Buying in Bulk: Money Saver or Self Sabotage?

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Recently, I’ve been buying a lot more non-durable goods when they are on sale. Whereas previously I might have purchased the normal amount plus one or two units, now I’m buying like 3x or 4x the normal amount.

What initially led me here was the nagging thought that a 50%-off sale is a superb investment – especially if I was going to purchase a bunch eventually anyway. I like to think that I’m relatively dispassionate about investing and finances. But I realized that I wasn’t thinking that way about my groceries. The implication is that I’ve been living sub-optimally. And I can’t have that!

If someone told me that I could pay 50% more on my mortgage this month and get a full credit on my mortgage payment next month, then I would jump at the opportunity. That would be a 100% monthly return. Why not with groceries? Obviously, some groceries go bad. Produce will wilt, dairy will spoil, and the fridge space is limited. But what about non-perishables? This includes pantry items, toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc. 

Typically, there are two challenges for investing in inventory: 1) Will the discount now be adequate to compensate for the opportunity cost of resources over time? 2)  Is there are opportunity cost to the storage space?

For the moment, I will ignore challenge 2). On the relevant margins, my shelf will be full or empty. I’ve got excess capacity in my house that I can’t easily adjust it nor lend out. That leaves challenge 1) only.

First, the Too Simple Version.

Continue reading →

Alex Madrigal’s Atlantic Article on Testing Positive for COVID, and Pushbacks

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

A friend just texted me a link to an article by Alex Madrigal that came out yesterday in The Atlantic. Madrigal described how he made a last-minute decision to attend a wedding and associated gatherings in New Orleans. He knew there would be non-zero risk of infection, of course, but he had been fully vaccinated and he had reason to believe that essentially everyone else at the festivities was likewise vaccinated.  Madrigal had helped to assemble and lead a consortium of journalists who gathered and published COVID data in the early months of the pandemic, before officialdom got its act together on reporting good numbers, so he is well-acquainted with the math of this disease.

He had been seeing maskless people laughing and chatting  in restaurants, and he really liked New Orleans, and he wanted to support his friend who was getting married, and he wanted to enjoy some return to good old normal good times. So, he went and he mingled. Liquor flowed and happy chatter filled the air. And then he flew home.

He has a wife and two children, so to be on the safe side, upon his return he took no less than three PCR antigen tests, a day or so apart. All came back negative, even the one four days after the wedding. He did develop some cold symptoms, and upon his wife’s request, did one more swab at home on the fifth day. That was unmistakably positive, as was a follow-up test.

What followed was a nontrivial amount of inconvenience – – he went and  lived in a rental apart from his family for at least ten days, his kids got pulled out of school, and he worried that if he had passed it to them, they in turn would need to quarantine. He is 39 and in top physical condition, and was vaccinated, so his course of illness was just that of a nasty cold, but that was still not fun. For him the most poignant aspect was the reaction of his two children:

My nonbinary 8-year-old was so mad and maybe so scared that they could barely look at me. My 5-year-old daughter proved her status as the ultimate ride-or-die kid. She brought a chair down the street so she could sit 20 feet away from me outside in her mask, as I sat on the porch in an N95. I’m not sure which reaction was more heartbreaking. It was as if one never wanted to see me again and the other didn’t want to let me out of her sight.

He wrote all this up in “ Getting Back to Normal Is Only Possible Until You Test Positive “. The concluding lines echo the title, “Right now most policies appear designed to make life seem normal. Masks are coming off. Restaurants are dining in. Planes are full. Offices are calling. But don’t be fooled: The world’s normal only until you test positive.”

My reaction, which I’d like to think would be a common reaction to this piece, is sympathy for the hassle that he and his family have been through, and appreciation for this reality check: the newer variants of COVID multiply so fast that you can get sick and spread the disease, even if you have been vaccinated. You probably won’t die, but getting infected could be very uncomfortable and inconvenient. At the macro level, some activities may never get fully back to pre-2020 levels, and on the personal level we should keep all this in mind before entering a room with lots of talking (or singing) unmasked people. In the U.S. there are still a thousand people dying every day from this communicable disease, and Europe is getting hit hard. I guess we all have pandemic fatigue, but a thousand deaths at a pop used to be considered a lot.

