Month: November 2017

“A Perfect Fit,” by Isaac Asimov

Gold said, “You underwent due process in great detail, and there was no reasonable doubt that you were guilty–”

“Even so!  Look!  We live in a computerized world.  I can’t do a thing anywhere — I can’t get information — I can’t be fed — I can’t amuse myself — I can’t pay for anything, or check on anything, or just plain do anything — without using a computer.  And I have been adjusted, as you surely know, so that I am incapable of looking at a computer without hurting my eyes, or touching one without blistering my fingers.  I can’t even handle my cash card or even think of using it without nausea.”

Gold said, “Yes, I know all that.  I also know you have been given ample funds for the duration of yoiur punishment, and that the general public has been asked to sympathize and be helpful.  I believe they do this.”

“I don’t want that.  I don’t want their help and their pity.  I don’t want to be a helpless child in a world of adults.  I don’t want to be an illiterate in a world of people who can read.  Help me end the punishment.  It’s been almost a month of hell.  I can’t go through eleven more.”

That is from the short story “A Perfect Fit,” from 1981, reproduced in the volume The Winds of Change and other stories.  I’ve been rereading some Asimov lately, in preparation for my chat with Andy Weir, and much of it has held up remarkably well.

The persistent influence of the frontier on American life

Samuel Bazzi, Martin Fiszbein, and Mesay Gebresilasse have a new NBER working paper on that theme, here is the abstract:

In a classic 1893 essay, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the American frontier promoted individualism. We revisit the Frontier Thesis and examine its relevance at the subnational level. Using Census data and GIS techniques, we track the frontier throughout the 1790-1890 period and construct a novel, county-level measure of historical frontier experience. We document skewed sex ratios and other distinctive demographics of frontier locations, as well as their greater individualism (proxied by infrequent children names). Many decades after the closing of the frontier, counties with longer historical frontier experience exhibit more prevalent individualism and opposition to redistribution and regulation. We take several steps towards a causal interpretation, including an instrumental variables approach that exploits variation in the speed of westward expansion induced by national immigration inflows. Using linked historical Census data, we identify mechanisms giving rise to a persistent frontier culture. Selective migration contributed to greater individualism, and frontier conditions may have further shaped behavior and values. We provide evidence suggesting that rugged individualism may be rooted in its adaptive advantage on the frontier and the opportunities for upward mobility through effort.

I am very much a proponent of this line of reasoning.

*Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America*

Acclaimed legal scholar, Harvard Professor, and New York Times bestselling author Cass R. Sunstein brings together a compelling collection of essays by our nation’s brightest minds across the political spectrum—including Eric Posner, Tyler Cowen, Noah Feldman, Jack Goldsmith, and Martha Minow—who ponder the question: Can authoritarianism take hold here?

With the election of Donald J. Trump, many people on both the left and right feared that America’s 240-year-old grand experiment in democracy was coming to an end, and that Sinclair Lewis’ satirical novel, It Can’t Happen Here, written during the dark days of the 1930s, could finally be coming true.

Is the democratic freedom that the United States symbolizes really secure? Can authoritarianism happen in America? Sunstein queried a number of the nation’s leading thinkers. In Can It Happen Here? he gathers together their diverse perspectives on these timely questions and more.

In this thought-provoking collection of essays, these distinguished thinkers and theorists explore the lessons of history, how democracies crumble, how propaganda works, and the role of the media, courts, elections, and “fake news” in the modern political landscape—and what the future of the United States may hold.

Due out in March, pre-order here.  The book also has Jon Elster, Timur Kuran, and Jonathan Haidt, dare I call it self-recommending?

My Conversation with Sujatha Gidla

Here is the transcript and podcast, I enjoyed this chat very much.  Here is part of the opening summary:

Sujatha Gidla was an untouchable in India, but moved to the United States at the age of 26 and is now the first Indian woman to be employed as a conductor on the New York City Subway. In her memoir Ants Among Elephants, she explores the antiquities of her mother, her uncles, and other members of her family against modern India’s landscape.

Our conversation considered the nature and persistence of caste, gender issues in India, her time as a revolutionary, New York City lifestyle and neighborhoods and dining, religion, living in America versus living in India, Bob Dylan and Dalit music, American identity politics, the nature of Marxism, Halldor Laxness, and why she left her job at the Bank of New York to become a New York City subway conductor, among other topics.

Here is one sequence:

GIDLA: Actually, the only relation I have with my family members is political views.

[laughter]

GIDLA: If we have to connect on familial links, we will always be fighting and killing each other. All that we talk about with my mother is politics and untouchability and caste and Modi and things like that.

