July 18, 2020
Florida Man, The Dems, Banerjee studies Banerjee, Objectivists learn collective action
Hi friends!
I hope you had a great week and have restful plans for the weekend. I'd like to extend a special hello to the newest subscribers — we tripled in size this past week. I am so very excited to have you all along for the ride. If you've just recently joined the newsletter, please feel free to drop me a message with your thoughts anytime.
The Weekend Reccs:
Drones can be ok sometimes I guess: As a longtime drone-hater this beautiful collection from Vermont made me soften my view…a little…and change my desktop background.
Winning elections: This is a long, worthwhile article on David Shor’s view of the Democratic Party, polls, and the electorate. (s/o Benedict Brady for sharing)
Two points:
The interviewer commits one of the worst sins of interviewing across the first three questions, and then the rest of the interview is great. As a rule: the reader does not care how clever or funny the interviewer is. The reader is interested in the subject. This is not about your good questions, it is about the good answers your good questions elicit.
Shor has some blindspots and weird phrasings that reflect his data science, nationalized-politics lens. Two that are important:
First, he gets very close to talking about the importance of organizational power and networks when discussing Black churches and the “cultural power” of businesses…but just doesn’t quite get there. Voters are people, not isolated vectors of opinions. They are connected to each other through networks that can activate or suppress them. Those networks matter, and the networks of organizations that connect those networks of people matter, too.
Second, a very smart person I know (hint) pointed out that the discussion of voters being “better informed” due to internet access is only true at the level of national politics. Voters are much less informed today about local issues and elections while making decisions (such as their Senate preference) on a nationalized basis, hence the decrease in split-tickets.
Hello...it's me: There is an old joke that every social psychologist studies themself: the awkward study conversational dynamics, the depressed study happiness, etc. It appears economists take it a little further. Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee's most recent study was on the impact of messages from Abhijit Banerjee. For the study, he sent a COVID-19 PSA to 25,000,000 people from West Bengal, his home state in India. In West Bengal he is, understandably, something of a celebrity. So unsurprisingly, people listened to him. Banerjee's messages caused recipients to report symptoms more often, travel less, and take other preventative measures, even if he didn't ask them to do so.
An important part of science is confirming that which we think we know, and I believe this study falls into that bucket. No surprise that people listen to celebrities. Whole industries are based on that principle. Yet what I found more interesting about this study is that it was about Banerjee’s message to the 25m people. Not MIT’s, not the Nobel Prize Committee’s. He wrote:
This is Abhijit Banerjee. I am stuck very far away but my heart is with you in West Bengal. I am sending you a set of suggestions and requests from the government of West Bengal and myself.
I have no doubt the government of West Bengal had distributed messages over the course of the pandemic, replete with credible endorsements. Therefore it seems not the case that Banerjee’s endorsement pushed the message over some evidence threshold people internally held. Rather, Banerjee’s message was a new, distinct thing.
As we live in times of increasingly personalized information streams (both I can decide what to receive, and I can easily transmit information), I don’t doubt that we will see a larger focus on the internalization of fame within a person. People trust Banerjee now because he’s Banerjee, and he can be Banerjee even if he were no longer an MIT professor. But he also can be in your life without MIT, too. In other times this may not always have been the case. Walter Cronkite couldn’t have been Cronkite without CBS; he could not text us a video of the news.
Athletes, though, are perhaps the more interesting case. As Geena Davis & Tom Hanks find out in A League of Their Own, sports are not about winning, they’re about entertainment. Similar to last week with golf, we don’t want our athletes just to win, we want drama and uncertainty and style. And increasingly, teams don’t so much care about championships: they want eyeballs and the lease-signing hands that are connected to them. Championships are nice, too, but only to the degree they get you eyeballs.
So what does this mean about the future of sports? Probably athletes spending a lot more time meeting with brand managers and social media coaches.
🎶Sweet irony, bah bah bah, I believed they never could🎶:
The President, sickness, lying about the press: No, it is not Donald Trump and COVID-19, it’s that one time Grover Cleveland secretly underwent anesthesia to get surgery on a moving boat. A question to which I don’t have a good answer: when he was under anesthesia, who was really the President? He hadn’t told his VP. The 25th Amendment was not yet ratified. Cleveland was practically in a coma. What if he stayed in that state for the remainder of his life? Would the VP have the powers of the President for the rest of his term? What if he was in a coma and the Presidency was passed to the VP and then Cleveland recovered, would we have to count him three times? If he had died on the ship, would they have had to inform the VP immediately? What about actions the VP took before he was informed but after Cleveland had died? Would those retroactively be Presidential? And for that matter, who was President between JFK’s assassination and LBJ’s inauguration? LBJ? Nobody? I have no clue. If you do please let me know.
Scrying, and more sickness: While we are on such unfortunate topics, I see two impending health crises resulting as fallout from COVID that people aren’t talking about. (1) We have seen a wave of millions of Americans retire early. My official position on retirement is that “retirement” is death. I use quotations because I believe there are two views of retirement, a popular one and a correct one. The popular one is that retirement is a time for convalescence and celebration after a long, hard career. This is what I am referring to when I say retirement is death. The other is that retirement is the time in your life where you pay yourself to do the work you want. Perhaps many people would call this no retirement at all, but maybe “working retirement” or “economic security”. Whatever you call it, you should aim for that and work until you cannot any longer. (2) A lot of parents were, and still are very worried (and rightfully so!) about COVID, whether for the safety of their children or of an adult living in the house. However there is good reason to believe that over-sanitizing causes long-term health impacts in children. I fear we may see a considerable growth in childhood illnesses in the coming years, both minor and severe.
Louder for the people in the back: I had written previously about the negative impacts of over-tightening lending standards after the housing crisis. (This tightening involved narratives about predatory lending and over-leveraged loans that don’t seem to pan out in the data. Instead we should accept that while those didn’t help, a bubble is a bubble is a bubble, and it wasn’t a subprime crisis.) While not about mortgage applications, this study from last month details how important access to credit can be. By exploiting a strict credit score cutoff at a European bank, the authors find that several years out from being denied a loan, would-be small business borrowers just below the cutoff have 11% lower income than those just above the cutoff who were accepted. This effect is even larger in areas in low-income areas, underlining the importance of access to credit in reducing inequality.
Lagniappe:
I was reminded this week of the importance and simplicity of the “Touch it Once” rule. If you have a physical item, or even a task, try to touch it only once. When you get your laundry out of the dryer, put it away. When you use a dish do not throw it in the sink: clean it right away. When you get your mail do not set it down somewhere: read it. When you start an email, unless you need more information (or, if it is very important, fresh eyes to edit it), write and send it in one go. I found this rule made me happier and more productive. Best of all there are never dishes to dread. There are clear times you don’t want to follow it. But I find it works well in most cases.
Graphs of the week:
[WSJ] A wave of evictions could be around the corner. As I’ve said often, we need to act fast or things get very bad very quickly:
[European Commission] The European Commission has specific policies towards combatting hate speech on social media. Below is a breakdown of the proportion of the different targets of hate speech by the number of reports that were received. That the measure is number of reports means that this is not a perfect representation of the size, scope, or even relative proportions of the actual hate speech (much less the underlying beliefs) in Europe, but I still found it very interesting:
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Your friend,
Harrison