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MARGINAL REVOLUTION
That is a paper by Paul Belleflamme and Eric Toulemonde, from a few years ago:. We analyze the effects of various taxes on competing two-sided platforms. First, we consider nondiscriminating taxes. We show that specific taxes are entirely passed to the agents on the side on which they are levied; other agents and platforms are leftunaffected.
FROM CHARLES KENNY
From Charles Kenny. Friends: I’m writing to tell you about my latest book and ask you to take a look (and share the news). Your World, Better is written for the smart and engaged middle school student. It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader’s parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and SARAH RUDEN'S GOSPELS TRANSLATION Am I the one who should be judging this? I am neither Christian nor have any fluency in ancient Greek. Nonetheless as a reader experience I am happy to give this one an A+. The “discursive glossary of unfamiliar word choices in English” is superbly useful, better arranged than most uses of footnotes. More importantly, HOW GOOD IS THE PFIZER VACCINE FOR OLDER PEOPLE How good is the Pfizer vaccine for older people? From mathematician Gary Cornell: For people 65 to 74, while the average number (92.9%) looks great, the confidence interval is not. It says that what we can say is that there is a 19/20 chance that the efficacy is between 53.2to 99.8.
THE GREGORY CLARK WORKING PAPER The Gregory Clark working paper. by Tyler Cowen March 2, 2021 at 12:05 am in. Data Source. Economics. History. I wanted to present this paper to you all, here is the abstract: Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization. CHINA STRAUSSIAN POEM-SHARING MISTAKE OF THE DAY China Straussian poem-sharing mistake of the day. by Tyler Cowen May 12, 2021 at 12:30 am. Shares in Chinese food delivery giant Meituan have fallen sharply after its boss reportedly shared a 1,000-year-old poem on social media. The Book Burning Pit by Zhang Jie was posted, then deleted, by the firm’s billionaire chief executive, Wang Xing. EXAMPLES OF FREE MARKET HEALTH CARE There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. That's Paul Krugman. I would frame this point a little differently. There are in fact plenty of people who buy their health care DEATH VS. TORTURE: UNCOMFORTABLE THOUGHTS Death vs. torture: uncomfortable thoughts. by Tyler Cowen October 3, 2006 at 8:13 am in. Law. Under one view, it is worse to torture someone than to kill him, at least provided the level of torture is sufficiently high. That can hold, a’la Amartya Sen, even if the person, in the Paretian sense, would prefer to be tortured than to bekilled.
WHY DID SO MANY GERMANS SUPPORT HITLER A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state. SWEDEN HAS LOTS OF WEALTH INEQUALITY Sweden has lots of wealth inequality. Sweden is viewed as an egalitarian utopia by outsiders, but reality is complex. In some ways Sweden has less social equality than the United States. While the American upper class is largely meritocratic, the upper class in Sweden are still mostly defined by birth. Historically, Sweden, Norwayand Finland
MARGINAL REVOLUTION
That is a paper by Paul Belleflamme and Eric Toulemonde, from a few years ago:. We analyze the effects of various taxes on competing two-sided platforms. First, we consider nondiscriminating taxes. We show that specific taxes are entirely passed to the agents on the side on which they are levied; other agents and platforms are leftunaffected.
FROM CHARLES KENNY
From Charles Kenny. Friends: I’m writing to tell you about my latest book and ask you to take a look (and share the news). Your World, Better is written for the smart and engaged middle school student. It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader’s parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and SARAH RUDEN'S GOSPELS TRANSLATION Am I the one who should be judging this? I am neither Christian nor have any fluency in ancient Greek. Nonetheless as a reader experience I am happy to give this one an A+. The “discursive glossary of unfamiliar word choices in English” is superbly useful, better arranged than most uses of footnotes. More importantly, HOW GOOD IS THE PFIZER VACCINE FOR OLDER PEOPLE How good is the Pfizer vaccine for older people? From mathematician Gary Cornell: For people 65 to 74, while the average number (92.9%) looks great, the confidence interval is not. It says that what we can say is that there is a 19/20 chance that the efficacy is between 53.2to 99.8.
THE GREGORY CLARK WORKING PAPER The Gregory Clark working paper. by Tyler Cowen March 2, 2021 at 12:05 am in. Data Source. Economics. History. I wanted to present this paper to you all, here is the abstract: Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization. CHINA STRAUSSIAN POEM-SHARING MISTAKE OF THE DAY China Straussian poem-sharing mistake of the day. by Tyler Cowen May 12, 2021 at 12:30 am. Shares in Chinese food delivery giant Meituan have fallen sharply after its boss reportedly shared a 1,000-year-old poem on social media. The Book Burning Pit by Zhang Jie was posted, then deleted, by the firm’s billionaire chief executive, Wang Xing. EXAMPLES OF FREE MARKET HEALTH CARE There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. That's Paul Krugman. I would frame this point a little differently. There are in fact plenty of people who buy their health care DEATH VS. TORTURE: UNCOMFORTABLE THOUGHTS Death vs. torture: uncomfortable thoughts. by Tyler Cowen October 3, 2006 at 8:13 am in. Law. Under one view, it is worse to torture someone than to kill him, at least provided the level of torture is sufficiently high. That can hold, a’la Amartya Sen, even if the person, in the Paretian sense, would prefer to be tortured than to bekilled.
