Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of October 11, 2021
Good journalism/Cool shit
Employers Have Been Offering the Wrong Office Amenities
Our lack of attention to the air we breathe indoors looks reckless in hindsight. Humanity is now an indoor species. Americans spend 90 percent of our lives indoors. You take 6,000 breaths in your workplace on an average day. Over the past 100 years, humans have made astonishing gains in public health by focusing on the basics of clean water, food safety, and sanitation. But as dozens of my scientific colleagues around the world and I argued recently in the journal Science, governments have not similarly prioritized cleaning up the air that most people breathe most of the time. “In the 21st century,” the article urged, “we need to establish the foundations to ensure the air in our buildings is clean … just as we expect for the water coming out of our taps.” [The Atlantic]
We can always dream (side note: calling Queen Anne a suburb of Seattle is kinda hilarious, it’s directly in the city! We should absolutely be adding density to places like Queen Anne, the Inner Sunset, Rockridge, Dupont, Park Slope, etc.! Not even a fucking question):
The newer, denser suburbs will have roughly the same layout, but single-family housing will be replaced with a mix of housing. New state-level housing bills like SB9 and SB10 are mandating legalization of things like accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and duplexes. But near transit hubs, they’re legalizing even more dense forms of housing, like apartment complexes. And some cities will choose to allow more density than the state governments mandate. Thus, the new suburban landscape will generally include:
single-family homes
single-family homes with ADUs
duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes
row-houses
low-rise apartment buildings
During a trip to Seattle last year, I noticed a fair amount of that housing going up in the neighborhood of Queen Anne.
Screw “neighborhood character,” coded language for just “white.” These new neighborhoods seem so much better, if you don’t like cities, just… move further out?
This is a somewhat more egalitarian vision of suburban America, but it also means that some of the “neighborhood character” that incumbent homeowners are used to — and that they fight so hard to protect — will be sacrificed. Having young people and college kids and working-class families in your leafy suburban neighborhood really does make it a different place (a better place, I would argue). And greater density will provide some other benefits, such as more people knowing their neighbors.
And a future everyone can complain about:
The densification of the suburbs that I envision here will not solve all of the problems of American urbanism. There will still be some segregation by class and race. Good local train networks like those enjoyed in Europe and Asia will still be far too few, and cars too common. The suburbs will still be too distant to form a truly efficient urban network. America will not become the Netherlands, and it will not become Japan.
But things will be moderately better. Housing will be a bit more affordable, living near to a knowledge industry center will be a bit easier, cars will kill somewhat fewer people. More people will know their neighbors, and life in the American suburbs will be less socially isolating and stultifying.
Side note: if you have some time to kill, this older article with maps about building in SoCal is really really good.
Does Instagram Harm Girls? No One Actually Knows.
Controversial because it feels like it HAS to be true, but really the evidence is pretty weak! (It’s a bad survey.) The research… isn’t really there yet! [New York Times]
Health, politics, and academia
How I feel about the debt (also really macro as a whole?):
One possibility is that people are worried about deficits for good reason. Lots of people like to heap scorn on anyone who thinks government debt is a problem, but there’s really a chance it might be a problem!
In fact, no one really knows what that chance is. In January, I wrote a post explaining why this is. If the government just keeps borrowing exponentially more and more, at some point private markets may stop buying the government debt. That will force the government to either A) default, or B) get the Fed to finance future government borrowing. If the Fed finances borrowing, there could be the possibility of a hyperinflation — an economic catastrophe so devastating that default would probably be a safer bet.
The problem is, no one actually knows how much government borrowing the Fed can finance before hyperinflation hits. It could be just another trillion, or it could be $100 trillion more.
And another I hadn’t considered:
One other thing they might be worried about is government social spending itself. I’ve written that I think Americans are in a “scarcity mindset”, where everyone is afraid that some other Americans are getting an unfair leg up on them, or cutting line, or getting a free handout, etc. One piece of supporting evidence is a recent poll finding that Americans don’t want to make Biden’s child tax allowance a permanent program.
What Climate Change Requires of Economics
From a few weeks ago: Acemoglu on climate change and economists.
The key question for a climate-policy utility function is: How much current consumption do we need to sacrifice to avoid the damage that global warming will cause in the future? The answer will depend on how we approach the problem of discounting. When thinking about individual or corporate decisions whose consequences will play out within the next decade or so, it makes sense to start from the premise that one dollar will be less valuable ten years from now than it is today. But when applied to decisions whose effects will be felt 100 years from now, this kind of discounting has some unpleasant implications.
