Wednesday assorted links
1. Model this, cross-state variation in teen suicide rates.
2. What Swedes think about driverless car algorithms and their moral weights.
3. Median voter theorem: “A year-long joint investigation by The Washington Post, Lighthouse Reports and a consortium of international media outlets shows how the European Union and individual European nations are supporting and financing aggressive operations by governments in North Africa to detain tens of thousands of migrants each year and dump them in remote areas, often barren deserts.”
4. MIE: “the train station has a mystery vending machine where you can buy whatever is in the unclaimed packages from delivery lockers”
5. Bryan Caplan, technological pessimist (though I would put aside faster than light travel).
6. Kroszner on AI risk and financial prudence and supervision. And the AI bill SB 1047 has at least passed the California Senate, with an uncertain future.
The Left on FDA Peer Approval
Robert Kuttner discovered an excellent treatment for colds while vacationing in France and is rightly outraged that it’s not available in the United States:
Toward the end of our stay, my wife and I both got bad coughs (happily, not COVID). We went to our wonderful local pharmacist in search of something like Mucinex or Robitussin, which are not great but better than nothing.
“We have something much better,” said he. And he did. It’s called ambroxol. It works on an entirely different chemical principle, to thin sputum, facilitate productive coughing, and also operates as a pain reliever and gentle decongestant with no rebound effect.
We experienced it as a kind of miracle drug for coughs and colds. A box cost eight euros.
Ambroxol is available nearly everywhere in the world as a generic. It has been in wide use since 1979.
But not in the U.S.
…You can’t get ambroxol in the U.S. because of the failure of the Food and Drug Administration to grant reciprocal recognition to generic medications approved by its European counterpart, the European Medicines Agency, when they have long been proven safe and effective. To get FDA approval for the sale of ambroxol in the U.S., a drug company would need to sponsor extensive and costly clinical trials. Since it is a generic, as cheap as aspirin, no drug company would bother.
…I’ve petitioned the FDA, asking them to create a fast-track procedure, whereby generic drugs approved in Europe, and well established as safe and effective, could get reciprocal approval in the U.S.
This would produce approval of ambroxol as over-the-counter medication for coughs and colds without unnecessary new clinical trials. And should ambroxol turn out to have real benefits for Parkinson’s as well, it would already be well established in the U.S. as an inexpensive generic.
Influenced by my work on FDA reciprocity aka peer approval, Ted Cruz introduced a bill, the Result Act to fast-track approval in the United States for drugs and devices already approved in other developed countries. Similarly, AOC has noted that the FDA is far behind the world in approving advanced sunscreens. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for bipartisan support.
Hat tip: the excellent Scott Lincicome.
What are your favorite non-violent movies?
From Jonathan Birch on Twitter:
What are your favourite nonviolent movies? I don’t mean romcoms, I mean movies that in some way exemplify or explore the idea of nonviolence.
Sorry, but Gandhi doesn’t do it for me. What actually comes to mind is that old Bruce Dern movie Silent Running. Or how about Babette’s Feast? The LLMs in general cough up politically sanctimonious movies. Is it crazy to suggest Vincent Ward’s Map of the Human Heart, admittedly a tragic work too? Terence Malick’s Tree of Life is a natural pick, but somehow it has never registered with me. Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night surely is in contention.
What I’ve been reading
1. Alexander C.R. Hammond, Heroes of Progress: 65 people who changed the world, with a forward by Steven Pinker. Starts with Gutenberg, of course Norman Borlaug is included, don’t forget Cobden, Bentham, Frederick Douglass, and many others. An Auto-Icon to those who spurred progress! Who knew that Virginia Apgar was born in Westfield, N.J.? Well done.
2. Cixin Liu, Supernova Era. An A+ plot premise (I won’t spoil it), the story goes downhill somewhat but still worth reading.
3. Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan, Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War. Clear and to the point, the best book I know on this topic. It is also especially clear on the roles of Eritrea and Somalia.
