Results for “food” 2044 found
Those new service sector jobs
Wanted: Restaurant manager. Competitive salary: $100,000.
The six-figure sum is not being offered at a haute cuisine location with culinary accolades, but at fast-food chain Taco Bell. Amid an increasingly tough U.S. labor market, the company is betting a higher salary will help it attract workers and keep them on the team.
The Yum! Brands Inc.-owned chain will test the higher salary in select restaurants in the U.S. Midwest and Northeast, and will also try a new role for employees who want leadership experience but don’t want to be in the management role.
Here is more by Leslie Patton at Bloomberg, via Joe Weisenthal.
My Conversation with Abhijit Banerjee
I had an excellent time in this one, here is the audio and transcript. Here is the opening summary:
Abhijit joined Tyler to discuss his unique approach to economics, including thoughts on premature deindustrialization, the intrinsic weakness of any charter city, where the best classical Indian music is being made today, why he prefers making Indian sweets to French sweets, the influence of English intellectual life in India, the history behind Bengali leftism, the best Indian regional cuisine, why experimental economics is underrated, the reforms he’d make to traditional graduate economics training, how his mother’s passion inspires his research, how many consumer loyalty programs he’s joined, and more.
Yes there was plenty of economics, but I feel like excerpting this bit:
COWEN: Why does Kolkata have the best sweet shops in India?
BANERJEE: It’s a bit circular because, of course, I tend to believe Kolkata has —
COWEN: So do I, however, and I have no loyalty per se.
BANERJEE: I think largely because Kolkata actually also — which is less known — has absolutely amazing food. In general, the food is amazing. Relative to the rest of India, Kolkata had a very large middle class with a fair amount of surplus and who were willing to spend money on. I think there were caste and other reasons why restaurants didn’t flourish. It’s not an accident that a lot of Indian restaurants were born out of truck stops. These are called dhabas.
COWEN: Sure.
BANERJEE: Caste has a lot to do with it. But sweets are just too difficult to make at home, even though lots of people used to make some of them. And I think there was some line that was just permitted that you can have sweets made out of — in these specific places, made by these castes.
There’s all kinds of conversations about this in the early-to-mid 19th century on what you can eat out, what is eating out, what can you buy in a shop, et cetera. I think in the late 19th century you see that, basically, sweet shops actually provide not just sweets, but for travelers, you can actually eat a lunch there for 50 cents, even now, an excellent lunch. They’re some savories and a sweet — maybe for 40 rupees, you get all of that.
And it was actually the core mechanism for reconciling Brahminical cultures of different kinds with a certain amount of social mobility. People came from outside. They were working in Kolkata. Kolkata was a big city in India. All the immigrants came. What would they eat? I think a lot of these sweet shops were a place where you actually don’t just get sweets — you get savories as well. And savories are excellent.
In Kolkata, if you go out for the day, the safest place to eat is in a sweet shop. It’s always freshly made savories available. You eat the freshly made savories, and you get some sweets at the end.
COWEN: Are higher wage rates bad for the highest-quality sweets? Because rich countries don’t seem to have them.
BANERJEE: Oh no, rich countries have fabulous sweets. I mean, at France —
COWEN: Not like in Kolkata.
BANERJEE: France has fabulous sweets. I think the US is exceptional in the quality of the . . . let me say, the fact that you don’t get actually excellent sweets in most places —
And this on music:
BANERJEE: Well, I think Bengal was never the place for vocal. As a real, I would say a real addict of vocal Indian classical music, I would say Bengal is not, never the center of . . . If you look at the list of the top performers in vocal Indian classical music, no one really is a Bengali.
In instrumental, Bengal was always very strong. Right now, one of the best vocalists in India is a man who lives in Kolkata. His name is Rashid Khan. He’s absolutely fabulous in my view, maybe the best. On a good day, he’s the best that there is. He’s not a Bengali. He’s from Bihar, I think, and he comes and settles in Kolkata. I think a Hindi speaker by birth, other than a Bengali. So I don’t think Bengal ever had top vocalists.
It had top instrumentalists, and Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Nikhil Banerjee — these were all Bengali instrumentalists. Even now, I would say the best instrumentalists, a lot of them are either Bengali or a few of them are second . . . Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan were the two great non-Bengali instrumentalists of that period, I would say, of the strings especially. And they both settled in Kolkata, so that their children grew up in Kolkata.
