Monday, November 26, 2018

Links 2018/11/26

The first gene-edited children may have been born this past month in China. Link. Good!

The average person who purchases at least one lottery ticket spends $600 per year on them. Link. Bad!

Suicide is declining basically everywhere except America. The stats and probable reasons for these trends are here. In Asia, a group that has historically had high rates of suicide is young women, and one of the main reasons seems to be "overbearing in-laws"...

"As the libertarian economist Bryan Caplan has wryly observed, in the United States today we really have no classical liberal party but instead have a choice between two national-socialist parties: one a little more nationalist, the other a little more socialist." Link.

People oppose congestion pricing as a means to reduce traffic... until it is implemented and they see how well it works. Link.

A bipartisan climate bill has been put forward in the House of Representatives that "would apply a $15-per-metric-ton carbon fee to the U.S. oil, gas, and coal industries, but rebate all of the revenue as a dividend to households to shield them from increased fossil fuel costs". Link. Surely it won't pass, but I can dream.

Out of major countries hit by the Great Recession, the countries who have recovered the best, in terms of real GDP per capita, are Germany, followed by the U.S. and Japan. Link.

"residents of the four states that share a border with Mexico are least likely to be worried" about the migrant caravan. Link. This sort of thing holds up in general, where people with the least exposure to immigrants are the most anti-immigrant.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Links 2018/11/19

Straight-ticket voting in Texas ends in 2020. Good. Link.

An antifa protester attacked a fellow protester, who was misidentified as a Nazi for... having an American flag. Link.

"We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a duty-to-bargain law, male earnings decline by $2,134 (or 3.93%) per year and hours worked decrease by 0.42 hours per week." Link.

When civil asset forfeitures can be used to raise money... "black and Hispanic arrests for drugs, DUI, and prostitution arrests are all increasing with deficits in states where seizure revenues are legally retained while white arrests are broadly insensitive to deficits." Link.

Americans have more faith in the Supreme Court than in the more partisan branches of government. But is that (both) changing? Link.

One of the themes of the Trump administration is deregulation, but maybe the only difference is the growth of regulations has slowed? Also, the number of regulations grew more under Bush than under Obama. Link.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Links 2018/11/11

"A Vermont gubernatorial candidate has proposed a nationally televised show in which a booing or cheering crowd would decide the fate of state prisoners." Link.

Polls show Americas as much more pro-diversity than Europeans. Link.

A libertarian economist's case for European health care. "American progressives do not favor anything even close to the European system"

In the recent elections, the majority of voters born in Texas chose Beto over Cruz. Link. This is certainly the opposite of how I would have guessed.

Despite a booming economy, we are now heading toward a $1 trillion deficit, due to tax cuts and increased spending by the Republican Congress/President. Link. Same thing happened the last time the GOP had all the power. At what point do Republicans have to stop pretending to care about the deficit?

Trump is talking about ending the 14th amendment with an executive order. Link. Surely all conservatives who claim strict adherence to the constitution, in the context of gun control, are similarly outraged by this? Or perhaps xenophobia trumps the constitution, as it does with opposition to tax increases?

Friday, November 9, 2018

Links 2018/11/09

Dogs process human faces with a dedicated part of their brain, separate from the part that processes the faces of other dogs. Link.

"Over the next decade, humanity will begin its 'transhuman' era: Biology can then be hacked, depending on lifestyle, interests and health needs." Link.

ICE kept a U.S. citizen "imprisoned as a deportable alien for nearly 3 1/2 years. Then it released Watson, who was from New York, in rural Alabama with no money and no explanation... an appeals court ruled that Watson... is not eligible for (compensation)... the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer." And... "There is no right to a court-appointed attorney in immigration court". Link.

Bernie Sander's "Stop BEZOS" bill "seems to be much more about grandstanding and pointing fingers than about actual solutions to help vulnerable American workers". It adds a tax on employers whose workers receive government benefits, which would actually give these employers an incentive to cut the wages of those workers. Link.

A Trump-backed political ad was so dishonest/racist that Fox News decided not to air it. Link.

Trump's aides have struggled to get him to use government approved phones, and he continues to use an insecure phone that the Chinese government taps to listen to some of this conversations. Link. I assume all the people who thought Hillary's email server was a big deal must be very upset about this...

Related: The Hack Gap.

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Links 2018/11/03

"You can earn $100 an hour to pet puppies". Link. In Fort Worth!

