Bookmarks (4496)

A proposal to ban clergy from charging or accepting fees for funerals, weddings and baptisms has prompted threats of industrial action by the clergy union of the Church of Iceland (Þjóðkirkjan). The Church of Iceland is the established Lutheran church of the island nation, and its clergy are paid by the state. Clerical salaries and […] The post The religious polity that is Iceland...

1. Larry Katz on the Great Resignation. 2. Paul Krugman reviews Dune and Foundation (NYT). 3. Do carbon offsets offset carbon? 4. Meaningless correlations.  Risque terms at the link.  And p.A15 in WaPo: “Iran’s role in attack on U.S. troops in Syria signals new escalation.”  Who cares!? 5. Is China cracking down on vanity skyscrapers? […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Laboratory developed tests are not FDA regulated–never have been–instead the labs are regulated under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) as overseen by the CMS. Laboratory developed tests are the kind your doctor orders, they are a service not a product and are not sold directly to patients. Labs develop new tests routinely and they […] The post Clement and Tribe Predicted the FDA...

According to Zucman’s analysis, Musk would pay as much as $50 billion under the tax over its first five years, while Bezos could pay as much as $44 billion. It could be that at least half of the planned revenue from the policy would have come from ten individuals only.  Fortunately, it is looking as […] The post The biggest tax bill ever tax...

Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest and largest venture capital firms, has launched a bold restructuring to create a single overarching fund. The Sequoia Fund will take in capital from investors and funnel it to Sequoia’s traditional venture funds, which invest in US and European start-ups. It will also hold Sequoia’s stakes in publicly […] The post Sequoia to go more long-term appeared...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit: A second question would be whether there is evidence to support the contention that Americans have become more negative overall. I am doubtful. Do fans of the Boston Red Sox hate the New York Yankees more than they used to? It’s not […] The post Don’t overpredict a negative future appeared...

1. People systematically underestimate how frequently their conversation partners think of them. 2. Does the internet make us overestimate our own knowledge? 3. Who pays sin taxes? 4. Correct link for builders vs. Nervous Nellies. 5. Austin Vernon on geothermal power. 6. Former markets in everything: “Uranium burger.” The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIs there a full transcript...

Put simply, this proposal is biased towards people with inherited wealth, invested in non-traded assets and mature businesses, and against people invested in publicly traded equities in growth companies, many of which they have started and built up. If that is the message that the tax law writers want to send, they should at least […] The post Further points on the tax on...

Here are new results from Autor, Dorn, and Hanson: We evaluate the duration of the China trade shock and its impact on a wide range of outcomes over the period 2000 to 2019. The shock plateaued in 2010, enabling analysis of its effects for nearly a decade past its culmination. Adverse impacts of import competition […] The post On the persistence of the China...

That is a new NBER working paper by Wolfgang Keller and Caroline H. Shiue, here is the abstract: This paper studies the economic consequences of the West’s foray into China after the Opium War (1839-42), when Western colonial influence was introduced in dozens of so-called treaty ports. We document a turnaround during the 19th century […] The post The economic consequences of the Opium...

1. Jodi Ettenberg interview.  Recommended. 2. “No evidence for cumulating socioeconomic advantage. Ability explains increasing SES effects with age on children’s domain test scores.“ 3. Unite America, for ranked choice voting.  And the sugar lobby is alive and well. 4. “We find that access to a plasma donation center reduces demand (inquiries) for payday and […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

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 move into loss territory.  You […] The post The tax on unrealized capital gains...

“The Federal Aviation Administration is prohibited from creating safety regulations for private spaceflights until October 2023.” Here is the NYT article, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  How else do you think they got Shatner up there? The post Intertemporal substitution sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsSingle Mom Makes $89,844/Yr in Her Spare Time on The Computer ... by Sarato be...

1. Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading the Faerie Queene.  A splendid book, take the title literally, and I very much liked these two sentences: “Others, however, pick it [Faerie Queene] up on impulse and find themselves helplessly enthralled, spurred by a devotion at once unsustainable and impossible to shake.  As C.S. Lewis put it, […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

1. Ducklings and fluid mechanics. 2. How many Americans were abandoned in Afghanistan and still wish to get out? 3. Why does Hollywood start going crazy with sequels around 1999? 4. Ilya Somin on the great Anthony Downs. 5. Patrick McKenzie free email newsletter about financial infrastructure. 6. The cost of running government bureaucracies on […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

An elegant essay by Saumitra Jha on why tolerance between Hindus and Muslims evolved in India’s port cities. [W]here do institutions of tolerance emerge? Combining the historical accounts, the fieldwork, and the data, it became clear that such institutions develop in very specific places, where two conditions were satisfied. First, Hindus and Muslims needed to […] The post Ports and Tolerance appeared first on...

Score and soundtrack: A+, Hans Zimmer Visual intelligence and sophistication: A+ Beauty: A+ Drama: I thought the first half was weak here, though the movie became progressively more gripping.  But too many of the proceedings felt stagey rather than organic or evoking of real interest. Memorable characters: I give this award to the sandworms and […] The post *Dune*, the movie (no real spoilers)...