And the other great instrumentalists are these Kolkata-born. They went to the same high school as I did. There were these Kolkata-born, not of Bengali families, but from very much the same culture. So I think Kolkata still is the place which produces the best instrumentalists — sitarists, sarod players, et cetera.
COWEN: Why is the better vocal music so often from the South?
Definitely recommended, Abhijit was scintillating throughout.
*Capital and Ideology*, by Thomas Piketty
This book is more than 1000 pp., here are my impressions:
1. About 600 pp. of this book is a carefully done history of the accumulation and sometimes dissipation of wealth and property. You can evaluate that material without reference to any particular set of political views.
2. At some point the book veers into partisan issues such as the wealth tax. Many of those parts remain interesting, but it also becomes clear that Piketty is “out to lunch,” to wit (p.591):
To return to the Soviet attitude toward poverty, it is important to try to understand why the government took such a radical stance against all forms of private ownership of the means of production, no matter how small. Criminalizing carters and food peddlers to the point of incarcerating them may seem absurd, but there was a certain logic to the policy. Most important was the fear of not knowing where to stop. If one began by authorizing private ownership of small businesses, would one be able to set limits?
I can think of a less naive explanation of Soviet attitudes toward the private sector. Piketty also calls for “participatory socialism” (p.592), a dubious doctrine not to be confused with say Nordic social democracy. For instance, Sweden (among other countries) seems to have fairly extreme wealth inequality.
3. The sentence “Real wages are much higher in America than in Western Europe” does not come easily to his pen. Nor does “The United States is a remarkably successful innovator, let’s see what we can learn from that.” Or even “Raising wages is more important than merely limiting inequality.” Those seems to be banished thoughts in the Piketty intellectual universe.
4. The sections on Soviet and socialist experience can only be called “delusional.” In his account, if only a few political decisions had gone the other way, the USSR might have ended up on a path similar to that of Norway (p.603 and thereabouts).
You know, maybe you think that the inequalities of the current day are much worse than people had been expecting. but that should not revise your view of socialism and the Soviet Union, two matters fairly well settled by historical research.
5. Give these lenses, it is impossible for Piketty to offer any commentary on recent events (about the last 400 pp. of the book) that is anything other than distorted and unreliable. There is massive distrust of the wealthy in this book, and virtually no distrust of concentrated state power.
6. There is a considerable sum of useful and valuable material in this book, and I would not try to dissuade anyone inclined from reading it. Nonetheless I suspect its main import is as another sign of the growing compartmentalization of academic discourse — good work intermingled with highly questionable partisan material — and how so many academics, if the mood affiliation tilts in the right direction, will tolerate or even encourage that.
You can pre-order the book here.
Friday assorted links
1. Shoplifters’ forum with discussion topics, some involving the idea of arbitrage.
2. Unconventional strategies for practicing Spanish.
3. The culture that is Sweden? Cook criticized for making food that is too tasty.
4. The culture that is (near) Maldon, Essex.
5. My two most read Bloomberg columns were on UFOs and Boomers.
6. Redux of a 2008 post: “For the people caught up in these intellectual traps, it all boils down to which groups of whiners they find most objectionable.”
Work on these things
Here are some projects I’d like to see funded, some through my own ventures, or others through alternative mechanisms. On these issues, the right person could have an enormous impact, whether through the research side or directly coming up with actionable ideas, including of course creating and building companies.
More studies of super-effective people. Either individually or collectively. If you take the outliers in any domain, what should our intuitions be for understanding the underlying processes determining how many people could have ended up in those positions? How many people had the right genes but had the wrong upbringing? How many people had the right genes and the right upbringing but the wrong luck, or perhaps society failed them in some other manner? The answers to these questions have significant policy implications.
A comprehensive analysis and critique of the NIH and NSF. The US funds more science research than any other country — about $35 billion per year on the NIH and $8 billion per year on the NSF. How exactly do these institutions work? How have they changed over time and have these changes been for good or bad? Based on what we now know, how might we better structure the NIH and NSF? What experiments should we run or what kind of studies should we perform?
Why is life expectancy so long in Hong Kong? Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 84.23 years, more than five years longer than the US and the highest in the world. Hong Kong is not that wealthy (median household income is $38,000 USD); it’s somewhat polluted; people don’t obviously eat what seems like a healthy diet; and they don’t seem to exercise a great deal. What should we learn from this?