The GDP of the DFW metroplex is $535 billion, which is about the same as the whole country of Sweden.

"in the last three decades of the 20th century... the children from the poorest families added more to their income than children from the richest families. That reality isn’t consistent with the standard pessimistic story that only the richest Americans have benefited from economic growth... The pessimistic story based on comparing snapshots of the economy at two different points in time misses the underlying dynamism of the American economy". Link.

The GOP is really pushing fear of the "migrant caravan" and its risk of terrorism. But looking at all U.S. terrorist attacks from 1975 onward: "Not a single terrorist in any visa category came from Mexico or Central America". Link. Meanwhile... "two-thirds of the terror attacks in the United States last year were carried out by right-wing extremists". Link. Instead of fearing immigrants you should fear those who fear immigrants.

It's widely known that younger voters are generally to the left of older voters. But I was surprised to learn that, among black voters, it's reversed! Link.

"Younger Americans are better than older Americans at telling factual news statements from opinions ... regardless of the ideological appeal of the statements" Link.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Links 2018/10/23

"Controlling for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, we find evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony." Link.

"80000 hours", which has spent years researching how to do the most good for the world by career choice, now has an official-ish summary of what they've converged on. Link. I was surprised that "earning to give", i.e. make a lot of money and give it to the best charities, has fallen in their rankings over time. This largely seems to be because they are prioritizing existential risk / improving the future over global poverty as the most important cause now. In questions of improving the future, the scarcest resource is not funding, but the number of good people working on it. With global poverty, the scarcest resource is probably still money. In particular, I found it interesting that one of their top recommendations is "being a China specialist".

An interesting point in why sexual abuse often seems rare to men and common to women: "Most men are not abusers, yet very large numbers of women have been abused. So if a man is an abuser, there is a good chance he has abused a fair number of women. That means many well-meaning men experience sexual abuse as a relatively rare phenomenon. They haven't done it, and most of their male friends haven't either. At the same time, most women have abuse, rape or #MeToo stories" Link.

And linked off the above link... WHO estimates that 1 in 20 deaths worldwide in 2016 was alcohol-related... Link.

Since around 1990, poor countries have been catching up with rich countries. "Looking at the 43 countries the World Bank classified as 'low income' in 1990, 65 percent have grown faster than the high-income average... The same is true for 82 percent of the 62 middle-income countries" ... "Neo-liberalism has been incredibly successful, essentially delivering on all of its promises of economic growth, declines in poverty, and peace." Link.

"Among refugees that entered the U.S. at ages 18-45, we follow respondents' outcomes over a 20-year period... (they) have much lower levels of education and poorer language skills than natives and outcomes are initially poor with low employment, high welfare use and low earnings. Outcomes improve considerably as refugees age. After 6 years in the country, these refugees work at higher rates than natives... (they) pay $21,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits over their first 20 years in the U.S." Link. The American dream y'all.

Trump's Deputy Attorney General "discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office". Link.

Monday, October 22, 2018

Links 2018/10/22

The flu killed 80,000 Americans last year. Can you imagine the drastic measures people would demand if, say, terrorism killed that many people? Get a flu shot! Link.

"Preference for realistic art predicts support for Brexit". Link. The correlation holds for myself; I don't get Brexit and I don't get why someone would prefer realistic art. If you want to capture literal reality, just take a picture. Art should be at least somewhat abstract/surreal!

"Virtually all poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration". Link.

The (weak) individual mandate of the ACA was supposed to be an essential cost control to counteract guaranteed coverage of pre-existing conditions in the individual health insurance market. The GOP repealed that this year, and then recently New Jersey passed a law reinstating it in their state, providing a good natural experiment to see what effect it has on costs. And the data is in from the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance. They claim that insurers initially had planned to hike costs by an average of 12.6%, and after reworking the numbers due to the state bringing the mandate back, the average rate hike dropped to 5.8%. IMO it should be common sense that we can improve health insurance by: 1. reinstating a stronger mandate, 2. phasing out the tax deductions for employer-provided insurance, and 3. move that money into subsidies for the individual market.

A couple of years ago, a GOP congressional candidate assaulted a reporter during the election. He even plead guilty. He still won the election. Now at a rally, the "law-and-order president" is praising him for that assault. Link.

