Jack

A new fee for Venice day trippers. A looming ban on vacation rentals in Barcelona. Restrictions on the sale of alcohol in Majorca. At a time when overwhelmed European destinations are slapping tourists with restrictions and fees, Copenhagen is trying a different approach: rewarding visitors who act responsibly.

Beginning July 15, tourists who demonstrate climate-friendly travel behavior by participating in the city’s green initiatives — including cycling, train travel and clean-up efforts — will be granted access to museum tours, kayak rentals, free meals and more.

Here is more from  Ceylan Yeğinsu at the NYT.

The post The tourist culture that is Copenhagen appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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In these polarized times, I think it’s important to try to find opportunities to bring people together and draw attention to public policy issues that are orthogonal to deeply entrenched culture wars.

For example: Dentists.

On one level, yes, oral health is important, and it is good that there is a profession dedicated to advancing it. On the other hand, the form of dental care that most people need is a regular cleaning, and perhaps some x-rays just to check for problems. And if you’ve ever been to a dentist’s office, you’ve probably noticed that the dentist does not actually do this work and that it is done instead by a dental hygienist. One might think that since the work of a routine dental appointment is done by a hygienist rather than a dentist, a standard oral health appointment would simply be with a hygienist who lets you know if you need more specialized dental care. In reality, however, “scope of practice” rules pretty strictly limit which services a hygienist can provide, and only in Colorado and Oregon can hygienists perform diagnostic work.

There is, notably, no real ideological or partisan pattern to this patchwork of regulations, which is usually a sign that you are dealing with shady interest group politics rather than any plausible theory of public interest. You’ll also note that it’s not like we all walk around with stereotypes in our minds about people from Colorado and Oregon having bad teeth — there’s no Portlandia sketch about that.

And while I, of course, condemn anti-dentitism in all its forms, dentistry’s bad regulatory state turns out to be just one part of a broader web of unsavory business practices in the oral health industry.

This is, admittedly, a kind of random topic.

But part of my (so far vain) hope that a full employment economy would generate a healthier politics is that this is precisely the kind of issue that policymakers who want to see stronger growth and higher wages need to focus on in a world where unemployment is low.

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The troubled dental insurance landscape

The rational, politically unrealistic (though existing in many foreign countries!) way to organize health care policy would be for the government to decide on some amount of money that it’s willing to spend on providing health care services to people, and then to put together a list of covered services that prioritized cost-effective services over low-value ones. Anything else, people could pay for out of pocket. There would then be political debates like “maybe we should spend more so we can cover more stuff” and counterarguments like “no, we shouldn’t do that because we would have to raise taxes.”

Instead, America has a system that is largely “private” but massively subsidized through the tax code.

This means of providing public subsidy has a lot of odd and mostly bad consequences (it’s quite regressive, among other things), including the creation of a confusing corporate benefits landscape that includes lots of subsidiary products, like dental insurance.

The problem with dental insurance is that because it’s not regulated particularly stringently, you can’t typically buy a product that insures you against the risk of catastrophically high dental bills. Instead, you get plans with relatively low annual maximums, which defeats the purpose of having insurance. What you are essentially doing is pre-paying for routine dental care, which doesn’t make a lot of sense conceptually — you end up paying an average payment $47 per month, when an uninsured tooth cleaning runs about $80-$100 on average. For the record, $47 times 12 is $564. It doesn’t pencil out.

One of the best-polling proposals from Build Back Better was to have Medicare include dental coverage, which would make sense because it’s actually possible to deliver real insurance value in that context. What’s more, the government could take advantage of Medicare’s massive scale to push the per unit cost of treatments down. But of course dentists don’t like that idea, so the American Dental Association lobbied against providing seniors with dental coverage. But it’s not like dentists would be out in the street, impoverished, if they had to accept lower fees.

Dentists are rich and often shady

Dentists occupy a kind of blind spot in the popular understanding of the American class structure.

They’re not billionaires or corporate executives, obviously. The field is not in the consulting/banking/tech bucket of careers that whiz kids from the top colleges pursue. It is famously easier to get into dental school than medical school. And, of course, dentists are scattered all across the country, not clustered in superstar metro areas. Yet it’s still professional training for college graduates; it’s not in the bucket of low-education rich guy fields like owning a car dealership.

And dentists make a lot of money. As Jonathan Rothwell points out, “there are five times as many top 1 percent workers in dental services as in software services.” About fifteen percent of dentists earn enough to qualify for that lofty status. The median hourly wage in the United States is $22.26 versus $74.54 for dentists. That doesn’t make the Medicare concept a total no-brainer — there are plenty of competing potential uses for tax money — but it certainly underscores that driving down the profits earned by dental businesses would have a progressive and beneficial impact on the distribution of wealth and income in this country.

This is particularly true because, as best I can tell, the dental industry is significantly under-regulated and under-scrutinized in regard to it’s science and ethics.

As the great Kenneth Arrow wrote in his famous 1963 paper on the welfare economics of medical care, the market for health services is significantly influenced by asymmetrical information. In other words, when you pay a health care provider, you aren’t just taking advantage of the division of labor by outsourcing a task you could, in principle, handle yourself. You also aren’t buying something — like a movie ticket or a restaurant meal— where your own subjective evaluation of whether you enjoyed it is the relevant criteria. If someone tells you that you need a certain treatment, you don’t get the treatment because it’s fun, you get it because you trust their technical expertise… expertise that you don’t have. Arrow’s paper most frequently comes up in the context of doctors, but the point applies equally well to dentists, who in practice have less training and face less scrutiny.