4. Kunal Purohit, H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars. If you are an outsider and looking for a good “micro-study” to understand India, this is a good place to start. Trying to better understand a country typically should consist of both macro overviews and micro-studies, of course.
5. Asimov Press, Origins. Their first publication, this volume is a series of essays on biotechnology. The key mission is learning how to conduct science better, and you can get updates here on synthetic biology, transgenic ants, macrophages, and other topics of recent (and earlier) note.
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice is not a book for me right now (thus I haven’t read it), but the authors are very smart and thus it is worthy of mention.
In return for a referee report, I requested Chen-Pang Yeang, Transforming Noise: A History of Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955. This book is good background for understanding late Fischer Black, as ideas derived from Brownian motion lie behind both options pricing theory and Black’s essay “Noise.“
What exactly is the national security argument here?
Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, has urged the EU to intervene urgently to dampen the growing export levels of Chinese cut-price green technology including solar panels and wind turbines, pushing European leaders to move to a full-scale trade war.
Here is the full story. And from the FT two days ago: “A number of major European power companies have scaled back or are reviewing their targets to develop renewable energy because of high costs…” Where again is the net national security argument? The biggest risk is that China will stop sending future wind turbines to Germany? Which is somewhat in China’s lap in any case? And according to GPT-4o those turbines have an average life of 20-25 years? C’mon people, we are not stupid…
Tuesday assorted links
1. Anthony Edwards jersey for sale at Sotheby’s at 20k.
2. On the disbanding of AI safety operations.
3. On the heritability of fertility, more from Robin Hanson. And Cremiaux differs.
4. It seems the House Republicans’ crypto bill will proceed. Maybe that is why ether was up 23% yesterday?
5. The growing importance of desalination.
7. Again, a generative AI directory of EV winners, by Nabeel.
8. TNSSjobs, or is this manufacturing?:
Cross-border gunshot arbitrage markets in everything, Jean Baudrillard gone wrong edition
Federal prosecutors on Friday announced charges against five people in connection with a Chicago-based scheme that staged armed robberies so the purported victims could apply for U.S. immigration visas reserved for legitimate crime victims…
Officials believe hundreds of people, including some who traveled from out of town, posed as customers in dozens of businesses across Chicago and elsewhere, all hoping to win favorable immigration status by becoming “victims” of pre-arranged “armed robberies.”
During a staged hold-up in Bucktown last year, one of the “robbers” accidentally fired their gun, severely injuring a liquor store clerk, according to one source. During that caper alone, five “customers” were “robbed.”
Here is the full story, via Ian.
Is the internet bad for you?
A global, 16-year study1 of 2.4 million people has found that Internet use might boost measures of well-being, such as life satisfaction and sense of purpose — challenging the commonly held idea that Internet use has negative effects on people’s welfare.
“It’s an important piece of the puzzle on digital-media use and mental health,” says psychologist Markus Appel at the University of Würzburg in Germany. “If social media and Internet and mobile-phone use is really such a devastating force in our society, we should see it on this bird’s-eye view [study] — but we don’t.” Such concerns are typically related to behaviours linked to social-media use, such as cyberbullying, social-media addiction and body-image issues. But the best studies have so far shown small negative effects, if any2,3, of Internet use on well-being, says Appel.
From separate Gallup polls:
Pryzbylski and his colleagues analysed data on how Internet access was related to eight measures of well-being from the Gallup World Poll, conducted by analytics company Gallup, based in Washington DC. The data were collected annually from 2006 to 2021 from 1,000 people, aged 15 and above, in 168 countries, through phone or in-person interviews. The researchers controlled for factors that might affect Internet use and welfare, including income level, employment status, education level and health problems.
…The team found that, on average, people who had access to the Internet scored 8% higher on measures of life satisfaction, positive experiences and contentment with their social life, compared with people who lacked web access. Online activities can help people to learn new things and make friends, and this could contribute to the beneficial effects, suggests Appel.