Perhaps you should not read economics editorials in The Wall Street Journal. "(Max Boot) got a meeting with Robert Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page... To Boot's surprise, Bartley offered him a job as economics editorialist. The prospect 'horrified' him... because he 'had never taken a class in the subject and had no interest in it.' Boot later learned that Bartley sought out conservatives unfamiliar with economics for such jobs. 'He did not want to hire an economist because most professional economists disdained supply-side economics'". Link.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

Links 2018/10/14

"15% of all (human) experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now" and "28% of the entirety of human experience has happened since (the current oldest living person's) birth. Link. Although humans have been around for a long time, there weren't very many until recently!

The CIA considered making a fake gay sex tape of Saddam Hussein to undermine him before the Iraq War. Link.

80% of Americans are opposed to using gene editing to increase intelligence. Just don't prohibit the other 20%! Link.

Scroll to the bottom of this article to see the legal document written up for a 5 year old immigrant to sign away her rights after being separated from her grandmother. I feel safer already.

"average minimum wage increase of $0.50 reduces the probability that men and women return to prison within 1 year by 2.8%... These reductions in returns to incarcerations are observed for the potentially revenue generating crime categories of property and drug crimes; prison reentry for violent crimes are unchanged, supporting our framing that minimum wages affect crime that serves as a source of income." Link.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Links 2018/10/09

  • "In a randomized, double-blind clinical trial—the gold standard of trials—a combination of ibuprofen (Advil) and acetaminophen (Tylenol) was just as effective at treating patients with acute pain in an extremity as three other pain-killer combinations containing opioids." Considering that "an estimated 91 people die each day" from opioids... this seems really worth following up on. Link.
  • There is a lot of evidence that making prostitution illegal significantly increases rape. Link. When people ask themselves whether it should be legal, I really wish "should there be less rape" would be considered with as a much importance as "how do I personally feel about prostitution"?
  • The number of detained immigrant children increases, and they are largely being moved from foster homes to a tent city in Texas. Link. Part of the cause for the increase is that detained children are not being picked up by their parents as much, because now ICE essentially uses undocumented children as bait for their undocumented parents. Link. I feel safer already.
  • After continual anti-NAFTA talk, Trump finally announced he ended it and signed a new trade deal... which basically NAFTA with a new name. Link.
  • Many state education rankings seem... not good. It is common for them to include spending as part of how states are measured. The more you spend, the higher you are ranked. So these are not a good way to check whether marginal state spending on education is worthwhile!
    "As recently as 2011, Education Week placed Florida fifth in the nation. Then the publication altered its methodology to put more weight on raw expenditures. Despite high test scores, the state dropped to 29th place—not because teaching effectiveness fell, but because the state supposedly spent too little!"
    Also, "According to U.S. News and World Report, Texas, which ranks 33rd, is far surpassed in educational quality by Iowa, which ranks eighth... But when we disaggregate student performance scores by racial categories... the rankings change dramatically... White students do better in Texas than in Iowa. Black students do better in Texas. Hispanic students do better in Texas. Asian students do better in Texas. Given these facts, it is absurd for U.S. News to rank Iowa higher than Texas in terms of educational performance. And this example is no fluke. Many other state comparisons similarly reverse if you account for student heterogeneity."
    Link.

Friday, October 5, 2018

Links 2018/10/05

  • A GMO cotton developed my Monsanto has led to a drastic reduction in the need and use of pesticides. Surely the average environmentalist will be thrilled, right?
  • Data from campuses and police compared to timing of college football games show a significant increase in rapes on the days of home games. "For away games, the effects are only statistically significant where we can verify that the game was televised." Link. Perhaps we should increase alcohol taxes?
  • Rodrigo Duterte, the President of the Philippines: "My only sin is extrajudicial killings".
  • American farmers are losing money due to our trade war with China, so we're doing a $12 billion bailout. This is best summarized by Senator Brian Schatz: "We are borrowing money from China to pay our farmers to not sell their crops to China".
  • Stephen Miller pushed for a total ban on Chinese students attending American universities, partly because it would "hurt elite universities whose staff and students have been highly critical of Mr Trump". He was not successful.

