Month: July 2019

What is an optimal number of Pamplona bull gorings?

Two or more each year?:

Longtime runners voiced their frustration that the event had been “totally adulterated” and said it was time to “say enough to the distortion of the run”.

The problem for purists is not just that the run, known as the encierro, has become too safe — with only two gorings last year, the least since 1984 — but that the bulls are unable to break free from the highly trained steers that accompany them. This makes the adrenaline-fuelled race less dangerous but also less exciting.

“For the runners, this is the end of the encierro as they know it,” said Joe Distler, a semi-retired American who ran the bulls for 50 years and took part in the protest in solidarity.

For regular runners, a good day is when the bulls break free from the cabestros — the castrated steers that accompany them over the 875-metre course to the city bullring — and one can feel the adrenaline-drenched thrill of running half a block directly in the front of a bull’s horns before letting it pass.

Here is more from Ian Mount at the FT.  As you wish folks, but I for one am content to live “inside the algorithm.”

Sunday assorted links

1. “This means the watching of pornographic videos generates as much CO2 per year as is emitted by countries such as Belgium, Bangladesh and Nigeria.”  Link here.

2. Should we add any countries as states to the U.S.?  How about Greenland?

3. “Yak butter tea is often referred to as the national drink of Dhorje’s homeland, Tibet. Tibetans drink it all day long — up to 60 cups a day…

4. Most published authors in the top economics journals.

5. First photo of quantum entanglement.

Compensating Kidney Donors

The Trump administration will allow greater compensation for live kidney donors.

Supporting Living Organ Donors.  Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall propose a regulation to remove financial barriers to living organ donation.  The regulation should expand the definition of allowable costs that can be reimbursed under the Reimbursement of Travel and Subsistence Expenses Incurred Toward Living Organ Donation program, raise the limit on the income of donors eligible for reimbursement under the program, allow reimbursement for lost-wage expenses, and provide for reimbursement of child-care and elder-care expenses.

While pure compensation is still illegal this goes a long way to recouping costs. In addition the executive order improves the rules that govern the organ procurement organizations with the goal of deceasing the number of wasted organs. Compensating kidney donors is a policy that I have long supported. Together the two changes could save thousands of lives. Even Dylan Matthew, a living organ donor who writes for Vox, is pleased.

Hat tip: Frank McCormick

How to prevent brain drain?

Moldova has a reasonable education system, but per capita income far below that of Mexico.  I don’t see any reason why that ought to change, moving forward.  Insofar as Moldova generates serious entrepreneurial talent, you would expect those individuals to leave for greener pastures, say London or even Vienna or Moscow.

(By the way, I wonder what the “new class of very poor white people” are going to be like in a generation or so, in terms of their political views, as liberalism becomes less internationally dominant.)

Sometimes I wonder which features of a country encourage the very smart people to stay there.

One possible candidate would be “very large and messy countries but with a unique ethos,” such as India or Nigeria.  If you are born in Latvia, having to migrate to and live in say Frankfurt or London just isn’t that much of a life disruption from the point of view of culture, and you can be at peace with what your breakfast likely will be.  It is perhaps harder to leave fufu or chapati behind.

Alternatively, Mexico would seem to be an example of a country where the most talented usually do not leave, and indeed we observe that Mexican migration to the United States is only of “average” human capital quality.  Many of the most talented Mexicans are keen to stay in Mexico, where they can earn relatively high incomes, have lots of servants, pursue a variety of life styles with impunity, and enjoy higher social status than they would receive in the States.  Yet perhaps those overall features — which induce the talented to stay — are also correlated with the economic, political, and social environment being somewhat dysfunctional?

Footnote: There are numerous very talented Mexican migrants from poor or possibly indigenous backgrounds.  But often they do not have the core educational conditions in their upbringing to be able to mobilize their ambitions to achieve maximum productivity potential.

Prejudice and foreign policy views

Scholars of foreign policy preference formation have accepted what Rathbun et al. (2016) call the “vertical hierarchy model,” which says that policy attitudes are determined by more abstract moral ideas about right and wrong. This paper turns this idea on its head by introducing the prejudice first model, arguing that foreign policy preferences and orientations are in part driven by attitudes towards the groups being affected by specific policies. Three experiments are used to test the utility of this framework. First, when conservatives heard about Muslims killing Christians, as opposed to the opposite scenario, they were more likely to support a humanitarian intervention and agree that the United States has a moral obligation to help those persecuted by their governments. Liberals showed no religious preference. When the relevant identity group was race, however, liberals were more likely to want to help blacks persecuted by whites, while conservatives showed no racial bias. In contrast, the degree of persecution mattered relatively little to respondents in either experiment. In another experiment, conservatives adopted more isolationist policies after reading a text about the country becoming more liberal, as opposed to a paragraph that said the United States was a relatively conservative country. The treatment showed the opposite effect on liberals, although the results fell just short of statistical significance. While not necessarily contradicting the vertical hierarchy model, the results indicate that prejudices and biases not only help influence foreign policy attitudes, but moral perceptions of right and wrong in international politics.

