cognitive bias

This open access article has a nice summary of cognitive bias research.

Black swans, cognition, and the power of learning from failure

Failure carries undeniable stigma and is difficult to confront for individuals, teams, and organizations. Disciplines such as commercial and military aviation, medicine, and business have long histories of grappling with it, beginning with the recognition that failure is inevitable in every human endeavor. Although conservation may arguably be more complex, conservation professionals can draw on the research and experience of these other disciplines to institutionalize activities and attitudes that foster learning from failure, whether they are minor setbacks or major disasters. Understanding the role of individual cognitive biases, team psychological safety, and organizational willingness to support critical self‐examination all contribute to creating a cultural shift in conservation to one that is open to the learning opportunity that failure provides. This new approach to managing failure is a necessary next step in the evolution of conservation effectiveness.

how about a war tax?

Part of the reason the U.S. public accepts continuous war as normal is that we don’t realize how much we are paying for it. The idea of a war tax sounds politically crazy, but is is? It used to be pretty standard. Congress would declare war, ordinary people would be drafted and taxed, and people would generally be supportive but expect the war to end and things to go back to the way they were.

Until the Vietnam War, American presidents regularly introduced war taxes, seemingly less worried about offending the people than about financing the war. In some cases, the government had to work to elicit fiscal sacrifice, for example, with a pro-tax Disney cartoon in 1943 that touted “Taxes to Beat the Axis” during World War II. In most cases, the taxes did not actually offend the people…

In 2009, during debates about the Afghanistan surge, House Appropriations Committee Chair David Obey proposed a tax that would require homes with incomes between $30,000 and $150,000 to pay 1 percent on top of their existing taxes, and higher levels for the wealthier. Veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan would be exempt: “We’re just trying to keep in the forefront what the financial costs are.”

Indeed, a study of the costs of these wars showed that the public is blissfully disconnected. In 2014, I surveyed 350 Americans and asked them to estimate the costs of the Afghanistan war to that point. Responses ranged from a million dollars to “probably $10 trillion. A lot more than we can afford.” The typical response was “I have no idea — $100 million?” The real answer at that point was $686 billion. Americans cannot make sense of such enormous figures. They can, however, make sense of their own budgets, which is why the connection with taxes is so much tighter, and why individuals become invested in the conduct of the war when war taxes are levied. As both Tilly and Smith observed, the visibility and intrusiveness of taxes are exactly what make individuals scrutinize the service for which the resources are being used. In the case of war, it means paying more scrupulous attention to its duration, goals, and cost.

running out of bombs?

The military-industrial complex needs to engage in continuous war so it can be ready in case a war starts. Or so I interpret the logic. Is this part of some vast, hidden conspiracy? Well, no, apparently they put a report out about it periodically.

The Pentagon plans to invest more than $20 billion in munitions in its next budget. But whether the industrial base will be there to support such massive buys in the future is up in the air — at a time when America is expending munitions at increasingly intense rates.

The annual Industrial Capabilities report, put out by the Pentagon’s Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy, has concluded that the industrial base of the munitions sector is particularly strained, something the report blames on the start-and-stop nature of munitions procurement over the last 20 years, as well as the lack of new designs being internally developed…

All this is happening as the U.S. is expending munitions at a rapid rate. For instance, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded that 1,186 munitions were dropped in that country during the first quarter of 2018 ― the highest number recorded for the first three months of the year since tracking began in 2013; that number is also more than two and a half times the amount dropped in the first quarter of 2017.

Interesting, and I thought the Afghanistan war was more or less over. It seems like wars don’t really end any more, and the public now accepts ongoing regional wars as normal.

@RealObamaCareForecast

The Congressional Budget Office has a new forecast of the fate of Obama care over the next 10 years. And the verdict is…the system is not in a death spiral. Premiums are forecast to rise faster than inflation, which is bad, and the number of people without insurance is forecast to rise slightly, which is bad unless you believe for some reason that these people are not entitled to the same human rights you are entitled to, for whatever reason, but that system is “stable”, i.e. not in a “death spiral”

The paragraph below caught my eye for a couple reasons. First, Obama care is only 10% of all government health care expenditures. Medicare is also only about 10%, which is amazing and I suspect almost everyone has the wrong idea about that. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are a whopping 40%.  Subsidies for corporate health insurance are the remaining 40%.

Net federal subsidies for insured people in 2018 will total $685 billion.
That amount is projected to reach $1.2 trillion in 2028. Medicaid and the
Children’s Health Insurance Program account for about 40 percent of that
total, as do subsidies in the form of tax benefits for work-related insurance.
Medicare accounts for about 10 percent, as do subsidies for coverage
obtained through the marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act
or through the Basic Health Program.

So what surprises me is that we are covering the elderly pretty thoroughly and pretty cost-effectively, while coverage for the poor seems to be both inadequate and extremely cost inefficient. And certainly, the system of hidden tax subsidies for corporate workers is grossly inefficient. So why does the public put up with all this? First, old people love to complain but at the end of the day they are reasonably well taken care of at a reasonable price. Upper-middle-class professional workers receive high quality care and don’t realize how heavily-subsidized and cost-inefficient that care is. These two groups make up a lot of the swing voters. The majority of those swing voters have bought into the decades of neo-fascist propaganda that the poor are undeserving for one reason or another, and therefore their sense of natural human empathy is damped down. and the poor themselves are not politically mobilized. Big business in general might be just as happy for government to take the responsibility for health coverage off their shoulders, but they are not really disadvantaged financially by the present system so they don’t fight it. The big exception of course is the insurance/finance industry which benefits directly from the inefficiencies of the current system, and certainly is politically mobilized.