Ferris Jabr noted in The Atlantic in 2019 that there is almost no systematic scientific evidence undergirding the practice of dentistry, such that even a maximally ethical dentist is, to an extent, just making informed guesses when she tells people what they should be doing:

The Cochrane organization, a highly respected arbiter of evidence-based medicine, has conducted systematic reviews of oral-health studies since 1999. In these reviews, researchers analyze the scientific literature on a particular dental intervention, focusing on the most rigorous and well-designed studies. In some cases, the findings clearly justify a given procedure. For example, dental sealants—liquid plastics painted onto the pits and grooves of teeth like nail polish—reduce tooth decay in children and have no known risks. (Despite this, they are not widely used, possibly because they are too simple and inexpensive to earn dentists much money.) But most of the Cochrane reviews reach one of two disheartening conclusions: Either the available evidence fails to confirm the purported benefits of a given dental intervention, or there is simply not enough research to say anything substantive one way or another.

Some people, of course, are not that ethical. And even those who are ethical are naturally going to find themselves inclined in the direction of self-interest when dealing with an evidentiary void. William Ecenbarger did a great investigative report for Readers’ Digest years ago where he visited dentists in different cities and asked for their recommendations and got prescribed courses of treatment ranging from $500 to $25,000. One outfit in Philadelphia diagnosed him this way: “Tell me what your insurance limits are, and we'll proceed from there.”

Back at Vox, I used to work with Joey Stromberg (whose dad is a dentist), who wrote a piece about how “while seeing other dentists, my brother has been told he needed six fillings that turned out to be totally unnecessary (based on my dad's look at his X-rays) and I've been pressured to buy prescription toothpaste and other products I didn't need.” Aspen Dental appears to have built a whole corporate dental chain around the observation that you can attract patients with low prices and then make it up in volume by prescribing unnecessary treatments.

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The social science of dentistry

To return to the scope of practice issue that we began with, while the scientific underpinnings of dental medicine are awfully vague, we do have pretty clear social science about the economic and public health consequences of different paradigms of dental regulation.

Where hygienists are allowed to be self-employed, their incomes rise by about 10 percent, while the incomes of dentists fall. The median hourly wage for dental hygienists is about $39 per hour — higher than the national average, but much lower than for dentists, so this is a progressive economic change.

But what happens to patients? Does dental health get better or worse with a stricter regulatory regime?

The Air Force assesses the dental health of its incoming recruits, which researchers used to gauge state-by-state variation. They find that stricter rules are associated with higher prices for consumers of dental services and worse oral health outcomes. A different team looked at state-by-state variation in the need to have teeth removed due to decay, and found that “more autonomous dental hygienist scope of practice had a positive and significant association with population oral health in both 2001 and 2014.”

Dental trade publications are full of advice about how to help your practice weather a recession, indicating that dentists themselves are well-aware that patients’ willingness to undergo routine tooth cleanings is responsive to their ability to pay. Of course, I think a person experiencing acute dental distress that requires high level treatment is likely to seek that treatment out even if it’s financially difficult. But the kind of basic cleanings and x-ray screenings that are the cornerstone of preventative dental health are things that people skip when they are squeezed financially. Letting hygienists do it more autonomously means it can be done more cheaply, which means not only savings for patients but better health outcomes. What’s more, in the very near future it should be possible to have x-rays evaluated by AI models that could be centrally regulated and would give standardized prescriptions for treatments rather than the current patchwork of humans making stuff up.

I acknowledge that this kind of thing can feel a little picayune relative to policy disputes that speak more to our core values and our identity as a nation. But to restate a theme I’ve been trying to hit more and more over the past year, having an economy with low unemployment means you need to try to find more ways to improve efficiency. Dentistry is also just a good example of how it’s not true that we face a routine tradeoff between efficiency and equality — the more efficient approach here is also more egalitarian. And the very fact that this topic, while important to families’ finances and health outcomes, does not touch at core questions of values and national identity means that talking about it can be non-polarizing and, hopefully, help diminish the tendencies through which this country is currently tearing itself apart.

“Red, White and Royal Blue,” the hotly anticipated queer rom-com based off Casey McQuiston’s best-selling romance novel, is finally here. The film arrives on Prime Video on Friday, Aug. 11. Like the book off which it’s based, the film centers on Alex Claremont-Diaz, the Mexican American son of the U.S. president and his royal counterpart […]

Hat tip: i/o.

The post The Gender Death Gap appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Northern Virginia might be the safest region in the whole country, based on this Bloomberg analysis of crime and external-cause mortality data. The local commonwealth’s attorney likes to boast that Fairfax is the safest county of its size. Letting more people live there would not change that.

Forty percent of Fairfax residents aged five and older speak a language other than English at home, per the May strategic plan update. The county’s extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity makes it a paradise for employers and food lovers alike.

That is from Luca Gattoni-Celli, most of the post concerning zoning issues.

The post Fairfax County facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Many pundits view financial crises as exogenous shocks that impact the business cycle. I’ve argued that most financial crises are actually endogenous, caused by the business cycle. There is very little evidence that financial crises have much effect on output, except when bank failures lead to currency hoarding that a central bank cannot fully accommodate due to a gold price peg. The banking crisis of the 1930s was a result of a depression that began in 1929, and the post-Lehman crisis of late 2008 was the result of a recession that began in December 2007.

Steven Kelly has a tweet pointing out that the recent banking problems in the US occurred on the West Coast, which is the worst performing region of the country (suffering from tech layoffs.)

Sudden bank runs are too often characterized as spontaneous fits of irrational panic. But what we see is that they’re very much tied to the business cycle. In 2023, West Coast bank runs have followed a West Coast business cycle that has very much turned.

When the banking problems developed back in March, the press was full of stories that the long awaited recession (which was already expected due to the Fed’s 2022 “tight money” policy) would now begin. After all, the recession of 2008 seemed to get much worse immediately after Lehman failed. (Actually, it got much worse before Lehman, but due to data lags this was not known until a few months later.)