It’s the same thing with my sister also. This is where we connect. Otherwise, we are like enemies. My brother, we’re completely alienated from each other, firstly because he goes to church now. We never used to go to church before. He’s into this Iacocca. Is there a name . . . ?

COWEN: Iacocca?

GIDLA: Yeah.

COWEN: Lee Iacocca?

GIDLA: Yeah.

COWEN: The former Chrysler chairman?

GIDLA: Yeah. He reads that kind of books.

COWEN: Management books.

GIDLA: He’s into that kind of stuff.

COWEN: You don’t?

GIDLA: No.

GIDLA: He read Freakonomics and he liked it. I don’t relate to that stuff.

And this toward the end:

COWEN: Your most touching memory of your mother?

GIDLA: I don’t know. When I was arrested, she was very worried. She said, “I wish I could take you back into my womb.”

Strongly recommended.  I was pleased to see that Publisher’s Weekly named Sujatha Gidla’s book as one of the ten best of 2017, you can order it here.

Wednesday assorted links

1. Who’s sitting next to you on the subway?

2. New results on the returns to education.

3. Meet the people who listen to podcasts at super speed.

4. Those with a college degree gain more from freer trade, but not actually by that much.

5. “Consistent with the reduced form results, the model estimates imply that labor supply factors are responsible for nearly the entire rise of in-and-outs, while changes in labor demand have contributed little…”  Link hereAnd “Our estimates suggest that the decline in product reallocation through these margins has contributed greatly to the slow growth experienced after the Great Recession.”

6. Absent-mindedness as dominance behavior.

7. MIE Hyderabad spot-a-beggar.

The earlier age of mass migration to America also brought political backlash

Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration (2017). JOB MARKET PAPER
Abstract: In this paper, I show that political opposition to immigration can arise even when immigrants bring significant economic prosperity to receiving areas. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to US cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants’ location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. Immigration increased natives’ employment and occupational standing, and fostered industrial production and capital utilization. However, it lowered tax rates, public spending, and the pro-immigration party’s (i.e., Democrats) vote share. The inflow of immigrants was also associated with the election of more conservative representatives, and with rising support for anti-immigration legislation. I provide evidence that political backlash was increasing in the cultural distance between immigrants and natives, suggesting that diversity might be economically beneficial but politically hard to manage.

That is from Marco Tabellini, job market candidate at MIT.

Investment in sons crowds out investment in daughters

…sons crowd out human capital acquisition by daughters.  If all daughters of self-employed men experienced the “sisters-only” level of transmission, the overall gender gap in self-employment would be reduced by nearly 20 percent.

That is from Elizabeth Mishkin, on the job market from Harvard.

While we are on related topics:

I establish that women in U.S. counties with heavier casualties were more active in starting new businesses after the war [WWII] ended and this difference persists to this day. I also find that single women were more likely to start new businesses than war widows. Evidence in favor of the marriage market channel suggests that reducing opportunity cost is more effective in encouraging women to start new businesses than merely providing financial subsidies.

That is from Patrick Luo, also on the job market from Harvard.

Tuesday assorted links

1. Average is over, installment #6372.

2. Does the home mortgage deduction limit the demand for (other) redistribution?

3. Corporate influence in World Bank lending.

4. Why is everyone interested in Djibouti?

5. “What sorts of workplace-related issues have been suppressed by 3-4 decades of a tough environment for workers?”  More here from Conor Sen.

6. “Nearly every other city in California performs better than San Francisco in educating low-income students, and it’s not like most of the cities are knocking it out of the park.” Link here.

7. The Trump administration is shifting back toward fee-for-service health payments (NYT).

8. IV uh-oh.

Seasteading is Making Progress

Seasteading, the once quixotic idea of Patri Friedman and early funder Peter Thiel, is now taking shape in French Polynesia writes David Gelles in the New York Times:

Long the stuff of science fiction, so-called “seasteading” has in recent years matured from pure fantasy into something approaching reality, and there are now companies, academics, architects and even a government working together on a prototype by 2020.

…Earlier this year, the government of French Polynesia agreed to let the Seasteading Institute begin testing in its waters. Construction could begin soon, and the first floating buildings — the nucleus of a city — might be inhabitable in just a few years.

“If you could have a floating city, it would essentially be a start-up country,” said Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute. “We can create a huge diversity of governments for a huge diversity of people.”

The future is hard to predict but I am eager to see greater experimentation in city governing rules.

Addendum: I have been a minor adviser.