That would be a fine observation with which to end this blog post. But I will throw in one other observation: the internet is a pretty harsh place, and Madrigal’s article spawned at least two fairly ascerbic pushback articles.  Claire Carusillo at gawker.com (which I know nothing about), in Alexis Madrigal: I Can’t Believe I, a Really Good Person, Got Covid , takes multiple jabs:

Alexis C. Madrigal, a columnist for The Atlantic and a cofounder of the COVID tracking project, got a mild breakthrough COVID case at a destination wedding in New Orleans. Instead of just going to bed for two weeks like a normal person, he wrote an essay about it wherein the only thing he makes clearer than his dedication to his workout routine is how he believes his story is a horrifying parable for our time.

It isn’t. It’s an unremarkable story from a public health perspective, though Madrigal’s inclusion of specific details make this piece a fascinating study of what it’s like to be an American man with a certain level of privilege who also just so happens to have a huge platform and a deadline to meet. Social distancing, it seems, has inflamed his out-of-touchness with what most people have endured over the course of the last 20 months.

… You may be thinking, spending a few childcare-light days at an Airbnb on your own block with a mild throat “tickle” that does not prevent you from either doing Peloton workouts or writing an essay for The Atlantic does not sound that bad. In fact, you may think it sounds a lot better than the trips I have taken to the Bay Area, particularly the family vacation we took to Alcatraz when I was nine. Either way, how dare you?

Ouch.

Tiana Lowe at the Washington Examiner blames Madrigal’s fear-mongering for his kids’ reactions to his plight, in her article If your nonbinary 8-year-old gets mad at you for getting COVID, tell them to grow up :

Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal engages in some light sadism, dedicating thousands of words to flagellating himself for the great sin of contracting the coronavirus….. He got a mild breakthrough case of coronavirus. But because the vaccines work well, he made a full recovery shortly thereafter.

….Children these days have dramatically calmed down from the bad behavior of the ’80s. This has brought with it the blessing of far fewer pregnancies and underaged smokers. But helicopter parenting, even before the pandemic, produced a significant cohort of children far, far too cautious and not nearly socialized well enough for adulthood. The share of teenagers who have ever had a job, gotten their driver’s license, or gone on a date, all previously the major milestones of young adulthood, has plummeted, and now we’re adding COVIDiocy to that trend?

An 8-year-old capable of making a parent abide by their preferred gender identity is probably also capable of bullying said parent out of having a normal social life. But the real fault belongs to the parent who would let a child live in such fear and fall so deeply into coronavirus delusions.

A virus for which we now have three vaccines and several new, inexpensive treatments does not provide any reason to stop living life to the fullest. To fail to explain this to children is the kindness of cowardice — or even cruelty masquerading as kindness.

Again, ouch. I think the two pushback articles make some valid points, particularly Lowe’s observations on helicopter parenting in general, and it does seem like the Madrigals’ kids had been given overly inflated fears about their dad’s prospects. That said, we need more in the way of civil discourse. The abrasive tone of these reactionary articles says more about their authors’ attempts to garner clicks than about Madrigal’s original earnest cautionary tale. It is a jungle out there.

Inflation is Here. Why? What Can We Do?

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

The latest CPI release today shows that real inflation is here. Headline inflation for consumer prices is up 6.2% compared to a year ago and a almost full percentage point in just the past month (seasonally adjusted, so compared to the normal monthly increase).

Back in June, we could reasonably say that 45% of the increase that month (and 27% over the prior year) had been due to just the price of new and used cars, in the past month only 17% can be attributed to vehicle prices. That’s still a lot, considering cars are only about 8 percent of the overall CPI, but inflation is clearly showing up in other areas.

Gasoline prices (also car related!) are always volatile, but they are up sharply in the past year. The over 50% increase for regular unleaded gasoline translates to $1.22 more per gallon than a year ago (and $1.50 more gallon than Spring 2020), which is the largest nominal price increase consumers have seen in a 12-month period (the data stretches back to 1977).

But gasoline is only about 4 percent of consumer spending. What if we look more broadly? Even excluding energy prices, inflation is 4.7% over the past year, the highest increase since 1991.

The natural related questions are Why? And what can we do about it?