Do note that in these latter data sets women ages 15-24 still are worse off from internet access.
Here is the Nature piece, via Clara B. Jones.
Emergent Ventures, 34th cohort
Kaavya Kumar, 16, Singapore, AI safety.
Asher Ellis, Yale, Indonesia studies and Pacific national security.
Sohi Patel and Teo Dimov, Yale, to work work on medical devices in the cardiovascular field.
Diego Sanchez de la Cruz, Madrid, to translate his new book on liberalism in Madrid into English.
Michael Ryan, Dublin, to build medical devices to monitor health.
Aden Nurie, 16, Tampa, to build an app to help people find soccer games.
Robert Davitt, Dublin/SF, starting a company to bring together visiting children with family and farm experiences.
Ulrike Nostitz, Dublin, to build out an Irish space law association.
Onno Eric Blom and Vinzenz Ziesemer, Netherlands, For a Dutch progress studies institute and a study on Dutch tech policy.
Katherine He, Yale, project to use LLMs to read and interpret legal codes.
Dan Schulz, San Francisco, podcasting.
Andrew Fang, Stanford, AI and real estate data project.
Ivan Zhang, San Francisco, AI safety.
Samuel Cottrell VI, Bay Area, general career support.
Julian Gough, Berlin/Ireland, book on black holes and the evolutionary theory of the universe.
Sean Jursnick, Denver, architect, website, competition, and Medium essays for single-stair reform to improve building codes.
Julia Willemyns and David Lawrence, London, to support studies for improving UK science policy.
Adam Mastroianni, Ann Arbor, to run a Science House.
Jacob Mathew Rintamaki, Stanford, Nanotech. Twitter here.
Agniv Sarkar, 17, San Francisco, neural nets.
Ukraine tranche:
Maria [Masha] O’Reilly, Kyiv, Instagram videos on Ukraine and its history.
Yanchuk Dmytro, Kyiv, to develop better methods for repairing electric station short circuits.
Yaroslava Okara, Kyiv/Kharkiv/LSE, to study internet communications, general career support.
Julia Lemesh, Boston, to send young Ukrainian talent to elite boarding schools abroad, Ukraine Global Scholars Foundation.
Monday assorted links
1. George Miller talks movies, silent movies, Mad Max, and Furiosa (New Yorker).
2. In this Greg Clark study, fertility seems not very heritable.
3. Mennonites smuggle illegal drugs from Mexico to Canada.
4. Yes the Fed is subject to political pressure.
5. “Ironically, the best hopes for a vibrant open source AI ecosystem might rest on the presence of a “rogue” technology giant, who might choose openness and engagement with smaller firms as a strategic weapon wielded against other incumbents.” Link here.
6. Eel vs. octopus (NYT).
Innovation Matters
Innovation Matters a podcast of the United Nations Economic Cooperation and Integration Group interviews me on matters related to innovation.
If productivity growth had continued on the WWII-1973 track we would today be living in the world of 2097 rather than the world of 2024.
The education sector in the United States is underdoing a revolution. Since the pandemic we have had millions of children start homeschooling, private education with vouchers and charters are exploding. I hope with AI we can give every student a personal tutor, one who never gets tired, never gets grumpy.
In my view we should be subsidizing degrees with the greatest externalities and yet we are subsidizing degrees with the lowest wages and smallest externalities and we expect innovation out of that…no way, it’s not going to happen.
The US is a welfare-warfare state. We spend a tiny amount on innovation.
There can be multiple equilibria. If you focus on redistribution you can get low growth and then it makes sense to focus on redistribution because that is the only way to get more. But if you focus on innovation you can get high growth and then people are much less concerned with redistribution. Both equilibria can be stable. Which do we want?
