Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 382

Assorted links

1. The news ecosystem of Myanmar.

2. Impoverished memory for elevator buttons.

3. Hitchhiking America by private plane.

4. Jaron Lanier on data rights.

5. The life of Ruth Rendell.

6. Texas Monthly hires full-time barbecue editor for new “golden age” of Texas barbecue.

Russian markets in everything

According to this story in Canada’s National Post, cops in Moscow have been ordered to inspect ambulances after learning that VIP commuters are riding around in “ambulance taxis” that cost as much as $200 per hour.

These aren’t just ordinary ambulances, either. They’ve been cleverly fitted with fancy and luxurious interiors so their passengers can eat caviar and sip champagne while they blow through traffic with lights and sirens blazing.

The story is here, tweeted here, hat tip goes to HL.

What is required of a successful human cannonball?

While Hentoff-Killian is not opposed to taking longer flights in the future, once she gets more comfortable with the cannon, she’s not sure if she’ll ever want to fly while in flames. “You have to hold your breath when you’re on fire,” she says, “and I like to breathe.”

And this:

The Human Cannonball doesn’t usually remember much about each flight, aside from a quick impression of soaring through the air. On the other hand, she has just been shot out of a 24-foot-long air-compression cannon and travels between 75 and 100 feet at a force of 7 g. That’s greater force than a roller coaster, greater than a Formula One racecar, greater than the space shuttle. A force powerful enough to have caused some human cannonballs to pass out midflight. This has never happened to Elliana Grace in more than 100 shots since she took the job last October. Still, she’s in the air approximately three seconds. How much would you remember?

Here is much more, very interesting throughout.  Some human cannonballs keep the job for as many as seventeen years.  By the way, Hentoff-Killian, the featured individual in the story, is the granddaughter of Nat Hentoff.

Hat tip goes to @RobertCottrell.

From David Sinky on subsidies for science, by email

Since it seems that the supply of talented researchers in any specific area is likely fairly inelastic in the short term, to what extent do you see cash funding (as opposed to supply of talent) as a major constraint to specific scientific research in either the short and medium terms?

>Even if we believe that this funding will lead to a proportional increase in clean-tech research, I suspect that returns may be quite low since the impacts of this funding would seem to be:

1. Pulling smart people from their private sector efforts into publicly funded research

2. Funding marginal projects by lower quality researchers where returns are likely to be significantly lower than average returns to research funding (which may be quite low already)

3. Increasing the funds available to established, high-status labs and researchers.  If a large percentage of a lab’s output is due to the abnormally high human capital of its lead researchers, the binding constraint is their time and mental resources rather than cash so the returns on additional cash would not be very high.

4. Allowing institutions that were already going to fund this sort of research to direct additional funds to other priorities such as undergraduate academics (stem or otherwise), student amenities or other unrelated research initiatives.

I suspect much of this logic also applies to donations to “cancer research charities” which I believe may be one of the single least efficient use of charitable dollars.

In general, I am disappointed that neither the right nor the left seems interested in trying to estimate the return to marginal government spending on research (either in aggregate or for specific programs).

The points above lead me to suspect it is quite low in aggregate but I’m open to being convinced otherwise if you think there is good evidence to do so.

Sarah Constantin replies on MetaMed

Not long ago I linked to this Robin Hanson blog post on MetaMed.  I was sent this reply, which I will put under the fold:

I noticed you linked Robin Hanson’s article on MetaMed on Marginal Revolution.  I’m the VP of research at MetaMed, and I just wanted to tell you a little bit more about us, because if all you know about us is the Overcoming Bias article you might get some misleading impressions.

Medical practice is basically a mass-produced product. Professional and regulatory bodies (like the AMA) put out guidelines for treatment.  At their best, these guidelines follow the standards of evidence-based medicine, which means that on average they will produce the best health outcomes in the general population.  (Of course, in practice they often fall short of that standard.  For example, checklists are overwhelmingly beneficial by an evidence-based medicine standard, and yet are not universally used.)

But even at their best, the guidelines that are best from a population-health standpoint need not be optimal for an individual patient.  If you have the interest and the willingness to pay, investigating your condition in depth, in the context of your entire medical history, genetic data, and personal priorities, may well turn up opportunities to do better than the standardized medical guidelines which at best maximize average health outcomes.