Bloomberg Terminal for everything. This might be a nonprofit, a company, or a government project. To state the obvious, many analyses hinge on having the right data. If you’re in finance, getting the right data is often easy: just pull it up on your Bloomberg terminal. But there is no practical way to ask “what most correlates with life expectancy in Hong Kong?” (See above on that topic.) Figure out a way to build a growing corpus of structured data across the broadest variety of domains.
A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system. The American healthcare system is by far the world’s biggest and also by a considerable margin the world’s most influential. Yet there is no comprehensive, dispassionate, and analytical disaggregation of how it all works. Who are the actors and what are their incentives? To the degree that the relationships between different entities are in equilibrium, what are the forces ensuring they stay there? What is the Sankey diagram of fund flows within the U.S. healthcare system?
Better answers for how to quantify worker productivity. In most knowledge industries, companies have nothing better than highly subjective measures (i.e., supervisors’ assessments) of worker productivity. In theory, it seems significant improvements should be possible. In the short term, is it possible to measure the productivity or efficacy of individual managers, software engineers, educators, scientists? How about teams, and what size of team? And can we do so without creating Goodhart’s Law problems?
What should Widodo do? Indonesia is a large, populous middle-income country. It faces no major near-term security threats. It has a small manufacturing base and no major non-commodity export sectors. What is the best non-bureaucratic 10 page economic development briefing document and set of prescriptions that one could write for Indonesia’s president? For Indonesia, substitute Philippines, Chile, or Morocco.
A comparative study of foundations and their efficacy. Philanthropic foundations are behind a lot of important work. But how does a foundation decide what it wants and how the resulting grants should be structured? How effective are the programs of that foundation? In practice, how have its institutional mechanisms evolved? Imagine some kind of resource that answered these questions for the major American foundations.
Institutional critiques. More broadly, there is no discipline of institutional criticism. There is a very rich literature of policy criticism in economics, journalism, and non-fiction books. There is also a rich literature of “corporate criticism”: there are thousands of articles about how Facebook (budget: $20 billion) works and how it might be good or bad. But there is relatively little analysis of the most important institutions in our society: government departments. How is the Department of Agriculture (budget: $150 billion) organized and how effective or not is it? How about the Department of Energy (budget: $32 billion)? And why are not those questions paramount in the minds of policymakers?
Cultures of excellence. If you ask informed Filipinos why the street food is mediocre, they will tell you that Philippines lacks a “culture of excellence”. It seems that some kind of “culture of doing things really well” has very persistent and generalizable effects. South Korea and Japan have developed much more rapidly than many Asian countries, despite many others adopting relatively free “Washington Consensus”-style trade policies. Russia still has higher GDP per capita than Mexico despite Mexico’s economic policies having been much better than Russia’s for many, many decades at this point. How should we think about cultures of excellence?
Regeneration at the government layer. Herbert Kaufman (unsurprisingly) concludes in an empirical study that government organizations don’t die. While we might all agree that this is a problem, actionable solutions are in short supply. What can or should we do about this?
IQ paradox. Ron Unz points out that intergenerational variation of IQ may be much higher than is often assumed, citing Ireland and Croatia as examples. For instance, not long ago Ireland had sub-par measured IQ and now that figure is much higher, following growth and prosperity. The policy implications of IQ disparities across nations may therefore be different to what might otherwise obviously follow: perhaps environment matters much more than is assumed. If so, what should we be doing more or less of?
Credible plans for new top-tier universities. 7 of the best 25 universities in the world (Times ranking) were started in the US between 1861 and 1891 by ambitious reformers. It’s probably harder in many ways to start an impactful new university today… but it’s likely not impossible and the returns to doing so successfully might be very high. What might be a good plan? Why have so few of these plans come to fruition?
Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields. As a general matter, a lot of oral knowledge in the world is still not readily available, and reflection on this fact might lead one in many interesting directions. One obvious application is helping people more readily understand the present state of affairs in different domains. If I want to know “how we’re doing” in, say, antiviral drug development, I could spend a few hours hunting for top researchers, email a few, and perhaps get on calls to obtain their candid assessments. Are we making good progress? What are the most important open problems? What’s holding things back? And so on. How can we make all of this knowledge publicly available across all fields?
