Ajit requests such a post, and I note that plenty of people have plenty of experience with this topic. So I’ll offer a few observations at the margin: 1. Venice, Florence, and Rome have, on average, the worst food in Italy. They have some wonderful places, but possibly hard to … | Continue reading
It is extremly disturbing that major scientific organizations are forbidding the publication of research that offends some political sensibilities. Indeed, roadblocks are being put into place to even investigate some questions. Here is James Lee, a behavioral geneticist at the Un … | Continue reading
It is much harder to predict foreign policy outcomes, especially in times of turmoil when there is no “nothing happens” default path, than it is to predict the results of economic policies. There is no coherent model, no causal identification in the data, and the data are not ve … | Continue reading
Each video is a little more than a minute, both recommended. Here is China, here is Coppola. The psychological richness packed into each minute is extraordinary. Via Anecdotal. | Continue reading
That is a question from a loyal reader, and he does not mean pharmaceuticals rather illegal drugs. I can see a few hypotheses: 1. Americans consume more of almost everything. Including health care. We are simply a nation of consumption, for longstanding cultural reasons and su … | Continue reading
At first I thought this was Twitter b.s., but no I have been referred to the PayPal website update: You may not use the PayPal service for activities that…involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) ar … | Continue reading
Montesquieu famously noted that Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that wherever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes; and that wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners. and Voltaire sai … | Continue reading
A whopping 50%+ of secondary school students in India are educated in private schools. Do private schools increase human capital or merely skim the best students? My paper, Private Education in India: A Novel Test of Cream Skimming made a simple but telling point: …As the private … | Continue reading
There have now been lots of resume-audit studies in which identical resumes but for the “minority-distinct” name are sent out to employers and callback rates are measured. A meta-study of 97 field experiments (N = 200,000 job applicants) in 9 countries in Europe and North America … | Continue reading
This prediction is from Manifold Markets. Metaculus gives similar odds to a similar question. These are serious predictions. In a 2019 post I pointed out that expert surveys (not markets) suggested the annualized probability of a nuclear war was on the order of ~1%–and I thought … | Continue reading
Today we honor Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov whose calm actions and general humanity helped to prevent a nuclear war on September 26th, 1983. The NYTimes reported the events on Petrov’s death in 2017. Early on the morning of Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov helped prevent the out … | Continue reading
Again this comment is from Sure: The US does not have a healthcare system. It has several. Medicare is single payer option with overwhelmingly private provision and some alternative administrative choices with a think skim of secondary overlays of private health insurance. The In … | Continue reading
In The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think I argued that the Biden student loan plan would incentivize students to take on more debt and incentivize schools to raise tuition with most of the increased costs being passed on to taxpayers through generous income base … | Continue reading
Dwarkesh Patel surveys one angle of that debate in this short post, and also here. More commonly, from EA types I increasingly hear the argument that if an economy grows at [fill in the blank] percent for so many thousands of years, at some point it becomes so massively large re … | Continue reading
Ian Leslie writes to me: John Lanchester in the LRB: “Richard Feynman was once asked what he would pass on if the whole edifice of modern scientific knowledge had been lost, and all he could give to posterity was a single sentence. What axiom would convey the maximum amount of sc … | Continue reading
In 2019 I presented this excerpt: Humans are living longer, better lives thanks to innovations in prescription drugs over the past three decades, according to several new studies by Frank Lichtenberg, the Courtney C. Brown Professor of Business. Every year, according to Lichtenbe … | Continue reading
Eric B. Budish has a new paper on this topic: Satoshi Nakamoto invented a new form of trust. This paper presents a three equation argument that Nakamoto’s new form of trust, while undeniably ingenious, is extremely expensive: the recurring, “flow” payments to the anonymous, decen … | Continue reading
How to improve society is one of the most commonly discussed questions, but it is not always approached with sufficient seriousness. We don’t think analytically enough about which variables can have maximum impact and also which are most feasible to steer. For instance, the manag … | Continue reading
Programmers in the US are well-paid and companies report difficulty hiring programmers. At the same time, while it’s less reported, there are a lot of people who are good at programming but can’t get programming jobs.There’s a simple explanation, and it’s one that I’ve validated … | Continue reading
Monkeypox isn’t in the same category of risk that COVID was before vaccines but it’s a significant risk, especially in some populations, and it’s a test of how much we have learned. The answer is not bloody much. Here’s James Walsh in NYMag: As monkeypox cases have ticked up nati … | Continue reading
A very nice paper in Management Science by Kini, Shen, Shenoy and Subramanian finds that labor unions reduce product quality. Two strengths of the paper. First, the authors have relatively objective measures of product quality from thousands of product recalls mandated by the FDA … | Continue reading
The Israeli kibbutz have long been moving away from utopian socialism towards “renewing kibbutz”; a kind of cooperative in which member wages differ, consumption is unequal, many resources are privately owned but there is some mutual aid–a “safety net”–and some common ownership t … | Continue reading
The author is William C. Kirby and the subtitle is Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China. The shocker is that this is actually a good book. In contrast, hardly any books on these topics are good. This book is substantive on virtually every page, the a … | Continue reading
One example of such evidence-free regulation in recent years comes from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In 2021, HHS repealed a rule enacted by the Trump administration that would have required the agency to periodically review its regulations for their impact … | Continue reading