Three months later we are still waiting for the recession.

People continue to make bad predictions because they have the wrong model. High interest rates do not indicate tight money. Financial turmoil is mostly the effect of a weak economy, not the cause.

Eventually, the US will experience a recession. But as long as the Fed continues to try to prevent recessions, the exact timing of recessions will be largely unforecastable.

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Joseph Fiennes expressed regret to The Observer over his decision to play Michael Jackson in a pulled 2017 episode of Sky Arts’ anthology series “Urban Myths.” The episode centered on Jackson taking a post-9/11 road trip with Marlon Brando (Brian Cox) and Elizabeth Taylor (Stockard Channing). Fiennes’ casting as the music icon generated whitewashing backlash, […]

The upcoming Australian series “NCIS: Sydney” has found its leads and main cast. The series, which is currently in production, will follow “the brilliant and eclectic team of U.S. NCIS Agents and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) as they are grafted into a multi-national taskforce to keep naval crimes in check in the most contested […]

Wastewater surveillance is one of the few tools that we can use to prepare for a pandemic and I am pleased that it is expanding rapidly in the US and around the world. Every major sewage plant in the world should be doing wasterwater surveillance and presenting the results to the world on a dashboard.

I was surprised to learn that wastewater surveillance is now so good it can potentially lock-on to viral RNA from a single infected individual. An individual with an infection from a common SARS-COV-2 lineage like omicron won’t jump out of the data but there are rare, “cryptic lineages” which may be unique to a single individual.

Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri and one of the authors of a recent paper on cryptic lineages in wastewater, believes he has evidence for a single infected individual who likely lives in Columbus, Ohio but works in the nearby town, Washington Court House. In other words, they poop mostly at home but sometimes at work.

Twitter: First, the signal is almost always present in the Columbus Southerly sewershed, but not always at Washington Court House. I assume this means the person lives in Columbus and travels to WCH, presumably for work. Second, the signal is increasing with time. Washington Court House had its highest SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels ever in May, and the most recent sequencing indicates that this is entirely the cryptic lineage.

Moreover the person is likely quite sick:

Third, I’ve tried to calculate how much viral material this person is shedding. (Multiply the cryptic concentration by the total volume). I’ve done this several times and gotten pretty consistent results. They are shedding a few trillion (10^12) genomes/day. What does this tell us? How much tissue is infected? It’s impossible to know for sure. Chronically infected cells probably don’t release much, but acutely infected cells produce a lot more. I gather a typical output in the lab is around 1,000 virus per infected cell. If we assume we are getting 1,000 viral particles per infected cell, that would mean there are at least a billion infected cells. The density of monolayer epithelial cells is around 300k cells/sq cm. A billion cells would represent around 3.5 square feet of epithelial tissue! Don’t get me wrong. The intestines have a huge surface are and 3 square feet is a tiny fraction of the total. But it’s still a massive infection, no matter how you slice it….My point is that this patient is not well, even if they don’t know it, but they could probably be helped if they were identified.

…If you are the individual, let me know. There is a lab in the US that can do ‘official’ tests for COVID in stool, and there are doctors that I can put you in contact with that would like to try to help you.

So if you poop in Columbus Ohio and occasionally in Washington Court House and have been having some GI issues contact Marc!

Hat tip to Marc for using the twitter handle @SolidEvidence.

The post The Poop Detective appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

New York City today has the worst air quality in the world, so now seems like a good time for a quick redux on air pollution. Essentially, everything we have learned in the last couple of decades points to the conclusion that air pollution is worse than we thought. Air pollution increases cancer and heart disease and those are just the more obvious effects. We now also now know that it reduces IQ and impedes physical and cognitive performance on a wide variety of tasks. Air pollution is especially bad for infants, who may have life-long impacts as well as the young and the elderly. I’m not especially worried about the wildfires but the orange skies ought to make the costs of pollution more salient. As Tyler noted, one reason air pollution doesn’t get the attention that it deserves is that it’s invisible and the costs are cumulative:

Air pollution causes many deaths. But it is rare to see or read about a person dying directly from air pollution. Lung cancer and cardiac disease are frequently cited as causes of death, even though they may stem from air pollution.

That’s the bad news. The good news, hidden inside the bad news, is that the costs of air pollution on productivity are so high that there are plausible ways of reducing some air pollution and increasing health and wealth, especially in high pollution countries but likely also in the United States with well-targeted policies.

For evidence on the above, you can see some of the posts below. Tyler and I have been posting about air pollution for a long time. Tyler first said air pollution was an underrated problem in 2005 and it was still underrated in 2021!

• Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible
• Air Pollution Reduces IQ, A Lot
• Air Pollution Kills
• David Wallace-Wells with a good overview.
• A good overview of the non-health impacts of pollution.

The post Air Pollution Redux appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

As late as 1980, the United States had more kilometers of metro lines per capita than all large developed countries but the United Kingdom—thanks in part to large public investments in projects like Washington’s Metro and San Francisco’s BART. In the decades since, both the United States and the United Kingdom have stagnated, falling behind even as other countries, particularly China, but also India and many in Europe and South America, have invested in massive new construction campaigns. Much of the world’s urban areas are rapidly becoming dominated by metro service.

In this post, I exploit data from the newly expanded Transit Explorer database, which now includes all metro lines worldwide plus other fixed-route transit services in many countries. The database has been significantly expanded since I wrote about findings from its last update in January. This geospatial database allows me to investigate when and where transit is being built.

The first trend is unambiguous: Worldwide, metro service availability has expanded exponentially. In 1950, only 24 metropolitan areas in 13 countries globally could boast of a subway, elevated line, or monorail (automated light metros didn’t yet exist). Today, 232 metropolitan areas in 63 countries can make such a claim.

