Month: July 2018

Parents who are gearing up for college application season will be cheered to learn that Ivy League graduates frequently ask local friends if their 6th grade gender-typically dressed boy-girl twins are identical or fraternal. Due to the parents having attended Harvard and our location being proximate to Harvard, many of the folks asking this question have at least one Harvard degree.

[This would not be a poor reflection on $500,000+ in education (private school plus Ivy League tuition) if we assume that the questioners are refusing to make cisgender-normative assumptions. The twins could have been identical (though they do look different) and then one decided on a gender transition. Separately, why isn’t it “sororal twins” as an alternative to “identical”?]

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We’ve been improving our minds lately by watching The Jetsons (aired in 1962; set in 2062), streaming on Amazon Boomerang. Some interesting items so far…

• the first episode has a reference to immigration; Mr. Spacely’s wife is involved in a “Martians Go Home!” campaign
• people still use paper currency
• Jane was 18 years old when she gave birth to Judy
• the writers did not foresee any changes to American family culture: nobody is gay, nobody is transgender, there are no never-married “single mothers,” nobody is divorced
• the writers did not foresee any changes to American diet. Machines prepare bacon and eggs for breakfast. International travel is supersonic, but there is no market for a restaurant serving the cuisine of a formerly exotic destination. Nobody is vegan, has a nut allergy, or asks for gluten-free pizza.
• there is a home computer, but no network, so the digital newspaper has to be delivered as a USB stick (packet switching was developed at roughly the same time as The Jetsons)

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We attended a semi-Orthodox Bar Mitzvah last month. Although we were happy to see our friend’s 13-year-old move onward and upward, the Bar Mitzvah is inevitably embedded within a long service in Hebrew. Young people of my generation were accustomed to managing boredom. But how can kids today sit through two hours of mumbling in what to them is an unintelligible language? They transition from an exciting phone or tablet game to staring blankly and daydreaming?

I wonder if Judaism and similar religions can survive the smartphone age.

Readers: What do you think? Public schools can continue to operate in an arbitrarily boring manner because children are required by law to show up and teachers are entitled to lifetime pay regardless of outcomes. But there is no law requiring young people to show up to a synagogue rather than stay home with Xbox and no law requiring parents to keep paying the rabbis. Judaism has survived for about 4,000 years, so it seems rash to forecast its demise, but we’re only in roughly Year 8 of the ubiquitous smartphone age.

Related:

• Facebook is bad for us (one of my posts on the book iGen, chronicling big changes since the introduction of the iPhone)

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I was talking to a venture capitalist the other day and he mentioned that his tax rate had gone up dramatically for 2018. Was it due to Massachusetts property taxes no longer being deductible? No. Buried in the Trump tax bill was an end to the multi-decade “carried interest” party in which private equity, venture capital, and real estate investors have been able to pay long-term capital gains rates on money that certainly seems like ordinary income (e.g., the managers of these funds don’t put any of their own money at risk in these investments so they are just getting paid for doing their jobs, presumably).

It used to be that the holding period was one year before the manager could claim the capital gains rate. Now it is three years and Massachusetts is imposing a 10 percent tax rate of its own.

See “2017 tax reform enacts a three-year holding period rule for carried interests” (Baker Tilly, a big accounting firm) for more on this.

Could it be that Donald Trump will be remembered as the president least cozy with Wall Street?

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“Hungary Pulls Out of U.N. Global Migration Agreement” (nytimes):

Hungary pulled out of a United Nations global agreement on migration on Wednesday, citing security concerns, just days after the accord was reached.

Hungary joined the United States as one of two United Nations members that are not committing to the agreement, the first of its kind to lay out international standards for countries to address migration.

As with “Germans shutting down immigration because they are tired of getting wealthier and enjoying lower crime rates?”, Hungary apparently doesn’t want to get richer and safer via immigration.

