Category Archives: Web Article Review

how much working from home is the right amount?

1-2 days a week is a sweet spot, according to human resources guidelines and some actual research.

long-run effects of telecommuting are all described by bell-shaped curves: Telecommuting first increases skilled and unskilled workers’ productivity and GDP up to some threshold. Beyond that level, a higher share of home-workers reduces the strength of the knowledge and information spillovers which, therefore, do not produce desirable effects. Too much WFH may thus be detrimental to long-run innovation and growth due to limitations of information and communication technologies as well as foregone agglomeration economies in the form of face-to-face contact and knowledge spillovers.2 Figure 1 illustrates this point via some back-of-the-envelope computations using consensus parameter values. The WFH share that maximizes GDP varies between 20% and 40% in our simulations – one or two working days per 5-day week. This is broadly in line with recommendations made in human resource management (Gajendran and Harrison 2007).

Vox

It wasn’t exactly clear to me whether the model mentioned here distinguished between the share of people work from home and the share of an individual’s work days that would be at home. That may not matter to a mathematical model, but it obviously matters to an individual.

1-2 days sounds about right to me. It’s enough to get the personal collaboration and interaction, which is important both for innovation and psychological reasons. Just having a change of scenery a couple days a week is important for psychological reasons too. That 1-2 days at home does cut down on all that wasted time and pollution caused by typical car commutes. This wouldn’t have to be the case if more people lived in communities where they could have active commutes (walking or biking), because the commute then provides some fresh air, exercise, a change of scenery, and sometimes a little social interaction. Sometimes its nice to stop at a coffee shop on the way in, and sit on a park bench for a few minutes or enjoy an…er…adult beverage on the way home (with no possibility of drunk driving, although angry car commuters can be a danger to mildly inebriated pedestrian. I’ve also noticed that car commuters seem particularly angry on Friday afternoons, while walking commuters seem particularly happy. Why is that? Because the walking commuter’s weekend has started and the car commuter’s psychological weekend doesn’t start until the car is in the garage, and in between that moment and the moment they are in are many forces outside their control.) It helps to have “third places” to unwind a bit between work and home. This is a major reason I live where I do, and one thing I have really missed during the pandemic. (Another thing I have missed is my children to and from school, parks, playgrounds, museums, etc.) Over the past year, the headaches of city living have outweighed the benefits I had taken for granted before that.

A couple more thoughts on working from home:

  • Obviously, some kinds of jobs can do it more than others. The kind that can tend to be higher paying. I think we have all learned something over the past year about “essential workers”, which actually means essential jobs done by expendable workers. Here’s a crazy idea – people who volunteer to do dangerous jobs like deep sea diving and drilling for oil in war zones get hazard pay to make it worth their while. It should be possible to have a government program that supplements the pay of ordinary people doing ordinary jobs under emergency conditions.
  • Co-working seems to me to hold some promise as a compromise between working in a corporate office and working from home. You get a professional atmosphere, a bit of breathing room between work and home (which let’s be honest, your family members may appreciate as much as you do), and you can significantly cut down on your commute – ideally, your co-working site should be accessible on foot, by 100% safe protected bike lane, or in a pinch by public transportation. Over time, this could allow your employer to downsize the office if that is what they want to do, without transferring 100% of the burden of operating an inefficient and far from ideal professional office to each individual worker in their family home. Some employers may have concerns about confidentiality, but outside high-security industries this should be manageable through things like sound-proof booths in the co-working sites.
  • Finally, my observation among professional workers is that some people and some specific jobs are better suited to it than others. I have noticed that the same people who struggled with communication in the office (for a variety of reasons – language barrier, personality type, or just being young and not having figured it out yet) are the ones who have been left behind in the co-working world. If those people are otherwise valuable, employers need to figure out how to bring them along through mentoring, training, carrots and/or sticks of some sort or they won’t realize the career potential they otherwise could have.