I’ve been wanting to do this one for some while, and Marc did not disappoint. Here is the audio, transcript, and video. Here is the summary: Marc joined Tyler to discuss his ever-growing appreciation for the humanities and more, including why he didn’t go to a better school, hi … | Continue reading
Before Space X can launch its Starship in support of NASA, the Department of Defense, and the greater goal of bringing humanity to the stars, the FAA has required that SpaceX must (among other requirements): Prepar[e] a historical context report (i.e., historical narrative) of th … | Continue reading
In an important new paper, Can Education be Standardized? Evidence from Kenya, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keats, Michael Kremer, Isaac Mbiti and Owen Ozier evaluate Bridge International schools using a large randomized experiment. Twenty five thousand Kenyan students applied for … | Continue reading
And why can’t the senders avoid them? You don’t need top-tier GPT-3 to sidestep these errors: “touch base with you” “urgent” “immediate reply requested” They are all dead giveaways that I should delete the message without reading further. And why does the top of the email have … | Continue reading
From Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keats, Michael Kremer, Isaac Mbiti, and Owen Ozier: We examine the impact of enrolling in schools that employ a highly-standardized approach to education, using random variation from a large nationwide scholarship program. Bridge International Acad … | Continue reading
During the pandemic, New York State allocated $100 million to turn struggling New York City hotels into low-cost housing. What could be simpler? Hotels are already used to house people so converting a hotel to more longer-term housing ought to be much simpler and cheaper than bui … | Continue reading
Government concerns about great disparities in housing conditions, what are often called housing crises, date to at least the 1920s. These great disparities are, of course, still with us 100 years later. In this essay, we argue there will be no progress ending these great dispari … | Continue reading
We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples. We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the tele … | Continue reading
People are more productive in cities. As a result, people move to cities to earn higher wages but some of their productivity and wages is eaten up by land prices. How much? In a new paper Philip G. Hoxie, Daniel Shoag, and Stan Veuger show that net wages (that is wages after hous … | Continue reading
Florian Ederer and Weicheng Min have an interesting new paper called Bayesian Persuasion with Lie Detection which shows that under some conditions fact checking can increase fake news. How does lie detection constrain the potential for one person to persuade another to change her … | Continue reading
Nate Hilger’s has written a brave book. Almost everyone will find something to hate about The Parent Trap. Indeed, I hated parts of it. Yet Hilger is willing to say truths that are often not said and for that I would rather applaud than cancel. Hilger argues that the problems of … | Continue reading
My recent post, Air Pollution Reduces Health and Wealth drew some pushback in the comments, some justified, some not, on whether the results of these studies are not subject to p-hacking, forking gardens and the replication crisis. Sure, of course, some of them are. Andrew Gelman … | Continue reading
Gallup did a survey of tech boot camp graduates and the results are quite good. A new study by Gallup and educational technology company 2U provides insight into these outcomes, based on interviews with 3,824 graduates of 2U-powered university boot camps, and helps shed light on … | Continue reading
Bayesian Brain theory flips this idea around again so that cognition is a cybernetic or autopoietic loop. The brain instead attempts to predict its inputs. The output kind of comes first. The brain anticipates the likely states of its environment to allow it to react with fast, u … | Continue reading
Abe emails me: Tyler, I really enjoyed your recent podcast with Russ Roberts talking about favorite books and reading strategies. On the podcast, you mentioned YouTube a couple of times. I was hoping Russ would ask you about your YouTube habits, but he didn’t, so I thought I’d em … | Continue reading
Brian Potter has a delightful primer on the physical, economic and regulatory barriers to building height beginning with the Great Pyramid of Giza and running to today. He concludes that the limit today isn’t technological–we could build much higher–but regulatory: …we can estima … | Continue reading
There is a new and very interesting paper on this topic by Annie Y. Chen, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, Ronald E. Robertson and Christo Wilson. Here is the abstract: Do online platforms facilitate the consumption of potentially harmful content? Despite widespread concerns that Y … | Continue reading
The so-called pink tax is an alleged tendency for products consumed by women to be more expensive than similar products consumed by men. In 2015 NYC put out a study under mayor Bill DeBlasio alleging a 7% pink tax across a range of goods. The pink tax is implausible. Products pro … | Continue reading
That’s why the six nuclear reactors that were operating in Germany in 2021 generated 80% as much power as all the gas power plants… If you turned back on all the nuclear reactors, you could eliminate nearly all the need for gas electricity—and some coal too, which is quite pollut … | Continue reading
Here are my picks, in no particular order: W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992, maybe not recent?). Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan quadrology. Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle, volumes one and two. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials. Michel Houellebecq, Submission. Min Lee, Pachinko. Li … | Continue reading
The UK has created a new visa for High Potential Individuals. Under the HPI visa any graduate from a top university as defined by “in the top 50 of at least two of the following three ranking systems: (1) Times Higher Education World University Rankings, (2) Quacquarelli Symonds, … | Continue reading
I am pleased to announce the initiation of a new, special tranche of the Emergent Ventures fund to identify and foster artificial intelligence researchers and talent in emerging economies. This tranche is thanks to a special gift from the Schmidt Futures. Several factors — includ … | Continue reading
In a nutshell, yes: In this paper we explore whether or not the experience as a founder of a venture capital-backed startup influences the performance of founders who become venture capitalists (VCs). We find that nearly 7% of VCs were previously founders of a venture-backed star … | Continue reading
Millions of people continue to curtail work and social activities for fear of COVID and they apparently have no plans to change their behavior. NYTimes: Throughout the pandemic, many people in the United States desperately hoped for an end to mask wearing, isolation from friends … | Continue reading