Month: July 2023

A new study is out that compares the amount of work completed in a day by office workers vs. home workers. It's based on random assignment to either home or office of data-entry workers in India, so the measure of "work" is pretty objective. The study has two basic conclusions:

• Your best workers are the ones who want to work at home.
• They are also the ones who lose the most productivity when they transition from the office to home.

On average, home workers are 18% less productive than office workers. Those who actively prefer working from home are 27% less productive:

Most of this difference is simply because home workers don't work as hard, but some of it is because home workers also don't learn as fast as office workers.

Roughly speaking, this result is consistent with time use studies in the US, which find that home workers put in about 25% fewer hours than office workers. It's also consistent with other studies and with anecdotal evidence.

The last time I wrote about working from home I got back this comment: Hard workers will work hard no matter where they are. Goof-offs will goof off no matter where they are. This is probably true. Certain occupations—like engineering—probably attract a lot of hard workers who do fine at home. Other occupations don't, and they make up the vast majority of the workforce. For those folks, the evidence is pretty strong that they just don't get as much done at home as they do in the office, and the reason is simply that they take more time off during the day because there's no one around to keep an eye on them.

Conventional wisdom says that, on average, you should earn more from an investment in stocks than an investment in government bonds. This is the equity premium, the reward you get for making a riskier investment.

But the equity premium has been drifting lower for the past year and a half. As of today, it's negative.¹ You can earn more from 100% safe government bonds than you can from the stock market:

If you discount, as you should, the possibility of a red-hot economy that sends corporate earnings soaring, this can correct itself in two ways. First, a recession could cause the stock market to tumble, which would produce higher yields compared to stock prices. Second, bond yields could go down, which will happen if the Fed thinks a recession is imminent and begins to reduce interest rates. Or both.

The equity premium is a pretty core feature of the economic system, and it's likely to correct itself one way or another. Unfortunately, both ways this can happen involve recessions. Stay tuned.

¹This is using trailing 12-month earnings to calculate the earnings yield. It will come out a little differently if you instead calculate it using projected earnings over the next year.

Check this out from JAMA:

Fair Allocation of Scarce CAR T-Cell Therapies for Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma

I imagine this is of interest to practically nobody, but it's right in my strike zone. So let's see what it says:

A 2023 study of centers offering CAR T-cell therapy for multiple myeloma found that for every allocated slot per month per center, there were 20 patients on the waitlist; patients were waiting a median of 6 months prior to leukapheresis.

That sounds about right. I waited even longer than that. In most places, the earlier you get on the waitlist the better, which the authors think is unfair:

This “first come, first served” allocation system is problematic because the US health care system prioritizes wealthy and well-connected patients for advanced treatments such as CAR T-cell therapy. In the clinical trial setting, there have been socioeconomic and racial disparities in enrollment for CAR T-cell therapy in multiple myeloma, with low representation of Black individuals.

Hey, that describes me! White, affluent, and well insured. The authors believe that the highest priority should instead be given to patients with the earliest date on which they qualified for CAR-T, which is usually only after four previous complete chemotherapy regimens. So even if you signed up later than me, for example, you'd have priority if you had an older case of multiple myeloma and had finished up your fourth round of chemo before I did.

Interestingly, this was something I remember thinking about while I was waiting to get to the top of the waitlist. On the one hand, obviously I thought that someone with a more serious disease profile—i.e., someone who might die if they had to wait very long—should be pushed ahead of me on the waitlist. On the other hand, if you do this too aggressively it means that most people won't receive the treatment until they're so sick that they have little chance of fully recovering. Shouldn't we also include some of the relatively healthier patients who are likely to benefit the most from treatment? The authors also point out that the very sickest patients have a high risk of dying just in the few weeks that it takes to prepare the CAR-T cells. When that happens, the CAR-T slot has been wasted since every cell preparation is unique to the patient and can't be given to someone else.

So what to do? In my case, I believe that City of Hope and Kaiser Permanente have a committee that reviews cases and creates the waitlist—which is based partly on when you signed up but partly on other factors that the committee weighs. That's probably why it took a year before I finally received treatment. I was too damn healthy.

As you may recall from Saturday, the four researchers who wrote "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" initially believed that it was quite possible—maybe even likely—that the COVID virus originated in a lab leak. One of the big reasons for this belief was the existence of a furin cleavage site in the virus genome, something that had never before been seen naturally in a SARS-like virus.

However, in late February 2020 they discovered a bat virus that had an insertion in the genome at exactly the point of the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2. This strongly suggested that the furin cleavage site could indeed be created naturally by evolution, which in turn meant it was no longer necessary to think the virus could only have been created artificially.

But the PO paper didn't say exactly that. It said an artificial origin wasn't plausible. But why say that unless there was explicit evidence that the lab leak theory wasn't just unnecessary, but positively unlikely?

Well, there was. I didn't include this in my timeline of the internal Slack messages exchanged by the authors while they were writing PO, but one of the messages outlines exactly the evidence against a lab leak. It's from Eddie Holmes, and was written after publication of PO when Kristian Andersen was having second thoughts:

To me there is too long a series of implausible events to suggest inadvertent escape via lab passage.

(i) The Shi group sequence and publish their bat viruses all the time, but none of these are the obvious progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. It seems improbable to me that the one that escaped was not one that they had sequenced already. And why do lab passage on a virus that you have not sequenced?

(ii) If there had been a lab escape then we would expect an initial outbreak at the [Wuhan lab]. Where's the evidence of the outbreak? How could this be hidden? That group were also well enough to sequence an early genome of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13.