WHY DID SO MANY GERMANS SUPPORT HITLER A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state. SWEDEN HAS LOTS OF WEALTH INEQUALITY Sweden has lots of wealth inequality. Sweden is viewed as an egalitarian utopia by outsiders, but reality is complex. In some ways Sweden has less social equality than the United States. While the American upper class is largely meritocratic, the upper class in Sweden are still mostly defined by birth. Historically, Sweden, Norwayand Finland
NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT... 2 hours ago · democratic rule and high state capacity combined produce higher levels of income inequality over time. This relationship operates through the positive effect of high-capacity democratic context on foreign direct investment and financial development. By making use of a novel measure of state capacity based on cumulative census administration, we find empirical support forthese claims
BETTER CROWDFUNDING
In 1998, I designed the “dominant assurance contract” (DAC) mechanism for producing public goods privately. In my latest paper, just published in GEB written with the excellent Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas we test the theory in the lab andit works! Kickstarter hadn’t yet been created when I first wrote but the DACmechanism can
THE COMING REGULATION OF BANK CRYPTO A $100 exposure in bitcoin would result in a minimum capital requirement of $100, Basel said. The standards would apply to assets created for decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but potential central bank digital currencies were outside the scope of the consultation, it added. Here is more from the FT. Whilethat is
BITCOIN AS LEGAL TENDER IN EL SALVADOR 15 hours ago · Here is FT coverage, I still feel I don’t know the whole story, but bitcoin will be legal tender and furthermore:. The government will set up a trust at the Development Bank of El Salvador to enable automatic conversion of bitcoin to dollars. The law willtake effect 90
SOME POINTS ABOUT CORPORATE TAX Written from the British context: Should the system be changed to one where companies are taxed on all the profits they make from their sales in the country? There are a few downsides to this. First of all it would be very hard for one country to switch to such a systemwithout getting the
THURSDAY ASSORTED LINKS 1. Is this possible?: “Criminals may have stolen as much as half of the unemployment benefits the U.S. has been pumping out over the past year, some experts say.” 2. When should ngdp be unstable? 3. Is Nero underrated? (New Yorker) 4. Sixty times the speed of sound? (USS Princeton radar team and pilot source, FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE OF $15? According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2019 (before the pandemic), in 47 states, at least one-quarter of all workers earn less than $15 per hour. In 20 states, half of all workers earn less than $18 per hour, and in 30 states, the median hourly wage is less than $19. These statistics show that $15 is a very high wage floor. IT FEELS LIKE WE ARE LIVING IN A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:. Now, for the first time in my life, I feel like I am living in a science fiction serial. The break point was China’s landing of an exploratory vehicle on Mars. It’s not just the mere fact of it, as China was one of the world’s poorest countries until relativelyrecently.
DEFI IS THE KILLER APP FOR CRYPTO 13 hours ago · That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, let me just give you one segment from the end:. And if the question is whether crypto is good for anything, there is now at least one clear answer: Crypto enables DeFi. You don’t have to like every consequence of that reality, but a reality it is. THE IRS TAX DATA LEAK Sometimes I wonder if I should blog on topics where I feel most of you already know what I think. I’ll just say this. The information was stolen illegally, yet on Twitter so many intellectuals were crowing about the disclosure. (Did some of those same people condemn the theft from Biden Jr.’s laptop? How manyMARGINAL REVOLUTION
Small Steps Toward A Much Better World. Nearly a year ago, I wrote Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive, arguing for rapid antigen tests:. A number of firms have developed cheap, paper-strip tests for coronavirus that report results at-home in about 15 minutes but they have yet to be approved for use by the FDA because the FDA appears to be demanding that all tests reach accuracyFROM CHARLES KENNY
From Charles Kenny. Friends: I’m writing to tell you about my latest book and ask you to take a look (and share the news). Your World, Better is written for the smart and engaged middle school student. It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader’s parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and CATEGORIES - MARGINAL REVOLUTION Categories - Marginal REVOLUTION. Thank-you! You've been successfully added to the Marginal Revolution email subscription list. COVID-19 EVENT RISK ASSESSMENT PLANNER COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planner. by Alex Tabarrok March 12, 2020 at 7:15 am. The mathematics for calculating the probability of exposure given the number of carriers in a population and group size aren’t difficult but they can be surprising. Even a low number of carriers can generate a relatively high probability for reasonablysized
HOW GOOD IS THE PFIZER VACCINE FOR OLDER PEOPLE How good is the Pfizer vaccine for older people? From mathematician Gary Cornell: For people 65 to 74, while the average number (92.9%) looks great, the confidence interval is not. It says that what we can say is that there is a 19/20 chance that the efficacy is between 53.2to 99.8.