The Why question is tricky. The Federal Reserve is very interested in whether the increase in prices is caused by monetary policy. It very much guides their action. Consumers don’t really care that much. They just want the pain to stop. Unfortunately, though, part of the pain may be induced by consumers themselves: spending on goods is extremely high right now, with the year so far 18% above the comparable period in 2019. Higher spending will increase prices in any environment, but the strain it is putting on supply chains only exacerbates the problem. This is not to “blame the victim,” but rather to understand what is going on.

What can be done? That’s an even harder question. It’s convenient to blame the President for things like gas prices. And certainly many voters and pundits will blame him. This charge is not completely without basis, as there are certainly things at the margin a president could do to ease gas prices in the short run (allow more drilling, gas tax hiatus), but we shouldn’t oversell this. And in other areas too, perhaps there are changes that could be made at the margin. But given the massive increases in consumer spending (at least for now), any changes won’t put a dent in the overall inflation rate.

But what about at the individual level? Milton Friedman was asked this question in 1980. That year inflation was 13.5%, the highest since World War II. Friedman’s answer: high living. He said there is no asset which you can expect to protect you against inflation, so you should spend what you have now on something nice. Buy a nice house, a nice suit, a picture to hang on the wall. This is what economists sometimes call “the flight to real values,” or as Phil Donahue put it “convert your money into material things.” While this advice may make sense at the individual level, it doesn’t have great implications for the current supply chain issues.

Friedman did have clear advice for the nation: the Federal Reserve should stop increasing the money supply. Whether that advice will work in the current environment, or whether it will stall the economic recovery, is the hard question the Fed is wrestling with at this very moment.

Presentation Today – “Firearms and Violence Under Jim Crow”

mdmakowskyLeave a comment

I’ll be giving a presentation today at 12pm ET over Zoom for the Ostrom Workshop Colloquium Series at Indiana University. It is my understanding that it is open to the public. The format is different than your typical economics seminar. I will give an introduction and brief summary of the paper for 20 minutes followed by questions.

https://ostromworkshop.indiana.edu/pdf/announcements/2021fall-colloq/11-08-makowsky.pdf

You can find the full working paper here.

The history of work and the myth of a leisurely past

Vincent Geloso3 Comments

Since Marshall Sahlins in the 1970s (and thanks to James Suzman’s Work ), a weird idea has worked its way into popular imagination: people of the past did not work much. Well, more precisely, the idea is that for most of human history our ancestors worked far less and thought very differently about work than we do now. That is based on a weird starting point and a misunderstanding of how “work” works.

The starting point is the pre-neolithic era when the vast majority of time was spent hunting and gathering. In that setting, the effort to acquire calories was modest largely because food was abundant relative to a tiny human population. Some early estimates suggest that, because of that relative endowment, people worked maybe less than 20 hours per week hunting and gathering. Some say even less. That is probably correct and also wrong.

Notice that I italicized hunting and gathering above suggesting that the time commitment of these two tasks was quite small. However, this is not the sum of all work people did then. One has to understand that nomadic groups were nomad in part because the largest share of their calories was also quite mobile. This meant moving around significantly to track food under a key constraint — that calories from gathering be available.

This meant that people moved from “oasis” to “oasis” or from “patch” to “patch”. Between each patch/oasis, there was a lot of time spent “in transit” (let’s call this d for dead time). That time is technically not work for hunting or gathering — but it is work. Not counting it is a mistake.

To see how it matters, consider the graph below which depicts a forager who moves between oases/patches where food is available. As they stay in a oasis, the yield of food y is marginally decreasing so that at one point he may have an incentive to move on. When he moves on, he incurs the cost d which is dead time while moving. Suppose also that a single oasis/patch per year (which encompasses multiple time periods) is insufficient to survive the year. Thus, multiple patches must be exploited. Supposing that all oases are equally distant, of equal quality and that there are many oases in total, how can we picture the decision to move to another? If you want to maximize your food intake over a long period of time, you have to go to multiple oases in a year. This is where we introduce the dashed blue line which is the total yield from all oases/patches divided by time. Notice that it starts at origin so that we are capturing the cost of d.

Figure 1: How people in the past worked

These two lines tell us that you stay at a single oasis until its marginal return is inferior to the average yield over all oases/patches. Why does this matter? Well, imagine the implications if each patch is less productive? You have to move more to reach a certain target and incur d more frequently. That effectively means that you have to exploit a greater territory to meet a certain target of food (e.g. survival).

