Infrastructure Saturdays continue with some minor tweaks to the link underlining, which should reduce visual clutter. I have also spent an unreasonable amount of time moving the infinity symbol a few pixels down. Point of diminishing returns reached!
Andrew Gelman writes, under a typographical nightmare of a headline:
Back in the day, Steven Levitt was a “rogue economist,” a genial rebel who held a mix of political opinions (for example, in 2008 thinking Obama would be “the greatest president in history” while pooh-poohing concerns about recession at the time), along with some soft contrarianism (most notoriously claiming that drunk walking was worse than drunk driving, but also various little things like saying that voting in a presidential election is not so smart). Basically, he was positioning himself as being a little more playful and creative than the usual economics professor. A rogue relative to a stable norm.
I wonder how the Freakonomics team feels now, in an era of quasi-academic celebrities such as Dr. Oz and Jordan Peterson, and podcasters like Joe Rogan who push all sorts of conspiracy theories, and not just nutty but hey-why-not ideas such as UFO’s and space aliens but more dangerous positions such as vaccine denial.
Being a contrarian’s all fun and games when you’re defining yourself relative to a reasonable center, maybe not so much when you’re surrounded by crazies.
The parallel in medicine is John Ioannidis, who went from a praised debunker of bad science to a controversial “covid minimizer” without really changing his M.O. So, have their ways always been suspect, have their methods become faulty with the changing circumstances, or are they in the right even now, and it is the hyper-polarized environment to blame for our skewed perspective of their current work? I haven’t a clue.
Or you can look at it through the lens Venkatesh Rao’s field guide to the new culture wars, which is relevant even without a post-covid revision. The academic iconoclasts like Ioannidis, Levitt, et al. are useful in peacetime to serve as an internal control, strengthening the ranks or whatnot — I am not familiar enough with military culture to pick a better analogy — but become useful fools at best and traitorous collaborators at worst when the opposing sides gain in strength and start an offensive. But then, you still need some contrarians around to keep you in check. So how do you square that circle?
Well, Elon Musk helped when he destroyed Twitter. Criticizing one’s academic elders is a centuries-long tradition, tolerated and at times promoted, provided one didn’t do it out in the open. But saying anything to “civilians” — only there are no civilians in the culture wars, just potential alias and foes — is… was… is unseemly.
For better or worse, the barricades are on their way back, the indisciminate co-mingling of ideologies is waning, and (a different set of) iconoclasts will again find their groove. So it goes…
Frustration among physicians who feel they are being asked to do increasingly more to prove their competency has been building for years and in recent weeks, boiled over for many. At least 12,000 people have signed a Change.org petition, which is open to anyone. Many added their name after the petition’s organizer resurfaced a July tweet in which ABIM suggested their ongoing certification was so easy, doctors could do it while on vacation.
I have been meaning to write about ABIM’s train wreck ever since I signed the petition, but yet again my proscratination has been awarded: Philadelphia Inquirer says everything I wanted to, and then some. Ding-dong…
Back when I had to commute from Baltimore to Bethesda via DC’s Union Station every day (don’t ask) I would obsess about which train car I should enter so that I exit just in front of the right escalator. Yesterday, a Good Samaritan and fellow commute optimizer posted the layouts of every DC metro station to the Washington DC subreddit. If only I could send this back to my 2014 self!
🍿Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was the perfect sequel. I can’t imagine anyone who liked the original not being absolutely thrilled, with a twinge of sadness for never again being able to see either with fresh eyes. I look forward to the 7-hour Spider-verse viewing party whenever Part 3 comes out.
Watching Across the Spider-verse reminded me of a recent article panning Phil Lord for his obsessive iterations on what the animators thought were finished sequences, because “the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable”. To those who don’t mind being jackassess go the spoils.
The most fascinating aspect of Tyler Cowen’s interview with Paul Graham is how many times Graham admits to not knowing, in a way that makes you think he may know a bit more than he is letting on. I’d attribute it to his age, but I know many elder doctors and scientists who’d rather die than say there was something they didn’t know.
🍿 Re-watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) both for palate-cleansing after a not-so-good attempt and to set stage for the sequel.
My gosh, what an outstanding movie, never mind the nitpicks. They swung for the fences like Pixar shuld have, had they listened to Hypercritical.
Yet again, The Washington Post is not letting facts get in the way of a good story. This time, under the headline “Credit card debt tops $1 trillion, trapping even six-figure earners” they spin a yarn of high-earners keeping their credit card debt for years as “pet rocks”, not having the discipline to pay them off even as the economy is recovering.
Bankrate found that 72 percent of cardholders with credit card debt and annual household incomes of $100,000 or more have been in debt for at least a year. The percentage drops to 70 percent for households with credit card debt and incomes between $80,000 and $99,999; 63 percent for people earning between $50,000 and $79,999; and 53 percent for folks making under $50,000.
But what do they mean by “credit card debt”?
“More people [are] carrying more debt for longer periods of time,” Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate, said. “The stats that we see from the New York Fed and elsewhere, they don’t distinguish typically between what’s paid in full at the end of the month and what’s not.”
The emphasis is mine, and to be clear this is the gist of their story: more households with incomes >$100,000 carry a balance than those who earn less. But why wouldn’t they? Between credit card rewards (cash back, travel points, etc.) incentivizing use even for daily purchases on one end, and the current ≥4% annual yield on low-risk high-interest savings accounts on the other, why wouldn’t high-earning and — let’s speculate — more financially literate households hold off from paying off the balance to $0 and earn 4% interest on what they held off from paying? There is an important distinction between paying off the balance and paying down to zero which the article never makes.
So, how many households have a revolving credit card balance, the one that actually charges interest? The article has some of that information, burried in the lead and with no context:
Overall, nearly half (47 percent) of credit cardholders have revolving debt, meaning they don’t pay off their balance in full.
They, of course, omit the most important part of the story: proportion of households paying of their balance grouped by income. Because — and I’ll speculate some more — there are two stories here, one of lower-income households saddled with debt that’s not a pet rock but a rock tied to their neck, paying off just enough to stay afloat; and the other of some (many? who knows — they didn’t give that data) higher-income households playing the credit card game, which would account for the first quoted paragraph.
James Fallows had a good story about framing in journalism and this is not a direct example — the boo boos are in the story itself, not the headline and positioning — but it rhymes. Spin it in a way that sells, I guess. Simplify to the point of enough ambiguity to support your preordained, attention-grabbing conclusion. Vague phrases and undefined terms, FTW.
Economists do occasionally publish papers with which I agree: For the other ones, look here.
…I find that vaccines saved 748,600 lives through June 2023. That is, without vaccines, cumulative mortality from COVID-19 would have been closer to 1.91 million over this time period. In answering the second question, I find that behavioral efforts to slow the transmission of the virus before vaccines became widely administered were critical to this positive impact of vaccines on cumulative mortality. For example, with a complete relaxation of these mitigation efforts, vaccines would have come too late to have saved a significant number of lives. Earlier deployment of vaccines would have saved many lives.
Which yet again shows that out of the two extremes, John Snow and GBD, Snow was the more correct one both ex ante and ex post. Yet instead of taking an “L”, GBD proponents keep saying that we should not have locked down. Yes, shutting down outdoor playgrounds for a full year was ridiculous, but stopping mass gatherings and any goings on in tight public spaces until we get a working vaccine? Absolutely! Only next time, Operation Warp Speed should be set at Warp 5, not 0.1.(ᔥTyler Cowen)