Favorites January 16th 2023

Mountain View, April 2022

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

I feel like if your product saves millions of lives, you deserve tens of billions of dollars. That's like...$10,000 per life? Not bad!

Robert Reich @RBReich

Moderna is planning to charge $130 for its COVID vaccine, but the vaccine only costs $2.85 to make. Meanwhile, over the last two years, the company made over $19 billion in profits off the vaccine. Folks, this is what corporate greed looks like.

mRNA vaccines are a great deal for the US. Of course if we find ourselves in a situation where individuals are paying that price something's gone horribly wrong, much of the benefit of vaccination flows to the people around you, so it makes sense to also pay for the vaccines collectively. Amusingly Yglesias pointed out that left-coded Robert Reich should attack vaccines more, forcing conservatives will take the other side to 'own the libs'.

Jennifer Doleac @jenniferdoleac

"When scale and replication work: Learning from summer youth employment experiments" by Sara Heller There is now lots of rigorous evidence that summer jobs programs are an excellent crime fighting strategy! Cities should be expanding these programs. doi.org/10.1016/j.jpub…

The reason it's so important that this experiment scaled and replicated is that very often in social science, an initial program works but a scaled up verison does nothing. The program gets watered down or the people on the ground are less invested. Maybe something about this jobs program is simple enough that it still works?

Brian Albrecht @BrianCAlbrecht

US construction productivity has FALLEN for 6 decades 📉 The technical term is a dumpster fire. From @Austan_Goolsbee and Syverson

This is unlike manufacturing productivity which is way way up over the same period.

Trung Phan @TrungTPhan

Just finished the entirety of Prince Harry’s “Spare” on Audible this AM. Nothing to report other than it’s a completely unintelligible book when listened to at 9x speed.

If you were thinking it's because of Prince Harry's accent, Phan says that you can't even tell above 4.5x.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Excellent thread here on learning from Canadian transit

Jedwin Mok @jedwinmok

This all goes back to the "lines on a map" derangement syndrome seen too often in US planning, instead of examining networks, ridership, and service. Common comparison is Toronto vs Chicago: similar pop but JUST LINE 1 of the TTC carries more riders/day than the ENTIRE Chicago L https://t.co/FoGNwKJCac

There was some discussion recently about cities American mayors can learn about transit from. One fun take was that they should look at Calgary, a Canadian city that Canadians say has terrible transit, but still outshines any US city besides NYC. Today there was a detailed thread about how Canadian and US transit policy differ.

Alex Su @heyitsalexsu

Me watching email notifications on my phone zoom by today

Threads

• Thread by Rutger Bregman about the significant progress that's been made in enforcing a minimum tax rate on corporations worldwide.

• Thread about how the Biden Admin has massively reduced illegal immigration on the Southern Border. TL;DR: Carrot and Stick: Made it easier to legit claim asylum with a sponsor and background check, straight up expelled anyone who uses other routes.

• India's economy is now larger than the UK's, this thread details how that happened. My favorite tidbit was that the cost of mobile data in India is lower than almost anywhere else in the world, $0.17 per GB. (vs $5.62 in the US, $0.41 in China)