Gongol.com Archives: January 2021
January 4, 2021
Do we have too many doctorate degrees?
There is some merit to Noah Smith's take on this matter (that America produces more Ph.D. degrees in some fields than would be optimal for society), but we also need to consider a perspective shift: Instead of front-loading education and creating 30-year-old Ph.D.s, we should try more "education smoothing". As people grow in practical and even commercial experience, there should be affordable and accessible pathways for them to continue formally learning without leaving the areas where they are productively employed. A person with 20 years of focused experience on the job probably knows more about where applied research would pay off than someone in the nonstop BS-to-PhD pipeline. That we don't have many obvious pathways for this (besides executive MBAs and EdD programs for school administrators) is a failure to match smart educational investment to economic development. We should be more strategic than we are.
Perverse incentives hurt people
New York is going to fine hospitals that don't use up their allotted Covid-19 vaccine doses -- and then will cut off the supply. We want doses administered promptly and without waste. But government has to be conscious of the dangers of perverse incentives. This approach seems almost perfectly calibrated to ensure that hospitals will order fewer doses than optimal and/or engage in misreporting. Order many, then get them delivered as soon as possible. And if there's overage, give a shot to the pizza delivery driver. Just get the vaccine into circulation in massive numbers without delay! That's the only way to make herd immunity work for us.
4 million Americans have received first doses of Covid-19 vaccines
The next few weeks are going to be interesting for news reporters to cover, since many journalists quite likely have higher-than-average exposure to health-care workers among their social circles. That's going to make it look to the people who report the news as if more people have been vaccinated than is representative of the population overall.
Good intentions have to be enacted through good policies
Fascinating economic research says that the children who lived in large public-housing projects did much better when those projects were demolished: "Public housing projects, particularly large projects, often provide housing to large numbers of people in geographically concentrated areas. This results in many job-seekers competing for nearby work." Few areas of study are going to have more to do with the health and prosperity of our future (as the United States, and as the world) than the subject of urban economics -- particularly as it deals with universal needs, like housing.
If only
George Will were wrong about this, but alas...he isn't
As the President plays up a completely false and paranoid narrative of electoral dishonesty, "Hawley and Cruz, both of whom clerked for chief justices of the Supreme Court, hope to be wafted into the White House by gusts of such paranoia." Regrettably, objectively book-smart people like Sen. Cruz and Sen. Hawley are making repugnant choices out of fear. And it's spread to others, like Rep. Elise Stefanik -- a smart and once-promising member of Congress who says she's going to engage in the nonsense, too. Rep. Stefanik would be doing her duty to the Constitution if, as she said, there were "serious questions" about electoral integrity. The problem is that the "questions" are profoundly unserious, and she's smart enough to know better. It's worse than being a simple dupe.