Mechanisms for better matching. One of the single interventions that could do the most to improve global welfare would be to improve the efficiency of the partner/marriage matching ecosystem. Online dating demonstrates that significant change (and maybe even improvement?) is possible, with some figures suggesting that up to two thirds of relationships in the US may now be initiated through online dating services. Accomplished people often seem to struggle with this challenge. Good solutions would be important.
What should Durkan do? Jenny Durkan is the current mayor of Seattle. As cities become more important loci of economic activity in the world, the importance of effective city governance will increase. As with the Widodo challenge, what is the best 10 page briefing document and set of prescriptions that one could write for her? What about Baltimore and St. Louis?
FDA Dual Track Legislation Advances
S&P Global: Four Republican lawmakers have authored new legislation to permit drugs for critically ill patients to enter the market before completing late-stage trials, saying the bill was necessary because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory process was too slow and burdensome.
The bill would create a time-limited conditional approval pathway in the U.S. similar to a system that has long been used by European regulators.
…The conditional approval would be valid for one year and could be renewed annually for up to five years….Companies would be required to meet certain obligations, like completing clinical investigations to provide full demonstration of safety and effectiveness and other studies.
…Companies could seek full U.S. approval at any time. The FDA would be required to let manufacturers include in their applications the real-world evidence they collected during the conditional approval period.
The lawmakers want the FDA to be able to grant the limited marketing authorization to new drugs that have successfully completed phase 1 and 2 trials, with the idea that companies could generate revenue to help fund their phase 3 studies.
They emphasized their legislation is targeted especially at small biopharmaceutical companies that may struggle to cover the costs of late-stage trials.
Under the dual-track approval system, companies would be able to sell pharmaceuticals earlier but would be required to track outcomes so greater real world information would be developed in the FDA process. The result is a more dynamic approval process better suited to modern medicine. The idea is due to the excellent Bartley J. Madden (note my bias).
Madden and Nobel-prize winner Vernon Smith explained the dual-track idea, noting:
Today’s world of accelerating medical advancements is ushering in an age of personalized medicine in which patients’ unique genetic makeup and biomarkers will increasingly lead to customized therapies in which samples are inherently small. This calls for a fast-learning, adaptable FTCM environment for generating new data. In sharp contrast, the status quo FDA environment provides a yes/no approval decision based on statistical tests for an average patient, i.e., a one-size-fits-all drug approval process.
A similar process has been adopted in Japan for regenerative medicine.
Monday assorted links
1. Are they clearing street food out of Bangkok? (NYT)
2. It is actually O’Sullivan’s First Law, not Conquest’s Second Law.
4. Does tough grading keep women out of STEM?
5. Firefighting expenditures in the western U.S.: “The expected net present value of this subsidy can exceed 20% of a home’s value.”
Airline markets in everything
Out of the many repulsive things about air travel, airline food probably ranks high. But not for AirAsia.
Asia’s largest low-cost carrier is betting people love its food so much that it opened its first restaurant on Monday, offering the same menu it sells on flights. It’s not a gimmick, either: AirAsia, based in Malaysia, said it plans to open more than 100 restaurants globally within the next five years.
The quick-service restaurant’s first location is in a mall in Kuala Lumpur. It’s called Santan, meaning coconut milk in Malay, which is the same branding AirAsia uses on its in-flight menus.
Entrees cost around $3 USD and include local delicacies such as chicken rice and the airline’s signature Pak Nasser’s Nasi Lemak dish, a rice dish with chilli sauce. Locally sourced coffee, teas and desserts are also on the menu.
Here is the full story, via Michael Rosenwald. P.S. Pablo Escobar’s brother is now selling a folding smart phone.
Is Cebu the most typical city in the world?
Yes, Cebu, Philippines. That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Now consider some non-economic factors. What is the world’s most important and widely spoken language? English. Along with the native Cebuano and Tagalog, English is widely spoken in Cebu, and present on most of the signs. And what about religion? Christianity registers as the most common religion in the world, and the dominant religion in Cebu is — you guessed it — Christianity. Islam, Hinduism and various native religions are also represented, as well as variants of folk Catholicism and folk Islam, mirroring the syncretic nature of religious belief in so many other countries.
Asia is the world’s most populous continent by far, and the Philippines (of course) is in Asia. Score another point for the typicality of Cebu. Yet there are also Spanish and Spanish colonial influences, and at times I felt like I was in Latin America more than Asia. That broadens the global connections of Cebu.
