In the movies I’ve seen people who try to get out of a traffic ticket by telling the police officer they made a donation to the policeman’s ball, but those were comedies. I had no idea that not only does this exist there are official cards. In fact, the police in New York are liv … | Continue reading
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, induced by a timely tweet by Conor Sen. It turns out the state of Maryland is abolishing the four-year college degree requirement for many state jobs. In Missour, neither the governor nor the lieutenant governor have a four=year … | Continue reading
One of the privileges of reading Emergent Ventures applications is that I get a cross-sample — admittedly a skewed one — of who and what is actually influencing people. When it comes to smart and many of the very smartest young people, the influence of Effective Altruism on their … | Continue reading
If a country is really good at X, and along comes social change Y, you ought to figure there is a pretty good chance Y will feed into X. So for instance the United States is really good at retail. So along comes Wokeism, and, lo and behold, Wokeism slots wonderfully into retail, … | Continue reading
The richest government the world has ever known is having trouble finding the money to buy Paxlovid, a critical medical treatment for COVID. STAT: The White House has held off on buying millions of courses of Pfizer’s highly effective antiviral drug that the White House already c … | Continue reading
I booked 5 nights at an Airbnb in Irpin, a heavily bombed city near Kyiv. Irpin pic.twitter.com/cPomVZKWFS — Illia Ponomarenko (@IAPonomarenko) March 2, 2022 I’m not going. (And I told the host I wasn’t going). The host replied: Любі друзі дякуємо за допомогу. На ці гроші ми змож … | Continue reading
He is kicked out of a forthcoming tournament, even though he has been critical of the war in Ukraine. In case you haven’t already guessed, Grischuk is Russian in his citizenship. This stuff never stays very accurate or fair. Here is more on Grischuk and other Russian players, a … | Continue reading
I was going to write a long post on this question, as recently I had been urged to do by one of the leaders of the Effective Altruism movement, during a Sichuan lunch. But then Putin declared a nuclear alert, and I figured a short post might be more effective. To be clear, I thi … | Continue reading
Reupping this post from 2019. No indent. I agree with Tyler who wrote recently that “the risk of nuclear war remains the world’s No. 1 problem, even if that risk does not seem so pressing on any particular day.” The probability of a nuclear war is inherently difficult to predict … | Continue reading
This paper evaluates the impact of a sudden and unexpected nation-wide alcohol sales ban in South Africa. We find that this policy causally reduced injury-induced mortality in the country by at least 14% during the five weeks of the ban. We argue that this estimate constitutes a … | Continue reading
A few years ago I reported on how the US repeatedly loses to China in war games (no indent): David Ignatius writing in the Washington Post: 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 primac … | Continue reading
The WSJ has several good piece on electric power in the United States, many of which are relevant to my recent podcast with Ezra Klein. Starting with the increased unreliability of America’s electric grid. The U.S. power system is faltering just as millions of Americans are becom … | Continue reading
The replication crisis isn’t just about social psychology. A meta-analysis of the effect of ocean acidification on fish behavior shows a big decline in effect size as the studies get larger and better. Using a systematic review and meta-analysis of 91 studies empirically testing … | Continue reading
It doesn’t raise them, as you might have been taught on Twitter over the last 10-15 years. Here is the report from the UK: British households are facing the biggest fall in real incomes in 30 years as inflation gallops ahead of wage growth, a stark illustration of the challenge … | Continue reading
The Dracula novel is of course very famous, but it is less well known that it was, among other things, a salvo in the direction of what we now call Progress Studies. Here are a few points of relevancefor understanding Bram Stoker and his writings and views: 1. Stoker was Anglo-I … | Continue reading
That is a new JEP piece by Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue. The piece, while not easily summarized, is interesting throughout. Here is one bit: The decline in birth rates has been widespread across the country. Birth rates fell in every state over this pe … | Continue reading
Yes, interviews very much do matter. You may have read articles like the one that Sarah Laskow wrote a few years ago in The Boston Globe, “Want the Best Person for the Job? Don’t Interview,” or the one Jason Dana published in The New York Times, “The Utter Uselessness of Job Inte … | Continue reading
The transistor radio/car radio was the internet of its time. Content was free, and there were multiple radio stations, though not nearly as many as we have internet sites. People tuned into the radio, in part, for ideas, not just tunes. But the ideas that spread best were attac … | Continue reading
Matt Levine: Facebook Inc. (now Meta Platforms Inc.) announced in 2019 with enormous fanfare that it was going to launch a stablecoin and work closely with all of the relevant regulators blah blah blah, and it went to the Federal Reserve and said “what do we need to do to launch … | Continue reading
In Rising private city operators in contemporary China, Jiao and Yu report that China’s private cities are growing. …the last decade has witnessed a large growth in private city operators (PCOs) who plan, finance, build, operate and manage the infrastructure and public amenities … | Continue reading
Being a natural non-dualist, I have been pondering this question. For instance, I know someone who almost always gives charismatic and “thunderous” answers to questions posed. These are typically smart answers, whether or not you agree, but I suspect over time that talk style m … | Continue reading
“What’s the best example of an experiment or trial that could be scientifically useful and informative but which can’t be done for legal, ethical or logistical reasons?” Comments are open… | Continue reading
In texts, both fictional and non-fictional and in English and Spanish, thinking words relating to technology and social organization (experiment, gravity, weigh, cost, contract) become more common between 1850 and approximately 1977 (beginning of the great stagnation) but since t … | Continue reading
Caleb Watney and Alec Stapp, to found a think tank related to progress studies. Joe Francis, a farmer in Wales, to write a book on the economic and historical import of slavery in the American republic. Ananya Chadha, freshman at Stanford, general career development, her interest … | Continue reading
