Sierra Leone update
An addiction crisis is gripping Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest nations, driven by a surge in use of “kush”, a toxic blend of psychoactive substances. As the West African nation struggles to boost its economy, thousands of unemployed young adults have turned to the potent alternative to marijuana to fill their days.
The kush crisis is part of a growing trend of substance abuse across Africa, particularly among the continent’s youth.
“People are addicted to escape,” said Abass Wurie, a biomedical scientist in Freetown who is studying the effects of the drug on the heart and kidney.
Here is more from Aanu Adeoye at the FT. Is this a new trend for very poor countries, as the prices of escapist, addictive drugs fall all the more?
Incentives matter, for childbirth too
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
There is in fact a pronounced “baby bump” in December. The numbers show that induced deliveries and scheduled Caesarian section deliveries are higher than average toward the very end of the year.
Why? In the US, there are significant tax advantages to having a child. If you are a single parent with an adjusted gross income below $112,500, an extra child brings you a $3,600 child tax credit per year.
So — speaking strictly about the tax implications, of course — a New Year’s Eve baby is better than New Year’s baby: You can claim that little bundle of joy as a dependent for the entire year, even though they were only there for a day of it. Yet further benefits could come from state-level earned income tax credit and child tax credit programs.
You might argue that the parents, not the kids, gain the most from these tax benefits. You might also ask if there are some costs to these newly born children. In fact, the study shows that these children have lower birthweights. Further research shows that the accelerated births had noticeable impacts on the children, again finding lower birthweights.
The good news, however, is that those same kids have accelerated weight gains over the course of subsequent examinations. The further good news is that those children reach early development milestones at a faster pace than average. That may reflect the extra income the parents have, since higher income and other positive parental features do predict better developmental outcomes for the kids.
Don’t wait until April!
How democratic are the French results?
Here is the source tweet.
The French left is now winning
This is a big surprise to many people, as in the first round the right was doing much better in terms of votes and seats. We’ll learn more soon, but in the meantime I am reminded of one of the paradoxes in the theory of expressive voting. You might want to send a protest vote, but you don’t want too many other people sending the same protest vote. For instance, some people voting for Ralph Nader didn’t really want him to win. And the same may be true for the French right. So the very show of force from the right, in the first round, may have limited their subsequent numbers. More generally, you could say that an equilibrium, when there is a lot of expressive voting, is super-sensitive to expectations about the voting behavior of others. Especially when the receives of the expressive votes come close to holding real power.
Do you know the apocryphal story of the economics department that wanted to decide, unanimously, to vote 18-3 on the tenure case of a junior professor? That was not allowed, and so everyone voted in favor.
I wonder what this all means for a possible Democratic mini-primary!?
Sunday assorted links
1. Esther Duflo calls for a new French left (FT). And South African power generation is improving (FT).
2. Bukele says keep your prices down. And here is some possible context. If you read, do read both. But reading this yet further explanation, I don’t think it is much of a save.
3. DEI chess?
4. Are smarter people more left-wing? And comment from Garett Jones: “The clearest of the “genetic politics” results here is that people with genes that predict higher IQ are less likely to be politically authoritarian.”
6. Sorkin interviews Peter Thiel. That this has become such a normal event and dialogue shows something significant about how the world is evolving?
7. Canadian yikes.
Time Preference, Parenthood and Policy Preferences
Using a small sample of couples before and after they have children, Alex Gazmararian finds that support for climate change policy increases after people have children. People also become more future-orientated when primed to think of children.
The short time horizons of citizens is a prominent explanation for why governments fail to tackle significant long-term public policy problems. Actual evidence of the influence of time horizons is mixed, complicated by the difficulty of determining how individuals’ attitudes would differ if they were more concerned about the future. I approach this challenge by leveraging a personal experience that leads people to place more value on the future: parenthood. Using a matched difference-in-differences design with panel data, I compare new parents with otherwise similar individuals and find that parenthood increases support for addressing climate change by 4.3 percentage points. Falsification tests and two survey experiments suggest that longer time horizons explain part of this shift in support. Not only are scholars right to emphasize the role of individual time horizons, but changing valuations of the future offer a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.
It’s a little tricky to say that the driving force is time preference per se, maybe it’s just caring about (some) future people. Suppose a white man marries an African American woman. He subsequently may become more interested in civil rights, just as having children may make people more interested in the(ir) future. Or suppose that medical technology extends life expectancy, leading people to save more. Is this due to lower time preference or increased-self love?