Suppose we apply a discount rate of 5%, which is common in analyses of individual or corporate decision-making and implies that a dollar a year from now is worth 95 cents today. But this discount rate would also mean that a dollar 100 years from now is worth only about half a cent and that a dollar 200 years from now is worth about 0.003 cents. At this rate, we should sacrifice one dollar today only if it will yield benefits equivalent to about $200 a century from now – a benefit-cost analysis that lends itself to climate inaction in the present…
Still, there is a plausible economic (and philosophical) case to be made for why future essential public goods should be valued differently than private goods or other types of public consumption. Reconciling these distinctions with other aspects of our economic models, not least those dealing with risk and uncertainty, is an urgent task for the economics profession. [Project Syndicate]
What the Nobel means for applied economists:
The importance of Card & Krueger (1994) thus goes far beyond the minimum wage — it’s about the scientific nature of economics itself. If even the most beloved, basic, consensus theory can be contravened by empirical evidence, it means that economics consists of a set of falsifiable claims about the world we live in, rather than simply a set of thought experiments.
It means that economics is a science…
That’s where the genius of Card’s work — and of Angrist’s and Imbens’ work — comes in. These economists devised clever ways to find comparisons — basically control groups — for natural experiments and policy experiments. The general methodology here is called difference-in-difference, and Alex Tabarrok explains it well in his post on Card and Krueger. A related technique is that of synthetic controls, where instead of comparing New Jersey to, say, Pennsylvania, you’d compare it to an imaginary mashup of other states designed to resemble New Jersey in all ways except for the minimum wage. An alternative technique is the randomized controlled trial, where economists actually use the real world as a sort of policy laboratory; Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, who helped pioneer RCT research in development economics, won their own Nobel two years ago.
Together these techniques are called “quasi-experimental” methods, and they form the core of what economists have called the “credibility revolution” in empirical economics. This term was coined by Angrist in a 2010 essay with Jörn-Steffen Pischke, where he praised the fields of public economics, labor, and development for their embrace of quasi-experimental methods, and called out macroeconomics and industrial organization for resisting them…
But what the credibility revolution does do is to change the relationship between theory and evidence. When evidence is credible, it means that theory must bend to evidence’s command — it means that theories can be wrong, at least in a particular time and place. And that means that every theory that can be checked with credible evidence needs to be checked before it’s put to use in real-world policymaking. Just like you wouldn’t prescribe patients a vaccine without testing it first.
Hate reading
Lot to like, lot to hate here. You love to see it:
His company bought 5120 Baxter Street for $700,000. He estimates the house would rent for $3,300 a month with a few renovations. Instead he spent about $400,000 building the new units and splitting the house, and believes he will get between $9,000 and $10,000 a month in rent across the property.
That return would increase the property’s value to about $1.7 million. The price would be galling to an aspiring homeowner who might have outbid another family before losing to Mr. Spicer and now feels cheated out of the American dream. But of course the 10 to 12 people who move in are unlikely to think the world would be better off if their homes had remained dirt and only one family lived there. Housing is complicated.
You hate to see it:
The yard signs have started to appear. This particular one was on Budd Street in Clairemont Mesa, about a 10-minute drive from the house on Baxter Street. When I arrived on the block to ask the neighbors about San Diego’s surge in backyard apartments, one discontented resident became two and two became a half-dozen. Suddenly I was in a semicircle absorbing dark prognostications from homeowners in shorts and gardening clothes, along with a grandmother holding a baby.
“It doesn’t fit.” “It’s adding people.” “We don’t want that here.” “There’s other places for that.” “We just want to keep our neighborhood like it is.” “They want to push us out and tear our houses down.” “Parking.” “Parking.” “Parking.”
And the irony here is tremendous (you’re SO CLOSE to getting it, lady!)
A few doors away stood a house with a For Sale sign. Ms. Estrada pointed to it and said she wanted to help her daughter buy it, but was worried an investor would outbid them. This would be a huge disappointment, because the house had a yard with the potential to help her solve two problems at once.
“My daughter will be 30, and I have another daughter who is 21 — she still lives at home,” Ms. Estrada said. “I’m thinking we can do an A.D.U. back there for her. She can have her own little place, too.”
Too funny (because this is not what you’re doing yourself? Building out an in-law unit to rent out for… a profit?)
But Ms. Estrada isn’t precisely complaining about growth — she’s mad that investors like Mr. Spicer have become a source of competition that could crowd out families that might develop land for one another.