EXAMPLES OF FREE MARKET HEALTH CARE There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. That's Paul Krugman. I would frame this point a little differently. There are in fact plenty of people who buy their health care *HOW U.S. ECONOMISTS WON WORLD WAR II* It was the Great Depression that brought economists into Washington policy circles, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. By the time World War II began, the federal government employed an estimated five thousand economists. David Warsh reviews the book here . I found some parts boring, some parts very valuable, overallworthwhile.
WHY DO THE YOUNG TAKE MORE RISKS? 1. The young take risks to signal they are strong and thus good potential mates. We are biologically programmed so that this motivation declines with age. This also helps explain why the young are most foolish amongst their peers. Note that under this hypothesis, the default setting must be that a non-risk-taker doesn’t reproducevery much
DEATH VS. TORTURE: UNCOMFORTABLE THOUGHTS Death vs. torture: uncomfortable thoughts. by Tyler Cowen October 3, 2006 at 8:13 am in. Law. Under one view, it is worse to torture someone than to kill him, at least provided the level of torture is sufficiently high. That can hold, a’la Amartya Sen, even if the person, in the Paretian sense, would prefer to be tortured than to bekilled.
OLIVER WILLIAMSON AND ASSET SPECIFICITY Oliver Williamson outlined these arguments in his debate with Harold Demsetz over privatizing cable TV . Much of the literature on "mechanism design," such as David Baron's pieces, picks up on this problem and extends Williamson's work. Williamson is a truly important economist. If you read him, especially in his later work, he also haslots of
MARGINAL REVOLUTION
Small Steps Toward A Much Better World. Nearly a year ago, I wrote Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive, arguing for rapid antigen tests:. A number of firms have developed cheap, paper-strip tests for coronavirus that report results at-home in about 15 minutes but they have yet to be approved for use by the FDA because the FDA appears to be demanding that all tests reach accuracyFROM CHARLES KENNY
From Charles Kenny. Friends: I’m writing to tell you about my latest book and ask you to take a look (and share the news). Your World, Better is written for the smart and engaged middle school student. It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader’s parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and CATEGORIES - MARGINAL REVOLUTION Categories - Marginal REVOLUTION. Thank-you! You've been successfully added to the Marginal Revolution email subscription list. COVID-19 EVENT RISK ASSESSMENT PLANNER COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planner. by Alex Tabarrok March 12, 2020 at 7:15 am. The mathematics for calculating the probability of exposure given the number of carriers in a population and group size aren’t difficult but they can be surprising. Even a low number of carriers can generate a relatively high probability for reasonablysized
HOW GOOD IS THE PFIZER VACCINE FOR OLDER PEOPLE How good is the Pfizer vaccine for older people? From mathematician Gary Cornell: For people 65 to 74, while the average number (92.9%) looks great, the confidence interval is not. It says that what we can say is that there is a 19/20 chance that the efficacy is between 53.2to 99.8.
EXAMPLES OF FREE MARKET HEALTH CARE There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. That's Paul Krugman. I would frame this point a little differently. There are in fact plenty of people who buy their health care *HOW U.S. ECONOMISTS WON WORLD WAR II* It was the Great Depression that brought economists into Washington policy circles, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. By the time World War II began, the federal government employed an estimated five thousand economists. David Warsh reviews the book here . I found some parts boring, some parts very valuable, overallworthwhile.
WHY DO THE YOUNG TAKE MORE RISKS? 1. The young take risks to signal they are strong and thus good potential mates. We are biologically programmed so that this motivation declines with age. This also helps explain why the young are most foolish amongst their peers. Note that under this hypothesis, the default setting must be that a non-risk-taker doesn’t reproducevery much
DEATH VS. TORTURE: UNCOMFORTABLE THOUGHTS Death vs. torture: uncomfortable thoughts. by Tyler Cowen October 3, 2006 at 8:13 am in. Law. Under one view, it is worse to torture someone than to kill him, at least provided the level of torture is sufficiently high. That can hold, a’la Amartya Sen, even if the person, in the Paretian sense, would prefer to be tortured than to bekilled.