The most developed thesis of that book was that capitalist economies were in a state of constant excess supply (overproduction) whereas centrally planned economies were in a state of constant excess demand (shortage), and he drew out with minute detail all the implications of this analysis. I remember raising arguments from his book in my […] The post Janos Kornai and the soft budget...

An unprecedented statement by current NASA Director and former Senator Bill Nelson. It is the most honest and forthright commentary to date on the UAP issue from a NASA Director, and perhaps the most thoughtful UAP-related statement ever made by a serving senior U.S. official: https://t.co/2RL4gBuCUD — Christopher K. Mellon (@ChrisKMellon) October 23, 2021 And […] The post NASA chief Bill Nelson on UFOs...

1. “More than 100,000 people have had their eyes scanned for free cryptocurrency.” (FT, how long ago would this headline have been inconceivable?) 2. Video about bowling. 3. New results on time-weighted happiness, caveat lector. 4. New results on cognitive long Covid. 5. Sadly, the great Anthony Downs has passed away.  Here is an obituary.  […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

Yes, I am talking about the new seven-volume set Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa.  I am now about halfway through volume II, and will read the rest, albeit slowly.  The books have plenty of text and also a lot of quality photographs.  While they are easy to read, they are not actually fast going. These […] The post The greatest book(s) on Africa ever...

The Reno City Council voted to ban the possession and use of whips without a permit in downtown Reno on Wednesday. Councilwoman Jenny Brekhus, who said she was not present when the ordinance was introduced, was the only no vote. Brekhus said that she wants the ordinance applied city-wide and expressed concern that as is, the ban targets […] The post The whip-banning polity that is Reno...

1. The culture that is Cook Islands quarantine.  They just got back from the Tokyo Olympics. 2. Pierce Brosnan and Colm Toibin are on board with Jack Yeats. 3. 18,000 people in a single building (St. Petersburg, Russia). 4. Otters are moving into Singapore. 5. Haitink dead.  And Yundi Li is in trouble. 6. My […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

Wow. Duha Altindag, Samuel Cole and R. Alan Seals Jr, three professors in the economics department at Auburn University, study their own university’s COVID policies. The administration defied the Alabama Governor’s public health order on social distancing and created their own policy which caused enrollment in about half of the face-to-face classes to exceed legal […] The post The Price of COVID-19 Risk In...

1. Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation.  The stories and anecdotes are fun, most of all about the early history of the polio vaccine and how poorly some of the process went.  By the end of the book, however, it […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about Paul is his willingness to be a plain, flat outright snot about other people.  Did you see lately when he called the Rolling Stones “a blues cover band”?  Not wrong!  Ever listen to the lyrics of “Another Girl“? Anyway, if you paw through the Ram album you will find […] The post Straussian Beatles, Paul McCartney solo edition...

The overall death rate for men is 1.6 times higher than the death rate for women. Here is the underlying Brookings study by Richard V. Reeves and Beyond Deng, based on U.S. data.  That is a pretty big gap.  We have done plenty to vaccinate older people first, but men are never given priority place […] The post Covid facts to ponder appeared first...

1. Why so little eSports in Japan? 2. Are emergency sirens dangerous? (NYT, though it seems they help recruit volunteers in rural areas). 3. Which vehicle prices are up the most and the least?  Can you model this? 4. NYT on the postliberal Right and Orban.  A more serious piece than you might have been […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

By Gordon B. Dahl et.al.: We provide a novel decomposition of changing gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor into differential changes in age-specific mortality rates and differences in “survivability”. Declining age-specific mortality rates increases life expectancy, but the gain is small if the likelihood of living to this age is small (ex ante […] The post Understanding the Rise in Life Expectancy...

Current per capital income measures at about 19k PPP.  Apply 2.2% growth for 30-35 years and Mexico then approaches the living standard of today’s UK or South Korea!  Since 1994, Mexico’s average growth rate has been 2.09%, including Covid times, so that is hardly outlandish as an assumption. Here is my latest Bloomberg column on […] The post Optimism about Mexico a story of...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the CWT summary: He joined Tyler to discuss whether we’ve gotten better or worse at analyzing risk, the dangerous urge among policymakers to oversimplify the past, why being a good military commander is about more than winning battlefield victories, why we’re underestimating the risk […] The post My Conversation with Stanley McChrystal appeared...

1. “It is said that bosses of the ‘Ndrangheta – godfathers and clan leaders – make their most important decisions in front of a plate of dormice…” 2. “A British bakery has been forced to pull its top-selling cookies from the market, after regulators informed the owner that the sprinkles are illegal. The U.S.-made sprinkles […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Twitter engineering had a nice tweet thread on how they use econometrics and causal inference:  You may have heard about this year’s Economics Nobel Prize winners – David Card, Josh Angrist (@metrics52) & Guido Imbens. Their publicly available work has helped us solve tough problems @Twitter, and we’re excited to celebrate by sharing how their […] The post Causal Inference at Twitter appeared first...

