Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success Continue reading →

Erik Torenberg interviewed me. I wouldn’t listen without ramping up the speed to at least 1.2X

So no, I am not back

I was musing the other day about the possibilities for changing higher education. I am fond of a seminar model in which there are about 6 to 8 students. The professor assigns material and in each class period a student presents a paper on that material, which is discussed by everyone in the seminar.

With the prospects for institutions this fall up in the air, I was thinking that I could offer a seminar, either this summer or in the fall. The title would be “Ways of knowing,” and it would deal with epistemology. A list of topics:

1. British empiricism and the Quine critique
2. Bayesian rationality
3. Forecasting–Tetlock Superforecasters
4. Complexity–Manzi Uncontrolled
5. Human nature and cultural influence–Pinker The Blank Slate, Harris The Nurture Assumption
6. Human nature and cultural influence–Henrich The Secret of our Success
7. Human nature and cultural influence–Mitchell Innate
8. Cognitive biases–Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow
9. Cognitive biases–Haidt The Righteous Mind
10. Cognitive biases and motivated reasoning–Kling The Three Languages of Politics
11. Order and design–Don Boudreaux The Essential Hayek

My ideal seminar students would be college age and self-motivated.

The original idea of taking the ratio of cumulative deaths today to that three days earlier was to be able to detect a sharp turn in the direction of the virus crisis. But it is not taking sharp turns, and at this point it is dominated by day-of-week factors.

For the record, today it is at 1.08, continuing its very gradual decline. Outside of New York, it is also declining, standing at 1.09.

If we look at 7-day intervals to correct for day-of-week effects, then we are not going to detect any sharp turning point. But that is probably the best we can do. I think that the simplest number to report would probably be either the 7-day total, or that total divided by 7 to get a daily average.

What I would most like to report would be 7-day averages broken out by age and whether or not the person resided in a nursing home.

What I will report, given what I can find, is the 7-day average outside of New York, because I think that the trend outside of New York will determine whether or not I win my bet against the models. The highest value so far is for 1546 average deaths per day for April 25 through May 1. The second highest value so far is 1539, for April 29 through today, May 5.

This figure rose from 705 for April 1-7 to reach 1476 April 15-21. It has been a plateau since then. Perhaps the shutdown orders stopped what otherwise would have been a steady increase. I would prefer to believe that the lockdowns had no significant effect, but we should let the facts speak for themselves. Going forward I will follow this 7-day average outside of New York to see what happens with easing the lockdowns. I won’t report this indicator every day, because it moves too slowly. Probably report about once a week or so.

1.14 overall, 1.18 excluding New York. Definitely not headed in the right direction. If I were deciding whether to lift economic restrictions based on “criteria” pertaining to the spread of the virus, then I would not.

I would lift economic restrictions based on a view that the externalities are not so large. If you open up your barber shop or restaurant, nobody has to patronize you unwillingly. There is no ventilator shortage. Hospitals seem to have unused capacity due to restrictions on caring for non-Covid patients.

Anti-fragile Arnold wears a mask and wants to see others wear masks. But he does not feel threatened by other people making choices to go to work or stores or parks or beaches.

1.12 overall, 1.16 outside of New York, so moving in the wrong direction. Curious to see whether the timing of reporting means that today borrowed some reported deaths from earlier days or even from tomorrow.

I should have put this on my last post. The alternatives are:

1. Loans to people and businesses who need help paying bills like rent or utilities. If you don’t know how I have proposed to do this, then you haven’t been following this blog long enough.

2. Raising taxes or cutting other government spending to pay for relief measures, including paying welfare to households that suffer unusually large or long-term losses.

There is no need to foster the sort of ethical breakdown that comes with people feeling entitled to renege on their obligations to landlords, utilities, automobile finance firms, mortgage lenders, and so on. There is no need to foster the sort of ethical breakdown in which every dime of government spending is financed by printing money. There is no need to foster the sort of ethical breakdown in which every asset market that the New York Fed deems essential (which is all of them, as far as I can tell) gets a full 100 percent bailout, ultimately paid for by the dupes who think they are being helped with their $1000 “stimulus checks.”

I don’t mind coming across as cranky. Every time I think about what the Federal government is doing, I get crankier.

David Henderson debates Justin Wolfers on the lockdown. I stopped watching when Wolfers made the shocking assertion that without continuing the lockdown a million lives would be lost, and with the lockdown only 60,000 lives would be lost.

One way or another, that claim ends the debate. If you believe it, then you cannot argue with Wolfers, because you have to agree that it makes sense to continue the lockdown. And if you don’t believe it, then you can’t argue with him, either, because it is so outlandish.

The original purpose of the lockdown was to “flatten the curve.” That meant that, relative to a no-lockdown baseline, we would trade a lower rate of illness now for a higher rate of illness later. The question about a lift-the-lockdown scenario becomes: how many people are out there who as a result will get the disease in May or June who could have been cured with adequate treatment and who cannot get adequate treatment in the near term but who could get adequate treatment in July or August. Wolfers implies that number is close to one million. That seems to require implausibly high estimates of the cure rate as well as the likely difference in resource availability.

My estimate of the number of lives saved by maintaining the lockdown is close to zero. Probably a closer would say that my estimate is outlandish and ends the debate. Wolfers and I disagree about a hypothetical, and only if we run the experiment will we find out who was right.

Honestly, I think that what has happened to many people, I hope not including Wolfers, is that the lockdown has morphed into a miracle cure for the disease itself. Once that becomes your mindset, it becomes impossible for an “opener” to argue with a “closer.”

This site, which I use for updating, does not include the 4000 deaths that NYC added with a lag. The 3DDRR is at 1.30, but excluding New York it rose to 1.36, the highest since before Easter. For those of us who have been waiting for signs of a really dramatic slowdown of the spread of the virus. . .we are still waiting.

Today it is at 1.28, and outside of New York it as 1.32

Apart from New York, the whole Acela corridor, from Massachusetts to Virginia, today saw their cumulative death totals rise by more than 10 percent.

I am seeing articles that suggests that it takes more than a day or two for deaths to be reported in these figures. Economists of a certain age might remember the phrase “long and variable lags.” If the average reporting lag is constant, then the trend is still reliable. But if the average lag is also variable–sometimes 1.5 days, sometimes 4.5 days–then the trend will be difficult to establish.

In any case, the growth rate of deaths is declining more slowly than I have been hoping for. The experts who in early April warned about a rough two weeks ahead seem to be correct.