Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 272

Amazon markets in everything

The cash-short United States Postal Service, which has failed to win congressional approval to stop delivering mail on Saturdays to save money, has struck a deal with the online retailer Amazon.com to deliver the company’s packages on Sundays — a first for both, with obvious advantages for each.

There is more here.  And here is an example of the trouble Amazon can get you into.

How large is the control premium?

Cass Sunstein on Twitter directs us to this paper (AEA gate), by David Owens, Zachary Grossman, and Ryan Fackler, entitled “The Control Premium: A Preference for Payoff Autonomy.”  The abstract is here:

We document individuals’ willingness to pay to control their own payoff�. Experiment participants choose whether to bet on themselves or on a partner answering a quiz question correctly. Given participants’ beliefs, which we elicit separately, expected-money maximizers would bet on themselves in 56.4 percent of the decisions. However, participants actually bet on themselves in 64.9 percent of their opportunities, reflecting an aggregate control premium. The average participant is willing to sacrifice 8 percent to 15 percent of expected asset-earnings to retain control. Thus, agents may incur costs to avoid delegating and studies inferring beliefs from choices may overestimate their results on overconfidence.

There are ungated versions here.

Mt. Kisco, New York dining bleg

That’s Westchester County, right?  I will have time for one meal there, before a trip to IBM Watson.  Where should I eat?

Assorted links

1. Did the 2009 Card Act work?

2. Has the Great Recession had a “productivity cleansing” effect?

3. The automated burger is coming to DC.  I’ll actually bet against that one.

4. Claims about Chinese cities (unconfirmed, I would say, but interesting).

5. The endangered sopranos.

6. The culture that is Russia (I am not convinced, by the way, that all of those will be ineffective as personal ads, quite the contrary).

What do we know about the easing of malaria burdens?

There are some new and interesting results from Lena Huldén, Ross McKitrick and Larry Huldén.  Here is the abstract:

Malaria has disappeared in some countries but not others, and an explanation for the eradication pattern has been elusive. We show that the probability of malaria eradication jumps sharply when average household size in a country drops below four persons. Part of the effect commonly attributed to income growth is likely due to declining household size. The effect of DDT usage is difficult to isolate but we only identify a weak role for it. Warmer temperatures are not associated with increased malaria prevalence. We propose that household size matters because malaria is transmitted indoors at night, so the fewer people are sleeping in the same room, the lower the probability of transmission of the parasite to a new victim. We test this hypothesis by contrasting malaria incidence with dengue fever, another mosquito-borne illness spread mainly by daytime outdoor contact.

The gated published version is here.  A six-page author summary is here.

For pointers I thank Aaron C. Chmielewski and Gregory Rehmke.

Does reading books change your mind?

All you authors out there, read this carefully and recall the words of Samuel Johnson:

Reading a book can change your mind, but only some changes last for a year: food attitude changes in readers of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Hormes JM, Rozin P, Green MC, Fincher K.

Source

Department of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York Albany, NY, USA.

Abstract

Attitude change is a critical component of health behavior change, but has rarely been studied longitudinally following extensive exposures to persuasive materials such as full-length movies, books, or plays. We examined changes in attitudes related to food production and consumption in college students who had read Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma as part of a University-wide reading project. Composite attitudes toward organic foods, local produce, meat, and the quality of the American food supply, as well as opposition to government subsidies, distrust in corporations, and commitment to the environmental movement were significantly and substantially impacted, in comparison to students who had not read the book. Much of the attitude change disappeared after 1 year; however, over the course of 12 months self-reported opposition to government subsidies and belief that the quality of the food supply is declining remained elevated in readers of the book, compared to non-readers. Findings have implications for our understanding of the nature of changes in attitudes to food and eating in response to extensive exposure to coherent and engaging messages targeting health behaviors.

Hat tip goes to Neuroskeptic.