We do see more parenthood driving future-oriented behavior on many margins. I am reminded, for example, of More Pregnancy, Less Crime which showed huge drops in criminal activity as people learn that they will be mothers and fathers. Criminals are very present-oriented so this effect is also consistent with parenthood driving lower time preference, although other stories are also possible. It’s difficult to distinguish these explanations and as far as policy and behavior is concerned perhaps the distinction between caring about the future and caring about future people doesn’t really matter.
AI teaching assistants?
“Morehouse College is planning to use AI teaching assistants to help crack the code of education.
Why it matters: Morehouse professor Muhsinah Morris says every professor will have an AI assistant in three to five years.
- Morris says the technology has taken off in the last 24 months faster than it has in the last 24 years. Meanwhile, baby boomers are leaving the workforce amid national teacher shortages and burnout.
How it works: Morehouse professors will collaborate with technology partner VictoryXR to create virtual 3D spatial avatars. The avatars use OpenAI to have two-way oral conversations with students.
- The avatars use professor-created content and 3D models for lessons, such as molecules for chemistry lessons, to help students.
- Avatars can also respond to unrelated topics raised by students and redirect the students back to the lesson.
- Students will have 24/7 online access to the avatar, which can communicate in a student’s native language.
What they’re saying: Morris called the avatars the world’s first spatial AI teaching assistants.”
That is all from Axios. Via Anecdotal.
Fernand Pajot’s list of best documentaries ever
I know most of them, a very good list:
So far I have as S Tier:
The Act of Killing
Apollo 11
Planet Earth 1/2
The Beatles Get Back
Searching for Sugar Man
Free Solo (?)
Citizenfour (?)Anything else?
Did not make the list, but great:
Herzog stuff
Blue Planet
Our Planet Behind the Scenes
The Last Dance
The Vietnam War
My Octopus Teacher
Meru
Man on Wire
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Honeyland
The Century of the Self
The Elephant Queen
Magnus
Exit Though the Gift Shop
I suggest adding Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story, and also that Strauss-sympathetic movie about fans of The Shining, room something or other it is called? What else?
Saturday assorted links
1. Do AI compansions reduce loneliness?
2. Inflation rates across the income distribution.
3. Was the Antikythera mechanism a kind of lunar calendar? (NYT)
4. There is now a Suno song “Incentives Matter.”
5. Did a forgotten priest predict black holes in 1783?
Those new, unpaid Tasmanian service sector jobs
Tasmania is looking for curious, adventurous professionals to fill a wide array of unusual roles—including a “wombat walker,” who will be responsible for taking the stocky marsupials on their morning jaunts and feeding them snacks.
Tasmania has posted a series of “odd jobs” in a bid to boost tourism during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, which runs from June to August. All of the gigs are unpaid, though the local tourism board will cover the cost of travel, lodging and food…
“The stuff that makes us feel alive,” the tourism board adds.
Here is the full story, via Mike Doherty.
What should I ask Christopher Kirchhoff?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. In case you do not know, Christopher self-describes as:
Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office and has led teams for the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He recently worked special projects at Anthropic. Previously, Dr. Kirchhoff helped design and scale $1 billion in philanthropic programs at Schmidt Futures. He also founded and led the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Office, Defense Innovation Unit X, which piloted flying cars and microsatellites in military missions and created a new acquisition pathway for start-ups now responsible for $70 billion dollars of technology acquisition. During the Obama Administration, he was Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council and the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I very much enjoyed his new book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, co-authored with Raj M. Shah. Here is his home page. The book just received a very strong review from the FT.
So what should I ask Christopher?
PR for the UK?
I say no, we have enough European governments with proportional representation already. Should not someone allow for the possibility of more decisive action?
Estimates are suggesting that Labour won two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote, more or less. So that induces the usual cries of misrepresentation of the electorate (it also reminds us that virtually all electoral systems are not “democratic” in the naive sense of that term). But Britain has many serious problems, and I would rather see one party given a decisive mandate to handle them. And I write that as someone who is not in general rooting for the Labour Party — virtually all of my favorite British politicians are Tories, even if I do not like what that party has become as a whole.
