Bookmarks (3364)

Singapore has developed a “globally inter-operable” standard based on blockchain technology to facilitate cross-border verification of health documents, such as pre-departure COVID-19 test results, said Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative Vivian Balakrishnan on Friday (Feb 26). Speaking at the Committee of Supply debate for the Prime Minister’s Office, Dr Balakrishnan said that these notarised […] The post Singapore sentences of the day appeared...

1. Douglas Murray on Greg Clark.  By no means do I agree with Greg on everything, but he is one of the finest economic historians in the world. 2. Markus’ Academy and its influence (Bloomberg). 3. The peaceable kingdom? (photos) 4. Redux of my November take on how Covid risk might rise once we are […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

The FDA panel voted unanimously to authorize the J&J vaccine. Good. Note, however, that the single-shot J&J vaccine is quite comparable to the first dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Yet, few people are demanding that J&J be required to offer a second shot at all, let alone in 3-4 weeks (What about vaccine […] The post Single-Shot and First Doses First appeared...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one bit: The hypothesis is that a lot of this new money got funneled into asset price markets, rather than being spent on goods and services. Measured rates of price inflation for consumer goods have remained stubbornly below 2%. This view is misguided. First, dollars are […] The post Is all that extra money trapped...

Drugmakers will be offered fast-tracked approvals for innovative medicines in the UK as ministers seek to build on the country’s world-leading approval of a Covid vaccine and attract life sciences companies to invest post-Brexit. The UK’s medicines regulator will become independent of EU pharmaceutical rulemaking when Britain quits the European Medicines Agency at the end […] The post UK to fast track drug trials...

The German national carrier Lufthansa plans to set up a first class “Corona Lounge” in a Moscow airport for rich patrons from other countries to fly into the Russian capital and get the Sputnik V vaccination without ever entering the country, bne IntelliNews can reveal. Here is more, via Air Genius Gary Leff. The post Vaccine markets in everything appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1. How much is the Tuskegee history still a factor? 2. Biggest archaeological findings of 2020? (an impressive list, recommended) 3. Should your company’s name or streaming service have a “+” on the end? (NYT) 4. Seven-volume book series of the complete works of Hilma af Klint. 5. Bloomberg profile of Janelle Jones, chief economist […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

Market design to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine supply is my new paper in Science, co-authored with Camilo Castillo, Michael Kremer, Eric Budish, Susan Athey and others. We make three vital points. First, governments invested much less than our group advised. We spent trillions on fiscal support and maybe $20 billion or so on vaccines, far too […] The post Market Design to Accelerate Vaccine Supply...

One hour, fifteen minutes, almost all of it about the history and culture and economic future of the Caribbean, here is the audio.  It starts with Rasheed interviewing me, but later becomes more of a back-and-forth dialog, covering Cuba, Trinidad, Barbados, the best music from Jamaica, why Haiti has failed so badly, whether the Caribbean […] The post My Caribbean podcast with the excellent...

1. Kevin Donnelly, Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics, & the Average Men of Science, 1796-1874.  The Belgian Quetelet was one of the pioneers of applying statistics to the social sciences, and he had a long-running and fascinating career obsessed with astronomy, crime, opera, jokes, and short essays, among many other things.  He developed the notion of […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

I’m pretty convinced that even with business as usual carbon emissions will drop like an anvil in most developed countries over the next decade. Solar panels are getting so cheap, new plants will add many more panels than what their grid connection can handle. The industry refers to this as a high DC:AC ratio. You […] The post The energy optimism of Austin Vernon...

1. The writing of philosophy.  And what is up in chess yes the world is really weird. 2. Sam Hammond on pro-family policy. 3. How Andy Warhol became the most important Western artist of the second half of the twentieth century. 4. “FutureFeed, a livestock feed made from seaweed that reduces methane emissions in beef […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

The last chat was with Brian Armstrong about bitcoin, this one started with Isaac Newton and bit coins (really).  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the CWTeam summary: Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: […] The post My Conversation with Patricia Fara appeared...

The Philippines will let thousands of its health care workers, mostly nurses, take up jobs in Britain and Germany if the two countries agree to donate coronavirus vaccines, a senior official said on Tuesday. Britain’s health ministry said it was not interested in such a deal and its priority was to use shots domestically, but added it […] The post Potential yet still thwarted Filipino nurse...

1. Robin Hanson: Is Status-Seeking A Context-Neglecting-Value? 2. UFO skeptic West has not in fact debunked those videos. 3. More on the new UK science funding agency. 4. Story of Novavax (WSJ).  And new efficacy data for Chinese vaccines. 5. Response to Julia Galef and Herbert Simon on the value of travel. 6. “The huge […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

As of Feb. 18 (last day of full data) we gave out 817,708 second doses and just 702,426 first doses. In other words, a majority of doses are now second doses. As Daniel Bier writes this means that we are boosting some people from ~85% to ~95% protected when we could be vaccinating more first […] The post A Majority of Doses are Now...

