Results for “from the rooftops” 79 found
Rooftops
It’s not at all clear that after tax 1% inequality has gone up at all https://t.co/rJADPjCFSg
— Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) November 8, 2023
Rooftops, people
We find that consumer surplus is the primary component of social impact (dwarfing profits, worker surplus, and externalities), suggesting that consumer impacts deserve more attention from impact investors. Existing ESG and social impact ratings are essentially unrelated to our economically grounded measures.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Hunt Allcott, Giovanni Montanari, Bora Ozaltun, and Brandon Tan.
Cultural values and productivity (rooftops)
This paper estimates differences in human capital as country-of-origin specific labor productivity terms, in firm production functions, making it immune to wage discrimination concerns. After accounting for wage and experience, estimated human capital varies by a factor of around 3 between the 90th and 10th percentile. When I investigate which country-of-origin characteristics correlate most closely with human capital, cultural values are the only robust predictor. This relationship persists among children of migrants. Consistent with a plausible cultural mechanism, individuals whose origin place a high value on autonomy hold a comparative advantage in positions characterized by a low degree of routinization.
That is by Andreas Ek from Lund University, recently accepted to the Journal of Political Economy. I do not currently see ungated versions of the paper.
Fact of the day, get to those rooftops!
Pepvar’s first goal should be supporting the production of enough doses to vaccinate the entire world within a year. It is estimated that building such capacity for an mRNA vaccine like Moderna’s would cost less than $4 billion — that’s significantly less than the U.S. government already spends each day on Covid-19 relief — with the cost about $2 per dose. Of course, making the vaccines is just the first step: Pepvar must
People, even if that estimate is off by a factor of ten or more…etc. Here is the NYT link, bJames Krellenstein, Peter Staley and .
Soon they will seek to cancel the rooftops
Based on a simple and intuitive point, the title of the paper is: “How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality?”, and the answer is something you hardly ever hear acknowledged:
When facing shifts in the income distribution like those observed in the US, a utilitarian planner chooses higher progressivity in response to larger residual inequality but lower progressivity in response to widening skill price dispersion reflecting technical change. Overall, optimal progressivity is approximately unchanged between 1980 and 2016. We document that the progressivity of the actual US tax and transfer system has similarly changed little since 1980, in line with the model prescription.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Jonathan Heathcote, Kjetil Storesletten, and Giovanni L. Violante.
Rooftops, and warm ones at that
Our best tool is to compare Labour’s 2019 manifesto against the Sanders’ economic platform. Doing so makes clear that Bernie is more radical than Corbyn on economics, both in absolute terms and relative to their countries’ respective politics.
Take the size of government. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl calculates that Sanders’ promises would add $97.5 trillion to spending over a decade, taking total annual US government spending to around 70% of GDP and more than doubling the size of the federal government. Even if climate investments prove a one-off, spending would settle at a massive 64% of GDP. That’s far higher than Labour’s planned 44% and even France’s current 57% (itself the highest in the OECD).
A look at certain individual spending areas also underlines just how radical the Sanders agenda is. Like Labour, he wants government-funded free public higher education. Unlike Labour, he’d also forgive all existing student debts. On climate change and infrastructure, Labour planned for £400 billion investment over 10 years (about 20% of current annual UK GDP). Sanders wants to invest $16.3 trillion over 15 years (about 75% of current annual US GDP.) On healthcare, both want government spending to expand to cover all medical treatment, prescription charges, long-term care for the elderly, and dentistry. But only Sanders would explicitly ban private health insurance (Labour did consider that proposal but held off in the end).
True, Corbyn and McDonnell favoured nationalising buses, railways, the energy sector, water, and parts of the broadband network. Corbyn even wanted free government-funded broadband for all. But even here the results of Sanders’ pledges would bring similar results. He would set up “publicly owned” and “democratically controlled” broadband networks. And his Green New Deal would bring most public transport under government control and deliver effective public ownership of energy production.
