense against the hornets, which can rapidly destroy their colonies.[3] Although a handful of Asian giant hornets can easily defeat the uncoordinated defenses of a western honey bee colony, the Japanese honey bee (Apis cerana japonica) has an effective strategy. When a hornet scout locates and approaches a Japanese honey bee hive, she emits specific pheromonal hunting signals. When the Japanese honey bees detect these pheromones, 100 or so gather near the entrance of the nest and set up a trap, keeping the entrance open. This permits the hornet to enter the hive. As the hornet enters, a mob of hundreds of bees surrounds it in a ball, completely covering it and preventing it from reacting effectively. The bees violently vibrate their flight muscles in much the same way as they do to heat the hive in cold conditions. This raises the temperature in the ball to the critical temperature of 46 °C (115 °F). In addition, the exertions of the honey bees raise the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ball. At that concentration of CO2, they can tolerate up to 50 °C (122 °F), but the hornet cannot survive the combination of high temperature and high carbon dioxide level.[45][46] Some honey bees do die along with the intruder, much as happens when they attack other intruders with their stings, but by killing the hornet scout, they prevent it from summoning reinforcements that would wipe out the entire colony.[47]
Detailed research suggests this account of the behavior of the honey bees and a few species of hornets is incomplete and that the honey bees and the predators are developing strategies to avoid expensive and mutually unprofitable conflict. Instead, when honey bees detect scouting hornets, they transmit an “I see you” signal that commonly warns off the predator.[48]
By Takahashi – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=348351
The demise of the happy two-parent family
Here is new work by Rachel Sheffield and Scott Winship, I will not impose further indentation:
“- We argue, against conventional wisdom on the right, that the decades of research on the effects of single parenthood on children amounts to fairly weak evidence that kids would do better if their actual parents got or stayed married. That is not to say that that we think single parenthood isn’t important–it’s a claim about how persuasive we ought to find the research on a question that is extremely difficult to answer persuasively. But even if it’s hard to determine whether kids would do better if their unhappy parents stay together, it is close to self-evident (and uncontroversial?) that kids do better being raised by two parents, happily married.
– We spend some time exploring the question of whether men have become less “marriageable” over time. We argue that the case they have is also weak. The pay of young men fell over the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. But it has fully recovered since. You can come up with other criteria for marriageability–and we show several trends using different criteria–but the story has to be more complicated to work. Plus, if cultural change has caused men to feel less pressure to provide for their kids, then we’d expect that to CAUSE worse outcomes in the labor market for men over time. The direction of causality could go the other way.
– Rather than economic problems causing the increase in family instability, we argue that rising affluence is a better explanation. Our story is about declining co-dependence, increasing individualism and self-fulfillment, technological advances, expanded opportunities, and the loosening of moral constraints. We discuss the paradox that associational and family life has been more resilient among the more affluent. It’s an argument we advance admittedly speculatively, but it has the virtue of being a consistent explanation for broader associational declines too. We hope it inspires research hypotheses that will garner the kind of attention that marriageability has received.
– The explanation section closes with a look at whether the expansion of the federal safety net has affected family instability. We acknowledge that the research on select safety net program generosity doesn’t really support a link. But we also show that focusing on this or that program (typically AFDC or TANF) misses the forest. We present new estimates showing that the increase in safety net generosity has been on the same order of magnitude as the increase in nonmarital birth rates.
– Finally, we describe a variety of policy approaches to address the increase in family stability. These fall into four broad buckets: messaging, social programs, financial incentives, and other approaches. We discuss 16 and Pregnant, marriage promotion programs, marriage penalties, safety net reforms, child support enforcement, Career Academies, and other ideas. We try to be hard-headed about the evidence for these proposals, which often is not encouraging. But the issue is so important that policymakers should keep trying to find effective solutions.”
Saturday assorted links
1. The zero dollar budget movie that topped the box office.
2. Fanta Traore at Fortune covers black economists. Good to see the recognition, but how about Virgil Storr (my colleague, recently promoted, thousands of citations)?
4. George Akerlof essay on the biases in economics.
5. Geoguessr, a new game, an automated version of the old Andrew Sullivan, “view out your window” where is this photo. And what the queen bees really are saying.
