Lunch at the Labs

Items of Interest

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Inequality and Its Discontents

  Michael J. Boskin, economist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, asks the question:

  What is really more important, the distribution of the economic pie or the level and growth of living standards?

  I emailed him to watch this video which explains why he is wrong:

  Capuchin monkeys reject unequal pay.

  He never responded and I don't expect any facts would change his political and economic beliefs.

• Hook, Line and Sinker

  In the Long Now, the single most important executive skill is the ability to shape the external narrative of the company.

  It's that Doug Parker is telling all of us - citizens and media alike - how to think about what an airline is. Doug Parker wants you to think that "American Airlines" is the financial health of AAL, the publicly listed company with its current debt holders, current equity owners, and current programs to programmatically offer cash and non-cash compensation to senior executives. He wants all of us to think that those things are synonymous with having functional, well-maintained airplanes, protected employees and route infrastructure capable of quickly ramping back up when the depression in air travel caused by COVID-19 subsides.
  ...
  And we're buying it - hook, line and sinker. ... We don't have to. As citizens, we can carry two ideas in our heads at once. We can believe that airlines are a critical industry, that its workers are important fellow citizens worthy of public financial support and that keeping them in the industry is an indispensable part of rapidly returning to full capacity. AND we can believe that literally none of that requires us to unconditionally support the share price, current equity holders or executive compensation expectations at AAL or UAL or any other airline.

• Why These Millionaires Are Staying Put Despite a New Tax on Them

  The reason has little to do with money. Family and community ties keep them from leaving their state.

• Covid-19: Immunity and Re-Infection

  Why not? Because from everything we can see, re-infection is a very rare event. The confirmed examples worldwide could possibly be counted on your fingers (depending on whose count you believe) out of at least 38 million total cases.

• Great Barrington Declaration

  As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.

• Why Physics Can’t Tell Us What Life Is

  The origin of life can’t be explained by first principles.

  Life is a grab bag of different pieces, some of whose physical properties are easier to predict mechanistically than others, and it is certainly the case that at least some of the factors that matter a great deal to how a living thing works will fall into the category of highly non-universal emergent properties that are impossible to derive from first principles.

• American Purpose

  American Purpose is a magazine, media project, and intellectual community.

  In the writing we publish, the podcasts we produce, and the conversations we host, we have three broad goals:
  1. First, we aim to defend and promote liberal democracy in the United States.
  2. Second, we seek to better understand and address the challenges to liberal democracy abroad.
  3. Finally, because we believe that the political and cultural issues of the moment cannot be separated from questions of enduring importance-about the ends and purposes of life, about how to live well and wisely together, about beauty and consolation-we intend to offer criticism and commentary on history and biography, high art and pop culture, science and technology.
• Fermat's Library Journal Club

  Fermat's Library is a platform for illuminating academic papers. Every week we send you a new paper annotated by the community in the fields of Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Computer Science and Biology.

• The Effects of Fluoride in the Drinking Water

  Water fluoridation is a common, but debated, public policy. In this paper, we use Swedish registry data to study the causal effects of fluoride in the drinking water. We exploit exogenous variation in natural fluoride, stemming from variation in geological characteristics at water sources, to identify its effects. First, we reconfirm the long-established positive effect of fluoride on dental health. Second, we estimate a zero-effect on cognitive ability - in contrast to several recent epidemiological studies. Third, fluoride is found to increase labor income.This effect is foremost driven by individuals from a lower socioeconomic background.

• I'm extremely controversial: the psychologist rethinking human emotion

  "Anger" is a cultural concept that we apply to hugely divergent patterns of change in the body, and there's no single facial expression reliably associated with it, even in the same person. (Some cultures don't have a concept that corresponds to "anger", such as the Utku Inuit of Canada's Northwest Territories.) The same is true, astonishingly, of "happiness", "excitement", "disappointment", you name it. No emotion is tied to a single, objective state in the body. Rather, emotions are cultural artefacts.