(iii) What are the odds that the virus then first appears in the very place — a wildlife market — where we exactly expect a natural species jump to occur? Why not in a far more crowded place in Wuhan of which there are many.

(iv) Why would the Shi group then publish RaTG13 that would only help point the finger at them? Makes no sense.

That was in April 2020. By now, of course, there's far more evidence both in favor of a natural origin of the virus and against a lab leak. But even at the very start, the evidence against a lab leak was pretty strong.

This is a panoramic shot of night owls rushing to catch the last train out of Gare St. Lazare. How do I know it was the last train? Because as soon as it left they shut down the station and threw everyone out.

For the past couple of decades the most popular promise from presidential candidates has been to get tough with China. Naturally Ron DeSantis did that today. Boring.

DeSantis also continued his anti-woke jihad by promising to forbid pension funds from adopting ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) standards. I doubt this would even be constitutional, so it's just blather. Boring.

But DeSantis also wants to fire Fed chair Jerome Powell. That's a little more interesting.¹ What does he have against Powell?

DeSantis has increasingly criticized the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell, accusing it of fueling inflation by printing trillions of dollars and saying it accepted Biden administration claims that price pressures were transitory. Interest-rate hikes, he has said, have hurt average Americans.

....DeSantis will appoint a Fed chairman who will focus on maintaining a stable dollar, according to his proposal. “The Fed must focus on stable prices; it is not a social engineer and cannot be allowed to be an unaccountable economic central planner,” the plan says.

Am I missing something or is this incoherent? DeSantis wants the Fed to focus solely on keeping inflation low, but he also thinks high interest rates—which are meant to do exactly that—have hurt people. I suppose he must think that our current bout of inflation is entirely due to increases in the Fed's balance sheet, which did indeed balloon during the pandemic:

During the 2008 recession and its aftermath, the Fed increased its assets by 2x immediately and 4x over time. There was no inflation. During the pandemic recession, it increased its assets by less than 2x. I doubt that was the cause of anything.

Oddly, DeSantis also invoked a certain amount of wokeness in his "Declaration of Economic Independence." He railed against increased wealth inequality. He's against Wall Street and big corporations. He thinks students should be able to discharge their loans in bankruptcy. I wonder where all this liberal stuff popped up from?

¹It's interesting because I want to fire Jerome Powell too. I think he's been a historically terrible Fed chair. I'm not sure I have the same reasons as DeSantis, though.

The Energy Information Administration published its latest report on solar module shipments today, and the news for 2022 wasn't very good. Shipments of photovoltaic modules were up only 10%, much lower than in previous years:

And for the first time in six years, the cost of photovoltaic modules increased. In 2022, modules cost 39 cents per kilowatt compared to 34 cents the previous year:

The top states for shipments of solar modules were California, Texas, Florida, and South Carolina. That's some pretty woke energy policy from those three red states.

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass's signature homeless program is Inside Safe, a program to get people out of encampments and bring them indoors. It's now six months old, and according to the LA Times one out of six participants isn't happy indoors:

The agency reported that 153 people, or 10.5% of Inside Safe’s participants, have exited the program entirely....On top of that, 6.6% of Inside Safe’s participants are now listed as being “served from the streets.”

....Bass said she has been told that one reason for the departures is dissatisfaction with the rules in place at the program’s hotels and motels. At the L.A. Grand Hotel, which is in downtown Los Angeles and currently being used as temporary homeless housing, residents have been prohibited from having guests in their rooms, she said.

Every program like this has retention issues, though this seems a little high. As usual, a big part of the problem is well-meaning rules. Prohibition of alcohol and drugs, for example, may motivate some people to get clean. But it will motivate a lot more to stay on the street in their tents, where they can do as they wish. It's a tradeoff, but it strikes me that at least some of the housing should be rule-free (aside from necessary safety and violence restrictions). Why not try to service everyone?

POSTSCRIPT: Kudos to LAT reporter David Zahniser for digging this up. I scoured the LA Homeless Authority's website for the "report" with this information and found no sign of it. It's apparently not part of their commitment to data ("a critical tool") and transparency ("of the utmost importance").

I have a feeling Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination for the third time in a row.

This is from a recent Harvard/Politico poll:

There's no longer any partisan difference at all. Across all parties, the lab leak theory is favored 2:1 over a natural origin for the COVID-19 virus. Here's how this has changed over time:

Since 2020, the virological community has discovered more and more evidence that COVID-19 evolved naturally. At a guess, fewer than 5% of the people who know what they're talking about still take the lab leak hypothesis seriously.

Why the enormous—and growing—distance between the public and the experts? My guess is that it's for two reasons. First, the lab leak zealots are simply louder and more persistent than the experts. Second, the lab leak theory makes all the front-pages whenever there's some fresh news about it. For example, when the Department of Energy decided a lab leak was likely, it got big play everywhere.¹ Ditto for the release of the names of the Wuhan researchers working on coronaviruses.² Conversely, science moves more gently. Evidence mounts over time and there are few decisive breakthroughs that make the news. And even when there are, they're barely comprehensible to the ordinary person.

So bad money drives out good. The lab leak theory is exciting and easy to understand—and implicates China, which everyone loves. Meanwhile, the natural origins story is boring and largely rests on a PhD-level knowledge of virology. What's more, experts are all careful to acknowledge that they can't prove the lab leak theory is wrong, which keeps the door permanently open for the crackpots.

By now, the lab leak theory is literally a one-in-a-million shot. The evidence is overwhelmingly against it. But no one cares.

¹And the news that literally every other intelligence agency thought the DOE case was weak? That didn't get so much play.

²The same dynamic played out here.