Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I think we have passed peak foliage this week - I’m seeing more bare trees when I drive through town. We’ve raked our yard three times so far, and I’m looking out the window right now and it looks like we haven’t done anything. Leaf cleanup doesn’t really end until after Thanksgiving - usually just as the first snow falls. Thursday was gorgeous here - about 70 degrees and sunny. I took a couple of hours off in the afternoon to paddle down the Oyster River and look at the foliage from the water (pic above). I wish I had a better camera than my phone to take on the water, but the risk damage is too high. I wore one of my new wetsuits for the first time, a “shorty” (it’s like a rubber onesie with short sleeves and short pants), because the water temperature has been dropping. I didn’t fall in, but better safe than sorry. I had a conversation with a colleague who does winter surfing (here in NH, during snow storms, etc) and he confirmed the 4/3 wetsuit (long sleeves, long pants, still a onesie) I bought should allow me to paddle through the whole winter - he uses a 4/3 himself and he is submerged - I’m just looking for survivability in case I fall in. We’ll see if I have the courage to do that. I would love to paddle through a snowstorm.
Anyway… this week I’ve got a bunch of cool stuff. It was a good week for podcasts - I’ve included three for you to check out on a range of topics - the economic effects of the bubonic plague, hacking medical devices, and the future of organ transplants. Other cool stuff too. Let me know if you see something you like - I always appreciate feedback!
Stay well and stay safe!
Read
What: askblog, Gossip at scale
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/gossip-at-scale/
Why: This is the opening to a longish blog post by economist Arnold Kling about the social functions of gossip, and how the internet has blown the natural limitations apart (e.g., SJW Cancel Culture):
The Internet, smart phones, and social media (ISS) have set human communication back about 20,000 years. That is, we now rely more on gossip than we have since we lived in small tribes.
1. Human evolution produced gossip. Cultural anthropology sees gossip as an informal way of enforcing group norms. It is effective in small groups. But gossip is not the search for truth. It is a search for approval by attacking the perceived flaws of others.
2. As a social enforcement mechanism, gossip does not scale. Large societies need other enforcement mechanisms: government, religion, written codes.
3. Our ISS technology changes this. It makes it possible to gossip effectively at large scale. This in turn has revived our propensity to rely on gossip. Beliefs spread without being tested for truth.
There’s a couple of pages of interesting thought at the link. My wife and I talk about this a lot. She’s convinced that social media has ruined the world. I think she is pretty much right, but I am optimistic that human behavior is self-correcting, and we will develop norms that will get this technology back under control. Mostly the reality is human beings are capable of a great range of behavior, from self-sacrificing generosity to vile cruelty. Civilization (and norms) limit the dark side of the capacity. Social media has disrupted those norms and we are seeing much more of the dark side of human behavior (think internet trolls of all political persuasions who would otherwise be polite if you met them in person, but are horrible on the internet).
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What: FastCompany, ‘Zoom towns’ are exploding in the West
https://www.fastcompany.com/90564796/zoom-towns-are-exploding-in-the-west
Why: Why not move to a resort town if you can work remotely?
The coronavirus pandemic is leading to a new phenomenon: a migration to “gateway communities,” or small towns near major public lands and ski resorts as people’s jobs increasingly become remote-friendly.
If there is one thing that the COVID-19 outbreak has done is it has leapfrogged us into a new way of thinking about geographic constraints and work. Why live in or near an expensive city and dream about your two weeks vacation each year when you can go off to the place you really want to be, when you can terminate your lease on your third floor walk up and move to the place you vacation full time, and continue to work?
I mean, I already have this in my life. I love where I live, and I can walk to work, so I totally get it. The real problem is one of speed of adjustment. Communities are organic and it takes time for communities to adjust. This is a great example of Schumpeter’s creative destruction. The people who made their lives and livings around these desirable vacation spots are going to be pushed out as remote workers with tech or finance salaries find they can move in and sustain their incomes. In some ways the locals will ultimately be better off - there will be more economic opportunity - but their communities will look and feel different. Some people see this as a tragedy. I see it as the course of nature. Communities change. Trying to force them to stay the same results in worse dysfunction.