When it comes to financing their promises, Sanders is arguably more radical again. Labour planned to only borrow to invest, raising the deficit by about 2% of GDP per year. But Bernie’s tax plans get nowhere near fully funding his agenda. Absent further broad-based tax rises, Riedl calculates annual borrowing would soar to around 30% of US GDP if his spending plans were implemented…
Combined with national insurance, Labour’s top marginal income tax rate would have been 52%. Sanders’ top federal income tax rate alone would be 52%, bringing a top combined top rate of around 80% once state and payroll taxes are considered. Sanders wants a new wealth tax too, another option Labour shirked. And while Labour wanted to raise the UK’s main corporation tax rate to 26%, Bernie would opt for 35% with a broad base.
That is from Ryan Bourne of Cato, and yes there is more at the link.
I would put it this way: right now we are sampling the offer curve of left-wing intellectuals and activists for “prioritizing climate change” vs. “mood affiliation,” and…let us hope for the best!
Here is Daron Acemoglu on Bernie Sanders.
Words of wisdom, man the rooftops
While the prediction that rising market toughness could generate an increase in concentration and the profit share may seem counterintuitive, the ambiguous relationship between concentration, profit shares, and the stringency of competition often arises in industrial organization.
That is from Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson and Van Reenen. In essence, rising market toughness reallocates a greater share of output toward highly productive superstar firms, which are more productive but also have higher fixed costs and mark-ups over marginal cost.
Have you ever wondered how “rising Chinese competition devastated parts of the American working class” and “market power is up” both could be true? Well, this paper is the best available attempt to square that circle. Market power is up as measured by price to marginal cost ratios, or concentration ratios, but in fact competition is much tougher than it used to be and the antitrust authorities should not (at least in this regard) be blamed for their laxness.
Very few people have put in the time to understand this point, which I should add comes from some of the top IO economists in the field.
Have I mentioned that changes in concentration are correlated with the most dynamic economic sectors?
Different rooftops
As the system gets gamed, the costs will be much, much higher than the CBO is estimating.
Arnold Kling explains his words in more detail. Elsewhere:
If you think of the social cost of this bill it's well below $900 billion. If we could collect in tax revenues all the dollars in savings and new wages that people will get because of this bill, it would bring the cost well below $900 billion.
Jonathan Gruber explains his words in more detail.
Trade and inequality, revisited — Rooftops edition
Another way of investigating the relationship between inequality and
trade with poor countries implies that China may actually help the
poor, suggests new work from University of Chicago economists Christian Broda and John Romalis.Instead of focusing purely on what’s produced outside of the
country, Broda and Romalis turn their attention to an interesting but
obvious relationship between imports and consumption within our border:
The goods exported by poorer countries are typically consumed by
lower-income Americans. Our typical methods of quantifying inequality,
however, don’t take this into account.
At the same time, inflation in the price of these goods has fallen
behind inflation in services, which make up a greater portion of what
wealthier people buy. Taken together, these trends imply that official
measures may be overstating the rise in inequality.
Looking at trade data between 1994 and 2005, Broda and Romalis
construct inflation rates for different income groups and find that
rates for the richest outpaced rates for the poorest by about 4 percent
over the period. Since income inequality between the top and bottom 10
percent of earners grew by about 6 percent, the different inflation
rates among income groups wipes out about two-thirds of the rise in
inequality.
The emphasis in that last sentence is mine. It continues:
China’s role in this new way of analyzing inequality is large, accounting for about 50 percent of the total reduction.
And scream this part from the rooftops too [how do you scream a parenthesis?]:
(A very interesting aside. Broda and Romalis also find that the poor
are more likely than the rich to buy newer goods. Because of the lag in
how quickly the CPI tracks new products, the researchers argue that
once this "new goods bias"
which serves to keep official inflation rates higher than they actually
are since newer goods are typically cheaper, is factored out,
inequality between the rich and the poor between 1994 and 2005 may not
have changed at all.)
Here is the link. Again, here is the Broda and Romalis paper. If this holds up it is big, big news and we must revise many claims that have been made about inequality, trade, and China.