This paper demonstrates that the measured stock of China’s holding of U.S. assets could be much higher than indicated by the U.S. net international investment position data due to unrecorded historical Chinese inflows into an increasingly popular global safe haven asset: U.S. res … | Continue reading
My top candidates: 1. Loss of locus of control. People go into medicine to save lives. They believe that they will use their demonstrated intelligence and skills to make a difference. Unfortunately, modern medicine is ever more about turning physicians into box checkers. CPT code … | Continue reading
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: The first piece of advice stems from what has been dubbed in Silicon Valley “the small group theory.” It goes like this: When working on any kind of problem, task or question, embed yourself in a small group of … | Continue reading
Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations is one of my favorite books and a classic of public choice. Olson may well have won the Nobel prize had he not died young. He summarized his book in nine implications of which I will present four: 2. Stable societies with unchanged b … | Continue reading
A useful post on getting E-Residency in Estonia: Being an e-Resident of Estonia means that you get remote access to the Estonian economy from anywhere in the world. It doesn’t mean you get to vote or receive access to Estonian welfare services, or even that you get to live there. … | Continue reading
The demographic transition –the move from a high fertility/high mortality regime into a low fertility/low mortality regime– is one of the most fundamental transformations that countries undertake. To study demographic transitions across time and space, we compile a data set of bi … | Continue reading
How many times have you read something like this, “Bitcoin uses as much electricity as Malaysia or Sweden or Denmark or Chile….”. What a bore. Have you ever wondered, however, why the comparison is to countries? Why don’t they ever tell you what would seem to be a more natural co … | Continue reading
It’s well known that the Green Revolution dramatically increased crop yields. In a new paper, Gollin, Hansen and Wingender use a general equilibrium model to show that the effects were even more far reaching. For a given acre, the Green Revolution raised the yields of some crops … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about the article on MAD you linked to: Haller & Fry’s “The Math is Bad”. Their point — that you have to run the game theory for the case where a surprise first launch has already occurred — is interesting. I agree MAD looks bad in that scenario. But I think … | Continue reading
Zvi at LessWrong rounds up the COVID news including this excellent bit on Pfizer’s anti-Covid pill Paxlovid which looks to be very effective but is not yet FDA approved. The trial was stopped due to ‘ethical considerations’ for being too effective. You see, we live in a world in … | Continue reading
This report uses natural language processing to analyze the abstracts of successful grants from 1990 to 2020 in the seven fields of Biological Sciences, Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Education & Human Resources, Engineering, Geosciences, Mathematical & Physical Sc … | Continue reading
An EV winner I might add, here is the news: Delighted to announce our $7.5m seed round for @woolfuniversity – funding that will help our mission to build a global institution that allows qualified organizations to join as new member colleges and offer accredited degrees. Here is … | Continue reading
Politicizing medicine is dangerous. Tens of thousands of people are dead because vaccines became politicized and people chose political identity over rationality. Yet instead of trying to depoliticize medicine, the AMA has doubled down and is going full woke. The AMA’s Advancing … | Continue reading
I am indebted to Jason Crawford and Matt Yglesias for the inspiration on this topic, here is an excerpt from my Bloomberg column: One second-order effect is that countries with good infrastructure planning would reap a significant relative gain. The fast train from Paris to Nice … | Continue reading
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one part: If you have had a relatively comfortable job during the pandemic, it might now be time to worry. The more culturally specific your knowledge and skills, however, the more protected you will be. Doing math and writ … | Continue reading
We quantify global and regional aggregate damages from global warming of 1.5 to 4 °C above pre-industrial levels using a well-established integrated assessment model, PAGE09. We find mean global aggregate damages in 2100 of 0.29% of GDP if global warming is limited to about 1.5 ° … | Continue reading
From Paul Kedrosky this graph which casts doubt on a sugar mono-causal theory of obesity. Yes, it includes corn syrup.: A longer series, also from Stephan Guyenet, shows that we are well above historical averages in sugar consumption even after the more recent decline. Obesity di … | Continue reading
This paper studies the implications of rental market policies that address evictions and homelessness. Policies that make it harder to evict delinquent tenants, for example by providing tax-funded legal counsel in eviction cases (“Right-to-Counsel”) or by instating eviction morat … | Continue reading
Maybe I don’t understand how the supposed plan is supposed to work. There is no tax credit for unrealized capital losses, right? So you won’t want to hold volatile asset classes any more, right? Imagine the value going up, you pay some tax, and then the value falls and you mov … | Continue reading
One of the silver linings of the pandemic was the ability to see a doctor and be prescribed medicine online. I used telemedicine multiple times during the pandemic and it was great–telemedicine saved me at least an hour each visit and I think my medical care was as good as if I h … | Continue reading
It’s time to reup the idea of buying coal mines and shuttering them. I wrote about this a few years ago based on Bard Harstad’s piece in the JPE and it came up again on twitter so I went looking for a coal mine to buy. Here’s a coal mine for sale in West Virginia […] | Continue reading
The Nobel Prize goes to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens. If you seek their monuments look around you. Almost all of the empirical work in economics that you read in the popular press (and plenty that doesn’t make the popular press) is due to analyzing natural experime … | Continue reading
In Launching the Innovation Renaissance I said that “If total factor productivity had continued to grow at its 1957 to 1973 rate then we today would be living in the world of 2076 rather than in the world of 2014.” Sadly, the future is continuing to recede. Consider the graph bel … | Continue reading
“Nuclear has a waste storage problem that remains largely unaddressed .” Not so. The first, and easiest way to address it is to reprocess spent fuel as France does. The next is to use modern reactor designs that actually clean up old fuel from light water reactors. For example, C … | Continue reading