Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Are we in an Atlas Shrugged moment?

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To some people it looks that way, but I am going to say no. The key issue, in my view, is the pursuit of excellence. Can great thinkers, engineers, and entrepreneurs still pursue excellence, or are they being stifled by ankle-biting social justice activists?

I think that the pursuit of excellence is still possible. If the New York Times fails as an outlet, there is still Quillette. If many academic departments become mediocre, excellence will find its way to other departments or the corporate sector or perhaps privately-funded research institutes. If the top tech firms stifle their best talent, venture capitalists will find better uses for them.

I worry about Scott Alexander. His excellence could be harder to pursue if his worst fears about the NYT revealing his name are realized. But on the whole, I think that the ability to pursue excellence is going to still be here.

Jordan Peterson is back

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He wrote recently,

Qualified and expert researchers in such fields are already in great danger of being pushed aside by activists of the proper opinion. The rest of us will pay in the longer run, when we no longer have the will or the capacity to make use of the rare talents that make people highly competent and productive as scientists, technological innovators, engineers or mathematicians. Wake up, STEM denizens: your famous immunity to political concerns will not protect you against what is headed your way fast over the next five or so years.

Your old world is rapidly agin’

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Ross Douthat writes,

even federal intervention probably won’t prevent small businesses from going under while bigger businesses ride things out, accelerating the pre-existing drift toward a less entrepreneurial, more monopolist America.

This is similar to a point that I made when I gave a talk on the virus economy over Zoom to a small group of friends and synagogue members last Sunday.

More controversially, he writes,

In politics, similarly, what was likely to be a slow-motion leftward shift, as the less-married, less-religious, more ethnically diverse younger generation gained more power, is being accelerated nationally by the catastrophes of the Trump administration

I think Ross needs to get out more, virtually if not physically. I doubt that the times are a-changin’ as fast as the Times is.

It does not seem to me that the younger generation is ready for power. The most visible young activists are too arrogant, tyrannical, and ideologically crazed to govern. Look at their performance in Seattle. What is the probability that the whole country gives way to that?

My guess is that whether Biden wins, loses, or draws in November, the young progressives will stir chaos. But their behavior will mostly serve to galvanize their opponents.

The DARPA process includes an audit

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Benjamin Reinhardt writes,

Every program at DARPA is intensely technically scrutinized by the tech council

The Tech Council is composed of people with technical expertise in the proposed program’s area and adjacent areas. The Tech Council Pitch Meeting is meant to be very high level but council members can ask deep technical questions on anything. The tech council doesn’t have any power besides advising the director on the program’s technical soundness. A purely advisory tech council seems like a good idea because it both avoids decision by committee and keeps all responsibility squarely on the director and PM.

I see this as something like an external audit. I am a big fan of audits. The essay I am working on will suggest audit mechanisms as a way out of our “post-truth” morass.

the closest thing to a framework that PMs use to guide program design is “be able to explain precisely why this idea will work to a group of really smart experts both in the area of the program and adjacent to it.”

Imagine if every research project or graduate course were put through this sort of process.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who correctly lauds the essay.

Higher ed is a Covinnovation good

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Bruce Wydick writes,

the distinction between purchases of what I’ll call “Snap-Back” goods and services and those that are “Gone Forever.” In the Snap-Back category are things that we couldn’t buy during the heaviest COVID lock-down period, but these purchases were simply delayed. There is good reason to think that as the economy begins to open up, purchases of these items might even be higher than normal due to pent-up demand. . .

“Gone Forever” goods and services, in contrast, are just like the term suggests: gone forever. Like me, you may have foregone several haircuts during shelter-in-place because you didn’t want to get (or give) coronavirus to your barber. But when it becomes safe to go back to the barber chair, you’ll still only get one haircut.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who seems unsure whether to agree with Wydick that higher education is a Snap-Back good.

I think that higher education is in a third category, which might be termed Covinnovation Goods. That is because the virus forces suppliers to innovate to deliver the goods, and some of the innovations will stick. When fear of the virus subsides, consumers will choose the best blend of pre-virus and virus-adapted practices.

I will say how higher education fits in the Covinnovation categorey. But first, let me use the example of Israeli dancing. Continue reading →

Predicting the virus one month ahead

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A commenter asks where I think we will be one month from now. I think we will be in the dark, or at least I will be.

Recall that I prefer to track death rates. What I finally settled on as an indicator was the 7-day average death rate, using this data. This average held at around 1500 through the dark days of April and the first third of May, and then it finally began to trend lower after that, down to less than 600 in the third week in June. Then on one day, June 25, there were 2500 deaths, sending the seven-day average to over 800.