Joe Biden has a mangy dog

I was having kind of a rough morning, and then this made me laugh out loud! Of course, the “panel of presidential historians” is being completely deadpan, if not actually serious. I did not independently verify that this is an actual picture of Joe Biden’s actual dog at the actual White House. If so, it does seem like they could afford to get a dog groomer in there. Then again, maybe it fits the image that an “average Joe” would have an average dog. And the dog looks perfectly happy to me, like it’s lying on a porch looking out over the Smoky Mountains with someone strumming a banjo in the background.

Twitter

fun stats on U.S. blackouts

Electric blackouts are yet another area where the hard data shows the U.S. is slipping behind other developed countries.

To put it bluntly, this kind of situation doesn’t happen everywhere. In fact, it happens more often in the U.S. than in any other developed country, according to the University of Minnesota’s Massoud Amin, a founding expert in smart-grid technology. Amin has found that utility customers lose power for an average of 4 minutes annually in Japan, compared to 92 minutes per year in the Upper Midwest.

“We are behind all other G7 nations in our infrastructure, including the power grid,” Amin said.

Yale Climate Connections

One simple (i.e. low tech but expensive) solution suggested is to bury power lines, which provides protection against both storms and freezing. I have always thought it would make sense to put utility tunnels under roads and streets. Then you could put all your utilities in there (electric, gas, water, sewer, communications) and have access to them through manholes rather than having to dig up the street. Of course, this would require up front planning and expense, it might be hard to retrofit an existing city this way, and it would require coordinating the patchwork of mostly uncoordinated public and private entities that fund and operate our infrastructure systems. Or we could try to untangle that patchwork into something that makes more sense.

We’ll need to figure something out just to keep the system functioning as it ages. At the same time, extreme weather and other disasters seem to be getting worse. There is talk of electrifying vehicles on a large scale, and some locales are shifting away from natural gas and toward electrifying more homes and businesses. Then we have the move toward more decentralized, intermittent sources of energy. And finally, there is the risk of cyber attacks and plain old fashioned attacks, whether by a serious foreign adversary or just mischief makers. Right now, foreign adversaries and mischief makers may just be sitting back and laughing at the United States as we manage to spread deadly biological agents and let our critical infrastructure fail from neglect without their help.

some new Covid-related numbers

Here are some new numbers, because I like numbers.

  • The CDC is citing the 100 cases per 100,000 population per day number as the threshold for “high transmission”. Here in Pennsylvania, our health department has been citing this number for when school should go all virtual. But the CDC says elementary schools should be having hybrid (reduced attendance) school right now. Here in Philadelphia our public school children have not been given this chance at any time since March 2020, and it is uncertain whether it will happen before the end of the school year in June. (I’m writing on Sunday, February 14).
  • New data on effectiveness of masks: something like 70-100%, and these studies cited were mostly in public or job settings, not medical settings.

another way to look at slipping U.S. life expectancy

Just in case we need another metric to believe that the U.S. is slipping behind its peers, there is this new study from Lancet, summarized in a Quartz article:

…if the US had a life expectancy equal to the average of countries of comparable wealth (in the study, the group is identified as G7 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, and US), its population would be nearly half a million more.

It’s not a new phenomenon. The US has trailed the rest of the advanced world in life expectancy since the 1980s, and it’s now 3.4 years shorter than the average of other G7 countries in 2018, the last year for which international data is available. On average, in 2018, people in G7 countries had a life expectancy of 81.9 years, while in the US (prior to Covid-19) it was 78.5 years. In 2018 in Japan, the G7 country with the highest life expectancy, it was 84.2 years.

Quartz

Note that the average we are comparing the U.S. to presumably includes the U.S., so the gap between the U.S. and its peers would be even slightly worse if we were just comparing the U.S. to the average of its peers. Japanese people are living 5-6 years longer than us, on average. This is before Covid-19, of course. Checking Our World in Data, Japan has a reported death rate from Covid-19 of about 55 per million population, and the U.S. of about 1,500 per million population! (I don’t use exclamation points lightly on this blog.)

what a global pandemic/bioweapon surveillance regime could look like

It’s pretty clear that the world needs some kind of surveillance or inspection regime to monitor both biological weapons and natural disease outbreaks. This Wired article goes into some of the possibilities.

