It’s hard to sell 1 million eggs for one price, and 1 million for another price.
Are you sure this is the case? It’s common for B2B transactions to feature highly customised and secret pricing and discounts. And in this case they’re not selling the same product from the customer’s point of view: one buyer gets a million ethical eggs, while another gets a million ordinary (from their point of view) eggs.
Thanks for writing this; ordered.
A teacher in year 9 walked up to a student who was talking, picked them up and threw them out of an (open) first floor window.
Worth clarifying for US readers that ‘first floor’ in the UK would be ‘second floor’ in the US, because UK floor indexing starts at zero. So this event is much worse than it sounds.
Thanks, added.
At the moment, the poor person and the rich person are both buying things. If the rich person buys more vaccine, that means they will buy less of the other things, so the poor person will be able to have more of them. So the question is about the ratios of how much the two guys care about the vaccine and how much they care about the other thing… and the answer is the rich guy will pay up for the vaccine when his vaccine:other ratio is higher than the other guys. This is the efficient allocation.
It might be the case that it is separately desirable to redistribute wealth from the rich guy to the poor guy. This would indeed allow the poor guy to buy more things. But, conditional on a certain wealth distribution, it is best to allow market forces to allocate goods within that distribution.
(For simplicity I have ignored macroeconomics in this post, but the same argument broadly goes through if you don’t.)
Hey Daniel, thanks very much for the comment. In my database I have you down as class of 2020, hence out of scope for that analysis, which was class of 2018 only. I didn’t include 2019 or 2020 classes because I figured it takes time to find your footing, do research, write it up etc., so absence of evidence would not be very strong evidence of absence. So please don’t consider this as any reflection on you. Ironically I actually did review one of your papers in the above—this one—which I did indeed think was pretty relevant! (Cntrl-F ‘Hendrycks’ to find the paragraph in the article). Sorry if this was not clear from the text.
Larks, excellent name choice for your AttackBot.
Thanks! I figured it was in the spirit of a DefectBot to defect linguistically as well, and there was a tiny chance someone might be doing naive string-matching.
You will have to wait for next time’s obituary I’m afraid! I think Isusr should have a good grasp on the philosophical and ethical traditions I was attempting to channel with CooperateBot—while the insights are deep, I think the lengthy code is quite clear on the matter.
I actually have no idea—I guess we are just two naturally very cooperative people!
Cool competition! It makes me wish I had had more time to put into CooperateBot. At present I would say it instantiated a relatively naive view of cooperation, and could do much better if I invested more time considering the true nature of generosity. Looking at the obituary I suspect that CooperateBot may not last much longer.
Holding constant the total amount of taxes you pay, it is better not to get a refund. This is the perspective you should take at the beginning of the year.
Holding constant the amount of taxes you have already paid, it is better to get a refund. This is the perspective you should take at the end of the year.
I attempted to produce a rough estimate of this here (excerpted below):
… One (BERI funded!) study suggested that banning large gatherings reduced r0 by around 28%.
Unfortunately, protests seem in many ways ideal for spreading the disease. They involve a large number of people in a relatively small area for an extended period of time. Even protests which were advertised as being socially distanced often do not end up that way. While many people wear masks, photos of protests make clear that many do not, and those that are are often using cloth masks that are significantly less effective than surgical or n95s in the face of repeated exposure. Additionally, protests often involve people shouting or chanting, which cause infectious droplets to be released from people’s mouths. Exposure to tear gas can apparently also increase susceptibility, as well as cramped indoor conditions for those arrested.
It’s hard to estimate how many new cases will be caused by the protests, because there doesn’t seem to be good statistics on the number of people at protests, so we can’t model the physical dynamics easily. A simple method would be to assume we have lost the benefits of the ban on large gatherings over the last week or so. On the one hand, this may be an over-estimate, because fortunately most people continue to socially distance, and protests take place mainly outside. On the other hand, protesters are actively seeking out (encouraging others to seek out) boisterous large gatherings in a way they were not pre-March, which could make things even worse. On net I suspect it may under-estimate the incremental spread, but given the paucity of other statistics we will use it as our central scenario.
