Category: Uncategorized
The progress in Progress Studies
Here is a very good article by Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine. Excerpt:
The contours of the new progress movement stretch from the Human Progress project at the libertarian Cato Institute to the “eco-modernist” initiatives at the Breakthrough Institute and the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Four relatively new groups at the forefront of the pro-progress forces are The Roots of Progress, the Institute for Progress, The Progress Network, and Works in Progress. Together, they are—as The Progress Network puts it—”building an idea movement that speaks to a better future in a world dominated by voices that suggest a worse one.”
And:
The heads of all four organizations cite the animating influence of the July 2019 Atlantic article “We Need a New Science of Progress,” written by Cowen and Patrick Collison, the billionaire founder of the internet payments company Stripe. “The success of Progress Studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions,” Cowen and Collison argued. “In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.”
Cowen and Collison are involved in the movements in other ways too. Both The Roots of Progress and Works in Progress have received grants from the Emergent Ventures project, administered by Cowen. Works in Progress became part of Stripe Press in 2022.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
A portrait of Portugal
…at least half of a population of ten million depend on the state in some way—35% are retirees, 10% government workers, and another 5% receive either unemployment benefits or integration benefits. They would see a country with less youth than they once saw; they would see what is in fact, after Italy, the second-oldest country in Europe, with 23% of the population being older than 65. And they would further see that like so many other democratic and less democratic countries, Portugal is having elections and that this election will, once again, pit the country’s aging population against its young people.
So-called “seniors” are reliable voters, while young people aren’t, and so this perverse incentive ensures that seniors vote, effectively, to extract rent for themselves from young people through the state. This is reflected in voting intentions: people over 54 are disproportionately likely to vote for the Socialist Party, while those who are under 25 are disproportionately unlikely to vote for it.
One in three people ages 15-39 has left for overseas. Here is more from Vasco Queirós, via The Browser.
Monday assorted links
1. Should we change species to save them? (NYT)
2. Mechanical watch.
3. Why is it called Martingale? And “With French under fire, Mali uses AI to bring local language to students.”
4. McDonald’s new marketing: Billboards that smell like its French fries.
Michael Cook on Iran
Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia. We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period. It has four major features. The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both a cultural and a political entity; Iran is there in the eleventh century, and it is still there in the eighteenth. the second is an alternation between periods when Iran is ruled by a single imperial state and periods in which it break up intoa number of smaller states. The third feature is steppe nomad power: all imperial states based in Iran in this period are the work of Turkic or Mongol nomads. The fourth is the role of the settled Iranian population, whose lot is to pay taxes and — more rewardingly — to serve as bureaucrats and bearers of a literate culture. With this first-order approximation in mind, we can now move on to a second-order approximation in the form of an outline of the history of Iran over eight centuries that will occupy most of this chapter.
That is from his new book A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. I had not known that in the early 16th century Iran was still predominantly Sunni. And:
There were also Persian-speaking populations to the east of Iran that remained Sunni, and within Iran there were non-Persian ethnic groups, such as the Kurds in the west and the Baluchis in the southeast, that likewise retained their Sunnism. But the core Persian-speaking population of the country was by now [1722] almost entirely Shiite. Iran thus became the first and largest country in which Shiites were both politically and demographically dominant. One effect of this was to set it apart from the Muslim world at large, a development that gave Iran a certain coherence at the cost of poisoning its relations with its neighbors.
This was also a good bit:
Yet the geography of Iran in this period was no friendlier to maritime trade than it had been in Sasanian times. To a much greater extent than appears from a glance at the map, Iran is landlocked: the core population and prime resources of the country are located deep in the interior, far from the arid coastlands of the Persian Gulf.
In my earlier short review I wrote “At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.” I have now concluded it is a great book.
GPT-4-Turbo still doesn’t answer this question well
“Name three famous people who all share the exact same birth date and year.”
Usually it fails, the most common failure being it names someone with the correct date but the incorrect year. Telling it to “reason step by step” is no panacea either. And if you want to make it harder, ask for more than three people, and if need be you can decrease the required degree of fame, so it is not a stumper per se.
Why does GPT repeatedly fail in this manner? Do you have a theory with microfoundations rooted in an understanding of how autoregression works? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Sunday assorted links
1. Austrian economist Walter Block is now a columnist for Israel Hayom.
3. Faith Ringgold, RIP (NYT).
4. The world of competitive quizzing (NYT). Good piece.
5. Post-fight interview, with profanity, and Mises.
6. U.S. homicide rates are plummeting (WSJ).
*The Carnation Revolution*
The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell. A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt:
The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents and forty-five governments, all the while experiencing an economic crisis, crushing debt and the Europe-spanning threats of the First World War. Mirroring similar movements in France and Mexico, early Portuguese republicanism’s defining feature is its fierce anti-clericalism, imposing a crackdown on churches, convents and monasteries and persecuting religious leaders. The turbulent political landscape is marked by escalating acts of violence, militant strike action, periodic military uprisings and borderline civil war, the government fluctuating wildly between different republican factions.
Unfortunately, this book does not read as if it is about a niche topic. And don’t forget Salazar was an economist.