As a proud Econ 101 veteran (plus some graduate courses too!), I like market-based solutions to perceived problems. “If countries won’t take refugees for moral reasons, let’s give them financial incentives” is by a couple of law school professors, but it has an economics angle and sort of proposes a market.

What if we depended less on potential host nations’ humanitarian impulses, and instead created a system that appealed to their economic self-interest? What if nations’ perceived self-interest could be better aligned with the humanitarian needs of refugees?

We begin with three basic propositions: Countries that create refugees can and should pay a price for it, countries that take them in can and should be paid for it, and refugees can and should have a say in where they go. Those three principles suggest a possible solution: We would allow refugees to assert a financial claim against the governments that have persecuted them, and also—if they wish—to trade that claim (a kind of “refugee debt”) to a host nation, thereby lessening the economic resistance and giving them some control over their own fates.

Oddly, these guys assume that the price for a refugee should be negative rather than positive. Politicians tell us that even the lowest-skilled immigrants make existing citizens of a country way better off. Yet here these guys say that “countries that take them in can and should be paid for it”. Why should countries get paid to do something that is guaranteed to enrich them?

Readers: What do you know about this grand new U.N. solution and why Hungary and the U.S. are staying out?

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Internet was supposed to enable individual authors to reach an audience and get paid. For example, see this distributed system conceived by Robert Kahn, of TCP/IP fame, in a patent filed in 1993 (6,135,646).

The technology that was supposed to decentralize commerce and media instead led to a much tighter concentration. Most ad revenue goes through Google or Facebook. The local newspaper has died while the New York Times captures a larger (and ever-more-outraged?) national audience. Nasim Aghdam had no practical way of getting paid for her media productions other than going through YouTube. When the righteous folks at YouTube decided that they didn’t like her content and “demonetized” her, the Iranian refugee went on a shooting spree at the YouTube HQ.

In a world where robots, perhaps overseen by a few low-wage humans in countries where their understanding of English and American culture is limited, can demonetize, doesn’t the long-term trend favor the biggest publishers? A traditional big media newspaper or TV station won’t be demonetized because there is too much at stake for a Google, Facebook, YouTube, et al. They can write something inflammatory or edgy and even if a robot misinterprets it the ads still display. But there is no real financial consequence to Google from demonetizing an individual author (see Ann Althouse’s personal tale, for example).

Except maybe for people whose production is limited to cat videos, does this mean that in the long run we will only be able to see material that has been filtered through the biggest (and primarily the traditional) media outlets?

Related:

• How was the refugee immigration of Nasim Najafi Aghdam supposed to work out?

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I am awesome at predicting the future of the stock market. I can tell you that there will be a crash at some point within the next few years. I just can’t give you the exact date…

But seriously, the S&P 500 is carrying a fairly high P/E ratio, isn’t it? Even if we allow for a “Trump bump” due to the lower corporate income tax rate?

Index funds are susceptible to corruption by companies about which investors are wildly enthusiastic, e.g., Tesla, Apple, Facebook, et al. I’m wondering why it isn’t easier to buy a profit-weighted index fund. See this article from 2003 on the subject, which claims a 59 percent outperformance compared to the S&P using hypothetical back-testing. But now there are some actual ETFs that try this approach, notably from WisdomTree (EXT, EPS, EZM, EES), started in 2007. Their EPS fund, since inception, has tracked the S&P 500 (SPTR) pretty closely, actually with slight underperformance (maybe due to the higher expense ratio of 0.28% versus around 0.1% for an S&P index?).

Readers: What do you know and/or think about this approach to index-based investing? Why isn’t the performance more different from dumb-as-bricks indexing? It can’t be that markets are efficient, can it?

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One of the papers that we studied during our Harvard Medical School “big data” course in February was “National Expenditure For False-Positive Mammograms And Breast Cancer Overdiagnoses Estimated At $4 Billion A Year” (Health Affairs 34:4, 2015). The researchers used a data set of 4 billion insurance claims to see what was going on in the U.S. population. We learned that screening mammograms are not helpful compared to waiting for a lump to show up. There are a lot of things that look bad on a mammogram that aren’t, in fact, bad.