Metro construction has accelerated. The number of kilometers of metro lines in active service has expanded from just over 7,000 in 2000 to more than 23,000 today—a tripling of service even as the global population has grown by only about 30 percent during that time. There are almost 7,000 additional kilometers of metro lines currently under construction globally.

The increase in metro service availability in since 2000 has been driven by Chinese cities, which now host more than 40 percent of world metro kilometers. European cities have been steadily increasing their metro route length since the 1970s, however, and Indian cities have accelerated subway and elevated construction since 2010.

Cities in the United States had a plurality of the world’s metro kilometers until 1960. At that point, cities in the now-European Union accumulated more route kilometers (European cities now have about double the total metro kilometers as those in the United States). Chinese cities passed those in Europe in terms of length in about 2010—and Indian cities are expected to host more metro service than the United States by 2025, given current construction activity.

One major explanation for the United States’ declining rank in terms of metro service availability is the fact that the New York City region—which had the world’s longest metro system until the mid-1980s—now has fewer subway or elevated kilometers than it did in 1940, at its peak.

The New York region now has the 13th longest metro system in the world (including the Subway and PATH)—shorter than systems in nine Chinese cities (not all shown on the following graph), plus London, Moscow, Seoul. By 2025, it will be the 15th longest, passed by Delhi and another Chinese city. Remarkably, Shanghai’s metro system is now twice as long as New York’s Subway—despite the former only opening its doors in 1993. New York City has no serious plans to expand its system, even as virtually every other major metropolitan area is doing so.

The result of the United States’ limited progress in providing metro services to its residents is that the number of metro kilometers per resident in the country is now lower than it was in the 1980s. It had the second-most-plentiful metro service per-capita in the world until that point (after the United Kingdom)—but on this metric it has now been passed by the European Union, as well as China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, among other countries.

Even when incorporating data on light rail and streetcar lines—which US cities have been more focused on building than metros—transit service availability has declined since the 1970s. Indeed, all of the rail transit construction that’s occurred in the United States since the 1980s has done little more than keep up with population growth.

Up until 2000—perhaps surprisingly given lower transit ridership—the United States had more kilometers of metro and light rail lines per capita than residents of neighboring countries or many large European countries for which the Transit Explorer database has complete information (the database does not yet include light rail or streetcar lines for all countries).

But the United States has lost its position on this metric to France and Spain in the years since. France went from having about half the per-capita urban rail miles as the United States in 2000 to significantly more today. And countries like Italy and the Netherlands have been rapidly expanding their services in recent years.

What’s next for the United States? The federal government’s infrastructure law, passed in 2021, will send hundreds of billions of dollars to cities for new transit projects. So far, though, that hasn’t been enough to spur a massive investment in new transit lines compared to past efforts. Transit agencies in major cities are facing a “fiscal cliff” due to declining ridership that may make it more difficult for them to continue to provide adequate daily service. And construction costs are rising rapidly due to inflation.

Every year in the US, nearly 50 million people are affected by food-borne disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Those incidents lead to almost 130,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths.

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Amid a housing crunch, Singapore’s only racecourse is being cleared to make way for more homes.

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1. Is that what French YIMBY looks like?  Does building needs its own ideology?  Is Brutalism OK after all?

2. Looking back at some key AGI predictions, the core lesson being not to weigh non-proven methods of abstract reasoning too heavily.  EY vs. Hanson is the organizing theme.  You can talk yourself into a lot of things.

3. Arnold Kling on narrow banking.

4. Some parts of Canada really are worth a whole lot more.

5. Should California allow Sikh motorcyclists to ride without helmets?

6. Tex-Ethiopian barbecue.

7. UFO weird stuff update.  And more.  Can we go back to talking about YIMBY for Chattanooga now?  How about which is the most underrated Wings album?

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Subway, one of the world’s largest fast-food chains, has announced a sprawling deal with a Shanghai development company to open nearly 4,000 new restaurants in mainland China over the next 20 years. It’s the largest franchise deal in Subway’s history.

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Apple took to the stage at WWDC today to announce that video-calling service FaceTime is finally coming to Apple TV hardware for the first time, thanks to a robust tvOS update. This seems to be a full-featured version of the company’s proprietary live-streaming app that takes full advantage of the recently-released Continuity Camera feature.

For the uninitiated, this feature lets you use your iPhone as a replacement webcam for your laptop, so you’ll now be able to use your iPhone or iPad as the primary camera for TV-based FaceTime conversations. Apple says wireless integration happens automatically and that the service can also use the phone or tablet’s microphone when joining or initiating a call. The company says the software has been designed so that you always remain in the center of the frame. You can also quickly switch the feed between devices with just a swipe and interact using gestures. FaceTime will be available for Apple TV 4K devices starting this fall. 

FaceTime is the main draw of tvOS 17, but not the only improvement. The company redesigned the control center to make it more intuitive and, more importantly, added Find My Remote support. Just use Siri on your phone, tablet, or computer to locate any mischievous Apple TV remotes. Apple also noted that video conferencing apps like Webex by Cisco and Zoom will launch on tvOS later this year. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/facetime-is-coming-to-apple-tv-182616297.html?src=rss

Robert Hetzel has written an outstanding new book entitled The Federal Reserve: A New History. I reviewed the book for Central Banking. Here’s an excerpt:

During 2008, the Fed overreacted to (transitory) rising energy prices, and policy became too contractionary during the early stages of the Great Recession. Just as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, policymakers misdiagnosed the core problem as the financial system, whereas the actual problem was an overly tight monetary policy.