urban (redevelopment) and trees

Redevelopment of private property in urban areas is generally a good thing for the regional economy, as is renewal of public infrastructure. It can be good for people and the environment too, if there are well-thought-out and well-implemented policies in place to make sure that is the case. But when those policies are not in place, or when enlightened and well-intentioned policies founder on the rocks of change-resistant and dysfunctional institutions that are supposed to implement them, I think the default is that this is not the case. Case in point: Seattle is experiencing a redevelopment boom, and has set goals to increase its tree canopy, but the development boom has resulted in a loss of tree canopy. The city is considering measures to try to reverse that trend. I would like to see my city (Philadelphia), which is also experiencing a development boom and (anecdotally, at least, from what I see with my own eyes) also losing trees, take similar measures. But after seeing a number of enlightened and well-intentioned local policies founder on the rocks of poor implementation, my confidence in the city’s political and bureaucratic leadership at the moment is not particularly high.

RFK Jr. doesn’t believe Sirhan Sirhan killed his father

Maybe people are a little tired of Kennedy conspiracy theories, but they just won’t go away. RFK Jr. actually went to the prison where Sirhan Sirhan is and interviewed him after examining the evidence. His conclusion, apparently, is that Sirhan Sirhan fired shots and intended to kill RFK, but a second shooter actually made the fatal shot at close range.

The Washington Post article has actual footage from the press conference just before and the confusion just after the killing, which I had never seen. You can hear a reporter saying “we don’t want another Oswald”.

dystopian Schumpeter meets Keynes

This article is about a serious attempt to consider climate change in a traditional economic model. Where does the dystopian part come in? Well, it sounds like the model suggests we are not going to innovate our way out of the consequences of climate change.

For these reasons, we develop the Dystopian Schumpeter meeting Keynes (DSK) model, which is the first attempt to provide a fully-fledged agent-based integrated assessment framework. It builds on Dosi et al. (2010, 2013, 2016) and extends the Keynes+Schumpeter (K+S) family of models, which account for endogenous growth, business cycles and crises. The model is composed by heterogeneous firms belonging to a capital-good industry and to a consumption-good sector. Firms are fed by an energy sector, which employ dirty or green power plants. The production activities of energy and manufacturing firms lead to CO2 emissions, which increase the Earth surface temperature in a non-linear way as in Sterman et al. (2013). Increasing temperatures trigger micro stochastic climate damages impacting in a heterogeneous way on workers’ labour productivity, and on the energy efficiency, capital stock and inventories of firms.

The DSK model accounts both for frequent and mild climate shocks and low-probability but extreme climate events. Technical change occurs both in the manufacturing and energy sectors. Innovation determines the cost of energy produced by dirty and green technologies, which, in turn, affect the energy-technology production mix and the total amount of CO2 emissions. In that, structural change of the economy is intimately linked to the climate dynamics. At the same time, climate shocks affect economic growth, business cycles, technical-change trajectories, green-house gas emissions, and global temperatures…

Simulation results show that the DSK model is able to replicate a wide array of micro and macro-economic stylized facts and climate-related statistical regularities. Moreover, the exploration of different climate shock scenarios reveals that the impact of climate change on economic performances is substantial, but highly heterogeneous, depending on the type of climate damages. More specifcally, climate shocks to labour productivity and capital stocks lead to the largest output losses and the highest economic instability, respectively. We also
find that the ultimate macroeconomic damages emerging from the aggregation of agent-level shocks are more severe than those obtained by standard IAMs, with the emergence of tipping-points and irreversible catastrophic events.

microgrids in Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rico blackouts have provided some opportunities to test microgrids, or small-scale combinations of intermittent renewable energy with battery storage.

Broken transmission lines and utility poles have been repaired–at a painfully slow pace, though the majority of Puerto Ricans finally have power again–but the grid is still vulnerable (last week’s blackout followed another blackout two weeks ago). The next hurricane season is a little more than five weeks away. In the event of another storm, a network of microgrids could keep going even if the larger grid fails again…

Though the current microgrids are used at individual buildings, in theory, larger systems could support a whole community. Jonathan Marvel, a Brooklyn-based architect working with Resilient Puerto Rico, is talking to mayors about the possibility of microgrids that could provide power to 20,000 people.

Individual microgrids could also be linked together. In Arizona, Sonnen is adding solar and energy storage to thousands of new homes in a community to create a “virtual power plant” that can share energy between homes. When connected to the grid, the system helps stabilize the overall grid, but it can also operate if a disaster takes the larger grid out. Sonnen has done the same thing in Germany.

the French AI strategy

Other countries (than the United States) are developing strategies for how artificial intelligence will affect work, productivity, and growth in the near future.

France’s national strategy also reveals that Macron’s government is wrestling with how to ensure that AI supports inclusivity and diversity, and to make certain that its implementation is transparent. The French aren’t just theorizing; they’re taking action. France plans to invest 1.5 billion euros (almost $1.8 billion dollars) in the next five years in artificial intelligence research. The French are looking to create their own AI ecosystem, train the next generation of scientists and engineers, and make sure that their workforce is prepared for an automated future.

France isn’t alone. Last month, the European Union’s executive branch recommended its member states increase their public and private sector investment in AI. It also pledged billions in direct research spending. Meanwhile, China laid out its AI plan for global dominance last year, a plan that has also been backed up with massive investment. China’s goal is to lead the world in AI technology by 2030. Around the world, our global economic competitors are taking action on artificial intelligence.

It’s therefore striking that the United States doesn’t have a national artificial intelligence plan.

The fact that I don’t find it striking reflects my lowered expectations more than anything. We don’t really have a strategy for infrastructure or education either, for example.