If the r0 was around 0.9 before, this suggests the protests might have temporarily increased it to around 1.25, and hopefully it will quickly return to 0.9 after the protests end. Even if we assume no chain infections during the protest - so no-one who has been infected at a protest goes on to infect another protester—this means the next step in disease prevalence would be a 25% increase instead of a 10% decrease. Unfortunately the exponential nature of infection means this will have a large impact. If you assume around 1% of the US was infected previously, had we stayed on the previous r0=0.9 we would end up with around 9% more of the population infected from here on before the disease was fully suppressed. In contrast, with this one-time step-up in r0, we will see around 12.5% of the population infected from here—an additional 3.5% of the population.
Assuming an IFR of around 0.66%, that’s a change from around 190,000 deaths to more like 265,000. Protesters skew younger than average, suggesting that this IFR may be an over-estimate, but on the other hand, they are also disproportionately African American, who seem to be more susceptible to the disease, and the people they go on to infect will include older people.
See next year’s post here.
I still found this helpful as it allowed me to exit my directional Yang and Buttigieg positions with negative transaction cost.
I would like to add that I think this is bad (and have the codes). We are trying to build social norms around not destroying the world; you are blithely defecting against that.
This case is more complicated than the corporate cases because the powerful person (me) was getting merely the appearance of what she wanted (a genuine relationship with a compatible person), not the real thing. And because the exploited party was either me or Connor, not a third party like bank customers. No one thinks the Wells Fargo CEO was a victim the way I arguably was.
I think you have misunderstood the Wells Fargo case. These fake accounts generally didn’t bring in any material revenue; they were just about internal ‘number of new accounts targets’. It was directly a case of bank employees being incentivised to defraud management and investors, which they then did. If ordinary Wells employees had not behaved fraudulently, all the targets would have been missed, informing management/investors about their mis-calibration, and more appropriate targets would have been set. In this case power didn’t buy distance from the crime, but only in the sense that it meant you couldn’t tell you were being cheated.
For more on this I recommend the prolific Matt Levine:
There’s a standard story in most bank scandals, in which small groups of highly paid traders gleefully and ungrammatically conspire to rip-off customers and make a lot of money for themselves and their bank. This isn’t that. This looks more like a vast uprising of low-paid and ill-treated Wells Fargo employees against their bosses.
...
So that’s about 2.1 million fake deposit and credit-card accounts, of which about 100,000 -- fewer than 5 percent—brought in any fee income to Wells Fargo. The total fee income was $2.4 million, or about $1.14 per fake account. And that overstates the profitability: Wells Fargo also enrolled people for debit cards and online banking, but the CFPB doesn’t bother to count those incidents, or suggest that any of them led to any fees. Which makes sense: You’d expect online banking and debit cards to be free, if you never use them or even know about them. Meanwhile, all this dumb stuff seems to have occupied huge amounts of employee time that could have been spent on more productive activities. If you divide the $2.4 million among the 5,300 employees fired for setting up fake accounts, you get about $450 per employee. Presumably it cost Wells Fargo way more than that just to replace them.
In the abstract, you can see why Wells Fargo would emphasize cross-selling of multiple “solutions” to customers. It is a good sales practice; it both indicates and encourages customer loyalty. If your customers have a checking account, and a savings account, and a credit card and online banking, all in one place, then they’ll probably use each of those products more than if they had only one. And when they want a new, lucrative product—a mortgage, say, or investment advice -- they’re more likely to turn to the bank where they keep the rest of their financial life.
But obviously no one in senior management wanted this. Signing customers up for online banking without telling them about it doesn’t help Wells Fargo at all. No one feels extra loyalty because they have a banking product that they don’t use or know about. Even signing them up for a credit card without telling them about it generally doesn’t help Wells Fargo, because people don’t use credit cards that they don’t know about. Cards with an annual fee are a different story—at least you can charge them the fee! -- but it seems like customers weren’t signed up for many of those. This isn’t a case of management pushing for something profitable and getting what they asked for, albeit in a regrettable and illegal way. This is a case of management pushing for something profitable but difficult, and the workers pushing back with something worthless but easy.
I was skeptical until I read the example. Now I am convinced!