Results for “that was then this is now ”
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That was then, this is now

by  Tyler Cowen in

My prediction from 2021:

If Russia and Belarus became a single political unit, there would be only a thin band of land, called the Suwalki Gap, connecting the Baltics to the rest of the European Union. Unfortunately, that same piece of territory would stand in the way of the new, larger Russia connecting with the now-cut off Russian region of Kaliningrad. Over the long term, could the Baltics maintain their independence? If not, the European Union would show it is entirely a toothless entity, unable to guarantee the sovereignty of its members.

Even if there were no formal political union between Russia and Belarus, the territorial continuity and integrity of the EU could soon be up for grabs. The EU has more at stake in an independent Belarus than it likes to admit.

Here is the Bloomberg column from that time.  I had always thought such an altercation would occur before Russia moved on Ukraine, but of course that prediction turned out to be wrong.  My view was that Putin would first seek to weaken NATO, and Ukraine would be closer to the end of the menu than the beginning.  In any case, I have been saying to some friends lately that, in history, the Trump presidency will (that is will, not should) be judged by how he handles the eastern European “situation.”  Do note by the way that the recent Russian drones were launched from Belarus.

That was then, this is now, Robin Hanson edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Robin Hanson, who joined the movement and later became renowned for creating prediction markets, described attending multilevel Extropian parties at big houses in Palo Alto at the time.  “And I was energized by them, because they were talking about all these interesting ideas.  And my wife was put off because they were not very well presented, and a little weird,” he said.  “We all thought of ourselves as people who were seeing where the future was going to be, and other people didn’t get it.  Eventually — eventually — we’d be right, but who knows exactly when.”

That is from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, which I very much enjoyed.  I am not sure Robin’s supply of parties has been increasing out here in northern Virginia…

That was then, this is now

by  Tyler Cowen in

In late 2022, Daisy Rodriguez, a U.S. citizen and owner of a small restaurant in the town of Sweetwater, Tennessee, said goodbye to her husband for what she thought would be a short stay in Guatemala. He had recently received approval to attend an immigration interview that would grant him a green card to live in the United States. Little did Rodriguez know her husband would not be returning to the U.S. Upon arriving at the consulate in Guatemala, her husband, Santos Maudilio Saucedo Rivas, was accused by U.S. consular officials of membership in a gang based on a tattooed set of initials on his body.

The officials denied Rivas a green card, separating him from his American wife and the restaurant they ran together, while cutting him off from the U.S., the country where he had spent nearly his entire adult life.

Rivas’s case is now the subject of a lawsuit filed today by the American Immigration Council and Consular Accountability Project, which is suing the U.S. State Department in the Eastern District of Tennessee. The lawsuit alleges that U.S. officials failed to review evidence showing that Rivas was never part of the “Barrio Azteca” gang and that the government violated the U.S. Constitution by denying him a green card after having him travel to Guatemala for the interview.

Here is the full story.  Precedent matters.  I had never heard of this 2022 case until I came across it randomly.  One lesson is simply that U.S. treatment of migrants has been unfair for a long time.

That was then, this is now — Liverpool heliport edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

For a brief moment in the mid-1950s, it seemed as if Liverpool’s transportation system was about to be revolutionised, not by cars, trams, buses or ferries, but instead by helicopters.  As strange as it may seem, Liverpool was at the forefront of a flurry of interest from planners and politicians who imagined that an age of mass helicopter transit was just around the corner.  With their vertical life, small size and ability to land on the roofs of buildings, helicopters seemed ideal for short trips between and even within cities.  From 1953, Liverpool’s City Engineer, Henry Hough, began to draw up plans for a network of heliports that would connect seamlessly with buses and form the basis of an integrated ground and sky transit system…After flirting with the idea of using floating pontoons in the Mersey to land helicopters, he settled on plans for a new integrated bus and helicopter station on a patch of bombed ground between Paradise Street and Canning Place.

That is from the new Sam Wetherell book Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain.  All those plans ended, however, as the popularity of the car spread amongst Liverpool residents.

More broadly, the book has quite a bit of useful and interesting content, though reading it you would never realize that Liverpool today is a far wealthier place than in times past.  It seems always to be in decline.  There is also too much “fashionable left-wing jargon,” plus an unwillingness to stress that capital accumulation is what boosts wages.  Will books like this one ever be willing to shed those features?

That was then, this is now

by  Tyler Cowen in

This year is likely to be remembered for the Covid-19 pandemic and for a significant presidential election, but there is a new contender for the most spectacularly newsworthy happening of 2020: the unveiling of GPT-3. As a very rough description, think of GPT-3 as giving computers a facility with words that they have had with numbers for a long time, and with images since about 2012…

The eventual uses of GPT-3 are hard to predict, but it is easy to see the potential. GPT-3 can converse at a conceptual level, translate language, answer email, perform (some) programming tasks, help with medical diagnoses and, perhaps someday, serve as a therapist. It can write poetry, dialogue and stories with a surprising degree of sophistication, and it is generally good at common sense — a typical failing for many automated response systems. You can even ask it questions about God.

…It also has the potential to outperform Google for many search queries, which could give rise to a highly profitable company.