OLIVER WILLIAMSON AND ASSET SPECIFICITY Oliver Williamson outlined these arguments in his debate with Harold Demsetz over privatizing cable TV . Much of the literature on "mechanism design," such as David Baron's pieces, picks up on this problem and extends Williamson's work. Williamson is a truly important economist. If you read him, especially in his later work, he also haslots of
BETTER CROWDFUNDING
6 hours ago · In 1998, I designed the “dominant assurance contract” (DAC) mechanism for producing public goods privately. In my latest paper, just published in GEB written with the excellent Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas we test the theory in the lab andit works! Kickstarter hadn’t yet been created when I first wrote but the DAC mechanism can CATEGORIES - MARGINAL REVOLUTION Categories - Marginal REVOLUTION. Thank-you! You've been successfully added to the Marginal Revolution email subscription list. A SIMPLE AND STUPID ONE VARIABLE THEORY OF THIS YEAR'S NBA It is typically worth trying on such theories for size, no matter what their defects. It is hard to avoid noticing that last year’s finalists — Miami and the Lakers — both exited this year in the first round, and ignominiously. Injuries and fatigue were part of the reason why. The teams that are doing THE MIRACLE OF THE INTERNET The internet has performed incredibly well in the crisis. Charles Fishman, at the Atlantic, gets an inside picture from AT&T:. The surge in traffic, on the internet as a whole and on AT&T’s part of the network, is extraordinary in a way that the phrase 20 percent increase doesn’t quite capture. AT&T’s network is carrying an extra 71 petabytes of data every day. SOME POINTS ABOUT CORPORATE TAX 1 day ago · Written from the British context: Should the system be changed to one where companies are taxed on all the profits they make from their sales in the country? There are a few downsides to this. First of all it would be very hard for one country to switch to such a system without getting the THE NEW PROPOSAL ON CORPORATE TAX SYNCHRONIZATION The G-7 nations have coordinated (NYT, FT here) to announce a minimum corporate tax rate of 15%. Even if seen through, that doesn’t mean all rates must be at 15% or higher, rather if a rate is at 5% another country (the home base country? the countries where the customers are?) gets to tack on TUESDAY ASSORTED LINKS 1. National Geographic. And amazing how unfunny is Woke TikTok (NYT). How many Woke comedians could fill a mid-sized arena? 2. Cicadas swarming around Washington are showing up on weather radar. 3. Bitcoin en El Salvador? (in Spanish) What is their real strategy here? 4. An argument that high inflation is indeed coming. 5. Ross STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT FOR THEE BUT NOT ALLOWED FOR ME The economy has not bounced back to prepandemic employment levels, even as G.D.P. effectively has. Some blame unemployment benefits for keeping workers at home, while others claim that it is the virus still holding back customers and therefore employers from adding jobs. Yet there is a third factor that is likely the labor market’s primary SARAH RUDEN'S GOSPELS TRANSLATION Am I the one who should be judging this? I am neither Christian nor have any fluency in ancient Greek. Nonetheless as a reader experience I am happy to give this one an A+. The “discursive glossary of unfamiliar word choices in English” is superbly useful, better arranged than most uses of footnotes. More importantly, JOHN STUART MILL ON THE CALIFORNIAN CONSTITUTION From 1850: The Californians have not been solely occupied with “the diggings.” They have found time also to construct a set of institutionsIt is worthy of remark how instantaneously any body of American emigrants, as soon as they have formed a settlement, proceed to make a constitution; though European authorities of no smallaccount in
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Thank-you! You've been successfully added to the Marginal Revolution email subscription list. THE F.D.A. HALTS A VIRUS TESTING PROGRAM BACKED BY BILL GATES by Tyler Cowen May 15, 2020 at 5:25 pm in* Law
* Medicine
> An innovative coronavirus testing program in the Seattle area — > promoted by billionaire Bill Gates and local public health officials > as a way of conducting wider surveillance on the invisible spread of > the virus — has been ordered by the federal government to stop its > work pending additional reviews. > Researchers and public health authorities already had tested > thousands of samples, finding dozens of previously undetected cases > in a program based on home test kits sent out to both healthy and > sick people in the hope of conducting the kind of widespread > monitoring that could help communities safely reopen from lockdowns. > But the research groups and the public health department of Seattle > and King County, which had been operating under authorization from > the state, was notified this week that it now needs approval > directly from the federal government. Officials with the U.S. Food > and Drug Administration directed the partnership to cease its > testing and reporting until the agency grants further approval. Here is the NYT link,
ahem
.
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MARKETS IN EVERYTHING by Tyler Cowen May 15, 2020 at 12:22 pm in* Food and Drink
> Tear gas is among the new flavors at a Hong Kong ice cream shop.>
> The main ingredient is black peppercorns, a reminder of the pungent, > peppery rounds fired by police on the streets of the semi-autonomous > Chinese city during months of demonstrations last year.>
> “It tastes like tear gas. It feels difficult to breathe at first, > and it’s really pungent and irritating. It makes me want to drink > a lot of water immediately,” said customer Anita Wong, who > experienced tear gas at a protest. “I think it’s a flashback > that reminds me of how painful I felt in the movement, and that I > shouldn’t forget.”>
> The flavor is a sign of support for the pro-democracy movement, > which is seeking to regain its momentum during the coronavirus > pandemic, the shop’s owner said. He spoke on condition of > anonymity to avoid repercussions from the pro-Beijing government.>
> “We would like to make a flavor that reminds people that they > still have to persist in the protest movement and don’t lose their > passion,” he said.>
> He tried different ingredients, including wasabi and mustard, in an > effort to replicate the taste of tear gas. Black pepper, he said, > came closest to tear gas with its throat-irritating effects…>
> At about $5 a serving, tear gas ice cream has been a hit. Prior to > social distancing regulations over the coronavirus outbreak, the > shop’s owner said he was selling 20-30 scoops per day. Here is the full story.