  • The WHO is an obvious possibility, but requires full cooperation of member states so this limits what it can do, even if it were well funded.
  • Something like the International Atomic Energy Agency is a possibility. It would have to be established by a treaty and would have the ability to swoop in and inspect advanced biological labs (these are called “biosafety level 4” or BSL-4) on short notice.
  • There is an existing treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention which might have the authority to create this body, but the article says it is somewhat ineffective and a new treaty wouldn’t need to have as many parties, just starting with the major players and letting others sign on over time.
  • Another model is the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is similar to IAEA.
  • The UN Security Council would also have the authority to establish a new inspection body, kind of like it did for Iraq in the 1990s (which turned out great… and this is the problem, the UN lost a lot of its previous credibility in that debacle.)

The BSL-4 labs are proliferating around the world according to the article, and this seems like a scary situation to me.

My modest proposal would be to fund the WHO fully right away and have it investigate natural disease outbreaks with member state cooperation. Then have the Security Council establish the heavy-duty biological weapons inspection program with the heavies right away. Like it or not, we also need surveillance to find the hidden labs or even just people messing around with dangerous stuff in their garages and basements. This will be much easier for the little guy to do than, say, getting your hands on some enriched uranium or Novachok.

This is an existential risk – we may not get many chances to make mistakes and learn from them. The risk will keep increasing and under any kind of moral or responsible government framework it has to be dealt with right away.

why inequality leads to crime and violence

In a rational choice model, cheating and stealing can become rational when people have less to lose from not cheating and stealing than they risk by cheating and stealing. And if they don’t trust one another, they are even more likely to cheat and steal. The more unequal a society is, the more likely people will fall below the threshold where they judge they have nothing to lose, and the less trust there will be between and within social classes.

 If your current resources are above the threshold, then, under the assumptions we make, it is not worth stealing. Instead, you should cooperate as long as you judge that the others around you are likely to do so too, and just work alone otherwise. If your resources are around or below the threshold, however, then, under our assumptions, you should pretty much always steal. Even if it makes you worse off on average.

This is a pretty remarkable result: why would it be so? The important thing to appreciate is that with our threshold, we have introduced a sharp non-linearity in the fitness function, or utility function, that is assumed to be driving decisions. Once you fall down below that threshold, your prospects are really dramatically worse, and you need to get back up immediately. This makes stealing a worthwhile risk. If it happens to succeed, it’s the only action with a big enough quick win to leap you back over the threshold in one bound. If, as is likely, it fails, you are scarcely worse off in the long run: your prospects were dire anyway, and they can’t get much direr. So the riskiness of stealing – it sometimes you gives you a big positive outcome and sometimes a big negative one – becomes a thing you should seek rather than avoid…

So if making sentences tougher does not solve the problems of crime in high-inequality populations, according to the model, is there anything that does? Well, yes: and readers of this blog may not be surprised to hear me mention it. Redistribution. If people who are facing desperation can expect their fortunes to improve by other means, such as redistributive action, then they don’t need to employ such desperate means as stealing. They will get back up there anyway. Our model shows that a shuffling of resources so that the worst off are lifted up and the top end is brought down can dramatically reduce stealing, and hence increase trust. (In an early version of this work, we simulated the effects of a scenario we named ‘Corbyn victory’: remember then?).