Also notable is Cebu’s North American heritage, as the Philippines was a de facto U.S. colony from 1898 to 1935. The native culture is still very much its own, but there are more superficial markers of U.S. cultural influence in Cebu, and in the Philippines more generally, than in almost any other emerging economy. There are lots of fast food restaurants, American casual dress is widespread, and basketball is much beloved.
What else? Most of the world’s population now lives in cities, and Cebu is the second largest metropolitan area in the Philippines.
Cebu is also pretty close to global median income. And here is the penultimate line:
I therefore nominate a 30-year-old Cebu mother as the epicenter of human existence.
Rico Lechon and Cafe Laguna are two places you might consider eating at.
Thursday Thanksgiving assorted links
1. Arizona pizzeria organist dies, make us realize more restaurants need organists.
2. Jiro sushi no longer open to the public.
3. Swiss asylum-seeker results: “Our baseline result is that cohorts exposed to civil conflict/mass killing during childhood are 35 percent more prone to violent crime than the average cohort.”
4. Will AI be a disaster for authoritarianism?
Best non-fiction books of 2019
It was a very strong year for non-fiction, these were the best books, more or less in the order I read them:
Toby Green, Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution.
Alain Bertaud, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.
Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities.
James W. Cortada, IBM: The Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon.
Joanna Lillis, Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan.
T.C.A. Raghavan, The People Next Door: The Curious History of India’s Relations with Pakistan.
Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History.
Ana Fifield, The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un.
Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew us to the Moon.
Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.
Bruce Cannon Gibney, The Nonsense Factory: The Making and Breaking of the American Legal System.
Ben Westhoff, Fentanyl, Inc.
Ben Lewis, The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting.
Judith Grisel, Never Enough: the neuroscience and experience of addiction.
David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History of Five Centuries.
Matthew Gale and Natalia Sidlina, Natalia Goncharova.
Lydia Davis, Essays One.
Fuchsia Dunlop, The Food of Sichuan.
Frederic Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy.
Alan Galley, Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire.
Robert Alter, translator, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (or should that go under “fiction”?).
Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, more here.
And which book takes the very top prize for best of the year? You can’t compare the Alter to the others, so I will opt for Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift and also Pekka Hämäläinen’s Lakota America, with Julia Lovell on Maoism and Alain Bertaud on cities as the runner-ups. But again a strong year all around.
Of course the year is not over yet, this list is for your holiday shopping, I’ll post an update toward the very end of December.
In the meantime, apologies to those I missed or forgot…
Bonus CWT episode with Fuchsia Dunlop
Here is the transcript and audio, and wonderful photos, over a Chinese meal at Mama Chang in Fairfax, run by the famous Peter Chang. I am not acting as lead interviewer, so this is more like a “Conversation with Tyler chiming in,” nonetheless numerous D.C. area food luminaries are present, as are other members of the Cowen family. Here is one brief excerpt:
T. COWEN: You learned Chinese food in China, of course, much of it in Sichuan province, Hunan province. As Chinese teach food, how is the method of education and training different from, say, Great Britain or the United States?
DUNLOP: Well, I haven’t been to culinary school in Great Britain or the United States, so I’m not sure.
T. COWEN: You’ve been to school in these countries.
DUNLOP: The first thing is that when you go to cooking school, you are learning the building blocks of a cuisine, which is like the grammar of a language. So the basic components, the basic processes and flavors, which you then put together to make a multitude of dishes.
Whereas, I guess, if you were studying French cuisine, you will learn some classic sauces, a bit of knife work, techniques of pastry making. In China, in Sichuan, absolutely fundamental was dao gong (刀工), the knife skills.
[Lydia] CHANG: I actually have a story to share about Dad’s cutting knife. He said when he first started learning, in school, there’s only limited time, but he wants to really excel at it. So he returned back to the dorm, started cutting, using cleaver to cut newspaper to practice.
Some of you will like this a lot, but don’t expect a normal CWT episode. And here is Fuchsia’s wonderful new book The Food of Sichuan, a significantly updated new edition of the old.
Tuesday assorted links
1. How much did the trade war and health care affect the 2018 election?
2. Amazon to offer a new grocery store separate from Whole Foods.
3. “Matt Hancock, the British health secretary, publicly apologized to a teenager with autism who has spent close to three years in near total seclusion.” Worse than slavery (NYT).