6. The success story of Nigerian-Americans.
7. “Median age of COVID-19 patients in Florida was 37 last week, compared to the 60s months ago.”
8. Are the ambidextrous less authoritarian? (speculative)
Bridge loans for economically troubled firms
Andrew Ross Sorkin explains (NYT):
The fix: The government could offer every American business, large and small, and every self-employed — and gig — worker a no-interest “bridge loan” guaranteed for the duration of the crisis to be paid back over a five-year period. The only condition of the loan to businesses would be that companies continue to employ at least 90 percent of their work force at the same wage that they did before the crisis. And it would be retroactive, so any workers who have been laid off in the past two weeks because of the crisis would be reinstated.
Strain and Hubbard call for $1.2 trillion in lending to smaller businesses (Bloomberg). John Cochrane considers a version of the plan. Here is Brunnermeier, Landau, Pagano, and Reis. I have been pondering the following points:
1. If you are an optimist about the cycle of recovery, this is very likely a good idea. If you let those companies fall apart, there is a significant loss of organizational capital and the matching problems in the labor markets have to be solved all over again. Recent experience on that front is not so encouraging.
2. If you are a pessimist about the cycle of recovery, I am less sure how well this will work. Let’s say a vaccine is difficult and there a few waves of the virus. Many of the smaller or even larger businesses may be going under anyway, as they cannot live off aid forever. In the meantime, you might actually want those resources to be reallocated to good transport, biomedical testing, and so on. If the wartime analogy is apt, you don’t want to freeze the previous capital structure into place, unless of course you get lucky and win the war early.
3. If you a pessimist about the solvency of banks (have you ever seen a stress test for 30% unemployment?), you have not gotten the government out of the business of capital allocation.
4. The bridge loans might work especially poorly for start-ups. Yes, StubHub or some company like that is around for the long run, and if the bridge loans can keep them up and running until concerts return, so much the better. But what about the eighty wanna-bees next in line, most of whom are likely to fail? Do they too get bridge loans? (Do note the ecosystem as a whole is yielding positive value.) The market itself chose the venture capital financing form for those entities, not debt. And yet now the government is stepping in and propping them up with debt, even though we know virtually all of them are likely to fail (even pre-coronavirus that was the case). You might think “well, we will know not to do that.” But on what legal basis would those other “likely to fail start-ups” be excluded from the bridge loans?
4b. Is it all about “banks decide”? How do we stop banks from simply hoarding the new money? (The Fed already has flooded the banking system with liquidity.) Just loaning the money to super-safe firms for de facto negative rates? What exactly are the regulatory requirements here? To the extent the loans are de facto guaranteed, won’t banks lend to a large number of lemons? What do the interest rates and collateral requirements look like on these loans and how are those set in what is now a non-competitive setting?
5. Overall my sense is that American policy, if only for cultural reasons, has to proceed on an optimistic basis. It is not clear what the relevant alternative is, and I do not oppose bridge loans. Nonetheless I am seeing too many people jump uncritically at bridge loans with a “throw everything at the wall” approach and not thinking hard enough about their possible downsides. At the very least, being critical about bridge loans will help us make bridge loans better.
6. No, I don’t favor governmental bridge loans for non-profits. De facto, that this means this is a huge relative shift of resources away from non-profits and toward businesses. YMMV.
7. I have received numerous reader emails telling me how bad, slow, and cumbersome is the Small Business Administration process for getting loans. Will this new regime do better?
8. It is the same government that could not organize testing and mask production that we are expecting to run what might amount to a $1 trillion plus bridge loans program.
Have a nice day.
My Conversation with Tim Harford
Here is the transcript and audio, here is part of the summary:
Tim joined Tyler to discuss the role of popular economics in a politicized world, the puzzling polarization behind Brexit, why good feedback is necessary (and rare), the limits of fact-checking, the “tremendously British” encouragement he received from Prince Charles, playing poker with Steve Levitt, messiness in music, the underrated aspect of formal debate, whether introverts are better at public speaking, the three things he can’t live without, and more.
Here is one bit near the opening:
COWEN: These are all easy questions. Let’s think about public speaking, which you’ve done quite a bit of. On average, do you think extroverts or introverts are better public speakers?