Contrast the British with the recent French election. The distribution of votes was not altogether dissimilar, but the Britsh have “a landslide,” while the French have a possibly ungovernable situation.
I do love checks and balances, but the UK needs to defeat NIMBY and fix the NHS. Now it is Labour’s turn to try. Here is a broad outline of Labour’s 100-day plan. Not exactly what I would choose (see Wooldridge at Bloomberg), but if they get two or three big things right the regime still could be a success.
Note that the margins for the Labour victorious seats are extremely low, which means there is an ongoing constraint on the exercise of government power. I am not so worried about an “elected dictatorship.” If anything, it may not be decisive enough.
Another consideration is that PR for the UK could end up meaning the rise of an Islamic party of some kind, of course with minority status. I suspect that would worsen rather than improve democratic discourse in Britain, and perhaps hinder immigrant assimilation as well. I don’t want that to happen, and so it is another reason why the UK should not switch to a PR system.
Friday assorted links
1. Has the Minotaur labyrinth been discovered in Crete?
2. Catching a Soviet lab leak.
3. A life cycle hypothesis, from AutismCapital.
4. A Potemkin landslide? And Labour vote share declined in districts with high Muslim populations.
5. A Singaporean talking about America and Asia, video. He is of course a Straussian. The comments are interesting too, you can see to what extent he is regarded as a U.S: puppet, which of course is absurd. The underlying ideological shifts in Singapore remain an underreported story.
6. Japan is finally eliminating the use of floppy discs.
7. By one measure, these are the most Christian countries. Does Vatican City really deserve to be number one?
The intelligent chicken culture that is Canada
A British Columbia chicken earned a Guinness World Record by identifying different numbers, colors and letters.
Gabriola Island veterinarian Emily Carrington said she bought five hyline chickens last year to produce eggs, and she soon started training the hens to identify magnetic letters and numbers.
“Their job was to only peck the number or letter that I taught them to peck and ignore the other ones. Even if I add a whole bunch of other letters that aren’t the letter they are supposed to peck, they will just peck the letter that I trained them to peck,” Carrington told the Nanaimo News Bulletin.
Carrington decided to have all of her chickens attempt the Guinness World Records title for the most tricks by a chicken in one minute.
One of the chickens, Lacy, emerged as the clear winner of the flock, correctly identifying 6 letters, numbers and colors in one minute.
The focused nature of the tricks led Guinness World Records to create a new category for Lacy: the most identifications by a chicken in one minute.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.
How Many Workers Did It Take to Build the Great Pyramid of Giza?
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built circa 2600 BC and was the world’s tallest structure for nearly 4000 years. It consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks with a weight on the order of 6-7 million tons. How many people did it take to construct the Great Pyramid? Vaclav Smil in Numbers Don’t Lie gives an interesting method of calculation:
The Great Pyramid’s potential energy (what is required to lift the mass above ground level) is about 2.4 trillion joules. Calculating this is fairly easy: it is simply the product of the acceleration due to gravity, the pyramid’s mass, and its center of mass (a quarter of its height)…I am assuming a mean of 2.6 tons per cubic meter and hence a total mass of about 6.75 million tons.
People are able to convert about 20 percent of food energy into useful work, and for hard-working men that amounts to about 440 kilojoules a day. Lifting the stones would thus require about 5.5 million labor days (2.4 trillion/44000), or about 275,000 days a year during [a] 20 year period, and about 900 people could deliver that by working 10 hours a day for 300 days a year. A similar number might be needed to emplace the stones in the rising structure and then smooth the cladding blocks…And in order to cut 2.6 million cubic meters of stone in 20 years, the project would have required about 1,500 quarrymen working 300 days per year and producing 0.25 cubic meters of stone per capita…the grand total would then be some 3,300 workers. Even if we were to double that in order to account for designers, organizers and overseers etc. etc….the total would be still fewer than 7,000 workers.
…During the time of the pyramid’s construction, the total population of Egypt was 1.5-1.6 million people, and hence the deployed force of less than 10,000 would not have amounted to any extraordinary imposition on the country’s economy.
I was surprised at the low number and pleased at the unusual method of calculation. Archeological evidence from the nearby worker’s village suggests 4,000-5,000 on site workers, not including the quarrymen, transporters and designers and support staff. Thus, Smil’s calculation looks very good.
What other unusual calculations do you know?