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FRIDAY ASSORTED LINKS by Tyler Cowen May 15, 2020 at 10:46 am 1. Did the dual-career model peak in the mid-1990s?
2. Long summit on vaccines,
long video, many top names represented. 3. List of possible coronavirus benefits?
4. Notes on the dynamics of subsequent epidemic waves.
5. Tokyo deaths do not seem to be up.
What is the best model for this? 6. What is school in Denmark looking like these days?
7. David Beckworth on the ngdp gap.
8. Budget allocation cuts going to higher ed appear to be brutal.
Again, the “free college” idea is a complete non-starter. 9. “Importantly, we detected SARS-CoV-2−reactive CD4+ T cells in ~40-60% of unexposed individuals, suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses andSARS-CoV-2.
”
10. NYT covers Navy reports of UFOs,
and no they’re not just a few simple, repeated optical illusions like maybe you saw in that YouTube video, for instance radar evidencetoo.
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SMALL STEPS TOWARD A MUCH BETTER WORLD by Tyler Cowen May 15, 2020 at 7:26 am in* Current Affairs
* Law
* Medicine
> After mounting criticism and thousands of deaths in New York nursing > homes—including several individual facilities that have lost more > than 50 residents—the state on Sunday reversed the mandate> ,
> which said nursing homes couldn’t refuse to accept patients from > hospitals who had been diagnosed with Covid-19. New York now says > hospitals can send patients to nursing homes only if they have > tested negative for the virus. Here is the WSJ article,
via John F.
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HOW TO THINK ABOUT UNI-DISCIPLINARY ADVICE by Tyler Cowen May 15, 2020 at 12:10 am in* Current Affairs
* Economics
* Medicine
* Political Science
Let’s say its 1990, and you are proposing an ambitious privatization plan to an Eastern bloc county, and your plan assumes that the enacting government is able to stay on a non-corrupt path the entiretime.
While your plan probably is better than communism, it probably is not a very good plan. A better plan would take sustainability and political realities into account, and indeed many societies did come up with better plans, for instance the Poland plan was better than theRussia plan.
It would not do to announce “I am just an economist, I do not do politics.” In fact that attitude is fine, but if you hold it you should not be presenting plans to the central government or discussing your plan on TV. There are plenty of other useful things for you to do. Or the uni-disciplinary approach still might be a useful academic contribution, but still displaced and to be kept away from the hands of decision-makers. Nor would it do to claim “I am just an economist. The politicians have to figure the rest out.” They cannot figure the rest out in most cases. Either stand by your proposed plan or don’t do it. It is indeed a proposal of some sort, even if you package it with some phony distancing language. Instead, you should try to blend together the needed disciplines as best you can, consulting others when necessary, an offer the best plan you can, namely _the best plan all things considered_. That might fill you with horror, but please recall from Tetlock that _usually the generalists are the best predictors_. Ignoring other disciplines may be fine when there is no interaction. When estimating the effects of monetary policy, you probably can do that without calculating how many people that year will die of air pollution. But you probably should not ignore the effects of a major trade war, a budgetary crisis (“but I do monetary policy, not fiscal policy!”), or an asteroid hurtling toward the earth. If that is too hard, it is fine to _announce your final opinion as agnostic_ (and explain how you got there). You will note that when it comes to blending economics and epidemiology, my most fundamental opinion is an agnostic one.
This is all well-known, and it has been largely accepted for some timenow.
If a public health person presents what is “only an estimate of public health and public health alone” to policymakers, I view it as like the economist in 1990 who won’t consider politics. Someone else should have the job. Right now public health, politics, and economics all interact to a significant extent. And if you present only one of those disciplines to a policymaker, you will likely confuse and mislead that policymaker, because he/she cannot do the required backward unthreading of the advice into its uni-dimensional component. You have simply served up a biased model, and rather than trying to identify and explain the bias you are simply saying “ask someone else about the bias.” If an economist claims he is only doing macroeconomics, and not epidemiology (as Paul Krugman has said a few times on Twitter), that is flat out wrong. All current macro models have epidemiology embedded in them, if only because the size of the negative productivity and negative demand shock depends all too critically on the course of the disease. It is fine to be agnostic, preferably with structure to the opinion. It is wrong to hide behind the arbitrary division of a discipline or afield.