Samuelson-Stolper, writ anew
At Sansan Chicken in Long Island City, Queens, the cashier beamed a wide smile and recommended the fried chicken sandwich.
Or maybe she suggested the tonkatsu — it was hard to tell, because the internet connection from her home in the Philippines was spotty.
Romy, who declined to give her last name, is one of 12 virtual assistants greeting customers at a handful of restaurants in New York City, from halfway across the world.
The virtual hosts could be the vanguard of a rapidly changing restaurant industry, as small-business owners seek relief from rising commercial rents and high inflation. Others see a model ripe for abuse: The remote workers are paid $3 an hour, according to their management company, while the minimum wage in the city is $16.
Here is more from the NYT, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Saturday assorted links
1. Sorry people, but I’m not convinced by the whole anti-cavities thing. Stuart Richie also comments.
2. Thirty minute talk by the great Gašper Beguš. You need to remove timing between the clicks!
3. A recent paper on AI and labor markets. I don’t quite follow the central intuitions, but possibly important?
4. Ukraine report.
5. The Budget Lab.
7. “In its beta, gpt-vetting has already conducted 13,000 AI interviews, saving ~10k hours for software engineers who would otherwise be conducting technical interviews.” Link here.
Should I trust this paper?
We examine the relation between earnings information content and the use of trust words, such as “character,” “ethics,” and “honest,” in the MD&A section of 10-K. We find that earnings announcements of firms using trust words have lower information content than earnings announcements of firms that do not use trust words. We also find that the value relevance of earnings is lower for firms using trust words than those not using trust words. Further, firms using trust words are more likely to receive a comment letter from the SEC, pay higher audit fees, and have lower corporate social responsibility scores. Overall, our results suggest that firms that use trust words in the 10-K are associated with negative outcomes, and trust words are an inverse measure of trust.
That is from Can We Trust the Trust Words in 10-Ks?, by Myojung Cho, Gopal V. Krishnan, and Hyunkwon Cho. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
2. Robin Hanson on the world’s monoculture mistake.
3. An AI system to match silver medalists in geometry?
4. Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed.
5. Have we been overestimating the decline in religiosity?
6. What to do with your Harry Potter books, Gemini 1.5 edition?
7. Noah is right. Twilight of the economists is the topic.
*Civil War*
This movie was more cinematically serious than I was expecting, and with some odd (but mostly good) 1970s vibes. It is also an interesting case study in anhedonia.
Video and grenades seem scarcer than they ought to be, even given the constraints. Good characters.
The movie works very hard not to reveal its politics to a mainstream audience, but of course they are there, you just have to squint and think a bit. No, I’m not going to spoil that one for you.
“Thirty Canadian?”
Excellent soundtrack as well. The same director also made Annihilation and Ex Machina.
Thursday assorted links
1. Some progress on the Moderna cancer vaccine.
2. The culture that is New Zealand (excruciating, not recommended).
3. My podcast with Sean Speer and The Hub on GOAT.
4. Edward S.F. suggests:
K. Omodo reviews G O A T:
“It was amazing. I took it in all at once!”
Here is the short video.
Scrabble markets in everything, okie-dokie edition
For the first time in 75 years, Mattel is making a major change to the iconic board game Scrabble — and touting a “No More Scoring” gameplay option.
The new launch is a double-sided version of the famous board game — one side with the original game for those who want to stick to the long-time traditional version, and one side with a “less competitive” version to appeal to Gen Z gamers.
The flip side of the classic game, called Scrabble Together, will include helper cards, use a simpler scoring system, be quicker to play and allow people to play in teams.
“The makers of Scrabble found that younger people, Gen Z people, don’t quite like the competitive nature of Scrabble,” Gyles Brandreth, who co-hosts the language podcast Something Rhymes With Purple, told BBC Radio 4 Today. “They want a game where you can simply enjoy language, words, being together and having fun creating words.”
And:
So what’s new exactly? In addition to a dual-sided board, there are helper cards, which provide assistance, prompts and clues and can be selected to match the player’s challenge level of their choice.
In the new version, scoring is a thing of the past — now all one has to do is finish a goal and collect the goal card.
Goal cards include challenges such as: “Play a horizontal word,” “play a three-letter word” or “play a word that touches the edge of the board.”
Here is the full story. I have read that 33 out of the world’s top 100 Scrabble players are Nigerian — I wonder what they think of this?
Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT*
An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular:
Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral of prices and wages, monetary and exchange rate policies were out of whack, multipliers operate, the quest for savings could lower incomes overall, and the influence of liquidity factors on money demand and interest rates was especially high. All at once” (p. 72, emphasis in the original). In other words, Cowen drives home the point that this “general theory” isn’t actually general, it’s about very special, very unusual circumstances.
He considers Lord Keynes the GOAT contender whom he would most “want to hang around with” (p. 54). I had exactly the opposite reaction. The Keynes he portrays is virtually an egotistical monster. One who, for example, “kept an extended spreadsheet of his lovers and sexual encounters … each one rated by number” (p. 58). Anyone who treats other human beings this way—let alone writing it down—isn’t the kind of person I want to hang around with.
Recommended.