This incorrect diagnosis of the problem led to a number of interventions into the banking system, which failed to boost the economy in late 2008. Even worse, fear of inflation led the Fed to enact some misguided contractionary policies, such as its decision in October 2008 to sharply raise the interest rate paid on bank reserves. The goal was to prevent its liquidity injections from going out and stimulating the broader economy.

The economy only began to recover in 2009, when the Fed switched from banking rescue operations to monetary stimulus. The Covid crisis saw the Fed make the exact opposite error, an overly stimulative policy that relied on the now discredited 1960s idea of a trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

In 2020, not many economists correctly diagnosed the dovish policy errors being made by the Fed. Even fewer correctly spotted the overly hawkish policy during 2008. Robert Hetzel is one of a vanishingly small number of economists who were correct on both occasions. Perhaps it’s time we started paying more attention to his views.

Hetzel’s book should become the new standard for those who wish to understand how monetary policy has shaped the economy over the past 110 years. Read the whole thing.

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The address is expected to be on June 22.

Congress enshrined a debt-limit deal late Thursday that makes modest progress toward Republicans’ goals of cutting spending, streamlining red tape and attaching more work requirements to federal safety-net programs.

Democrats had to console themselves with the thought that the bargain wasn’t even worse.

These are some of the biggest highlights in the compromise’s spending and policy provisions — a deal that leaves major White House priorities intact but lays out a road map for what conservatives may demand in future fiscal showdowns:

Spending caps

What the deal does: This fight was ostensibly about the national debt — and it produced a deal that locks in two years of caps on federal spending.

For the fiscal year that kicks off in October, overall discretionary funding for non-defense programs would stay about the same as today’s total, while defense funding would get about a 3 percent bump. A year later, those funding ceilings would increase by less than 1 percent.

The bill includes funding levels for four more years beyond that. But Congress doesn’t actually have to abide by those totals.

What Republicans got: Democrats agreed to essentially static funding for non-defense programs, a far cry from the 7 percent increase in President Joe Biden’s budget request.

Consolation for Democrats: They got Republicans to budge from their demands for substantial spending cuts. The debt limit bill House Republicans passed in April would have slashed non-defense funding by more than 20 percent if defense spending were spared from reductions.

Democrats also won in the debate over long-term budget constraints. Republicans wanted a decade of binding totals, but they got only two years of real caps.

Some streamlining on permits — but nothing on Democrats’ top priority

What the deal does: The bill includes modest steps to speed up reviews of federal permits under the National Environmental Policy Act, one of the nation’s bedrock regulatory laws. This could offer some help for both fossil fuel and clean energy projects, but falls far short of what either party had wanted.

What Republicans got: The deal sets one- or two-year time limits for environmental reviews of new projects, limits the number of pages in agencies’ environmental analyses, and allows developers to go to court if agencies miss the deadlines.

But Republicans didn’t achieve the sweeping regulatory changes they had sought. For instance, the agreement doesn’t restrict project opponents’ ability to sue.

Consolation for Democrats: The biggest one is that it leaves the $369 billion in clean-energy incentives in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act intact, despite House Republicans’ demands that the spending be rolled back. That outcome allowed the White House to boast that it had protected the heart of the president’s climate agenda, whose passage last year was perhaps Biden’s biggest legislative achievement.

But progressive Democrats are furious. They note that the deal doesn’t include provisions they had requested that would have made it easier to build interstate electrical transmission lines — a dire need for ensuring the spread of wind, solar and other renewable energy projects.

Adding to Democrats’ frustration, the White House also acceded to demands from West Virginia’s congressional delegation, led by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, to expedite federal approvals for the stalled Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline.

A haircut for the IRS

What the deal does: It rolls back $21.4 billion from the $80 billion windfall that the Internal Revenue Service had received last year from the Inflation Reduction Act, although only $1.4 billion will be rescinded immediately.

Negotiators say they agreed to redirect an additional $10 billion from the IRS to other federal agencies in the annual appropriations bill for fiscal year 2024, which begins this October, and do the same thing with another $10 billion for fiscal year 2025.

What Republicans got: They have made it a priority to rescind funding for the tax agency ever since they took control of the House, arguing that the IRS would inevitably ramp up audits on small businesses and the middle class. Speaker Kevin McCarthy insists that the IRS cuts are a clear win for the GOP.

Consolation for Democrats: The cuts will make only a relatively small dent in the agency’s total budget, and White House officials say they don’t expect the cuts to affect the IRS’s plans in the next five years or so. That explains why members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus are so unhappy with this outcome.

And the fight isn’t over. Democrats who support more cash for the IRS to crack down on wealthy tax cheats may push Congress to provide an additional infusion to the agency sooner than expected. Meanwhile, Republicans are likely to seek even more cuts.

More work requirements for safety net programs

What the deal does: It makes the biggest changes to work requirements for federal food aid in decades. But it also offers exceptions for homeless people, veterans and recent foster youth for the first time — a concession to Biden’s team that the Congressional Budget Office projected would increase overall spending.

What Republicans got: The deal forces additional work requirements on adults ages 50 to 54 who don’t have children living with them — an extension from existing requirements for the 18-to-49 age bracket. It imposes other new restrictions on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.

More than 275,000 people are at risk of losing food aid as a result, according to CBO.

The final deal phases in the SNAP work requirements and sunsets them by 2030. The bill also includes new restrictions on emergency cash aid known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which will hit low-income families with children.

McCarthy and other Republican lawmakers argue that requirements will help increase the workforce and provide resources to older Americans to find jobs.

But Democrats forcefully dispute that, and the White House says such work requirements “tie the most vulnerable up in bureaucratic paperwork” and “have shown no benefit for bringing more people into the workforce.”

Consolation for Democrats: Once again, it could have been worse. They have largely praised Biden’s team for helping expand SNAP to several new vulnerable groups amid Republican demands for new restrictions on other populations.