Late Admissions
NYTimes: Glenn C. Loury’s new book, “Late Admissions,” is unlike any economist’s memoir I have ever read. Most don’t mention picking up streetwalkers. Or smoking crack in a faculty office at Harvard’s Kennedy School — or in an airplane at 30,000 feet. Or stealing a car. Or having sex on a beach in Israel with a mistress and attracting the attention of the Israel Defense Forces. Or later being arrested and charged with assaulting her. Or cuckolding a best friend….“Late Admissions” passes the Orwell Test. “An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
Of course, even given all this, Loury has had a successful career as an economist and as a public intellectual.
Here’s a less salacious Conversations with Tyler and here is EconTalk both with Loury.
*Unit X*
The subtitle of this new and excellent book is How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Art of War. It is written not by journalists but two insiders to the process, namely Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchoff. Here you can read about Eric Schmidt, Brendan McCord, Anduril, Palantir, and much more.
I am not yet finished with the book, in the meantime here is one short excerpt, one that sets the stage for much of what follows:
It turned out that before Silicon Valley tech could be used on the battlefield, we had to go to war to buy it. We had to hack the Pentagon itself — its archaic acquisition procedures, which prevent moving money at Silicon Valley speed. In Silicon Valley, deals are done in days. The eighteen- to twenty-four month process for finalizing contracts used by most of the Pentagon was a nonstarter. No startup CEO trying to book revenue can wait for the earth to circle the sun twice. We needed a new way.
And this bit:
Ukraine avoided power interruptions in part because its over-engineered power grid boasts twice the capacity that the country needs — ironically, the system was originally designed by the Soviets to withstand a NATO attack.
The authors understand both the worlds of tech and bureaucracy very well, kudos to them. Due out in July.
How Does Flexible Incentive Pay Affect Wage Rigidity?
Perhaps not as much as you might think:
We introduce dynamic incentive contracts into a model of inflation and unemployment dynamics. Our main result is that wage cyclicality from incentives neither affects the slope of the Phillips curve for prices nor dampens unemployment dynamics. The impulse response of unemployment in economies with flexible, procyclical incentive pay is first-order equivalent to that of economies with rigid wages. Likewise, the slope of the Phillips curve is the same in both economies. This equivalence is due to effort fluctuations, which render effective marginal costs rigid even if wages are flexible. Our calibrated model suggests that 46% of the wage cyclicality in the data arises from incentives, with the remainder attributable to bargaining and outside options. A standard model without incentives calibrated to weakly procyclical wages matches the impulse response of unemployment in our incentive pay model calibrated to strongly procyclical wages.
That is from a new and interesting paper by Meghana Gaur, John Grigsby, Jonathon Hazell, and Abdoulaye Ndiaye. My take is that effort is often relatively fixed with personality and temperament, and thus more net flexibility results than this paper indicates. Nonetheless this is an interesting result worthy of some pondering.
Sunday assorted links
1. The most notable person from each geographic area?
2. French post office releases scratch-and-sniff baguette stamp.
3. Skepticism about the new and higher estimates of the costs of climate change. And here are some critical comments from Matt Kahn, most about lack of adjustment in individual behavior, as it is modeled.
4. Did humans settle the Chesapeake earlier than we had thought? “To complicate matters, Lowery — who has been affiliated with the Smithsonian but does much of his work independently — presented the results of his study of Parsons Island in a 260-page manuscript posted online rather than in a traditional peer-reviewed journal.”
5. “On a recent trip to Sephora, 11-year-old Lincoln Rivera asked his mom for a $125 atomizer of Yves Saint Laurent eau de parfum.
He also covets scents from Jean Paul Gaultier, which he learned about from the animated movie “Megamind,” and Paco Rabanne (some of its cologne bottles are shaped like robots).
“I feel fine about how I smell,” said Lincoln, a fifth grader in Westchester County, N.Y., whose olfactory experimentation has so far been limited to deodorant. “But I could smell even better.” Here is the NYT link.
6. Group chats rule the world.