The estimate of time spent hunting and gathering are essentially the time within patches rather than the time spent for all patches. Thus, there is a massive underestimate. The yield on a single oasis/patch was so low in the pre-neolithic that moving was something that clans did often. In the late Ice Age, family groups apparently moved every 3-6 days. Modern nomads in certain regions move some 400 km per year. At 5km/h, this is 80 hours of work per year. However, that 5km/h is too high as there were children to carry which slow things down. At 3km/h, we are talking 133 hours per year (or roughly 2.6 extra hours per week). This is just dead time but it is work. As such, more exhaustive worktime estimates suggest values of 35 to 43 hours per week. Most western countries are below this level. Moreover, it is worth considering that work started at young ages and there was no retirement. With shorter lives and earlier work-entry, a smaller fraction of awake life-time was spent in leisurely pursuits. Ergo, it is insanely likely that no society today exhibits more “life-time” work than the prehistoric humans.

Finally, it is worth pointing out the very obvious. The introduction of agriculture, by removing the need to move around and also reducing variability in calories (i.e. fewer chances of catastrophes), essentially increased the benefit of working (i.e. making leisure relatively costlier). It is unsurprising then that the introduction of agriculture led to some increases in labor supply. However, that being said, it is clearly false than we work more today than our prehistoric ancestors did. There is no way around it.

Gen Z on The Great Resignation

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

Even though a housing price crash is often reported on as a crisis, it benefits first time homebuyers. Do the college seniors in 2021, likewise, see this “labor shortage” as a wonderful opportunity and stroke of luck for them personally? They overwhelmingly think of themselves as sellers of labor, not employers.*

Sometimes Samford students write for EWED if I felt like there was something that I and readers could learn from their perspective. This is accounting major Rachel Brinkley:

As a 21-year-old senior in college, the workforce is a confusing place. On the one hand, “The Great Resignation” is creating millions of jobs across America. It is a very encouraging time to be graduating college, as it appears that most of my peers and I will have no issues finding employment. Employers are currently struggling to compete in terms of compensation and benefits offered. I am majoring in accounting, and everyone that I have spoken to in my major has had at least one compensation increase since accepting their position. None of us have worked even one day on the job. This competition between employers creates favorable bargaining power for those entering the workforce, while putting a strain on employers.

While I may have confidence in my employment status after graduation, I will be starting at an entry level position for a firm that has a relatively structured promotional process. Like most large accounting firms, the promotions within the firm are based on the number of years spent working at the firm. There may be a few exceptions to the standard promotional pace, but I am not very optimistic about climbing the corporate ladder any faster than I would under more typical economic conditions. This is due, in part, to the fact that the best jobs are hard to come by. At a large accounting firm, the structured promotional process limits the number of the most sought-after jobs.

This circumstance leads me to ask how it is possible to obtain a top job when competition for those positions seems to be increasing. We read “Deep Work” for class, and I think about the author’s advice. We will need to continue learning new skills to make it into top positions.

Are my students running through the halls celebrating the current state of the labor market? Maybe they should be, but they are not, especially if their focus is on what Rachel called “top jobs”. Some jobs, almost by definition, are limited because they are top-of-the-pyramid or “tournament” positions.

My current Fall students pointed out that they feel better than the last two batches of students graduating into a closed-down Covid world. Many of our previous students got hired virtually and I don’t know at what point if at all they have had in-person interactions with work colleagues.

*The truth is more complex in a large diverse economy. Even though I don’t think of myself as en employer, I am concerned that there will be no one to operate my upcoming flight to a conference. The airline I rely on has had to cancel hundereds of flights in the past week over labor issues.

You Current Grade: It’s Complicated

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

By now, most US universities are 4-5 weeks away from the end of the fall semester. Whether it’s now, or just prior to the withdrawal deadline, student tend to demonstrate increased interest in their grade for their courses. They say that they want to know how they are doing. But they often prefer to know what grade they will earn at the conclusion of the course. The answer to the latter question could include all kinds of assumptions. But “What is my grade right now?” is a deceptively subtle question.