We need the best estimates possible, and presented to policymakers as such, and embodying the best of synthetic human knowledge. Of course that is hard. That is why we need the very best people to do it. ADDENDUM: You might try to defend a uni-disciplinary approach by arguing a decision-maker will mainly be fed other, biased uni-disciplinary approaches, and you have to get your discipline into the mix to avoid obliteration of its viewpoint. But let’s be clear what is going on here: you are deliberately manipulating with a deliberately non-truthy approach (I intend those words as a description, not a condemnation). If that’s what it is, I wish to describe it that way! I’ll also note I’ve never done that deliberately myself, and that is along many years of advising at a variety of levels. I’d rather give the best truthful account as Isee it.
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REQUEST FOR REQUESTS by Tyler Cowen May 14, 2020 at 4:02 pm I haven’t asked for a while — so what would you all like to readmore about on MR?
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THURSDAY ASSORTED LINKS by Tyler Cowen May 14, 2020 at 12:14 pm 1. The dark side of Coase: a crypto tale.
2. The Covid-19 rave culture that is German.
3. Wisconsin Supreme Court rejects stay-at-home order(NYT).
4. How much of health care spending is discretionary?
5. What it is like to land in Hong Kong and try to enter (recommended, short photo essay). 6. New data from France.
And a Twitter thread on same.
7. What is the cost of reining in wild horses?
8. World 2.0: chess does indeed move to the internet, and Magnus Carlsen is calling the shots.
9. Is Virginia mixing up its test results and reporting the wrongnumbers
?
10. I find this kind of defense convincing for many research efforts, but not for actual real world problems with immediate decisions to be made: “I don’t know the 2 Swedish models in question but in general it is disingenuous to say the models that do not try to take into account changes in human behavior failed because people behaved in ways the models didn’t model. The models were upfront about the scenarios addressed.”* __ 113 Comments
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WILL OUR MILITARY STATE FAIL US? by Alex Tabarrok May 14, 2020 at 7:25 am I always assumed that for all its failings the US government was good at blowing things up. Now, I am not so sure. We did better than I expected in Desert Storm and I don’t blame the military for failures in Iraq and Afghanistan but those were not exactly major powers. I certainly don’t want war but could we handle one if it came to us? David Ignatius writing in the Washington Postsays no:
> Here’s a fact that ought to startle every American who assumes > that because we spend nearly>
> $1 trillion each year on defense, we have primacy over our emerging> rival, China.
>
> “Over the past decade, in U.S. war games against China, the United > States has a nearly perfect record: We have lost almost every single> time.”
>
> That’s a quote> from
> a new book called “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future > of High-Tech Warfare> ,”
> the most provocative critique of U.S. defense policy I’ve read in > years. It’s written by Christian Brose> , former
> staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a close > adviser to late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). The book isn’t just > a wake-up call, it’s a fire alarm in the night.>
> Brose explains
>
> a terrible truth about war with China: Our spy and communications > satellites would immediately be disabled; our forward bases in Guam > and Japan would be “inundated” by precise missiles; our aircraft > carriers would have to sail away from China to escape attack; our > F-35 fighter jets couldn’t reach their targets because the > refueling tankers they need would be shot down.>
> …How did this happen? It wasn’t an intelligence failure, or a > malign Pentagon and Congress, or lack of money, or insufficient > technological prowess. No, it was simply bureaucratic inertia > compounded by entrenched interests.* __ 214 Comments
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THE GENERAL LESSON STILL HAS YET TO SINK IN by Tyler Cowen May 14, 2020 at 2:33 am in* Law
* Medicine
* Web/Tech
Apple Store’s Temperature Checks May Violate EU Privacy Rules, Says German Data Protection Office Of course they do. And yes, I know that is a small thing, and furthermore temperature checks may not even be effective. The general point is this: you cannot over the longer run have a society based on such inflexible rules of adjustment. For decades it may seem possible, due to underlying stasis, but eventually the truth will be revealed. No single anecdote will be so convincing, and it will take a long time for the failures to pile up. And in the meantime this will breed disrespect for the more valuable laws.* __ 90 Comments
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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING by Tyler Cowen May 14, 2020 at 12:56 am in* Books
1. Jordan Mechner, The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993.
A memoir and game development journal from a game developer. The content is foreign to me, but this is one of the most beautiful and artistic books I ever have seen and I suspect some of you will find the narrative gripping. A product of Stripe Press — “Ideas forProgress.”
2. Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology,and Institutions
.
This book is a series of lectures, based on Sachs’s earlier work on economic geography and development, yet somehow with a vaguely Yuval Harari sort of glow. Some parts are a good introduction to the earlier work of Sachs, other parts are pitched a bit too low or too generally. It is strange to see chapter subheadings such as “Thalassocracy and Tellurocracy.” As an _economist_, I still maintain that Sachs is considerably underrated. 3. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi.