5. ‘Bookshops pass on anything to the right of Tony Blair’.
6. New (expensive) book on the economics of Michael Polanyi.
My Conversation with Ted Gioia
Here is the audio and transcript, the chat centered around music, including Ted’s new and fascinating book Music: A Subversive History. We talk about music and tech, the Beatles, which songs and performers we are embarrassed to like, whether jazz still can be cool, Ted’s family background, why restaurants are noisier, why the blues are disappearing, Elton John, which countries are underrated for their musics, whether anyone loves the opera, whether musical innovation is still possible, and much much more. Here are some excerpts:
GIOIA: …Spotify still isn’t profitable. I believe Spotify will become profitable, but they’re going to do it by putting the squeeze on people. Musicians will suffer even more, probably, in the future than they have in the past. What’s good for Spotify is not good for the whole music ecosystem.
Let me make one more point here. I think it’s very important. If you go back a few years ago, there was a value chain in music — started with the musician, worked for the record label. The records went to the record distributor. They went to the retailer, who sold the record to the consumer. At that point, everybody in that chain had a vested interest in a healthy music ecosystem in which people enjoyed songs. The more people enjoyed songs, the better business was for everybody.
That chain has been broken now. Apple would give away songs for free to sell devices. They don’t care about the viability of the music subeconomy. For them, it could be a loss leader. Google doesn’t care about music. They would give music away for free to sell ads. In fact, they do that on YouTube.
The fundamental change here is, you now have a distribution system for music in which some of the players do not have a vested interest in the broader musical experience and ecosystem. This is tremendously dangerous, and that’s the real reason why I fear the growth of streaming, is because the people involved in streaming don’t like music.
And:
COWEN: Do you think music today is helping the sexual revolution or hurting it? Speaking of Prince…
GIOIA: It’s very interesting. There’s market research and focus groups about how people use music in their day-to-day life. Take, for example, this: you’re going to bring a date back to your apartment for a romantic dinner. So what do you worry about?
Well, the first thing I have to worry about is, my place is a mess. I’ve got to clean it up. That’s number one. The second thing you worry about is, what food am I going to fix? But number three on people’s list — when you interview them — is the music because they understand the music is going to seal the deal. If there’s going to be something really romantic, that music is essential.
People will agonize for hours over which music to play. I think that we miss this. People view music as distance from people’s everyday life. But in fact, people put music to work every day, and one of the premier ways they do it is in romance.
COWEN: Let’s say you were not married, and you’re 27 years old, and you’re having a date over. What music do you put on in 2019 under those conditions?
GIOIA: It’s got to always be Sinatra.
COWEN: Because that is sexier? It’s generally appealing? It’s not going to offend anyone? Why?
GIOIA: I must say up front, I am no expert on seduction, so you’re now getting me out of my main level of expertise. But I would think that if you were a seducer, you would want something that was romantic on the surface but very sexualized right below that, and no one was better at these multilayered interpretations of lyrics than Frank Sinatra.
I always call them the Derrida of pop singing because there was always the surface level and various levels that you could deconstruct. And if you are planning for that romantic date, hey, go for Frank.
There is much more at the link, interesting throughout, and again here is Ted’s new book.
Release Bad News on a Friday
Politicians have long known to release bad news on a Friday and it appears that pharmaceutical firms may do likewise.
Safety alerts are announcements made by health regulators warning patients and doctors about new drug-related side effects. However, not all safety alerts are equally effective. We provide evidence that the day of the week on which the safety alerts are announced explains differences in safety alert impact. Specifically, we show that safety alerts announced on Fridays are less broadly diffused: they are shared 34% less on social media, mentioned in 23% to 66% fewer news articles, and are 12% to 51% less likely to receive any news coverage at all. As a consequence of this, we propose Friday alerts are less effective in reducing drug-related side effects. We find that moving a Friday alert to any other weekday would reduce all drug-related side effects by 9% to 12%, serious drug-related complications by 6% to 15%, and drug-related deaths by 22% to 36%. This problem is particularly important because Friday was the most frequent weekday for safety alert announcements from 1999 to 2016. We show that this greater prevalence of Friday alerts might not be random: firms that lobbied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the past are 49% to 56% more likely to have safety alerts announced on Fridays.
From The Friday Effect in Management Science by Diestre, Barber and Santalo.
Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.