Americans fell in love with mammograms:

• Obama talks about Mammograms on Jay Leno (are either of these guys experts on breasts or radiology?)
• Hillary Clinton expressed faith in mammograms back in 2008
• the central planners behind Obamacare continue to force insurance companies to pay for 100 percent of the cost of mammograms every 1-2 years (see healthcare.gov)

Why do we love them so much? It turns out that the five-year survival rates for breast cancer were improved after women en masse got put through the mammography industry. Why would anyone want to stop doing something that improved five-year survival rates?

It turned out that the statistical cure for breast cancer because of mammography was due to the fact that women who did not have cancer were being treated for cancer. They hadn’t been killed by cancer five years later because… they never had cancer to begin with.

So we wrapped ourselves around the axle with data that we weren’t smart enough to comprehend.

(Separately, we learned during this medical school class that it takes approximately 17 years for an identified “best practice” to be adopted by physicians nationwide. Thus we can expect Americans to back off on their love for mammography perhaps in 2032.)

Related:

• “Heart Stents Are Useless for Most Stable Patients. They’re Still Widely Used.” (nytimes)

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School is almost out, so it is time to think about retreating to the peace and quiet of our National Parks, right?

Check out these photos from my October 2017 trip to Zion National Park. The parking lot at the park entrance is generally full so you park a few miles away and wait for a shuttle bus, packed to standing-room-only. Then you wait 30-45 minutes to get on a second shuttle bus, within the park, and that too will be standing-room-only. The visitor center features a 20-minute line for “information” next to a sign talking about “wilderness” and how it “has outstanding opportunities for solitude”.

Zion National Park was established in 1919 and I don’t think that any new trails have been built since then. Consequently, once you do get off the shuttle bus, unless you’re planning to do a 15-mile hike, you’ll likely be on a trail that is more crowded than the average Manhattan sidewalk (not more crowded than Times Square, of course, but far more crowded than the sidewalks away from Midtown). See my photos for the typical crowds on a trail in a shoulder season. The monopoly vendors of crummy food enjoyed long lines of customers, the flip side of which was that it was much more time-consuming to purchase food than it would be in Manhattan, even during the Midtown lunch rush.

Currently access to the park is rationed by ability to stand in lines, ability to stand on a packed bus, and tolerance for walking on a jammed trail. (We went to a convention in Las Vegas afterward, attended by nearly 30,000 people, and it seemed far less crowded than the National Park.)

Americans don’t seem to be willing to ration access to this scarce resource by price. See, for example, “National Park Service Reconsiders Steep Fee Increase After Backlash” (nytimes):

A Trump administration proposal to steeply increase entrance fees to the most popular national parks landed with a thud when it was presented in November, and park officials say they are now reconsidering it.

The proposal, which would apply during the peak visitor season to 17 parks including the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite, called for a $70 fee for noncommercial vehicles, up from $30.

The fee increase seems to be sold as a way of increasing the funds available for maintenance, not as a way to reduce crowds.

Since we aren’t going to reduce the crowds by imposing a higher price and we’re going to continue to grow U.S. population through immigration and incentives to Americans to have more kids, our National Parks are going to end up being more like tourist attractions in Japan or China. Once we accept that we’re going to have Shanghai-style densities, why not reconfigure the parks to be more like Shanghai? Build a denser network of trails where possible. Run robot-driven buses every minute (like the Moscow subway!). Put in high-rise hotels and McDonald’s restaurants that are capable of handling a high volume of customers efficiently. Since we have accepted that our National Parks should be urban environments, why not run them as competent urban environments instead of as pretend wilderness with hour-long waits for the standing-room-only bus and 30-minute waits for a frozen burger?

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