Daniel Nettle

Well, you can redistribute, or there are other options. The highest social classes could maintain the social order through sheer force. Or they could try to achieve the same ends through ideology and propaganda that convince the lower classes the social order is natural or desirable, or they can try to use ideology and propaganda to divide the lower classes and turn them on each other. The guy on the second rung from the bottom may very well be willing to kick the guy on the bottom rung in the teeth to keep him from climbing, and thank the people higher up for the opportunity even while they are shitting on his head. Which of these options sounds good to you probably depends on which rung of the ladder you happen to be standing on, and the rung you happen to be standing on is probably within a couple rungs of the one you were born on, in most cases.

more on mRNA technology for vaccines and beyond

There are several interesting nuggets in this MIT Technology Review article:

  • A lot of the technology was developed by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (which I have mixed feelings about – it’s essentially a giant evil greedy corporation in most ways, but it does provide a lot of jobs locally – much like any giant inefficient Soviety industry, and obviously it created this technology for greedy purposes which now has the potential to save hundreds of millions of lives while making a few greedy people extraordinarily rich.)
  • The technology essentially gets your body to make its own medicine, “turning a human body into a bioreactor”. However, doesn’t work well (so far) for medicines that need to be taken repeatedly, which is most medicines except vaccines. So vaccines are the most obvious candidate for now. Combining it with gene editing technology holds the promise of permanent protection against disease, even handed down the generations, but there are also some scary risks here.
  • It may work for herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer and HIV. For flu and coronavirus, there is a possibility of “universal vaccines” that would protect against thousands of strains with a single shot.
  • The vaccine was designed within 48 hours of the scientists receiving its DNA sequence, and ready for animal trials in less than six weeks. (This is exciting, because it suggests the possibility of responding to new threats quickly in the future, whether natural or manmade.)
  • “vaccine programs for emerging threats like Zika or Ebola, where outbreaks come and go, would deliver a -66% return on average.” (sounds like an obvious, clear textbook market failure to me and an obvious moral requirement for government to step in)
  • The researchers are advocating for the government to create “megafactories” for producing mRNA that could be leased to companies in normal times, but taken over by the government to pump out vaccines quickly in times of crisis. They liken this to how governments “governments spend billions on nuclear weapons they hope to never use”. (They have this one wrong – it’s trillions! And if we need a military reason to do this, we need this to protect against biowarfare and bioterrorism in addition to naturally arising pandemics. It’s an existential threat and like I said, an absolute moral imperative for government to make this happen.)
  • The article also mentions an experimental gene therapy cure for blindness. Exciting but costs about a million dollars right now for two eyes.

Microsoft’s Cylon chat bot

Microsoft has filed a patent for code that can suck in a (living or dead I suppose) person’s online history and configure a chatbot to act something like them. Of course, just because they filed a patent doesn’t mean they plan widespread commercialization of the idea, just that they had an idea and don’t want others to be able to profit from the idea (which I would bet somebody else had first but didn’t file the patent…) At its most innocuous, this would not be too much different than looking up famous quotes of a famous person (let’s say Abraham Lincoln) on a particular topic, except it could apply to anyone.

This, of course, is the exact plot of Battlestar Gallactica, at least the 2004-2008 series I am most familiar with. And that was an awesome series that won over many people (my significant other included) who did not consider themselves fans of science fiction. Somewhat similar to the way Game of Thrones won over people who considered themselves too serious for fantasy. So check it out if you haven’t.

New Start extended for five years

Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have just done a very good thing in extending the New Start treaty for five years.

The treaty, signed in 2010 by the US president Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, who was president of Russia at the time, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance.

The Guardian

The numbers seem somewhat underwhelming to me (as in, a modest reduction in an enormous nuclear arsenal), but the important thing is the willingness to cooperate to reduce risk, and the message that sends to the rest of the world. The world has gone from believing a nuclear free world might be possible, to trying to avoid proliferation while modestly reducing what nuclear-armed countries already have, to trying to slow the rate of proliferation while “modernizing” or increasing what nuclear-armed countries already have, to teetering on the brink of an all-out arms race. Now we have gone back to the “maintain what we have”, which is still incredibly cynical, but the trend has turned back in the right direction. Accidents, proliferation, unstable nuclear-armed states (I’m talking to you Pakistan), and terrorism are all still very frightening, and there is no margin for error even with one relatively small event one time. The ocean liner captain has seen the iceberg, let up on the steam, and turned the wheel an inch to the left. Is it in time to avoid collision?