An interesting article in the WSJ reports on the growing acceptance of autonomous vehicles being used for ride hailing. The dominant platform, Waymo, is currently operating 300 retrofitted Jaguars in San Francisco and 400 in a few other other west coast cities.
This striking finding quickly captured national and international headlines, and generated nearly 700 Google Scholar citations. The study was widely interpreted—incorrectly, say the authors—as evidence that newborns should be matched to doctors of the same race, or that white doctors harboured racial animus against black babies. It even made it into the Supreme Court’s records as an argument in favour of affirmative action, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (mis)citing the findings. A supporting brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges and 45 other organisations mentioned the study as evidence that “For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”
CAUSALITY: birth weight determines mortality, not the animus of white physicians
...a disproportionately high share of underweight black babies were treated by white doctors, while a disproportionately high share of healthy-weight black babies were treated by black doctors.
IRONY:That a flawed social-science finding which fitted neatly within the zeitgeist was widely accepted is understandable. Less understandable is that few people now seem eager to correct the record. The new study has had just one Google Scholar citation and no mainstream news coverage.
For decades, the California Coastal Commission has had near-unchecked authority to regulate development along the state's 860-mile coastline, and it's been unafraid of using it.
It's now trying to expand its terrestrial authority to outer space.
This past week, the commission voted to oppose plans by private space company SpaceX to launch more rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California.
The commission is asserting for the first time that SpaceX must get coastal development permits to shoot more rockets into space. SpaceX and the Department of the Air Force have conversely argued that SpaceX launches are federal activity that's exempt from the commission's regulatory powers.
WORSE: it appears that the regulators opposed the launch due to Elon Musk's political beliefs. The case now goes to trial.
...SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 rockets had a similar string of spectacular failures (it even released a blooper reel). But there was a method behind all the explosions. The idea is that flying lots of hardware, and failing rapidly, lets you learn from reality, which is the best teacher of all. That sort of mindset, best-known in Silicon Valley, is not how the rocket business has traditionally worked. But it is hard to argue with the results: SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have now made more than 350 successful landings. That has helped the firm cut the cost of getting a tonne of payload into space by perhaps a factor of ten. It now dominates the launch industry.
On a per-person basis, American economic output is now about 40% higher than in western Europe and Canada, and 60% higher than in Japan—roughly twice as large as the gaps between them in 1990. Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.
WHY?
Ryan Field, where Northwestern played until this season, sat over 47,000 fans—nearly four times as many as the [temporary] cv lakeside stadium.
Tickets for last Saturday’s home game against Indiana started at $129 on the school’s official site, an increase of more than 900% on the $17 average secondary-market price for last season’s home opener.The shift in capacity creates a natural experiment, a movement along the demand curve, that allows us to calculate the Price Elasticity of Demand for Northwestern football.
How much bargaining power did the two sides have in the recent dock workers' strike?
For shippers, what is the cost of a one day delay in coming to terms? The port of New York handled 6.6 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) containers in 2022, but the East cost and Gulf coast ports for which data are available handled ~21 million. The average value of a TEU is $54.500. Assume firms have a 20% annual discount rate for a little back-of-the-envelope calculation.
| Port of New York | All Affected Ports | Units | |
| Volume Handled 2022 | 6.6 | 20.8 | Million TEU |
| Value of TEU 2020 | $54.5 | $54.5 | $Thousands |
| Annual Value | $359.7 | $1,133.6 | $Billion/Year |
| Daily Value | $985.5 | $3,105.8 | $Million/Day |
| Daily Carrying Cost | $540.0 | $1,701.8 | $Thousand/Day |
The carrying cost alone is over $1.7 million per day, perhaps more in 2024 due to inflation and increases in trade volume. This is also a lower-bound since there will also be production disruptions & spoilage of goods. The cost to shippers might come to $3-5million per day.
What is labor's cost of a one day delay in coming to terms? The earnings of the 45,000 affected dock workers could be anywhere from $39/hour to $200,000/year. Suppose half of these would have worked on any day and that a typical day is eight hours of work, the 45,000*0.5*$39/hour*8hours = ~$7million per day. This is an upper-bound since opportunity cost of workers time is not $0. The cost to workers might be $3-5million per day.
You can adjust any of these assumptions as you deem appropriate, but it seems that the two parties were pretty evenly matched.