It seems direct. We could easily be curt and claim that it shouldn’t be complicated to tell a student what their grade is, and that it’s a failure of the teacher or of the education system writ large if it is complicated. While I entirely agree that a teacher should have an answer, it’s important to emphasize that “What is my grade right now?” is an ill-defined question. The problem is that a student can mean two different things when they ask about their grade.

Q1) What proportion of possible points have I earned so far?

Q2) What proportion of points will I have earned if my performance doesn’t change?

It’s important for teachers to ensure that their students understand which question is being answered.

First, I’ll illustrate when there is no distinction between the answers. Let’s say that there are two types of assignments: Exams, which are worth 75% of the course grade, and quizzes, which are worth 25%, of the course grade. So long as the two assignment types are identically distributed throughout the semester, Q1 & Q2 have the same answer. Below is a bar chart that illustrates a distribution of points over 4 weeks. The proportion of points for each assignment type is identically distributed over time (not necessarily uniformly distributed).

What is the student’s grade at the end of week 2 if they have scored 90% on the exams and 70% on the quizzes? By the end of week 2, there have been 30 possible exam points and 10 possible quiz points. The student has earned 34 of the 40 possible points so far. The math for Q1 is:

(0.9)(30)+(0.7)(10) = 27+7=34

34/40 = 85%

And, if they continue to perform identically in each assignment category, then they can expect to earn an 85% in the class. The math for Q2 is:

(0.9)(75)+(0.7)(25) = 67.5+17.5 = 85%

Both Q1 and Q2 have the same answer. And, honestly, principles or introductory courses have formats that often lend themselves well to having assignments distributed similarly over time. My own Principles of Macroeconomics class matches up pretty well with the above math. Each week, there is a reading, a homework, and a quiz. By the time students complete the first exam, they’ve completed about one third of all points in each assignment category.

Higher level classes or classes with projects tend *not* to have identical point distributions across time among assignments. Maybe there are presentations, projects, or reports due throughout the semester or at the culmination of the course. For example, my Game Theory class has two midterm exams, but no final exam. It has homework in the first half of the semester, and term paper assignments in the latter half.

The bar chart below displays a point-split among the same quizzes and exams, but they now are differently distributed throughout the semester. Quiz points have been frontloaded.

What is the student’s grade at the end of week 2 if they have scored 90% on the exams and 70% on the quizzes? By the end of week 2, there have been 30 possible exam points and 15 possible quiz points. The student has earned 37.5 of the 45 possible points so far. The math for Q2 is:

(0.9)(30)+(0.7)(15) = 27+10.5=37.5

37.5/45 = 83.33%

And, if they continue to perform identically in each assignment category, then they can expect to earn an 85% in the class. The math for Q2 is:

(0.9)(75)+(0.7)(25) = 67.5+17.5 = 85%

All I did was frontload 5 percentage points for quizzes and now the answers to Q1 and Q2 differ by 1.66 percentage points. That may seem like small potatoes. But consider that a) many students and universities use and care about the +/- system of grades, and b) a grade difference of 1.66 points was caused by a mere change of 5-point change in the distribution. Bigger changes result in bigger differences. Frontloading the remaining 5 quiz points from the end of the semester would result in a Q1 score of 82% – yielding a 3 point difference between the two calculation methods.

The differences between Q1 & Q2 illustrated above are even more pronounced once you begin to include extra credit. One point of extra credit has a smaller effect on the answer to Q1 as more and more possible course points have been earned.

If students only care about their ultimate grade in the course, then they will always prefer to receive the answer to Q2. But, students may also want to know how effective their recent study habits have been so that they can re-evaluate them conditional on the knowledge of the assignment point distributions. Q2 requires more assumptions if an assignment type hasn’t even occurred yet. Students can ask “Have I given this course the appropriate amount of attention given the types of assignments that we’ve had?”.

For example, my Principles of Macroeconomics course has the first exam at week 5. Students should have an average score that is greater than 90% by the end of week 4 because the reading assignments are simple, the homeworks are lenient, and the quizzes permit practice attempts. Students who have an 80% by the end of week 4 are going to have a rougher time once they encounter an exam.

Reasonable people can disagree about which calculation is more useful. And more mathematically inclined students can calculate their own grades anyway. Therefore, after every exam, I send a mail-merge email to each of my students in order to update them about their grade. I give them the answer to both Q1 & Q2, and I illustrate the impact of several alternative scenarios for their future performance. If there is information that a student wants about their grade, then it’s in that email.