Covid clawbacks

What the deal does: The White House and House Republicans agreed to take back nearly $28 billion in Covid-19 relief funds, including money slated for highway infrastructure programs and strengthening the food supply chain.

What Republicans got: They say they recovered unspent funds that had been appropriated to respond to an acute public health crisis that is no more. The public health emergency officially ended on May 11, and weekly Covid-19 hospitalizations are at their lowest level since the start of the pandemic.

Consolation for Democrats: They say they protected several programs intended to maintain readiness if Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths spike again. The agreement keeps $5 billion to support research into new Covid vaccines and treatments, and roughly $800 million for Defense Production Act investments, including efforts to strengthen pharmaceutical supply chains.

The deal also retains money to ensure that people without health insurance still have access to vaccines and treatments, as well as funds for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to maintain genomic surveillance intended to detect emerging variants of concern and other activities.

So much for that unemployment revamp

What the deal does: The rescinding of Covid-era funding also removes $1 billion that was supposed to help states revamp their creaky unemployment insurance systems. The weaknesses in those systems had become apparent when many states were unable to quickly deal with the crush of claims for benefits at the height of the pandemic — or to stem widespread fraud.

Congress originally provided $2 billion for the program. Taking account of money that has already been obligated, only about $500 million will be left after the debt deal takes effect.

The Labor Department announced a $653 million round of grants just last week. But the clawback throws that money into question and raises concerns about other tranches that could also be affected.

What Republicans got: The cuts go after a program whose structure had brought objections from GOP lawmakers, some of whom took issue with its goal of addressing inequities in the unemployment insurance system.

The GOP has also focused on how acting Labor Secretary Julie Su handled California’s unemployment program when she was a top official in that state, and have made it one of their main arguments against Su’s confirmation as full-time secretary.

Consolation for Democrats: See above — it could have been worse.

The return of student loan payments

What the deal does: The legislation terminates the Education Department’s ongoing suspension of federal student loan payments and interest as of Aug. 30.

It effectively requires the Biden administration to resume collecting monthly payments and charging interest for roughly 40 million Americans for the first time since they were paused in March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic.

The pause has been repeatedly extended through executive action, twice by the Trump administration and six times by the Biden administration.

What Republicans got: They cemented into law the Biden administration’s stated plan to restart student loan payments later this year — preemptively blocking the White House from offering any further extensions.

GOP lawmakers hailed the end of the payment pause as a victory for taxpayers, citing the roughly $5 billion-a-month price tag of keeping the payments halted and interest rates set to 0 percent.

Still, many conservatives were unhappy that the deal didn’t go further and block Biden’s plan to cancel large swaths of outstanding student debt outright. That plan would wipe out up to $20,000 of debt apiece for tens of millions of Americans.

Consolation for Democrats: They fended off House GOP demands that would have ended the payment pause, blocked student debt cancellation, and prevented Biden from moving ahead with a new income-driven repayment plan aimed at lowering monthly payments. Republicans also wanted to permanently curtail the Education Department’s authority to make changes to the student loan program.

Biden administration officials argue that the compromise keeps the president’s student loan agenda intact and merely codifies their preexisting plan to restart payments.

But many progressives worry that the administration was locking itself into restarting payments even if the Supreme Court rules in the coming weeks that it can’t cancel student debt for tens of millions of borrowers. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he would not vote to eliminate the student loan pause that “has been a lifeline to millions of working families during the pandemic.”

Limits on defense spending (for now)

What the deal does: It caps defense spending for the next two years, a break from the last two years of growth in the Pentagon budget. But it doesn’t preclude Congress from giving the military a spending boost sometime later, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Thursday under prodding from defense hawks.

The deal caps defense spending at $886 billion for fiscal 2024, a 3.2 percent increase from current levels and in line with what Biden had requested. Military spending would then go up by just 1 percent in fiscal 2025, to $895 billion.

What Republicans got: GOP defense hawks avoided cuts, but the fact that the deal endorses Biden's preferred topline is a loss. Despite concerns that the push to rein in spending would mean slashing the Pentagon, defense spending still increases.

Still, defense hawks are pushing for supplemental funding. Schumer didn’t promise such a supplemental will get a vote, but he entered a statement into the record saying the debt deal doesn't prevent the Senate from approving additional emergency spending — for either national security or domestic needs.

Consolation for Democrats: They get the defense funding level the administration proposed, at least in the near term, even though some would have backed more money for the military. The deal also treats defense and non-defense funding levels differently, so an increase in military appropriations wouldn't mean gutting domestic programs.

Jennifer Scholtes, Josh Siegel, Benjamin Guggenheim, Meredith Lee Hill, David Lim, Nick Niedzwiadek, Michael Stratford and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.

 

This graph from David Leonhardt's column is illuminating. Now I understand why those of us who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal have trouble finding political candidates to fully represent our views. There are too few of us!

If prompted correctly, even GPT 3.5 can achieve draws against Stockfish 8 (an older but very powerful Chess engine), empirically demonstrating how LLMs are reasoning engines, not just text generation engines. https://t.co/an9eY27Re9

— Siqi Chen (@blader) May 29, 2023

And here are some results for Minecraft.  I would like to see confirmations, but these are credible sources and this is all quite important if true.

The post The art of prompting is just at its beginning appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A new paper provides good evidence that the shingles vaccine can prevent dementia, which strongly suggests that some forms of dementia are caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), the virus that on initial infection causes chickenpox. The data come from Wales where the herpes zoster vaccine (Zostavax) first became available on September 1 2013 and was rolled out by age. At that time, however, it was decided that the vaccine would only be available to people born on or after September 2 1933. In other words, the vaccine was not made available to 80 year olds but it was made available to 79 year and 364-day olds. (I gather the reasoning was that the benefits of the vaccine decline with age and an arbitrary cut point was chosen.)