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What: Art of Manliness, The 7 Habits: Sharpen the Saw
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-7-habits-sharpen-the-saw/
Why: This short article is based on Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I was complaining to my wife yesterday that I cannot seem to get caught up on all of the things I need to get done, and she was saying, once again, that all I seem to do is work. That’s one of the hidden curses of a professor’s life - there is very little structure. With the exception of classes and a few meetings, you can make your own schedule. Unfortunately what often happens is work expands to fit all of the white space on your calendar. The thing my wife pointed out to me was that maybe I needed to be more disciplined about what I am working on. So that’s a long way of getting to the topic at hand - this conversation got me thinking about Covey’s 7th habit - sharpening the saw - which includes scheduling time for self-development and self-care. The paddle I took yesterday was a good example of self-care. I love my time on the water. It helps me decompress and be present. That makes me a better, more focused worker when I do come back to work. I also had a great meeting yesterday with a couple of folks who do executive coaching. This is a discipline I am interested in adding to you my professional practice. I spent a little time yesterday exploring this potential avenue for self-development and growth. It’s been a while since I read Covey’s book (a couple of decades), so it might be time to circle back around and sharpen the saw.
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Watch
What: Marginal Revolution University, Externalities and Incentives: The Economics of COVID (6 min)
Why: Economics is most fun when the intuition it generates runs counter to the folkway intuitions that we all run around with. Tabarrok explains externalities well, and then shows how we shouldn’t be worrying about overpaying vaccine manufacturers, but underpaying them.
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Listen
What: WSJ, The Future of Everything, Custom Parts: The Future of Transplanted Organs (17 min)
Why: This podcast covers some of the current state of lab-grown organs. They focus on xenotransplantation and organ printing. The xenotransplantation gets the lion's share of the podcast as it is closer to reality, but I am really fascinated with the idea of organ printing. What an amazing world it will be when we can get replacement parts made of our own cells. Both are the stuff of science fiction. The xenotransplantation played a key role in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to very creepy effect.
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What: a16z Podcast, Taking the Pulse on Medical Device Security (23 min)
https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/security-hacking-medical-devices-rueHEtdO
Why: Imagine you have a pacemaker installed in your chest to help regulate your heart rate. The pacemaker runs on software and has a bluetooth connection so that your doctor can download logs about how often the device is operating and how often it is required to provide your heart assistance. Now imagine someone can hack into your pacemaker and turn it off, or make it behave in a dangerous way. As it turns out, medical device manufacturers have been making implantable devices with exactly these vulnerabilities. The assumption was no one would do such a thing. That’s not really a defense.
At this point, we don’t know if anyone has done such a thing. But we do know, thanks to security researchers that it is possible. Given the number of scam artists that hit my cell phone and email daily, I’m pretty sure as soon as they can step up their game to threatening medical devices, they will. Given the heartless individuals attacking hospital medical records systems with service denial, we have pretty good evidence that healthcare is not off limits. This is worth a listen to get some insight into this depressing new way humans can be evil, and how we need to be thinking about security as we become ever more connected.
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What: Planet Money, After The Plague (22 min)
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/913735599
Why: I haven’t been following Planet Money for a while, so I thought I’d check back in on them this week and found this great episode where they talk about the astounding economic effects of the Black Death (bubonic plague). This is the plague that Monty Python makes fun of when they have the men with the wheel barrows walking down the street calling “bring out your dead!” It’s actually not at all funny because the plague killed nearly half of the human race. However, as a natural experiment (“I wonder what would happen if I removed half of the labor supply in a short period of time?”) it provides some remarkable data for economic historians. I remember first reading about this in my macro econ class during my PhD studies. The collapse of the labor supply radically transformed the economic and social institutions of the late middle ages and had a major effect in bringing on the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)