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Links 2018/09/27

  • "Self-driving homes could be the future of affordable housing". If the technology pans out, we'll still probably screw it up as described by this actually-good-internet-comment: "Poor people will not live in glorious RV parks. They'll be shunted to shitty areas by new NIMBY laws and charged exorbitant fees for services."
  • "Reductions in childhood mortality have prevented 100m deaths since 1990". #latestagecapitalism
  • Jason Furman, the previous Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, gives a history of the policies we passed to counter the Great Recession and summarizes the evidence we've gathered since then. Link to the paper and link to the easier-to-read twitter thread. One interesting thing is in his "lessons for the future" at the bottom, he discusses how many recent studies have suggested tax cuts are a much more effective form of stimulus than previously believed. This is good (if true), because they are presumably both technically and politically easier to do at whatever amount makes sense than finding a bunch of temporary spending projects.
  • www.nber.org/papers/w25000: "state-wide minimum teacher salary laws created sharp differences in teacher wages between adjacent counties. These differences had large impacts on schooling attainment, suggesting an important causal role for school quality in mediating upward mobility"
  • Trump, the "law-and-order president", wants his Justice Department to not prosecute Republican congressmen for crimes. This seems like the sort of thing that would be done in secret, and once leaked, would be a huge scandal for a president. But this is... a tweet to the public:

Saturday, February 17, 2018

People should stop paying so much attention to mass shootings

Bringing more attention to a problem can lead to a reduction of it. There is a lot of preventable death and suffering, and there is finite attention. If we want to bring attention to problems with the goal of reducing death+suffering, then ideally, attention would be rationed out to each problem in proportion to 1: "how bad that problem is relative to other problems" and 2: "how much it will reduce that problem".

NOTE: For simplicity's sake, I'm only talking about the U.S.

Mass shootings are clearly given more attention, relative to other problems, than the harm they cause. They are certainly not one of the leading causes of preventable death, and they are only a tiny share of all gun violence. Is it worse for a number of people to die in one shooting than it is for the same number to die in separate shootings? No, but the former will get way way more attention. You would save far more lives if you were able to decrease the number of deaths caused by cigarettes by 1% than if you ended all mass shootings. The amount of attention the media gives to a problem does not represent how big it is.

We can expect bringing more societal attention to a problem to cause a reduction in that problem, on average. But there are good reasons to suspect mass killings are an exception to that rule. Many experts believe that the media attention brought to these killings is one of the main incentives for future mass killers. And you can't just blame the media for that: our demand is what drives their coverage.

To do my small part in reducing mass shootings, I choose not to click on news articles about them, which gives the media less incentive to make such a huge deal about them.

Relevant links:

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

But The Stock Market

2008. I hadn't ever investigated politics/economics much. I had recently graduated college and started my career. Then the Great Recession hit, and there was a presidential election. That freaked me out and suddenly increased my interested in the topic. I decided I should probably put a little effort into figuring out how the economy works and vote accordingly.

I was really unsure how to evaluate the various theories and arguments for explaining the problem + solution on all the different sides. Then I remember coming across this, which was a big turning point in how I approached it.

It dawned on me: why not just look at the evidence of how the economy has done under the presidents of different parties? As shown above, the stock market did much better, on average, under Democratic presidents. When I looked at any other economic indicator - inflation, unemployment, GDP - the same pattern held up. So I decided, despite having considered myself a conservative all my life up to that point, I would support Obama. And sure enough, in keeping with the historical trends I had noticed, during his presidency the stock market grew more than under the average presidency.

I continued learning about politics/economics though, and at some point I decided the stock-market-performance-per-president was not a good way to judge which side is better on economics. The stock market is a mysterious beast, the president is just one of so many variables, correlation is not causation, etc. I no longer reached to that data to support my opinions on politics/economics.

...

Fast forward to now. Trump has been president for a year, and the stock market has been doing very well. And some people are pointing at that as evidence that Trump has been good for the economy. That is strange, obviously. If the stock market 1 year into Trump's presidency shows that Trump/Trumpism is good for the economy, don't you have to be consistent with your logic? Shouldn't you then believe that, on average, Democrats are better presidents? Shouldn't you believe that Obama was a good president?

You also have to consider this:

Stock markets globally have been doing very well the past year. In fact, we are underperforming compared to other countries. So Trump is doing great things, to cause stocks across the world to go up, and causing our own stock market to grow slower than the others?

Monday, January 15, 2018

The hard problem of ... matter?

Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery...

I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is... It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour...

Many make ... the Very Large Mistake ... of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t. We don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, except ... insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience.

We find this idea extremely difficult because we’re so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can’t be physical. We don’t see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is.

We may think that physics is sorting this out, and it’s true that physics is magnificent. It tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations (e = mc2, the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, the periodic table and so on) and that we can use to build amazing devices. True, but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure.

-- link