The cutoff date for vaccine eligibility means that people born within a week of one another have very different vaccine uptakes. Indeed, the authors show that only 0.01% of patients who were just one week too old to be eligible were vaccinated compared to 47.2% among those who were just one week younger. The two groups of otherwise similar individuals who were born around September 2 1933 are then tracked for up to seven years, 2013-2020. The individuals who were just “young” enough to be vaccinated are less likely to get shingles compared to the individuals who were slightly too old to be vaccinated (as one would expect if the vaccine is doing it’s job). But, the authors also show that the individuals who were just young enough to be vaccinated are less likely to get dementia compared to the individuals who were slightly too old to be vaccinated, especially among women. A number of robustness tests finds no other sharp discontinuities in treatments or outcomes around the Sept 2, 1933 cut point.

The following graph summarizes. The top left panel shows that the cutoff led to big differences in vaccine uptake, the top right panel shows that there was a smaller but sharp decline in dementia in the vaccinated group. The bottom panel shows that was no discontinuity in a variety of other factors.

Read the whole thing.

I have had my shingles vaccine. As I have said before, vaccination is the gift of a superpower.

The post Can the Shingles Vaccine Prevent Dementia? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

DC’s relative success can be traced to a few decisions made decades ago. In the 1970s, policymakers in Arlington County made a decision to adopt what’s known as ‘transit-oriented development planning’ ahead of the opening of DC’s Metro Orange Line, which runs between Arlington and Prince George County, Maryland (via DC). Arlington policymakers identified that zoning for apartment construction in commercial areas could bring in property taxes and help balance the budget without the level of controversy of changing zoning in existing residential areas. Some nearby jurisdictions followed suit, learning from Arlington’s example, helping the DC region stay more affordable than the country’s other superstar cities.

Here is the full essay by Emily Hamilton of Mercatus, serving up a very good short economic history of Arlington.  And this on the District:

The District itself has permitted extensive redevelopment of formerly industrial neighborhoods when they received new Metro stations, including Navy Yard and NoMA. In the years since the 2010 financial crisis, DC has permitted thousands of apartments each year, a high rate compared to peer cities. As in Arlington, they’ve primarily been permitted on land that previously housed industrial or low-value commercial development where there are few or no existing residents to oppose new construction.

Interesting throughout.  I am pleased to live in the land of partial YIMBY.

That is all from the new and excellent issue of Works in Progress.

The post How D.C. densified appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Federal individual income tax revenue is down a lot since last summer but is still 15% higher in real terms than before the pandemic. New York’s personal income tax revenue is almost 17% lower.

Here is more from Justin Fox at Bloomberg.

The post New York state fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The group that is most likely to contact a public official? Atheists.

The group that puts up political signs at the highest rates? Atheists.

HALF of atheists report giving to a candidate or campaign in the 2020 presidential election cycle.

And while they don’t lead the pack when it comes to attending a local political meeting, they only trail Hindus by four percentage points.

…atheists take part in plenty of political actions – 1.52 to be exact. The overall average in the entire sample was .91 activities. The average atheist is about 65% more politically engaged than the average American.

And this:

The results here are clear and unambiguous – atheists are more likely to engage in political activities at every level of education compared to Protestants, Catholics or Jews. For instance, an atheist with a high school diploma reports .7 activities, that’s at least .2 higher than any other religious group.

Political engagement is clearly related to education, though. The more educated one is, the more likely they are to be politically active. But at every step of the education scale, atheists lead the way. Sometimes those gaps are incredibly large. A college educated atheist engages in 1.7 activities, it’s only 1.05 activities for a college educated evangelical.

From Ryan Burge, here is the full data analysis.

The post Claims about atheists appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In 2002, Florida adopted a phonics based reading strategy due to Charlie Crist. Scores started to rise. Other southern states started to following suit, including Mississippi long deried as the worst in the nation.

APNews: Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and Alabama, meanwhile, were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states.

The turnaround in these three states has grabbed the attention of educators nationally, showing rapid progress is possible anywhere, even in areas that have struggled for decades with poverty and dismal literacy rates. The states have passed laws adopting similar reforms that emphasize phonics and early screenings for struggling kids.

“In this region, we have decided to go big,” said Burk, now a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd, a national advocacy group.

These Deep South states were not the first to pass major literacy laws; in fact, much of Mississippi’s legislation was based on a 2002 law in Florida that saw the Sunshine State achieve some of the country’s highest reading scores. The states also still have far to go to make sure every child can read.

But the country has taken notice of what some have called the Mississippi miracle.

Addendum: See my previous posts on the closely related issue of Direct Instruction.

The post Mississippi Learning appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

I am not endorsing these, or claiming these propositions are the entire story, but I heard a number of interesting claims during my trip.  Here are a few:

1. Ranked choice voting has worked relatively well for Alaska, by encouraging more moderate candidates.

2. Faculty at U. Alaska are not rabid crazy, because the locale selects for those who are into hunting and fishing, and that keeps them from the worst excesses of academic life.

3. The oil-based “UBI” in Alaska keeps down government spending, because voters feel that any money spent is being spent at their expense.

4. Health care costs are a major problem up here, mostly because there is not enough scale to support many hospitals.

5. When air travel shuts down, due to say ash from Russian volcanos, the local blood bank runs into problems either testing its blood donations or getting out-of-state blood.

6. East Anchorage has perhaps the largest number of languages in its high school student population of anywhere in the United States.  Some of this stems from the large number of different kinds of Alaska Natives, some of it stems from having many Samoans, Hawaiians, Hmong, and other migrant groups.

7. Resources for Alaska Natives are often held through the corporate form (with restrictions on share transferability), rather than tribes, and this has worked fairly well.