Assorted links

1. More on old vs. new Keynesianism.

2. An old style socialist analysis of racism in Madison, Wisconsin.  And what are the whitest job categories in America?  #1 is veterenarian.

3. Can we unwind wealth illusions without pain?

4. Polygamy over space and time.

5. How Twitter marries man and machine.  And Ten Questions Consumers Should Ask When Choosing a Robo-Adviser.

6. A caustic piece on the fundamental political flaw behind Obamacare.

Google patents a throat tattoo with a built-in lie-detecting mobe microphone

Maybe your boss (or spouse?) will want you to wear it:

And then there’s the lie-detector feature. “Optionally,” the filing muses, “the electronic skin tattoo can further include a galvanic skin response detector to detect skin resistance of a user. It is contemplated that a user that may be nervous or engaging in speaking falsehoods may exhibit different galvanic skin response than a more confident, truth telling individual.”

There is more information here.  The pointer is from Charles C. Mann.

When will pitch-tracking technology displace baseball umpires?

This is a fascinating article by Ben Lindbergh, and it does not require interest in baseball, here is one bit:

“The goal, of course, is no error, or as close to that ideal as we can possibly come. And so the best solution might be a hybrid approach that combines tradition with technology. Not robot umps, but regular umps with input from robot brains.”

Here is another good bit of many:

Over time, players have internalized some of the idiosyncrasies of the strike zone as it’s currently called. The zone called against left-handed hitters is shifted a couple inches away relative to righties. The size of the zone fluctuates depending on the count — expanding dramatically on 3-0 and shrinking severely on 0-2 — and according to the base-out state, velocity of the pitch, and many other factors. Yes, these are all arguments in support of standardizing the strike zone, assuming you like to see pitches called according to code. They’re also reasons to exercise caution. “Because it’s always worked this way” isn’t a good reason not to do something different, but it is a reason to think through the possible ramifications before making a major change that could upset the delicate batter-pitcher balance. Players will adjust to whatever the zone looks like, but it’s in baseball’s best interests to make those adjustments smooth.

McKean cautions that instituting an automatic zone “would ruin the game,” which makes him the latest in a long line of thus-far-incorrect critics who’ve warned that something would be the end of baseball. “If you told the pitchers to try and throw that ball with an automatic strike zone, which means it has to hit some part of that plate or be in some part of that strike zone, heck, the games would go on for five, six hours,” he says. My guess is that he has the direction of the effect right, but the magnitude wrong. Automating the strike zone would probably make it slightly smaller, on the whole, and more predictable for the hitter. That could increase scoring and perhaps lead to longer games, but not to such an extent that the sport would be broken.

However, standardizing the zone would remove a level of interplay between batter, pitcher, catcher, and umpire that many fans find compelling.

Interesting throughout, and for the pointer I thank Hamp Nettles.

Chat with James Pethokoukis on *Average is Over*

Here is one of several interesting bits:

Well the Brynjolfsson and McAffee book, “Race Against the Machine,” that’s a great book.  It’s influenced my thinking.  I just read their second forthcoming book, “The Second Machine Age.”  They focus more on automation than I do and less on inequality and much less on social issues.  But I think of myself as thinking along the same lines as they do.  But they and I, we differ a lot about the past.  So they don’t think the past has been a great stagnation.  I agree with them a lot about the future, but disagree with them a lot about the past.

Gordon, I disagree with him about the future, but agree with him about the past.  So Gordon, like me, sees a great stagnation.  And he thinks it will never ever end.  I think that’s crazy.  Even if it were true, how would you know?  But I see a lot of areas, not only artificial intelligence, but medicine and genomics, where the advances are not on the table now.  But it’s hard to believe there’s not going to be a lot more coming.  Science is very healthy.  There’re new discoveries all the time. The lags are much longer than we’d like to think, but absolutely progress is not over, and we’re about to see a new wave of progress over the lifetimes of our children.

The full dialog is here.