…It is not difficult to imagine a wide variety of GPT-3 spinoffs, or companies built around auxiliary services, or industry task forces to improve the less accurate aspects of GPT-3. Unlike some innovations, it could conceivably generate an entire ecosystem.

That was the opening paragraph of my 2020 Bloomberg column on GPT-3.

Jefferson’s DOGE (that was then, this is now)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jefferson swiftly undid twelve years of Federalism.  He allowed the Sedition Act to expire and adopted a more catholic naturalization law.  He reduced the federal bureaucracy — small even by today’s standards — particularly in the Treasury Department (a slap at Hamilton, who had been Secretary under Washington), slashing the number of employees by 40 percent and eliminating tax inspectors and collectors altogether.  He cut the military budget in half, which was then 40 percent of the overall federal budget.  He eliminated all federal excise taxes, purging the government of what he called Hamilton’s “contracted, English, half-lettered ideas.”  Reluctantly he kept the First Bank of the United States, but paid off nearly half the national debt.  “No government in history,” the historian Gordon S. Wood has observed, “had ever voluntarily cut back on its authority.”

That is from the new and very good book Martin van Buren: America’s First Politician, by James M. Bradley.  Later things were different:

Martin van Buren went into office deermined to avoid Andrew Jackson’s fateful staffing mistakes.  The backbiting and intrigue wasted two years of Jackson’s presidency.  This van Buren could not afford.

And a wee bit later:

Then the voters had their say.  The November elections in New York were an absolute bloodbath for the Democrats.  There were 128 elections for assembly in 1837, and the Whigs won 101 of them.

The book is well-written.

That was then, this is now…

by  Tyler Cowen in

Oil companies are conveying an unlikely message to the GOP and its presidential candidate: Spare President Biden’s signature climate law. At least the parts that benefit the oil industry.

In discussions with former President Trump’s campaign and his allies in Congress, oil giants including Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, and Occidental Petroleum have extolled the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act. Many in the fossil-fuel industry opposed the law when it passed in 2022 but have come to love provisions that earmark billions of dollars for low-carbon energy projects they are betting on.

Some executives in the largely pro-Trump oil industry are worried the former president, if re-elected, would side with conservative lawmakers who want to gut the IRA. They fear losing tax credits vital for their investments in renewable fuel, carbon capture and hydrogen, costly technologies requiring U.S. support to survive their early years.

Here is more from the WSJ.

That was then, this is now, NBA edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Then, from summer of 2023: “The Boston Celtics just set an NBA record by agreeing to a five-year, $304 million contract with two-time All-Star Jaylen Brown…the odds are the deal will be seen as a good one — maybe even a bargain. The economics of the National Basketball Association have been shifting toward more and more money.”

That was by me, for Bloomberg, and at the time that claim received a lot of pushback.

Now: “With a potential $7B annual media rights deal looming, NBA players could make up to $95M a year on supermax contracts in the future.”

Here is a further look at those numbers.  Did I mention that the Celtics are in the Eastern Finals and are the current favorite to win the title?

The Gershwins on free trade (that was then, this is now)

by  Tyler Cowen in

In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin put on a musical satire about trade and war entitled Strike Up the Band.  The plot centres around a middle-aged US cheesemaker, Horace J. Fletcher of Connecticut, who wants to corner the domestic dairy market.  When Fletcher hears that the US government has just slapped a fifty per cent tariff on foreign-made cheese, he sees dollar signs.  High tariffs mean his fellow citizens will have little choice but to ‘buy American’.  What’s more, the tariff’s impact soon reaches beyond the national market to sour the country’s trade relationships.. Swiss cheesemakers are particularly sharp in their demands for retaliation.  Fletcher surmises that a prolonged Swiss-American military conflict would provide the necessary fiscal and nationalistic incentives to maintain the costly tariff on foreign cheese in perpetuity.

To make his monopolistic dream of market control a reality, Fletcher sees to it that the tariff spat between the two countries leads to an all-out war.  He first creates the Very Patriotic League to drum up support for the Alpine military adventure, as well as to weed out any ‘un-American’ agitation at home.  The Very Patriotic League’s members, donning white hoods reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, go about excising all things Swiss from the nativist nation.  Not even the classic adventure The Swiss Family Robinson escapes notice: it gets rebranded The American Family Robinson.  With domestic anti-war dissent quelled, Fletcher next orchestrates a military invasion of Switzerland.  The farcical imperial intervention ends with a US victory.  But just as the war with Switzerland winds down and a peaceful League of Cheese established, an ultimatum arrives from Russia objecting to a US tariff on caviar.  And, it’s implied, the militant cycle repeats.

That is from the new and interesting Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by Marc-William Palen.

That was then, this is now

by  Tyler Cowen in

…the first German pogroms of the modern age, the so-called Hep-Hep riots, took place in 1819.  Jews were attacked on the streets and Jewish stores were ransacked.  It was a new and as yet unknown phenomenon in the German-speaking lands.  The riots were led by students, ostensibly the anti-absolutist and progressive force in German society.

That is from Shlomo Avineri’s Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State.  Here is a new bulletin from MIT.