Spanking and Sex
Here are some more oddities about the study. According to this report:
"the study found that 29 percent of the
male and 21 percent of the female students had verbally coerced sex
from another person….The percentages of those who physically forced sex were much lower: 1.7 percent of the men and 1.2 percent of the women…."
Don’t these percentages seem very high? Especially for the women?
And get this,
"Straus found that 15 percent of the men and 13 percent of the women
had insisted on sex without a condom at least once in the past year.Using the four-step corporal punishment scale, Straus found that of
the group with the lowest score on the corporal punishment scale, 12.5
percent had insisted on unprotected sex. In contrast, 25 percent of
students in the highest corporal punishment group engaged in this type
of risky sex."
13 percent of the women insisted that the man not use a condom?
More importantly, I believe that there is a causal connection between child abuse (rather than spanking) and later problems of violence but to me a connection between the kid being spanked and later engaging in risky sex is especially suggestive that the connection is a risk-loving person. Children who take a lot of risks, like running out on to the street a lot, are going to get spanked more. Later these same children also engage in risky activities. Not having seen the data I would be willing to bet that spanking is also correlated with skydiving, not wearing your seatbelt, gambling, and many other risky behaviors which are plausible not caused by spanking.
Finally, how about this for a non sequitur of the day:
"because over 90 percent of U.S. parents spank toddlers, the potential
benefits for prevention of sexual and relationship violence is large,”
Straus says."
U.S. immigration policy is slightly better than you think
Keep in mind that Canadian immigration policy also is U.S. immigration policy. Currently Canada is taking in about 400,000 people a year, with plans to raise that to 500,000. At the same time, the U.S. is doing little to boost high-skilled immigration. But Canada is serving as a kind of farm system for the U.S. The very best Canadian arrivals — or their children — have the best chance of getting into the United States, if only through O-1 visas.
So if the quantity of Canadian immigration is going up, the quality of U.S. immigration is going up too, through Canada in this case. Call it cherry-picking if you like.
Not surprisingly, neither side in the immigration debate wants to scream this loudly from the rooftops. The pro-immigration side wants to present the status quo as dire. The immigration-skeptical side does not want to stress that there are perfectly good ways of screening for immigrant quality, some of which already are in place.
Great News for Female Academics!
For decades female academics have been told that the deck is stacked against them by discrimination in hiring, funding, journal acceptances, recommendation letters and more. It’s dispiriting to be told that your career is not under your control and that, no matter what you do, you face an unfair, uphill battle. Why would any woman want to be a scientist when they are told things like this:
A vast literature….shows time after time, women in science are deemed to be inferior to men and are evaluated as less capable when performing similar or even identical work. This systemic devaluation of women women results in an array of real consequences: shorter, less praise-worth letters of recommendation, fewer research grants, awards and invitations to speak at conferences; and lower citation rates for their research…
The good news is that this depressing and dispiriting story isn’t true! In an extensive survey, meta-analysis, and new research, Ceci, Kahn and Williams show that the situation for women in academia is in many domains good to great. For example, in hiring for tenure the evidence is strong that women are advantaged. Moreover, women are advantaged especially in fields where they have relatively low representation (GEMP: geosciences, engineering, economics, mathematics/computer science, and physical science).
Among political scientists, Schröder et al. (2021) found that female political scientists had a 20% greater likelihood of obtaining a tenured position than comparably accomplished males in the same cohort after controlling for personal characteristics and accomplishments (publications, grants, children, etc.). Lutter and Schröder (2016) found that women needed 23% to 44% fewer publications than men to obtain a tenured job in German sociology departments.
…In summary, all of the seven administrative reports reveal substantial evidence that women applicants were at least as successful as and usually more successful than male applicants were—particularly in GEMP fields.