Duke University has gone to incredibly and absurd lengths to contest other people’s trademark applications. For example, Duke opposed the following marks by filing with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board : “The Dude Diet” for a diet-related website “Kuke” for electronic products “Goluke” for clothing “Le Duc” for food and drink services they have […] The post Duke is a Trademark Bully! appeared...

But there was also a missed opportunity on the demand side. Texas has retail choice for electricity, but the overwhelming majority of Texas customers face electricity prices that are too static, too inflexible, and don’t respond to market conditions. Economists have been advocating dynamic prices for decades, but adoption has been slow. Case in point. […] The post Texas utilities should have had more...

Beeple is an artist. He makes digital art—pixels on screens depicting bizarre, hilarious, disturbing, and sometimes grotesque images. He smashes together pop culture, technology, and postapocalyptic terror into blistering commentaries on the way we live. A recent frame depicted Donald Trump wearing a leather mask and stripper’s pasties, taking a whip to the coronavirus bug […] The post “Beeple is an artist” appeared first...

1. Thwarted markets in everything: “Indianapolis Colts WR Michael Pittman Jr. says he won’t give up No. 11 to Carson Wentz.” 2. Siddhartha Mukherjee on heterogeneities in relative pandemic performance, revisiting a now-neglected topic (New Yorker). 3. North Dakota legislative house passes an anti-mask mandate bill. 4. Experiencing the Spanish flu lowered social trust.  And […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

A new study looking at essentially the entirety of the Scottish population finds that both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccine work very well at preventing hospitalizations from the first dose. UK policy for use of vaccines against COVID-19 involves an offer of a first dose followed by a second dose 12 weeks later. To our […] The post The AstraZeneca Vaccine Works Well appeared...

Over the summer of 2020, as coronavirus cases fell and life in Britain felt briefly normal, something very abnormal was happening to the country’s electricity supply. No coal was burned to generate any portion of it for a period of more than two months, something that had not happened since 1882. Britain’s four remaining coal-burning […] The post Cool, green Britannia appeared first on...

More than 2 million people are imprisoned in the U.S., among them hundreds of thousands who experts say don’t pose a public-safety threat and could be released. One problem: the data that could trigger those releases get backlogged, because they’re often spread out among different departments. That’s why in 2019, Clementine Jacoby, a software engineer, […] The post Clementine Jacoby, Emergent Ventures winner appeared...

In the 10 years since Chris Torres created Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, the meme has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times. On Thursday, he put a one-of-a-kind version of it up for sale on Foundation, a website for buying and selling […] The post The new world of digital art...

1. When it came to actual human affairs, John Rawls was in fact a mediocre, ordinary thinker at best.  Yes TJ is a deep and wonderful book.  But when he wrote on anything concrete, would it today even make the better half of Twitter? 2. Call for papers on Smith and Hume.  And Ian Anderson […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

AP: Hungarian health authorities were the first in the EU to approve the Sinopharm jab for emergency use on Jan. 29. That came after a government decree streamlined Hungary’s vaccine approval process by allowing any vaccine administered to at least 1 million people worldwide to be used without undergoing review by the country’s medicines regulator. […] The post Hungary’s Vaccine Approval Rule appeared first...

I’ve already blogged my earlier job working in the supermarket, so I thought I would add a few remarks on my very first job as chess teacher, which I did at ages 14-15. I had three regular students, two adults (about 50 and late 20s) and one a younger chess prodigy himself, maybe 10 or […] The post My days as a teenage chess...

1. Rohit Krishnan reviews Stubborn Attachments. 2. “South Korea was the only country in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that had total fertility rate below 1 for two consecutive years.” 3. Israel-Syria barter markets in everything prisoners for vaccines (NYT). 4. “Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, posited that […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

Fernando Tatís Jr. was 18 years old, just a low-level prospect from the Dominican Republic trying to work his way up in the San Diego Padres farm system, when he made a financial deal that would impact his entire baseball career. And it wasn’t with the Padres. Tatís signed a contract with Big League Advance, […] The post The equitization of human labor, Fernando...

Sure and Tom Meadowcroft have been hitting it out of the ballpark in the comments sections. Two examples. Sure: Protocol was made to serve man, not man to serve the protocol. The reason we have protocols is because we need to weight the harms of waiting without a treatment against the harms that happen if […] The post From the Comments, On FDF appeared...

As Venezuela enters its eighth year of economic crisis, a deeply personal drama is playing out inside the home: Millions of women are no longer able to find or afford birth control, pushing many into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have. Around Caracas, the capital, a pack of […] The post Venezuelan relative price fact of the...

A number of people on Twitter were mocking this earlier idea of Martin Feldstein’s, now a policy since 1986.  But of course unemployment benefits should be taxed at the federal level.  If your income that year was low, you won’t pay any tax anyway.  As of 2018, about 44 percent of American households paid no […] The post Should unemployment benefits be taxed? appeared...

