Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years

  As Trump rails against 'far-left' fascism, new database shows leftwing attacks have left far fewer people dead than violence by rightwing extremists.

  More broadly, the database lists 21 victims killed in leftwing attacks since 2010 , and 117 victims of rightwing attacks in that same period - nearly six times as much. Attacks inspired by the Islamic State and similar jihadist groups, in contrast, killed 95 people since 2010, slightly fewer than rightwing extremists, according to the data set. More than half of these victims died in a a single attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.

• Thomas Sowell Happily Removes Color From the Success Equation

  Data concerning Nigerian immigrants and their children emphasize this point. The Migration Policy Institute reported in 2015 that they have a higher median household income than other Americans, and are more likely to have a college degree, a master's degree, a Ph. D, or a professional degree and to be employed in professional or managerial occupations.
  ...
  Some contend that Nigerian immigrants and their children are different from other Black Americans, but - as Sowell has noted - the theory that Blacks on average are poorer because their skin color subjects them to racism cannot distinguish these immigrants and their children from other Americans with the same skin color. Racism isn't preventing these immigrants and their children from moving ahead, so it can't be the reason that Blacks on average trail economically.

  Rather than racism, Sowell has highlighted a different factor as the big brake on Blacks' success: while "[m]ost black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s." With the rise of the welfare state, "today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families."

• What You Can't Say

  Paul Graham from January 2004!

  Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
  ...
  What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

• The Purity Posse pursues Pinker

  The link to the document in question, " Open Letter to the Linguistic Society of America," was tweeted yesterday by Pinker's fellow linguist John McWhorter, who clearly dislikes the letter. And, indeed, the letter is worthy of Stalinism in its distortion of the facts in trying to damage the career of an opponent.
  ...
  Many of the signatories are grad students and undergrads, members of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), which may explain why the vast amount of criticism leveled at Pinker comes from his social media, all tweets from Twitter. The letter shows no familiarity with Pinker's work, and takes statements out of context in a way that, with the merest checking, are seen to be represented duplicitously. In the end, the authors confect a mess of links that, the signatories say, indict Pinker of racism, misogyny, and blindness to questions of social justice.

• Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley's War Against the Media

  How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times.

  On June 22nd, visitors to Slate Star Codex, a long-standing blog of considerable influence, discovered that the site's cerulean banner and graying WordPress design scheme had been superseded by a barren white layout. In the place of its usual catalogue of several million words of fiction, book reviews, essays, and miscellanea, as well as at least as voluminous an archive of reader commentary, was a single post of atypical brevity. "So," it began, "I kind of deleted the blog. Sorry. Here's my explanation." The farewell post was attributed, like virtually all of the blog's entries since its inception, in 2013, to Scott Alexander, the pseudonym of a Bay Area psychiatrist-the title "Slate Star Codex" is an imperfect anagram of the alias-and it put forth a rationale for this online self-immolation.
  ...
  The final post went on, "It probably would have been a very nice article. Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me." Alexander explained that he has a variety of reasons to prefer that his real name, which can be ascertained with minimal investigation, be left out of the paper of record.

• Central Banks have Become Irrelevant

  The Scottish market strategist Russell Napier warns that investors should prepare for inflation rates of 4% and more by next year. The main reason: Governments have taken control of the money supply.

  The Scottish market strategist has for two decades - correctly - seen disinflation as the dominant theme for financial markets. That is why investors should listen to him when he now warns of rising inflation.
  ...
  We are currently in the worst recession since World War II, and yet we observe the fastest growth in broad money in at least three decades. In the US, M2, the broadest aggregate available, is growing at more than 23%. You'd have to go back to at least the Civil War to find levels like that. In the Eurozone, M3 is currently growing at 8,9%. It will only be a matter of months before the previous peak of 11.5% which was reached in 2007 will be reached. So I'm not making a forecast, I just observe the data.

• Andrew Cuomo's Coronavirus Response Has Been a Failure

  The media's fawning interviews obscure the New York governor's record.

  The most egregious mistake was mandating nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients, but see the article for numerous other missteps.

• Combining Life and Health Insurance

  We estimate the benefit of life-extending medical treatments to life insurance companies. Our main insight is that life insurance companies have a direct benefit from such treatments as they lower the insurer's liabilities by pushing the death benefit further into the future and raise future premium income. We apply this insight to immunotherapy, treatments associated with durable gains in survival rates for a growing number of cancer patients. We estimate that the life insurance sector's aggregate benefit from FDA approved immunotherapies is $9.8 billion a year. Such life-extending treatments are often prohibitively expensive for patients and governments alike. Exploiting this value creation, we explore various ways in which life insurers could improve stress-free access to treatment. We discuss potential barriers to integration and the long-run implications for the industrial organization of life and health insurance markets, as well as the broader implications for medical innovation and long-term care insurance markets.

• Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

  Take down of the popular and positively reviewed book.

  In the process of reading the book and encountering some extraordinary claims about sleep, I decided to compare the facts it presented with the scientific literature. I found that the book consistently overstates the problem of lack of sleep, sometimes egregiously so. It misrepresents basic sleep research and contradicts its own sources.
  ...
  Walker's book has likely wasted thousands of hours of life and worsened the health of people who read it and took its recommendations at face value.

• Declining eyesight can be improved by looking at red light, pilot study says

  A few minutes of looking into a deep red light could have a dramatic effect on preventing eyesight decline as we age, according to a new study published this week in The Journals of Gerontology.
  The science works, Jeffery said, because the light stimulates the health of mitochondria, which are like batteries in our cells.
  

  Published paper abstract here.

Some links about the cause of trade imbalances and their connection to income inequality around the world.

• Why Trade Wars Are Inevitable

  Michael Pettis

  The real problem is that, over the past two decades, it has become increasingly difficult for the world to fix its massive trade imbalances; the very mechanisms that created them also make them harder to absorb. That is because trade surpluses and deficits are mainly the result of domestic savings surpluses and deficits, which are themselves a result of domestic income inequality. Until such inequality is substantially reversed, high-saving countries will continue to use trade as a way to pass the effects of their distortions onto other nations, such as the United States. This makes global trade conflict nearly inevitable-regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. For the United States, the only way out may be reconsidering how willing it is to absorb everyone else's excesses.

  For a video interview with Hidden Forces's Demetri Kofinas see Wealth Inequality in Global Trade & Finance.

  For an opposing view (albeit by someone favoring the investor class) see A Misguided and Harmful View of Trade Deficits.

• Martin Wolf: what trade wars tell us

  Book review: Trade Wars Are Class Wars

  "Trade war is often presented as a war between countries. It is not: it is a conflict mainly between bankers and owners of financial assets on one side and ordinary households on the other - between the very rich and everyone else."
  ...
  "For decades," note the authors, "real borrowing costs have been below long-term forecasts of real economic growth and remain around zero." This combination of extraordinarily low real interest rates with weak global demand and low inflation is a prime symptom of underconsumption or, in modern parlance, "a savings glut". The explanation given by Klein, economics commentator at Barron's, and Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, is that income has been shifted to wealthy people who do not spend what they earn.
  ...
  "As of 2018, Chinese households still consume less than 40 per cent of Chinese output - a lower ratio than in every other major economy in the world, by far," the authors write. This is due to a host of mechanisms - high household savings, low interest rates, lack of rights of rural migrants in cities, regressive taxation, weak social safety nets and the failure of state-owned companies to pay dividends - all designed to shift income from workers and retirees to companies and the state.

• Trade Wars Are Class Wars

  A discussion between Adam Tooze, Michael Pettis, and Matthew Klein

  Our argument is fairly straightforward: trade cost and trade conflict in the modern era don't reflect differences in the cost of production; what they reflect is a difference in savings imbalances, primarily driven by the distortions in the distribution of income. We argue that the reason we have trade wars is because we have persistent imbalances, and the reason we have persistent trade imbalances is because around the world, income is distributed in such a way that workers and middle class households cannot consume enough of what they produce.
  ...
  Periods of significant income inequality in the US included the 1830s, the 1860s, the period before World War One, and the 1920s. In each case, often in a very chaotic way, the US took necessary political steps to redistribute income. I suspect that maybe we're going through that process again. We've reached the limits of our ability to absorb rising income inequality. At least that's what I hope.
  ...
  Video

• How to escape the trap of excessive debt

  The rich will benefit if we create sustainable demand with less household borrowing

  As Eccles said so clearly, beyond a point, inequality weakens an economy by driving policymakers into a ruinous choice between high unemployment or ever-rising debt. The paper on the savings glut makes two points. First, rising inequality in the US has resulted in a large increase in the savings of the top 1 per cent of the income distribution, not matched by a rise in investment. Instead, the investment rate has been falling, despite declining real interest rates. The rising savings surplus of the rich has been matched by the rising dissaving, or consumption above income, of the bottom 90 per cent of the income distribution.