…In a natural experiment, French economists used national exam data for 11 fields, focusing on PhD holders who form the core of French academic hiring (Breda & Hillion, 2016). They compared blinded and nonblinded exam scores for the same men and women and discovered that women received higher scores when their gender was known than when it was not when a field was male dominant (math, physics, philosophy), indicating a positive bias, and that this difference strongly increased with a field’s male dominance. Specifically, women’s rank in male-dominated fields increased by up to 40% of a standard deviation. In contrast, male candidates in fields dominated by women (literature, foreign languages) were given a small boost over expectations based on blind ratings, but this difference was small and rarely significant.6
The situation is also very good in grant funding and journal acceptance rates which are either not biased or biased towards women. Similarly, “no persuasive evidence exists for the claim of antifemale bias in academic letters of recommendation.”
There is evidence of bias in student evaluations. Both female and male students rate male professors higher, even in situations where names are known but actual gender is blinded. Male students are more likely to write nasty comments. Most research universities, in my experience, don’t put much weight on student teaching evaluations, beyond do you pass a fairly low bar, but it can be disconcerting to get nasty comments.
There is also mild evidence of differences in salary, although less so when productivity is taken into account.
Some critics will say, but the real discrimination happens before a women applies for a tenure track job! Maybe so but that is a shifting of goal posts and we should take pride in the fact that in the United States today (and most developed countries) there is very little bias against women in high stakes, important decisions in tenure track hiring, journal acceptances, grant funding and so forth. This is a major accomplishment.
It should be noted that the Ceci, Kahn and Williams paper is an adversarial collaboration; Ceci and Williams have published previous work showing that women are, generally speaking, not discriminated against in academia while:
Kahn has a long history of revealing gender inequities in her field of economics, and her work runs counter to Ceci and Williams’s claims of gender fairness. Kahn was an early member of the American Economics Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). Articles of hers in the American Economics Review (Kahn, 1993) and in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Kahn, 1995) were the first publications on the status of women in the economics profession. She was the first to identify gender inequities as a concern in economics, something she has revisited every decade since then in her publications. In 2019, she co-organized a conference on women in economics, and her most recent analysis in 2021 found gender inequities persisting in tenure and promotion in economics (Ginther & Kahn, 2021). In short, gender bias in academia has been a long-standing passion of Kahn’s. Her findings diverge from Ceci and Williams’s, who have published a number of studies that have not found gender bias in the academy, such as their analyses of grants and tenure-track hiring in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS; Ceci & Williams, 2011; Williams & Ceci, 2015).
The Ceci, Kahn, and Williams paper covers much more material than I can cover here and is nuanced so read the whole thing but do also shout the good news from the rooftops!
The Slow Rollout of Rapid Tests
I thought the Biden administration would at least make original pandemic errors. But no, its been making all the same errors. Slow on vaccines, slow on rapid testing and slow on new drugs, and far too little investment. Still after a year and half of shouting it from the rooftops we are getting some rapid tests. Josh Gans has an interesting reminder focusing on Canada that this has been an example of expert failure not just US failure.
Rapid test advocates such as myself have suddenly moved from fringe crazies who were told they didn’t understand the science to we need them and we need them now.
Several cases in point:
- The CDC now says that unvaccinated students exposed to Covid can “test to stay.” That is, rather than sending all the students in a class (or a school!) home when one tests positive for Covid, they test the students instead and so long as they are negative, they stay.
- The US Government is going to order 500 million rapid tests and distribute them free to the public … by mail!
It is hard to appreciate what a sea change this is in terms of attitude. A year ago, when we tried to roll out rapid tests — that had already been purchased and were sitting in their millions in warehouses in Canada — to Canadian workplaces, we were told that those tests had to be administered by health care professionals in PPE in secure and sanitised environments with all manner of precautions taken that really took the “rapid” out of rapid testing let alone exploding the costs to businesses who wanted to keep their workers safe. This was because they required those long-swabs etc. Eventually, short swabs were permitted. Then self-swabbing supervised in the workplace. Then swabbing at home while on a virtual call with a professional for that supervision with the swabs being picked up and then taken for safe disposal. Finally, we got to self-administered, at-home screening without supervision and you could pop your negative swan in the bin. A year after we had been told that you needed a full-court medical professional press to do this, our kids in Ontario were sent home with 5 rapid tests to use over the holidays. Only a couple of weeks ago, the Ontario government’s advisory board, the Ontario Science Table, finally endorsed the use of rapid tests in this way.