1. Do birth subsidies lead to more babies? (NYT) 2. Heartland visas will be part of the Biden immigration bill. 3. U-Roy has passed away (NYT). 4. Both The Dig (1939 British archaeology and sexual restraint) and Minari (Korean immigrant family farming in Arkansas) are excellent movies and show that “old school” substantive cinema is […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

Steven Joffe, MD, MPH, a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said he doesn’t believe clinicians “should be lowering our standards of evidence because we’re in a pandemic.” Link here.  That sentence is a good litmus test for whether you think clearly about trade-offs, statistical and speed trade-offs included, procedures vs. final ends of […] The post Medical ethics? (model this) appeared first...

WSJ: The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE generates robust immunity after one dose and can be stored in ordinary freezers instead of at ultracold temperatures, according to new research and data released by the companies. The findings provide strong arguments in favor of delaying the second dose of the two-shot vaccine, […] The post The First Dose is Good appeared...

Sterling climbed to $1.40 for the first time in almost three years as investors looked past gloomy data and instead focused on hopes the country’s rapid coronavirus vaccine rollout will boost economic prospects. The currency has risen 2.4 per cent against the dollar since the end of 2020, and more than 3 per cent against […] The post British real wealth is rising appeared...

In mid-April, while he was living with his parents in Santa Clara, Calif., Gu spent a week building his own Covid death predictor and a website to display the morbid information. Before long, his model started producing more accurate results than those cooked up by institutions with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and decades of […] The post Profile of Youyang Gu, data scientist...

1. Some relative optimism from YouYang Gu.  And from Trevor Bedford. 2. Working for Zuckerberg and Bezos, what it is like. 3. Facebook and Australia. 4. Israel moving toward a two-tier system for vaccinated and unvaccinated (NYT). 5. More from Olivier Blanchard on the stimulus. 6. What it was like working at Trump Hotel. 7. […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

Here is an email from a loyal MR reader: I’ve been importing a few things for a new business. Such a huge opportunity for crypto. And not just for Nigerians. The payments are a real pain. Many vendors already accept bitcoin. And you could eventually use smart contracts to provide a version of Alibaba Trade […] The post The demand for crypto appeared first...

Yesterday I outlined my supermarket job from ages 16-18 in suburban New Jersey.  I did know plenty of economics at that time, including Adam Smith and Paul Heyne and most of classical economics, and here are some of the observations I made.  Please note this is all n = 1 or n = 2, these […] The post Personnel economics working in the supermarket...

What should I read and follow on this topic? The post Texas power cut bleg appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1. “Work on things that aren’t prestigious.” 2. Patricia Lockwood on Ferrante. 3. How to get cancelled in Iceland, alternatively what not to look for in your supermarket’s PR director. 4. What do jobless men do all day?  And the undermotivated apostate. 5. Vitalik on prediction markets, smart contract risk, epistemic humility, and more.  Like […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the government to underinvest […] The post Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy...

…With such a highly protective first dose, the benefits derived from a scarce supply of vaccine could be maximized by deferring second doses until all priority group members are offered at least one dose. There may be uncertainty about the duration of protection with a single dose, but the administration of a second dose within […] The post Canada and First Doses First appeared...

Diem has been through several iterations since it was first announced in June 2019, with adjustments not being limited to just a change of name. Now those behind the project are beginning to reveal where they expect Diem to sit within financial markets and how the stablecoin will overcome regulatory and structural hurdles as it enters […] The post Diem is getting underway appeared first...

Here is another request: What is the hardest manual labor you’ve ever done? I love intellectual policy wonk commentary, but I can’t help but feel some small amount of disdain for people who SEEM (a possibly faulty assumption) to have never really suffered trying to solve problems in the physical realm. There’s so much abstract […] The post My history of manual labor appeared...

Schools in Oregon, Washington, and much of the west coast are slow to reopen, even with teachers getting vaccinated: Marguerite Roza, a Georgetown University school finance expert based in Seattle, points out that Washington, Oregon and California “all have more left-leaning leadership that is cozier with the unions.” But Boston, Chicago and New York also […] The post Political economy matters appeared first on...

1. Arnold Kling on feminized culture. 2. SSC on vitamin D.  He is fairly skeptical, I am more skeptical yet. The macro correlations that are there could be the result of many different forces, there is not much reason in theory to attribute such power to vitamin D. 3. How Paul Graham chose what to […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Canada has made some smart moves with the Novavax vaccine. First, they initiated a rolling review of the Novavax vaccine in late January which suggests that they might authorize the vaccine based on the British trial before the US trial is concluded. The FDA will probably wait until the US trial is concluded. Second, Canada […] The post Canada and Novavax appeared first on...

The U.S. government distributed millions of fast-acting tests for diagnosing coronavirus infections at the end of last year to help tamp down outbreaks in nursing homes and prisons and allow schools to reopen. But some states haven’t used many of the tests, due to logistical hurdles and accuracy concerns, squandering a valuable tool for managing […] The post The problem with rapid testing was...