The dystopia of Malcolm Harris

He is the author of the new and interesting Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials.  Most of the book is about millennials as the generation that invests in itself.  Towards the end he lays out a somewhat separate discussion of what a future dystopia might look like, I am very briefly summarizing his seven points, noting that some of the headings are my rewordings:

1. The equitization of human capital.  This will start out as “win-win” transactions, but eventually will become “subprime human capital.”

2. The professionalization of childhood.  Kids will start preparing for fairly specific and very locked-in careers at quite young ages, and find it difficult to deviate later on.

3. “Climate privilege.”  The ability to live somewhere insulated from most of the costs of climate change will become a major marker of class and privilege.

4. Discrimination by algorithm.

5. “The Malfunctioning.”  “America will need institutions for people who just can’t make it….I don’t think this will be “funemployment” of a guaranteed minimum income.  It’s more likely to be an unholy combination of mental asylum and work camp.”

6. Misogynist backlash.

7. Fully tracked.  The “data self” will increasingly approach the “real self.”

Worth a ponder.

*The Impossible Revolution*

The subtitle is Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy, and the author is leading Syrian intellectual Yassin Al-Haj Saleh.  Imagine having a well-written book, totally conversant in the arguments of the social sciences, that set out to explain the Syrian tragedy to an intelligent reader.  Here is one typical bit:

The extremely decentralized nature of the Syrian revolution stemmed from nearly half a century of regime-enforced seclusion and isolation of Syrian society.  It was also occasioned by the regime’s forcible domination over all social interaction — and so a divide-and-conquer strategy was used by the Assadist oligarchy to confront the revolution right from the start.  Such strategies made any protest activities in central squares obviously impossible because this would have permitted the gathering of Syrian society’s diverse groups, and perhaps would have also allowed a degree of discussion, exchange of opinions, and general building of trust.  Keeping this in mind, it becomes clear that the extreme, forced fragmentation of the revolution’s activities is an additional factor that has facilitated the spread of the nihilist synthesis of complete distrust and a propensity for violence.

Where else can you find a book that compares and contrasts ISIS nihilism to 19th century Russian nihilism, or Sultanic principles in Syria vs. Lebanon?:

Lebanon is a neo-Sultanic state without a Sultan, and should either fill the gap and assign a Sultan with a well-developed general security shield, or turn the page of the sectarian patronage system and evolve toward a state of citizenship and equality.  In the context of present interconnections between the two Sultanates, Lebanon is the incomplete one with a large ‘security branch’ (i.e. Hezbollah) that is leaning more towards Sultanism, and the complete model is currently beset by a revolution.

Strongly recommended.  And as the author himself suggests in closing: “It is always necessary to demystify sectarian fraud…”

You can order the book here, though please note I do not sympathize with the author’s career or overall views in many respects.  He was a political prisoner from 1980-1996.  “Worthy of Gramsci…”  This book remains under-reviewed by mainstream outlets.

The working rich are driving income inequality, not the rentiers

Anti-Piketty:

Have passive rentiers replaced the working rich at the top of the U.S. income distribution? Using administrative data linking 10 million firms to their owners, this paper shows that private business owners who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Private business income accounts for most of the rise of top incomes since 2000 and the majority of top earners receive private business income—most of which accrues to active owner-managers of mid-market firms in relatively skill-intensive and unconcentrated industries. Profit falls substantially after premature owner deaths. Top-owned firms are twice as profitable per worker as other firms despite similar risk, and rising profitability without rising scale explains most of their profit growth. Together, these facts indicate that the working rich remain central to rising top incomes in the twenty-first century.

That is from a new paper by Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Mind the gap bring back retail deregulate building

Mandatory parking requirements, sidewalks, curb cuts, fire lanes, on site stormwater management, handicapped accessibility, draught tolerant native plantings… It’s a very long list that totaled $340,000 worth of work. They only paid $245,000 for the entire property. And that’s before they even started bringing the building itself up to code for their intended use. Guess what? They decided not to open the bakery or brewery. Big surprise.

Here is much more, from Johnny at Granola Shotgun, one of the best pieces of the year, with superb photos, lovely twists and turns in the narrative, hat tip goes to Anecdotal.

Here are all posts by Johnny, “I’m an amateur architecture buff with a passionate interest in where and how we all live and occupy the landscape, from small rural towns to skyscrapers and everything in between. I travel often, conduct interviews with people of interest, and gather photos and video of places worth talking about. The good, the bad, and the ugly – it’s all fascinating to me.” — a new master of the medium.