Quick takes and random stuff May 9, 2024

Interesting content for the curious

When I work on the weekly Quick Takes post, I generally just go with whatever caught my attention over the last week. Some weeks seem to end up with a theme, while others are more scattershot. This week is more scattershot and maybe even a little quirky. The data I get shows some real variability in reads from week to week, and I can’t figure out what makes one week more interesting than another. Anyway, enjoy.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s time to mine

The IMF article Harnessing Sub-Saharan Africa’s Critical Mineral Wealth (4/29/2024) has a couple of interesting facts. First is this graph.

The demand for lithium needs to grow over 10 fold by 2050 to meet demand, with most of it for the (hopeful) energy transition. Other minerals also need large increases. I’m not convinced this will happen by 2050. What I wasn’t fully aware of was how much sub-Saharan Africa has in these minerals.

Between 2022 and 2050, demand for nickel will double, cobalt triple and lithium rise tenfold, according to the International Energy Agency. With sub-Saharan Africa estimated to hold about 30 percent of the volume of proven critical mineral reserves, this transition—if managed properly—has the potential to transform the region, the latest Regional Economic Outlook reports.

This could be a big deal for them as

Global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals—copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium—are estimated to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years, in 2023-dollar terms. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to reap over 10 percent of these cumulated revenues, which could correspond to an increase in the region’s GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050.

Youth suicide

This is from Suicide Rates Are Now Higher Among Young Adults Than the Middle-Aged It’s time to update common beliefs about age and suicide (4/24/2024) at After Babel (a substack worth reading). Note that the graph stops at 2021 and that suicide rates for 20–29 were increasing well before COVID.

Guess the object

Any guesses as to where this is from and what it is for?

It is a Roman dodecahedron that is likely 1,700 years old. The best guess seems to be a religious artifact or one used for rituals.

Views of technology

The Pew article, Americans’ Views of Technology Companies: Most think social media companies have too much influence in politics and censor political viewpoints they object to – both sentiments are growing among Democrats (4/29/2024) has an interesting choice of title. Consider the main graph.

It is true that Democrats have moved from 63% to 74% among those who believe that social media has too much influence in today’s politics. The title could also have said that Democrats are catching up to Republicans on this belief. Of course, the choice of title is because the Democrats moved 11 points while the Republicans moved only 2 (likely within the margin of error).

But there is a more interesting question here. The closer the result is to 100%, the harder it is to increase. For example, if the Republicans moved from 82% to 93%, then I would say that is more interesting and unlikely to happen than the Democrats moving from 63% to 74%, although the media would treat them as equivalent. I haven’t seen a metric that normalizes changes in percentages relative to proximity to an extreme, but there should be one. The Republican shift might be more meaningful than perceived, although I’d have a better case if it were more like a 5-point shift. In that case, 83% to 88% might be just as meaningful as 63% to 74%.

As another example, if on the first exam in a class one student earns an 55 and another a 90, I would argue that increasing the score on the next exam by 5 points is much easier to do starting at 55 than at 90.

Keep this in mind when interpreting polls, and don’t let Democrats know they are coming around to the Republican viewpoint on this one.

From the garden

A crabapple, an apple (although you can’t see the flowers well), and a redbud.

Busy as a bee

Who knew you could train bumblebees to push blocks? Evidence for socially influenced and potentially actively coordinated cooperation by bumblebees. (5/1/2024) There are graphs of data but this image seems more interesting.

Together, these results show that bumblebees waited for their partner and attended to their partner’s presence/absence at the point of cooperation, and thus strongly indicate that their coordination in both tasks was socially influenced.

Data center news

Large data center campus is proposed in Davenport, Iowa. Will include two buildings on 328 acres. (5/2/2024)

According to city documents, the proposed project includes a minimum investment of $800 million. The proposal will see the construction of two data halls and ancillary facilities totaling 715,000 sq ft (66,425 sqm).

Currently, the land is zoned for agricultural use and has an assessed valuation of $958,000. When complete, the proposed facility will have an estimated assessed valuation of $420 million.

China’s nuclear power

China has been adding nuclear power. (5/6/2024) We often hear about China’s growing wind and solar power but it is also investing in nuclear. Keep in mind that you get 90+% of the installed capacity for nuclear.

In the past 10 years, more than 34 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power capacity were added in China, bringing the country’s number of operating nuclear reactors to 55 with a total net capacity of 53.2 GW as of April 2024. An additional 23 reactors are under construction in China. The United States has the largest nuclear fleet, with 94 reactors, but it took nearly 40 years to add the same nuclear power capacity as China added in 10 years.

Despite rapid capacity growth in 2022, nuclear power made up only about 5% of China’s cumulative power generation that year. Nuclear power accounts for about 18% of the electricity generation mix in the United States.

Are we optimizing too much?

Freddie deBoer has an interesting essay on Substack: The Modern Curse of Overoptimization. (5/3/2024)

My current working definition of overoptimization goes like this: overoptimization has occurred when the introduction of immense amounts of information into a human system produces conditions that allow for some players within that system to maximize their comparative advantage, without overtly breaking the rules, in a way that (intentional or not) creates meaningful negative social consequences. I want to argue that many human systems in the 2020s have become overoptimized in this way, and that the social ramifications are often bad.

It is worth reading. I’ll add an example. Why do a Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, or any compact car basically look the same. If you want to build a small sedan to maximize gas mileage and keep costs down, then the physics to optimize this problem largely leads everyone to the same design. Optimization leads to a lot of sameness.

Class difference in motherhood

This graph comes from the IFS article The Motherhood Wage Penalty Is Declining But Only For Some Women (5/1/2024), although they got it from the paper they cite.

A few key quotes.

What drives the class inequality story is that the modal age at first birth for those who have completed high school but do not have a four-year college degree is in the 20-24 range, whereas it is a full decade later for college graduates.

Those who became mothers near or after age 30 no longer take a pay hit associated with motherhood. The wage penalty for women who had their first child before their late 20s has been fairly stable over time. That means that for American women without a college degree, motherhood costs every bit as much as it used to. The progress over time is only among relatively advantaged women. 

There was another piece of new evidence that Yu and Kuo introduced about inequality between men and women. Men experience a fatherhood premium—fathers have higher hourly wages than similarly qualified childless men. And women who become mothers at older ages now share this parenthood premium. This is finding is new: it is a reversal of the motherhood wage penalty rather than just an erasure of it. 

The article is short and worth reading. What strikes me is the continuing and growing class divide that we should not be ignoring.

The spinning CD

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Thank you

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Disagreeing and using comments

I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than always be right. I'm not writing to upset or antagonize anyone on purpose, though I guess that could happen. I welcome dissent and disagreement in the comments. We all should be forced to articulate our viewpoints and change our minds when we need to, but we should also know that we can respectfully disagree and move on. So, if you think something said is wrong or misrepresented, then please share your viewpoint in the comments.