Sunday assorted links

1. Is this new drinking straw an instant cure for hiccups? 2. Mark Lutter page of major instances of social change led by movements. 3. Interview with Jim Keller. 4. Which countries have appeared the most in NYT headlines over the decades? 5. Crypto joint accounts to cement relationships? 6. Tokyo Olympic eugenics? The post Sunday assorted links...

1h

Ho-hum

After nearly two decades of hardcore drug addiction — after overdoses and rehabs and relapses, homelessness and dead friends and ruined lives — Gerod Buckhalter had one choice left, and he knew it. He could go on the same way and die young in someone’s home or a parking lot, another casualty in a drug epidemic that has claimed nearly 850,000...

3h

The looks gap in earnings

…the magnitude of the earnings disparities along the perceived attractiveness continuum, net of controls, rivals and/or exceeds in magnitude the black-white race gap and, among African-Americans, the black-white race gap and the gender gap in earnings. Here is the full paper.  Here is an earlier MR post on lookism, and here.  Two points are worth making...

6h

The best mask-wearing study so far?

Mask-wearing has been a controversial measure to control the COVID-19 pandemic. While masks are known to substantially reduce disease transmission in healthcare settings (Howard et al 2021), studies in community settings report inconsistent results (Brainard et al 2020). Investigating the inconsistency within epidemiological studies, we find that a...

15h

Long-term gene–culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition

It has been suggested that the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI). But there is disagreement about how to apply the ETI framework to our species, and whether culture is implicated as either cause or consequence. Long-term gene–culture coevolution (GCC) is also poorly understood. Some have argued that culture...

17h

Basil Halperin on sticky wage vs. sticky price models

Here is a long post, full of insight and citations, basically arguing that sticky wage models are better for macro than sticky price models.  Sticky wage models had been deemphasized because real wages seemed to be acyclical, but sticky prices can’t quite do the work either.  The post is hard to summarize, but my reading of it is a little different...

1d

North vs. South India?

The data set used by Paul and Sridhar starts with the year 1960, when per capita income in Tamil Nadu was 51 per cent higher than UP’s. In the early 1980s, this difference had narrowed to 39 per cent. However, over the following decades the gap began to rapidly grow, and in 2005 an average resident of Tamil Nadu earned 128 per cent more than an average...

1d

Saturday assorted links

1. “A set of land in virtual world Decentraland has sold for a record-breaking $913,808 worth of MANA, the game’s Ethereum-based cryptocurrency.” 2. Vitalik on Verkle trees.  And cryptocurrency machines headed to San Antonio. 3. Ecuadorean frog named after Led Zeppelin. 4. Profile of economist Natasha Sarin (NYT). 5. “Soccer’s international governing...

1d

China fact of the day

Here is the link and source. The post China fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1d

Friday assorted links

1. Megan McArdle on where Obamacare stands. 2. Exactly how weather matters for Covid spread. 3. Covid and brain tissue loss confirmed. 4. The politics of vaccines and Covid in Taiwan. 5. Chilaquiles and migas are not the same thing duh. The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2d