Our Regulatory State Isn’t Learning
Delta is the fourth wave of covid, and amazingly the US policy response is even more irresolute than the first time around. Our government is like a child, sent next door to get a cup of sugar, who gets as far as the front stoop and then wanders off following a puppy.
The policy response is now focused on the most medically ineffective but most politically symbolic step, mask mandates. An all-night disco in Provincetown turns in to a superspreader event so… we make school kids wear masks in outdoor summer camps? Masks are several decimal places less effective than vaccines, and less effective than “social distance” in the first place.* Go to that all night disco, unvaccinated, but wear a mask? Please.
If we’re going to do NPI (non pharmaceutical interventions), policy other than vaccines, the level of policy and public discussion has tragically regressed since last summer. Last summer, remember, we were all talking about testing. Alex Tabarrok and Paul Romer were superb on how fast tests can reduce the reproduction rate, even with just voluntary isolation following tests. Other countries had competent test and tracing regimes. Have we built that in a year? No. (Are we ready to test and trace the next bug? Double no.)
What happened to the paper-strip tests you could buy for $2.00 at Walgreen’s, get instant results, and maybe decide it’s a bad idea to go to the all night dance party? Interest faded in November. (Last I looked, the sellers and FDA were still insisting on prescriptions and an app sign up, so it cost $50 and insurance “paid for” it.) What happened to detailed local data? Did anyone ever get it through the FDA’s and CDCs thick skulls that even imperfect but cheap and fast tests can be used to slow spread of disease?
…And then we indulge another round of America’s favorite pastime, answers in search of a question. Delta is spreading, so… extend the renter eviction moratorium. People who haven’t paid rent in a year can stay, landlords be damned.
All true. I got dispirited on testing. It’s insane that we don’t have cheap, rapid testing and good ventilation ready for a new school year. As I wrote about earlier, even the American Academy of Pediatrics is shouting from the rooftops that the FDA is deadly slow. The eviction moratorium is a sick joke. Just a backhanded way to redistribute wealth without a shred of justice or reason. Disgusting.
Here’s one more bit (but read the whole thing there is more.)
To learn from the mistakes, and institutionalize better responses would mean to admit there were mistakes. One would think the grand blame-Trump-for-everything narrative would allow us to do that, but the mistakes are deeply embedded in the bureacracies of the administrative state. Unlike bad admirals in WWII, nobody less than Trump himself has lost their job over incompetent covid response. The institutions have an enormous investment in ratifying that they did the best possible job last time. So, as in so many things (financial bailouts!) we institutionalize last time’s mistakes to keep those who made them in power in power — which means we do not learn from mistakes.
Patents are Not the Problem!
For the last year and a half I have been shouting from the rooftops, “invest in capacity, build more factories, shore up the supply lines, spend billions to save trillions.” Fortunately, some boffins in the Biden administration have found a better way, “the US supports the waiver of IP protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help end the pandemic.”
Waive IP protections. So simple. Why didn’t I think of that???
Patents are not the problem. All of the vaccine manufacturers are trying to increase supply as quickly as possible. Billions of doses are being produced–more than ever before in the history of the world. Licenses are widely available. AstraZeneca have licensed their vaccine for production with manufactures around the world, including in India, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, China and South Africa. J&J’s vaccine has been licensed for production by multiple firms in the United States as well as with firms in Spain, South Africa and France. Sputnik has been licensed for production by firms in India, China, South Korea, Brazil and pending EMA approval with firms in Germany and France. Sinopharm has been licensed in the UAE, Egypt and Bangladesh. Novavax has licensed its vaccine for production in South Korea, India, and Japan and it is desperate to find other licensees but technology transfer isn’t easy and there are limited supplies of raw materials:
Virtually overnight, [Novavax] set up a network of outside manufacturers more ambitious than one outside executive said he’s ever seen, but they struggled at times to transfer their technology there amid pandemic travel restrictions. They were kicked out of one factory by the same government that’s bankrolled their effort. Competing with larger competitors, they’ve found themselves short on raw materials as diverse as Chilean tree bark and bioreactor bags. They signed a deal with India’s Serum Institute to produce many of their COVAX doses but now face the realistic chance that even when Serum gets to full capacity — and they are behind — India’s government, dealing with the world’s worst active outbreak, won’t let the shots leave the country.