This paper estimates the workplace productivity effects of COVID-19 by studying performance of soccer players after an infection. We construct a dataset that encompasses all traceable infections in the elite leagues of Germany and Italy. Relying on a staggered difference-in-differences design, we identify negative short- and longer-run performance effects. Relative to their preinfection outcomes, infected […] The post Long soccer Covid appeared first on...

…we use Oregon’s 2008 Medicaid lottery to assess the management of diabetes and asthma, as well as several markers of physical health. This analysis complements several prior studies by introducing new data elements and by analyzing chronically ill subpopulations. While we had previously found that having insurance increases the diagnosis and use of medication for […] The post Medicaid coverage doesn’t seem to help...

Blocked on Weibo, by the way.  One major figure in the video is the Malaysian-Chinese rapper Namewee, also Kimberly Chen.  I put up this post, among other reasons, to show just how much there is in the way of cultural codes to crack.  How much of it do you understand?  Do you get the references […] The post What is going on in this...

1. Ted Gioia 12 predictions for the future of music. 2. How and what should a ghost maximize? 3. Agarwal and Budish survey chapter on market design. 4. Can robotic textiles improve your breathing? 5. Colombia’s antimachismo hotline (NYT, a good thing to be clear!).  Encapsulates the broader trend. 6. Puerto Rico now the most […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

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 had been in […] The post Make TeleMedicine Permanent appeared first on...

NYTimes: An examination of hundreds of health departments around the country shows that the nation may be less prepared for the next pandemic than it was for the current one. …State and local public health departments across the country have endured not only the public’s fury, but widespread staff defections, burnout, firings, unpredictable funding and […] The post Worrying Sentence(s) of the Day appeared...

Somewhat less than an hour, here is his summary of our chat: Prof. Cowen and I had a wide ranging interview on topics ranging from whether economic growth is a moral imperative, UFOs are extraterrestrials, rent seeking is a drain on the economy, things like Plato, pumpkin spice, and the Founding Fathers are overrated, why […] The post My podcast with philosopher Jimmy Alfonso...

Thirteen-year-olds saw unprecedented declines in both reading and math between 2012 and 2020, according to scores released this morning from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Consistent with several years of previous data, the results point to a clear and widening cleavage between America’s highest- and lowest-performing students and raise urgent questions about how […] The post Average is over appeared first on...

Here is the NYT account, they sound both confused and confusing.  How about “if you have had J&J, it is fine and probably preferable to get a further dose of Moderna or Pfizer”?  Yet suddenly it is fine. And it is the usual story — people have been doing this for months, and the FDA […] The post FDA relents on mix and match...

The panel also seemed intrigued by preliminary data suggesting that Johnson & Johnson recipients may be better off with a booster shot from Moderna or Pfizer. Although no vote was taken, Dr. Peter Marks, who oversees the F.D.A.’s vaccine division, said regulatory action to allow boosters with a different vaccine was “possible.” While some experts […] The post Some of them are frauds appeared...

1. Fukushima wildlife seems to be fine. 2. A Hansonian primer. 3. Patent protection boosted plant biotechnology. 4. Do minimum wage hikes hurt firm variety? 5. The Great Recession made academic hiring less diverse. 6. Gender gaps. The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to EdR. My dad was a newspaper reporter and when I ... by Just...

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 […] The post Be Green: Buy a Coal Mine!...

I am going to pick Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957, Sligo) as Ireland’s greatest artist. And yes he was the brother of William Butler Yeats and son of the artist John Butler Yeats, notable in his own right. (For background, here are my earlier posts on William Orpen, John Lavery, Mainie Jellett, and Harry Clarke.  Here […] The post Jack Yeats, the greatest Irish artist...

So what did I get for my $117, other than six discs that could have been three or dare I say two? “I Dig a Pony” was a good composition that never saw an effective release; the Glyn Johns mix rehabilitates the song, though it remains far from perfect in execution.  You can listen to […] The post *Let It Be*, the new release...

1. “Nearly 40% of California state workers are unvaccinated against COVID despite Newsom order.” 2. “Part of the Catholic church in Sicily has imposed a three-year prohibition on naming godparents, arguing that the tradition has become merely a way to fortify family ties — and mob ties, too.”  Jonathan Schulz, telephone!  (NYT) 3. Carmen Mola […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

Climate mitigation scenarios envision considerable growth of wind and solar power, but scholars disagree on how this growth compares with historical trends. Here we fit growth models to wind and solar trajectories to identify countries in which growth has already stabilized after the initial acceleration. National growth has followed S-curves to reach maximum annual rates […] The post The continuing case for nuclear energy...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: American elites like to argue for a carbon tax and other means of raising the price of carbon emissions, and I fall into that camp myself. Yet higher energy prices are extremely unpopular with many voters. A recent study found that most Americans would […] The post Is this the uh-oh moment for...