“If you want to build your garage into a A.D.U. or you want to put one in your backyard — God bless you, that’s awesome,” she said. “But I know these developers, and it’s all about profit. It’s all about the money.” [New York Times]
We Accidentally Solved the Flu. Now What?
Once again, a bunch of people so focused on one thing (the disease itself) while not focused on anything else (the inconvenience and loneliness of all these measures!) While this sounds good in theory, I think we’ve very clearly decided that these are NOT small sacrifices and also that we don’t know what it was that worked! If this is your plan:
One thing we’re not going to do is go into lockdown every year (or even go into what passed for lockdown in the United States, which in reality was not). This, the public-health experts I spoke with for this story all agreed, would be neither feasible nor desirable. Broad restrictions on travel and large indoor gatherings, they said, also seem like nonstarters (though Seema Lakdawala, a flu-transmission expert at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested that companies might consider rescheduling their annual holiday party for the summer and moving it outdoors). Even more moderate capacity limitations, though beneficial from a health perspective, Popescu told me, are “tricky for business.”
And you’re restricting what you’ll do to just “masking,” then I don’t think it’s going to do much (see: Asian countries pre-pandemic, the flu still exists there!) Although there is one passage that does speak to me:
Whether because of that culture or because they don’t realize they’re contagious, some sick people will still come in to work. That, experts told me, is where overhauled ventilation can help us. For all the advances we’ve made in preventing diseases transmitted via water or insects, my colleague Sarah Zhang has written, we have overlooked air. Until the advent of sewer systems and water treatment, Marr said, people accepted deadly waterborne diseases as a basic fact of life. These days, the idea of drinking dirty water strikes most as repulsive, even as we resign ourselves to breathing filthy air and contracting seasonal respiratory viruses. But now, Marr said, “we’ve seen we don’t have to live that way.” By better ventilating our buildings—which to this point have largely been optimized for energy efficiency, not air quality—she said, we could do for air what we have done for water.
I would gladly take the risk of the flu to simply hug my friends—I think most Americans have made this calculation too! [The Atlantic]
How Scrubs Reinforce Sexist Double Standards
This article takes an important concern and… completely sucks ass (it might not be the author’s problem, since they rarely write the titles, but given the content, it doesn’t seem so)?
The pandemic rendered all this moot. Concerns about the white coat’s potential to harbor and transmit pathogens led many hospitals to drop it—along with the business-casual alternatives—in favor of unisex scrubs for all. A chance to level the playing field? You’d think so. Instead, the goal posts for women physicians just shifted.
Ok this is a good start! I’m all ears, tell me how everyone wearing the same shit is bad. Next paragraph:
Female physicians don’t even need to be at work to experience sexism related to how we look and dress. In the summer of 2020, during the brief respite between the onset of the pandemic in the spring and the fall surge to come, a medical journal posted an article titled “Prevalence of Unprofessional Social Media Content Among Young Vascular Surgeons.” Under the paternalistic guise of wanting to ensure that early-career physicians were “cautious of their social media content,” three male “screeners” used fake accounts to scour the accounts of their unwitting female colleagues (who make up a paltry 6 percent of their specialty) to evaluate their “unprofessional” clothing; they were off-duty female surgeons accused of “provocative posing in bikinis/swimwear.” (In the middle of a global pandemic, it is unclear how this issue became a pressing scientific question.)
Uh. This absolutely sucks, don’t get me wrong. But this has nothing to do with how scrubs reinforce sexist double standards! This story has a ton of good content and stories that should be told:
One day, during my senior year of residency, I was explaining the etiology of a patient’s heart murmur to my team of seven more-junior physicians, pharmacists, and medical students. I asked my patient how much exercise he was able to tolerate with his condition.
He hesitated, then smiled. “I’m sorry, I got distracted. It’s that little leopard skirt you have on. Can’t take my eyes off.”
I froze. The atmosphere in the room transformed. I was no longer leading a large medical team in a didactic moment but turning red under the male gaze as everyone stared … at my hips.
This is absolutely horrifying and fucking awful (fuck that guy). But this article is weak on premise and lede. There’s nothing in here at all about how scrubs promote sexism. Not a single example. An example of a story that needs to be told (sexual harassment of female doctors: not fucking ok!) but the framing of this story is terrible! Don’t sell me on a headline to get my attention, only to prove not true at all. [The Atlantic]
Et cetera
On sneakerheads and bots. [New York Times]