Yes this is a work of fiction. Clarke of course wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,
a very long novel that I have read twice, an odd mix of fantasy, science, magic, and Enlightenment esotericism, the only novel I know with fascinating footnotes. I was thrilled to receive this one, and on p.51 I am still excited. 4. Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs.
The hot new novel from Japan, it comes with a Murakami rave endorsement. To me it seems like “ordinary feminism” (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and so far it is a bore. If it doesn’t get better soon, I’ll write it off as a “mood affiliation text,” not that there’s anything wrong with that. It probably makes most sense read in a very specific cultural context. 5. Douglas Boin, Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fallof Rome
is a fun look at one part of ancient history through alternative eyes. I always wonder what to trust about this era other than primary sources, and if you can’t understand them or grasp them intelligibly maybe _that is_ itself the correct inference, namely that we have no idea what the **** went on back then. Still, as imaginary reconstructions go, this is one that ought to be done and now it is. 6. Ryan Patrick Hanley, Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living aBetter Life
.
Smith as a practical moral philosopher, this short volume pulls out the side of Smith closest to Montaigne and the Stoics. You can ponder Smithian sentences such as “The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another.” 7. Sonia Jaffe, Robert Minton, Casey B. Mulligan, Kevin M. Murphy, Chicago Price Theory.
A very good intermediate micro text, patterned after how Econ 301 is taught at Chicago. Apparently in the current Coasean equilibrum, this book ends up published by _Princeton_ University Press. Get thepicture?
From a legal perspective there is Ron Harris, Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700.
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WHY AREN’T WE TALKING ABOUT FORCIBLE QUARANTINE MORE? by Tyler Cowen May 13, 2020 at 2:18 pm in* Current Affairs
* Law
* Medicine
* Philosophy
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column,
here is one excerpt: > There has been surprisingly little debate in America about one > strategy often cited as crucial> for
> preventing and controlling the spread of Covid-19: coercive > isolation and quarantine, even for mild cases> .
> China, Singapore and South Korea separate people from their families > if they test positive, typically sending them to dorms, makeshift > hospitals or hotels. Vietnam and Hong Kong have gone further, > sometimes isolating the close contacts of patients.>
> I am here to tell you that those practices are wrong, at least for > the U.S. They are a form of detainment without due process, contrary > to the spirit of the Constitution and, more important, to American > notions of individual rights. Yes, those who test positive should > have greater options for self-isolation than they currently do. But > if a family wishes to stick together and care for each other, it is > not the province of the government to tell them otherwise. What I observe is people citing those other countries as successes, wishing to “score points,” but without either affirming or denying their willingness to engage in coercive quarantine. Here is anotherbit:
> Furthermore, all tests have false positives, not just medically but > administratively (who else has experienced the government making > mistakes on your tax returns?). Fortunately, current Covid-19 tests > do not have a high rate of false positives. But even a 1% net false > positive rate would mean — in a world where all Americans get > tested — that more than 1 million innocent, non-sick Americans are > forcibly detained and exposed to further Covid-19 risk.And this:
> Coercive containment was tried> during one
> recent pandemic — in Castro’s Cuba, from 1986 to 1994, for those > with HIV-AIDS. It is not generally a policy that is endorsed in > polite society, and not because everyone is such an expert in Cuban > public health data and epidemiological calculations. People oppose > the policy because it was morally wrong.>
> And what about uncertainty? Is it really a safe bet that America’s > quarantine policy would be executed successfully and save many > lives? What if scientists are on the verge of discovering a cure or > treatment that will lower the Covid-19 death rate significantly? > Individual rights also protect society from the possibly disastrous > consequences of its own ignorance. Here are a few points that did not fit into the column: 1. I am not opposed to all small number, limited duration quarantine procedures, such as say holding Typhoid Mary out of socializing. This same point also means that a society that starts coercive quarantine _very early_ might be able to stamp out the virus by coercing relatively small numbers of people. (It is not yet clear that the supposed successes have achieved this, by the way.) That is very different from the “mass dragnet” to be directed against American society under current proposals. 2. I am familiar with the broad outlines of American quarantine law and past practice. I don’t see that history as necessarily authorizing how a current proposal would have to operate, and on such a scale. In any case, I am saying that such coercive quarantines would be wrong, not that they would be illegal. I believe it is a genuinely open question how current courts would rule on thesematters.
3. From my perch from a distance, it seems to me that Human Challenge Trials for vaccines are more controversial than is mass forced quarantine. I could be wrong, and I would gladly pursue any leads on the current debate you might have for me. Who are the philosophers or biomedical ethicists or legal scholars who have spoken out againstsuch policies?