HARFORD: I am an introvert. I’ve never seen any research into this, so it should be something that one could test empirically. But as an introvert, I love public speaking because I like being alone, and you’re never more alone than when you’re on the stage. No one is going to bother you when you’re up there. I find it a great way to interact with people because they don’t talk back.
COWEN: What other non-obvious traits do you think predict being good at public speaking?
HARFORD: Hmmm. You need to be willing to rehearse and also willing to improvise and make stuff up as you go along. And I think it’s hard for somebody to be willing to do both. I think the people who like to rehearse end up rehearsing too much and being too stiff and not being willing to adapt to circumstances, whereas the people who are happy to improvise don’t rehearse enough, and so their comments are ill formed and ill considered. You need that capacity to do both.
And another segment:
HARFORD: …Brian Eno actually asked me a slightly different question, which I found interesting, which was, “If you were transported back in time to the year 700, what piece of technology would you take — or knowledge or whatever — what would you take with you from the present day that would lead people to think that you were useful, but would also not cause you to be burned as a witch?”
COWEN: A hat, perhaps.
HARFORD: A hat?
COWEN: If it’s the British Isles.
HARFORD: Well, a hat is useful. I suggested the Langstroth beehive. The Langstroth beehive was invented in about 1850. It’s an enormously important technology in the domestication of bees. It’s a vast improvement on pre-Langstroth beehives, vast improvement on medieval beehives. Yet, it’s fairly straightforward to make and to explain to people how it works and why it works. I think people would appreciate it, and everybody likes honey, and people have valued bees for a long time. So that would have been my answer.
And:
COWEN: I’ve read all of your books. I’ve read close to all of your columns, maybe all of them in fact, and I’m going to ask you a question I also asked Reid Hoffman. You know the truths of economics, plenty of empirical papers. Why aren’t you weirder? I’ve read things by you that I disagreed with, but I’ve never once read anything by you that I thought was outrageous. Why aren’t you weirder?
The conversation has many fine segments, definitely recommended, Tim was in top form. I very much enjoyed our “Brexit debate” as well, too long to reproduce here, but I made what I thought was the best case for Brexit possible and Tim responded.
What I’ve been reading
1. Aladdin, a new translation by Yasmine Seale. A wonderful, lively small volume, a good reintroduction to the Arabian Nights, recommended.
2. Shalini Shankar, Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success. Not as analytical as I was wanting, but more analytical than I had been expecting.
3. Rowan Ricardo Phillips, The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. Provides a good look at the interior world of tennis competition, with emphasis on very recent times. A good look at how to think about the game, not only in the abstract, but as it plays out through the logic of particular events and tournaments.
4. Tim Smedley, Clearing the Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution. Perhaps the best extant introduction to the air pollution issue, one of the world’s most important and underrated crises, and no I am not talking about carbon.
5. Gordon Peake, Beloved Land: Stories, Struggles, and Secrets from Timor-Leste. Mostly analytical, with real information blended with travelogue. I can’t judge the content, but I was never tempted to put this one down and throw it away.
6. Roderick Beaton, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation. Excellent survey and overview, makes the late 19th century intelligible, among other achievements. “For Greeks, unlike the concept of the nation, the state had always been an object of popular derision.”
Will insects go extinct?
No, probably not, no matter what you might have read or seen on Twitter. The underlying paper is “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers.” Here is a tweet thread by Alex Wild on the paper, here is one bit:
They make a great deal of local extinctions as a sort of proxy for global extinctions. That’s pretty dicey. I mean, bison are locally extinct here in my Austin neighborhood. But their numbers are recovering elsewhere.
They used 73 studies done on different taxa in different places. Those studies must represent tens of thousands of person-hours. Gargantuan. But the input studies weren’t designed for global assessment.
The paper itself has strong evidence on the severe pressure on butterflies and bees, and furthermore the general encroachment of humans on the natural environment probably is going to diminish species numbers and biodiversity, for insects too. At the same time, the remaining species will adapt and evolve to meet the new potential habitats, with many kinds of insects having an easier time adapting than say gorillas.
The paper has some quite non-dramatic sentences such as: “Studies on ant populations and trends are lacking except for a few invasive species.” And: “A single long-term study on grasshoppers and crickets is available…”
So I don’t quite see how the authors arrive at: “The conclusion is clear: unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” Bryan Caplan, bet away!