That’s basically MetaMed’s raison d’etre.  And it’s a pretty conservative hypothesis, in fact.  We may harbor a few grander ambitions (for example, I come from a mathematical background and I’m working on some longer-term projects related to algorithmically automating parts of the diagnostic process, and using machine learning principles on biochemical networks in novel ways) but fundamentally the thing we claim to be able to do is give you finer-grained information than your doctor will.  We’re, of course, as yet unproven in the sense that we haven’t had enough clients to provide empirical evidence of how we improve health outcomes, but we’re not making extraordinary claims.

Robin Hanson seems to be implying that MetaMed is claiming to be useful only because we’re members of the “rationalist community.”  This isn’t true.  We think we’re useful because we give our clients personalized attention, because we’re more statistically literate than most doctors, because we don’t have some of the misaligned incentives that the medical profession does (e.g. we don’t have an incentive to talk up the benefits of procedures/drugs that are reimbursable by insurance), because we have a variety of experts and specialists on our team, etc.

The “rationalist” sensibility is important, to some degree, because, for instance, we’re willing to tell clients that incomplete evidence is evidence in the Bayesian sense, whereas the evidence-based medicine paradigm says that anything that yet hasn’t been tested in clinical trials and found a 5% p-value is completely unknown. For instance, we’re willing to count reasoning from chemical mechanisms as (weak) evidence. There’s a difference in philosophy between “minimize risk of saying a falsehood” and “be as close to accurate as possible”; we strive to do the latter.  So there’s a sense in which our epistemic culture allows us to be more flexible and pragmatic.  But we certainly aren’t basing our business model on a blanket claim of being better than the establishment just because we come from the rationalist community.

Assorted links

1. What are the consequences of late marriage?

2. A closer look at the health care cost slowdown.

3. Update on Chinese plans for Iceland.

4. The black box that is Google (a redo of “I, Pencil,” arguably).

5. Bostridge on Britten.

6. ZeroHedge speculates on Cyprus.  I don’t see how even the “good bank” will be able to survive under the plan in the works.  The key question is whether any enacted plan has a deposit guarantee backed by the EU as a whole and right now that looks quite unlikely.  Capital controls will sever the “Cypriot euro” from the euro more generally and de facto end the euro era in Cyprus.  It will be very hard to ever take them off (how soon can you imagine Cyprus rebuilding its credibility?)  Another question is what Cypriot legislators actually will vote for, given their connections to Russia and perhaps also their fear of Russian reprisals against their persons.  There is a very good Cyprus post here, and another here.  Here is a very good post on what is in the capital controls, lots.

From State Welfare to Federal Disability

In an excellent report on disability NPR’s Planet Money notes :

A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And the Public Consulting Group is glad to help.

PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability.

…In recent contract negotiations with Missouri, PCG asked for $2,300 per person [moved from state welfare to federal disability].

In other words, money and real resources are being paid to redistribute wealth from one set of taxpayers to another.

A sentence from Neil Munro

He emailed this to me:

Let me summarize; Diversity = the self-assembling, self-serving ideology of high-IQ, complexity-arbitraging professionals.

My view by the way is different, and can be found in my book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures.

Open banking resolution in New Zealand

The excellent Eric Crampton sends me this by email:

NZ’s wound down the temporary deposit insurance we had in place post 2008 in favour of Open Banking Resolution: freeze a part of all deposits, keep the banks open, liquidate the shareholders and unsecured creditors, then (if necessary) haircut the depositors.

The Greens here have been comparing it to Cyprus, which is obviously rather different.

Anyway, if interested:

RBNZ: http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/research/bulletin/2007_2011/2011sep74_3HoskinWoolford.pdf

http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/finstab/banking/4933917.html

TVHE critique (on credibility): http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2013/03/21/political-equilibrium-obr-and-deposit-insurance

Me: http://www.offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/deposit-insurance.html

A 10-yr old piece by then RBNZ Deputy Governor, now U Canterbury Vice Chancellor, Rod Carr, on related topics: http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/speeches/0104984.html

Here, the Reserve Bank distances its policies from those of Cyprus.

NGDP in Cyprus

It seems to be falling:

Luscious strawberries – €3.50 a box on Monday – are now €1.45. The prices of other perishables have also plummeted. “People are buying only what they needed.”

No one knows how telephone, water and electricity bills paid monthly on instructions to banks will be settled. No one knows when and if they will be paid their salaries.

Here is more.