Plastic bags are a bigger bottleneck than patents. The US embargo on vaccine supplies to India was precisely that the Biden administration used the DPA to prioritize things like bioreactor bags and filters to US suppliers and that meant that India’s Serum Institute was having trouble getting its production lines ready for Novavax. CureVac, another potential mRNA vaccine, is also finding it difficult to find supplies due to US restrictions (which means supplies are short everywhere). As Derek Lowe said:
Abolishing patents will not provide more shaker bags or more Chilean tree bark, nor provide more of the key filtration materials needed for production. These processes have a lot of potential choke points and rate-limiting steps in them, and there is no wand that will wave that complexity away.
Technology transfer has been difficult for AstraZeneca–which is one reason they have had production difficulties–and their vaccine uses relatively well understood technology. The mRNA technology is new and has never before been used to produce at scale. Pfizer and Moderna had to build factories and distribution systems from scratch. There are no mRNA factories idling on the sidelines. If there were, Moderna or Pfizer would be happy to license since they are producing in their own factories 24 hours a day, seven days a week (monopolies restrict supply, remember?). Why do you think China hasn’t yet produced an mRNA vaccine? Hint: it isn’t fear about violating IP. Moreover, even Moderna and Pfizer don’t yet fully understand their production technology, they are learning by doing every single day. Moderna has said that they won’t enforce their patents during the pandemic but no one has stepped up to produce because no one else can.
The US trade representative’s announcement is virtue signaling to the anti-market left and will do little to nothing to increase supply.
What can we do to increase supply? Sorry, there is no quick and cheap solution. We must spend. Trump’s Operation Warp Speed spent on the order of $15 billion. If we want more, we need to spend more and on similar scale. The Biden administration paid $269 million to Merck to retool its factories to make the J&J vaccine. That was a good start. We could also offer Pfizer and Moderna say $100 a dose to produce in excess of their current production and maybe with those resources there is more they could do. South Africa and India and every other country in the world should offer the same (India hasn’t even approved the Pfizer vaccine and they are complaining about IP!??) We should ease up on the DPA and invest more in the supply chain–let’s get CureVac and the Serum Institute what they need. We should work like hell to find a substitute for Chilean tree bark. See my piece in Science co-authored with Michael Kremer et. al. for more ideas. (Note also that these ideas are better at dealing with current supply constraints and they also increase the incentive to produce future vaccines, unlike shortsighted patent abrogation.)
Bottom line is that producing more takes real resources not waving magic patent wands.
You may have gathered that I am angry. I am indeed angry that the people in power think they can solve real problems on the cheap and at someone else’s expense. This is not serious. I am also angry that they are sending the wrong message about business, profits and capitalism. So let me end on positive note. Like the Apollo program and Dunkirk, the creation of the mRNA vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna should be lauded with Nobel prizes and major movies. Churchill called the rescue at Dunkirk a “miracle of deliverance,” well the miracle of Moderna will rescue many more. Not only was a vaccine designed in under a year, an entirely new production process was set up to produce billions of doses to rescue the world. The creation of the mRNA vaccines was a triumph of science, logistics, and management and it was done at a speed that I had thought possible only for past generations.
I am grateful that greatness is still within our civilization’s grasp.
Addendum: Lest I be accused of being reflexively pro-patent, do recall the Tabarrok curve.