In conclusion, teachers should take great care in making student grades and progress reports clear. Students should take great care to understand what they are asking and and what the answer means. Grades can be very important for students who are close to the margin for scholarships, academic probation, or failure. While students may care too much about their grades, teachers should be sensitive to the fact that the care is real none the less. Teachers owe their students a firm and clear indicator of performance.

*There is another case in which Q1 & Q2 have the same answer. It’s when the student earns exactly the same grade in each assignment category, regardless of whether the category points are distributed identically across time.

Starship: Quantity has a Quality of its own

James BaileyLeave a comment

If the SpaceX Starship ends up working as planned, it will do the same things our rockets do now, but at one one-hundredth the price. In an inspiring blog post, Casey Handmer argues that even people within the industry have yet to appreciate the qualitatively different opportunities that this price drop would enable:

By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

Second, and more importantly, shoehorning Cassini 2.0 or Mars Direct into Starship fails to adequately exploit the capabilities of the launch system. Not to pick on Cassini or Mars Direct, but both of these missions were designed with inherent constraints that are not relevant to Starship. In fact, all space missions whether robotic or crewed, historical or planned, have been designed with constraints that are not relevant to Starship. 

What does this mean? Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities. 

Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production.

As they say, read they whole thing, especially the part about space tractors. I leave you with one final quote:

It is time to raise the scope of our ambition and think much bigger

COVID and The Young

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

The CDC just approved vaccines from Americans aged 5-11. That’s great news! But today, I want to talk about another age group: mine.

A few months ago I wrote a post summarizing data for COVID-19 deaths among people in their 30s and 40s. While we have primarily thought of COVID as a disease impacting the elderly (and indeed in the aggregate, it is), there have been major health consequences for those under 65 too. Including major health consequences for the age group 30-49 (which I believe is the age range of all our bloggers here at EWED).

I wanted to update that data because a few new things have come to light. First, I highly recommend reading a recent paper by my friend Julian Reif and co-authors. They estimate the number of Years of Life Lost and Quality-Adjusted Years of Life Lost for different age groups from COVID-19. Their data runs through mid-March 2021, so before vaccines probably had much of a chance to impact the aggregate death numbers (though vaccines were being rolled out at the time).

Here’s their main result: while most of the deaths from COVID were among those aged 65 and older (80% through March 2021), most of the life lost in terms of years was for Americans under 65 (54% of QALYs). And even for very young adults, the risk in terms of years of life lost was not minimal. A comparison from the paper: “Adults aged 85 years or older faced 70 times more excess risk for death than those aged 25 to 34 years but only 3.9 times more individualized loss of QALYs per capita.” Compared to the 35-44 age group, the relevant factor is 2.8 times more individualized loss for the 85+ group.

It’s a great paper, but it only goes through March. What has happened since March 2021? While 80% of the COVID deaths up through March 2021 were among the elderly (65 and older), since April 2021 only 60% of the COVID deaths have been among the elderly. Part of this is because deaths are down among the elderly, but it’s also because deaths are up for the non-elderly. The table is my attempt to show this effect, looking at the period from March-September in both 2020 and 2021 (data is current as of October 27, so the September 2021 data is still not complete, but instructive).

For the oldest Americans, COVID deaths fell by 50%. That’s great! But for younger Americans, COVID deaths roughly doubled. Not good!

Continue reading →

Zuckerberg Wants to Suck You into His Metaverse

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been making a lot of noise in the past few months about the “metaverse”, and now has changed his company’s name from Facebook to “Meta Platforms” (MVRS on the NASDAQ). What, you may ask, is the metaverse?

The term itself has been around for a while. Wikipedia defines it as, ”The metaverse is an iteration of the Internet part of shared virtual reality, often as a form of social media. The metaverse in a broader sense may not only refer to virtual worlds operated by social media companies but the entire spectrum of augmented reality.” In the near term, it will to be embodied by people wearing headsets with Augmented Reality (AR) goggles (with little projector screens in front of your eyes) connected over the internet to other people wearing AR googles. Instead of seeing people on flat screens (think Zoom calls), both you and they will seem to be in the same room, interacting with each other in 3-D. You and they will each be represented by digitally constructed avatars. Eventually your body would have various sensors attached to it to convey your position and motions, and your sense of touch for objects you are handling. For instance, this just in:

Together with scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, artificial intelligence researchers at Meta created a deformable plastic “skin” less than 3 millimeters thick….When the skin comes into contact with another surface, the magnetic field from the embedded particles changes. The sensor records the change in magnetic flux, before feeding the data to some AI software, which attempts to understand the force or touch that has been applied.