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WEDNESDAY ASSORTED LINKS by Tyler Cowen May 13, 2020 at 11:33 am 1. Sentences to ponder:
“He’s in London with his girlfriend, in the apartment the Batman folks rented for him…’I went for a run around the park today,’ he says. ‘I’m so terrified of being, like, arrested. You’re allowed to run around here. But the terror I feel from it is quite extreme.’…I was so obsessed with watching Christopher Hitchensdebates.”
2. The man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship.
3. The Cal State system — which covers about 500,000 people — seems to be opting for a virtual Fall semester.
4. “We find that talking about white privilege causes a major reduction in support for a politician.”
5. Leisure-enhancing technological change.
6. How are bookstores doing?
(NYT)
7. Henry on what the public really wants.
8. Calgary Zoo to ship giant pandas back to China early due to difficulty getting bamboo during pandemic.
9. “However, from May 15th, nationals of the Faroe Islands and Greenland will be able to visit without going intoquarantine.
”
10. John Gray ponders the apocalypse.
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A SIMPLE QUESTION ABOUT SPACE ALIENS by Tyler Cowen May 13, 2020 at 2:38 am If you thought non-hostile but highly disruptive aliens would arrive within the next ten years, which of your decisions would change?Should change?
Should you save more or less? Long or short crypto? Contribute less to Wikipedia pages and other public-minded ventures? What else? To be clear, I’m not interested in debating space aliens here, I want to hear about optimal responses, taking the aliensas a given.
By the way, will a Tom Cruise movie actually be shot in outer space?
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“OUR REGULATORY STATE IS FAILING US” by Tyler Cowen May 13, 2020 at 12:45 am in* Current Affairs
* Law
* Medicine
A number of commentators suggest that the real problem is President Trump, rich people overly concerned with tax cuts, a Republican Party with a deregulatory ideology, and so on. Instead I have been repeating insistently that “our regulatory stateis failing us
.”
The FDA and CDC, for instance, have through their regulations made it harder for testing and also widespread mask supply to get off theground.
I don’t see how you can blame (supposed) deregulatory fervor for the presence of too many regulations, as we have been observing in theseinstances.
I do think you can blame President Trump, along multiple dimensions, for a poor response to the pandemic, see my grades here.
(If there were a separate risk communication grade, Trump would get an F minus for that.) Nonetheless a regulatory state cannot be said to work well if it requires such extraordinary attention from a sittingpresident.
It can be the case that both Trump and the permanent bureaucracy are at fault. If something takes a long time to get done for reasons relating to preexisting rules, regulations, and laws, usually the current president is not directly at fault for that particular problem. Was it only Trump’s fault, for instance, that the permits to build a mask factory can take months to acquire? Or that the HHS did not respond to inquiries about gearing up mask production in Texas? Or that a law had to bechanged
to allow industrial companies to sell quality masks to hospitals? Or that so many a-legal or extra-legal activities (e.g., rich people arranging deliveries by plane, etc.) had to occur to sneak masks into this country? That the trade barriers on masks persisted for so long? (And yes likely the Trump administration _is_ at fault for de facto toughening restrictions on masks from China.) It is fine to say “the buck stops here,” and to criticize Trump for not having erected processes to be more aware of these problems and to dissolve them more quickly. I would agree with some of those criticisms, while noting the Trump administration also has tried to ease many of the regulations hampering adjustment. This is more something on the horizon, but how do these apples make you feel? Comforted? The fault of plutocratic Republicansmost of all?
> And in both cases, vials and stoppers, a vaccine manufacturer cannot > just switch to a slightly different product or another brand. They > typically have to run manufacturing changes by FDA first, which > could make quick supplier changes to curb shortages a difficult> prospect.
>
> The FDA can decide how flexible it will be about this type of > change, says Sklamberg. The agency said in a December 2017 draft> guidance
>
> that companies could note some changes in their annual reports > rather than waiting for approval, but it has not finalized the> policy.
>
> The ability to switch products could be crucial as the entire world > readies for a possible vaccine and vies to secure their supplies. If you wish, consider a simple question. When the CDC pooh-poohed masks early on, or botched their testing kit thereby delaying U.S. testing by weeks or maybe months, did the permanent staff of the CDC rise up and rebel and leak howling protests to the media, realizing that thousands of lives were at stake? That is surely what would happen if say the current FDA announced it was going to approvethalidomide.
Those are still cases of our regulatory state failing us.* __ 279 Comments
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TUESDAY ASSORTED LINKS by Tyler Cowen May 12, 2020 at 2:07 pm 1. Why mass testing is harder for the United States.
2. Coronavirus hairdo in Kenya.
3. Ross Douthat is back from paternal leave(NYT).
4. Norway will not proceed with the RCT for school reopening.
5. How much of the world will end up with the Swedish strategy?
6. What are the macro benefits of large cities?,
by Salim Furth.
7. What keeps stablecoins stable?
8. The third quarter of quarantine.
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