Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 185
May 5, 2014
Profiting from Machine Learning in the NBA Draft
There is a new paper by Philip Maymin:
I project historical NCAA college basketball performance to subsequent NBA performance for prospects using modern machine learning techniques without snooping bias. I find that the projections would have helped improve the drafting decisions of virtually every team: over the past ten years, teams forfeited an average of about $90,000,000 in lost productivity that could have been theirs had they followed the recommendations of the model. I provide team-by-team breakdowns of who should have been drafted instead, as well as team summaries of lost profit, and draft order comparison. Far from being just another input in making decisions, when used properly, advanced draft analytics can effectively be an additional revenue source in a team’s business model.
Note these are “partial equilibrium” estimates, namely given rivalry not every team can draft better to this extent.
Why Vampires Live So Long
NYTimes: Two teams of scientists published studies on Sunday showing that blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice, rejuvenating their muscles and brains. As ghoulish as the research may sound, experts said that it could lead to treatments for disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease.
The key papers are here and here and here. Some of the papers are pointing to a specific protein but the last paper suggests that simple transfusions also work and that raises a number of issues of public policy. As Derek Lowe notes:
Since blood plasma is given uncounted thousands of times a day in every medical center in the country, this route should have a pretty easy time of it from the FDA. But I’d guess that Alkahest is still going to have to identify specific aging-related disease states for its trials, because aging, just by itself, has no regulatory framework for treatment, since it’s not considered a disease per se.
…You also have to wonder what something like this would do to the current model of blood donation and banking, if it turns out that plasma from an 18-year-old is worth a great deal more than plasma from a fifty-year-old. I hope that the folks at the Red Cross are keeping up with the literature.
A simple Bayesian updating on Ukraine
Putin didn’t carve off the eastern parts of the country, although he could have. I now infer he wishes to take the whole thing. There are sometimes reasons why you do not wish to stop and take the free lunch and create a focal line, namely that it can constrain you for the future. I don’t mean that Putin will conquer Ukraine by military force, but rather bit by bit he will harass the current government into losing legitimacy, until a strongly pro-Russian, pro-Putin government is running that country. By hook or by crook.
Parisian notes
By this point most of the Right Bank is mind-numbingly oppressive. I discovered the upper part of Marais, however, and fell in love with (parts of) Paris once again. Start on or near Rue Vertbois, explore the small streets, and end up in the food stores of Rue Bretagne, stopping many times along the way.
I’ve mostly seceded from the restaurant scene here, instead preferring to buy foodstuffs in the small shops. I just spent seven dollars for three (excellent) artichokes.
I know exactly how long an unrefrigerated crottin can stay good in a French hotel room.
Overall, what I am seeing more of is bagel shops and e-cigarette stores. The stand-alone fromagerie is increasingly difficult to find.
There is a separate art to ordering in Indian restaurants in Paris. Focus on the salmon and spinach, mostly unadorned.
For the first time ever I enjoyed gazing at the Mona Lisa.
May 4, 2014
Are athletes really getting better, faster, stronger?
A new TED talk by David Epstein says “not as much as you might think.”
From the transcript, here is one interesting excerpt:
…consider that Usain Bolt started by propelling himself out of blocks down a specially fabricated carpet designed to allow him to travel as fast as humanly possible. Jesse Owens, on the other hand, ran on cinders, the ash from burnt wood, and that soft surface stole far more energy from his legs as he ran. Rather than blocks, Jesse Owens had a gardening trowel that he had to use to dig holes in the cinders to start from.Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens’ joints shows that had been running on the same surface as Bolt, he wouldn’t have been 14 feet behind, he would have been within one stride.
This is interesting too:
In the early half of the 20th century, physical education instructors and coaches had the idea that the average body type was the best for all athletic endeavors: medium height, medium weight, no matter the sport.And this showed in athletes’ bodies. In the 1920s, the average elite high-jumper and average elite shot-putter were the same exact size. But as that idea started to fade away, as sports scientists and coaches realized that rather than the average body type, you want highly specialized bodies that fit into certain athletic niches, a form of artificial selection took place, a self-sorting for bodies that fit certain sports, and athletes’ bodies became more different from one another. Today, rather than the same size as the average elite high jumper, the average elite shot-putter is two and a half inches taller and 130 pounds heavier. And this happened throughout the sports world.
There is this contrast:
… if you know an American man between the ages of 20 and 40 who is at least seven feet tall, there’s a 17 percent chance he’s in the NBA right now…in sports where diminutive stature is an advantage, the small athletes got smaller. The average elite female gymnast shrunk from 5’3″ to 4’9″ on average over the last 30 years, all the better for their power-to-weight ratio and for spinning in the air.
I cannot say I am convinced, if only because I don’t recall too many NBA players from my boyhood looking like Charles Oakley. You can suggest that example more than fits the author’s hypothesis, but then I wonder which view he is arguing against. If you hold enough other things equal, of course performance has to be equal too.
For the pointer I thank Mitch Berkson.
The Rise of Human Capital
No economist was more responsible for the appreciation, understanding and analysis of the fact that people invest in improving their productivity than was Gary Becker.
Some neglected Gary Becker open access pieces
Summarizing Becker’s contributions is like trying to summarize economics and it is not really possible. I believe he has the best “30th best” paper of any economist, living or dead.
Here are a few Becker articles which are not even his best known work:
1. “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory.” Can the theorems of economics survive the assumption of irrational behavior? (hint: yes)
2. “Altruism, Egoism, and Genetic Fitness: Economics and Sociobiology.” The title says it all, from 1976.
3. “A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influence on Price.” Why don’t successful restaurants just raise the prices for Saturday night seatings?
4. “The Quantity and Quality of Life and the Evolution of World Inequality” (with Philipson and Soares). The causes and importance of converging lifespans.
5. “Competition and Democracy.“ From 1958, but most people still ignore this basic point about why government very often does not improve on market outcomes.
6. “The Challenge of Immigration: A Radical Solution.” Auction off the right to enter this country.
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