Zuckerberg gave a presentation on October 28 touting his company’s pivot.  In his words:

The next platform and medium will be even more immersive, an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it, and we call this the metaverse….When you play a game with your friends, you’ll feel like you’re right there together in a different world, not just on your computer by yourself. And when you’re in a meeting in the metaverse, it’ll feel like you’re right in the room together, making eye contact, having a shared sense of space and not just looking at a grid of faces on a screen. That’s what we mean by an embodied internet. Instead of looking at a screen, you’re going to be in these experiences.  You’re going to really feel like you’re there with other people. You’ll see their face expressions. You’ll see their body language. Maybe figure out if they’re actually holding a winning hand…

Next, there are avatars, and that’s how we’re going to represent ourselves in the metaverse. Avatars will be as common as profile pictures today, but instead of a static image, they’re going to be living 3D representations of you, your expressions, your gestures that are going to make interactions much richer than anything that’s possible online today. You’ll probably have a photo realistic avatar for work, a stylized one for hanging out and maybe even a fantasy one for gaming. You’re going to have a wardrobe of virtual clothes for different occasions designed by different creators and from different apps and experiences.

Beyond avatars, there is your home space. You’re going to be able to design it to look the way you want, maybe put up your own pictures and videos and store your digital goods. You’re going to be able to invite people over, play games and hang out. You’ll also even have a home office where you can work…

We believe that neural interfaces are going to be an important part of how we interact with AR glasses, and more specifically EMG input from the muscles on your wrist combined with contextualized AI. It turns out that we all have unused neuromotor pathways, and with simple and perhaps even imperceptible gestures, sensors will one day be able to translate those neuromotor signals into digital commands that enable you to control your devices. It’s pretty wild.

The reactions to all this I have seen on the internet have not been particularly positive. Some suggest that this is largely a publicity stunt to deflect attention from recent revelations of hypocritical and harmful decisions by Facebook management. The Guardian scoffs:

First came the Facebook papers, a series of blockbuster reports in the Wall Street Journal based on a cache of internal documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower.

The dam broke wider last week after Haugen shared the documents with a wider consortium of news publications, which have published a slew of stories outlining how Facebook knew its products were stoking real-world violence and aggravating mental health problems, but refused to change them.

Now the regulatory sharks are circling. Haugen recently testified before US and UK lawmakers, heightening calls to hold the company to account.

Facebook, meanwhile, appeared to be living in another universe. Its rebrand to Meta this week has prompted ridicule and incredulity that a company charged with eroding the bedrock of global democracy would venture into a new dimension without apologizing for the havoc it wreaked on this one.

Ouch. Privacy advocates are concerned about the implications of identity theft taken into the 3D domain: imagine some malicious actor sending a realistic avatar of you around cyberspace doing things you would not do. Also, it is widely recognized that too much time on today’s (flat) screens is unhealthy; how would 3D glasses make that better?

Scott Rosenburg at Axios notes some more prosaic shortcomings of Zuck’s beatific vision:

The real you is just sitting in a chair wearing goggles…The video mock-ups of the metaverse Zuckerberg unveiled showed us what remote-presence wizardry might look like from within the 3D dimension. But they omitted the prosaic reality of most current VR… Right now, the metaverse isn’t “embodied” at all. It’s an out-of-body experience where your senses take you somewhere else and leave your body behind on a chair or couch or standing like a blindfolded prisoner…

Today’s headsets mostly block out the “real world” — and sometimes induce wooziness, headaches and even nausea. Why it matters: If you fear screen time atrophies your flesh and cramps your soul or find Zoom drains your energy, wait till you experience metaverse overload….

Virtual-world makers will feel the same incentives to boost engagement and hold onto users’ eyeballs in the metaverse that they have on today’s social platforms.

That could leave us all nostalgic for our current era of screen-blurred vision, misinformation-filled newsfeeds and privacy compromises.