8. Starlink has had a major impact on the more remote parts of Alaska, which otherwise had internet service not much better than “dial up” quality.

9. For a while there were direct flights from Chengdu to Fairbanks, due to Chinese interest in the “Northern Lights” phenomenon.

10. The population of Anchorage turns over by about ten percent each year, with only some of this being driven by the military.

11. For a human, a moose is a greater risk than a bear.

Personally, I observe that the university in Anchorage is more pro-GPT than other academic groups I have had contact with.  Might this be due to their distance from the center, their frontier mentality, and the possible scarcity of skilled labor here?

The post Claims made by intelligent Alaskans appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In my comments at Brookings on bail I pointed out that:

In New York City (2008-2013) most of the people arrested had prior interactions with the criminal justice system. On average, each arrested person had 3.2 prior felony arrests and 5 prior misdemeanor arrests—convictions were considerably fewer than arrests, which suggests to me that the system isn’t convicting enough people. Interpretations may differ, but, in any case, the typical arrested person has been arrested multiple times previously.

…I think most Americans would be surprised and upset to learn that by far the majority of the arrestees are released prior to trial, 74% in total in NYC.

Moreover, the people who do not make bail are obviously not a random sample of arrestees—the people who do not make bail are on average more dangerous—they have twice as many arrests and twice as many convictions on average as those who are released. For example, the average defendant who doesn’t make bail has 6 previous felony arrests and 4 previous failures to appear.

These numbers are by no means unique to New York City. Across 34 states for which data could be collected, for example, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the average person sent to state prison in 2014 had 10.3 previous arrests (median 8) and 4.3 previous convictions (median 3)!

(These are not including the arrest and conviction that sent them to jail so add one to get to the figures in Table 6.)

At Brookings I continued with the obvious, yet controversial:

What is going on here seems pretty obvious to me. There is a group of people whose job is a crime. Thus, being arrested is simply part of their job and so after being arrested and released these people go back to work—it’s almost laudatory—they keep working until finally an arrest results in a conviction and they spend some time behind bars.

As Tyler noted yesterday, The NYTimes has a piece on some of the extreme versions of this basic fact.

Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.

These, by the way, are just criminals who are repeatedly caught. The problem is much bigger:

…By the end of 2022, the theft of items valued at less than $1,000 had increased 53 percent since 2019 at major commercial locations, according to a new analysis of police data by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice…..Only about 34 percent resulted in arrests last year, compared with 60 percent in 2017.

The way bail reformers like to frame the issue of eliminating cash bail is to point to a misdemeanor case and say ‘look this ordinary person was denied bail because of a misdemeanor!’ In fact, what is going on is that judges are dealing with serial offenders–they are setting high bail rates for those who have already failed to appear on multiple previous misdemeanor charges. Eliminating cash bail for misdemeanors is one of those policies which sounds reasonable on its face but in practice it leads to shoplifters who have already been arrested 20 times being arrested and released again. The issue of “unaffordable bail” is also misleading. Judges set high bail amounts for a reason!

I am not against reform. As I wrote in 2018 in We Cannot Avoid the Ugly Tradeoffs of Bail Reform:

Sometimes poor people are unfairly held until trial. Eliminating money bail, however, is a crude and dangerous approach to this problem. Instead we should deal with it directly by flagging and reevaluating jailed, non-violent offenders with low bail amounts, use alternative release measures such as ankle bracelets and most importantly, we should look to the constitution. The founders understood the ugly tradeoffs which is why the constitution guarantees the right to a “speedy trial.”  Unfortunately, that right today is widely ignored. My route to reform would begin by putting teeth back into the constitutional right to a speedy trial.

The post Misdemeanor Bail appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

• The Great Pacific Ocean Patch refers to a big swirling soup of plastic in the ocean.
• A new study found the patch was full of sea life that was living on the plastic debris.
• The findings challenged the assumption that coastal species couldn't survive in the open ocean.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more than just a swirling vortex of plastic floating in the open ocean over 1,000 miles from land — it's also become an ecosystem hosting a variety of sea creatures that cling to the debris.

Scientists studying the infamous trash heap have found dozens of marine species that call the patch home, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

They found 46 different species of invertebrates living on the debris, with the vast majority being species that are typically only found along coastlines, rather than the middle of the open ocean. The creatures included sponges, oysters, anemones, crustaceans, barnacles, and worms.

—Matthias Egger (@oceanegger) April 17, 2023

 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch typically refers to an area of the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii in which floating trash concentrates due to factors like wind and currents. The area — which is more like a giant trash soup rather than one large continuous heap — has become an unfortunate example of plastic pollution in Earth's oceans.

The researchers collected 105 pieces of floating garbage from the patch and examined them for signs of life, ultimately identifying 484 invertebrates organisms. More than 70% of the trash collected was carrying coastal species.

"We expected to find some; we just didn't expect to find them at such frequency and diversity," study co-author Linsey Haram, then a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, told The Atlantic.

The findings also contradicted the assumption that coastal species could not survive in areas of open ocean.

The authors said the results suggest the lack of available surface "limited the colonization of the open ocean by coastal species, rather than physiological or ecological constraints as previously assumed."

"They're having a blast," study coauthor Matthias Egger, head of environmental and social affairs at The Ocean Cleanup, told The Wall Street Journal of the coastal species living on the trash. "That's really a shift in the scientific understanding." 

The study also noted that many of the coastal animals were living alongside animals that are at home in the open ocean on the same piece of debris, putting together species that historically were unlikely to come into contact.

Biogeographer Ceridwen Fraser at the University of Otago, who was not involved in the study, told The Atlantic: "As humans, we are creating new types of ecosystems that have potentially never been seen before."