It is not that 2500 people died of the virus on the 25th. But that was the day that New Jersey included over 2000 previously unreported deaths from April and May. I am afraid that we have not seen the last of this “death harvesting.” I came across an article the other day, which I forgot to bookmark, that said that analysts are suspicious about the high rate of deaths reportedly caused by Alzheimer’s this year. So perhaps 10,000 more deaths will be re-stated as Covid deaths.

The data I wish I had is data on serious cases. I would define a serious case as a case that deprives the victim of normal activities for more than 30 days. Death obviously counts. Quibble with my definition all you want, but my point is that in order to calibrate my fear of the virus, I would like to know the prevalence of serious cases.

Virus science catches up?

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From a UPI story.

The first, published June 5 by the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology, found that sunlight — specially ultraviolet solar radiation — kills SARS-CoV-2 in 30 minutes.

The second, published by JAMA Network Open on June 11, suggested that climates with warmer temperatures and higher humidity — like much of the United States during the summer — might slow the spread of the virus.

. . .The authors of both studies argue that people might be safer outdoors. This runs counter to many of the lockdown and social distancing measures implemented across much of the country in March, the researchers told UPI.

I posted What I Have Come to Believe on April 23. I said,

A fresh-air lifestyle is good for you. I am struck by the low death rate among homeless people and in India. Those populations ought to be at high risk, and the only story I can come up with is that they don’t spend as much time as we do indoors with HVAC.

I did not have much to go on. But I think what I said holds up. You are better off outside. The problem with hot weather in the U.S. is that it drives many people indoors for the air conditioning. UPDATE: According to Tyler Cowen, Nate Silver agrees on this point.

In fact, pretty much everything in that post holds up. I think that if you go back to March and April, I out-performed the professional health care experts in drawing inferences about the virus.

Notes for a TLP talk

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1. Terms that describe the current state

–Negative polarization. Political energy comes from hatred of the other side. May not even like the leaders on your side.

–Zero cognitive empathy. Unable to imagine that the other side is reasonable. Makes you inclined to want to make the other side disappear.

–Asymmetric insight. The belief that the other side does not realize what its motives are, but you do.

2. The desired state

–Widespread cognitive empathy

–Goal in political arguments is to understand the other side, not to humiliate it.

3. Three-axes model

progressive: oppressor-oppressed

conservative: civilization-barbarism

libertarian: liberty-coercion

4. example: “de-fund the police”

5. axes of demonization?

6. the Trump era–elites vs. populists

7. example: defer to health authorities on the virus?

Everybody hates the libertarians

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It’s not just Brink Lindsey. Patrick Deneen writes,

Until recent times, America has never been so foolish to consider itself a libertarian nation, much less had such a view advanced by so-called “conservatives.” We have had a libertarian public policy imposed by the mainstream of each political party: libertarian economics by elites on the right, and libertarian social ethos by elites on the left. This elite coalescence is represented no better than today’s two Supreme Court decisions, one which gives precedence to a corporation’s rights of property and profit (U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association), and the other which continues to elevate sexual autonomy as paramount libertarian good that trumps all contesting claims (Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia). Will and Thompson mistake this aberration – foisted upon an increasingly recalcitrant and unhappy public – as the sum of the American tradition, rather than an aberration and deformation.

I stand by my critique of Deneen from two years ago.

Who else remembers Tom Lehrer?

Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
and the Catholics hate the Protestants
and the Hindus hate the Moslems
and everybody hates the Jews

We are in the era of what political scientists call “negative partisanship,” where people feel at best lukewarm to their own side but are filled with fear and loathing for the other side.

The virus and the labor market

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Erik Hurst and others write,

employment declines were disproportionately concentrated among lower-wage workers. Segmenting workers into wage quintiles, we find that more than 35 percent of all workers in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution lost their job—at least temporarily—through mid-April. The comparable number for workers in the top quintile was only 9 percent. Through mid-May, bottom quintile workers still had employment declines of 30 percent relative to February levels but some workers have been re-called to their prior employer. We also find that employment declines were about 4 percentage points larger for women relative to men. Very little of the differences across wage groups or gender can be explained by business characteristics such as firm size or industry. Finally, we show that employment losses were larger in U.S. states with more per-capita COVID-19 cases and that states that re-opened earlier had larger employment gains in the re-opening sectors.

The massive decline in employment at the lower end of the wage distribution implies meaningful selection effects when interpreting aggregate data. For example, we document that average wages of employed workers rose sharply—by over six percent—between February and April in the United States, consistent with official data.4 However, all of this increase is due to the changing composition of the workforce

Note that the most interesting empirical work in macro these days is using non-governmental data sources. In this case, data from a payroll processor.