That is from Richard Hanania and Robert Trager.  File under “Mood Affiliation…”

Does Taiwan have the weirdest politics in the world?

That is the topic of my Bloomberg column earlier in the week, here is one excerpt:

Chiang Kai-shek, the first leader of the island, was part of a generation of Asian visionary leaders which is perhaps without parallel. It includes Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Park Chung-Hee in South Korea, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in China, and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Whether you admire these figures or not, theirs  was an unparalleled time for nation building and at a much swifter pace than in European history.

And there is no successful polity that has so many apparently insoluble problems:

Taiwan is also inextricably linked to the economy of the mainland. By one estimate, over 10% of the Taiwanese population lives or works in mainland China, including many of the most ambitious Taiwanese, and China is by far the number one counterparty for trade and investment. Taiwanese real wages stagnated from 2000-2016, in large part because it was more profitable for Taiwanese investors to send their capital to the mainland. The Taiwanese birth rate has plummeted to 1.2 per woman, possibly the lowest in the world.

The Chinese also wish to take them over, by the way.  Finally, I close with some remarks on the forthcoming election.

How I practice at what I do

Following up on my post a few days ago, about the value of deliberate practice for knowledge workers, a number of you asked me what form my practice takes.  A few of you were skeptical, but it is long since established that practice improves both your writing and your memory, so surely it can do much more than that for your thinking.  Here is a partial list of some of my intellectual practice strategies:

1. I write every day.  I also write to relax.

2. Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own.  I recommend this for most of you.

3. I do serious reading every day.

4. After a talk, Q&A session, podcast — whatever — I review what I thought were my weaker answers or interventions and think about how I could improve them.  I rehearse in my mind what I should have said.  Larry Summers does something similar.

5. I spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to crack cultural codes.  I view this as a comparative advantage, and one which few other people in my fields are trying to replicate.  For one thing, it makes me useful in a wide variety of situations where I have little background knowledge.  This also helps me invest in skills which will age relatively well, as I age.  For me, this is perhaps the most importantly novel item on this list.

6. I listen often to highly complex music, partly because I enjoy it but also in the (silly?) hope that it will forestall mental laziness.

7. I have regular interactions with very smart people who will challenge me and be very willing to disagree, including “GMU lunch.”

8. Every day I ask myself “what did I learn today?”, a question I picked up from Amihai Glazer.  I feel bad if I don’t have a clear answer, while recognizing the days without a clear answer are often the days where I am learning the most (at least in the equilibrium where I am asking myself this question).

9. One factor behind my choice of friends is what kind of approbational sway they will exercise over me.  You should want to hang around people who are good influences, including on your mental abilities.  Peer effects really are quite strong.

10. I watch very little television.  And no drugs and no alcohol should go without saying.

11. In addition to being a “product” in its own right, I also consider doing Conversations with Tyler — with many of the very smartest people out there — to be a form of practice.  It is a practice for speed, accuracy in understanding written writings, and the ability to crack the cultural codes of my guests.

12. I teach — a big one.

Physical exercise is a realm all of its own, and that is good for your mind too.  For me it is basketball, tennis, exercise bike, sometimes light weights, swimming if I am at a decent hotel with a pool.  My plan is to do more of this.

Here are a few things I don’t do:

Taking notes is a favorite with some people I know, though my penmanship and coordination and also typing are too problematic for that.

I also don’t review video or recordings of myself, for fear that will make me too self-conscious.  For many people that is probably a good idea, however.

I don’t spend time trying to improve my memory, which is either very bad or very good, depending on the kind of problem facing me.  (If I need to remember to do something, I require a visual cue, sometimes a pile on the floor, and that creates a bit of a mess.  But it works — spatial organization is information!)

I’ve never practiced trying to type on a small screen, though probably I should.

I’ll close by repeating the end of my previous post:

Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”  If you don’t know the answer to that one, maybe you are doing something wrong or not doing enough. Or maybe you are (optimally?) not very ambitious?

Better training has brought big improvements to the quality of athletics and also chess, and many of those advances are quite recent — when is the intellectual world going to follow suit?  When are you going to follow suit?

From the comments, was 1970 an American turning point of sorts?

A lot of things changed around 1970. That year looks like a major historical fulcrum for the USA.

1970 was approximately (within a few years):

1. The year manufacturing employment started to stagnate (later to decline).
2. The Great Compression reached its peak.
3. The Great Stagnation began.
4. Roe v. Wade was passed
5. Women entering workforce en masse.
6. Historic increase in immigration begins.
7. End of Bretton Woods.
8. Beginning of large trade deficits.

That is from Famulus.

Why so many women in public affairs schools?

This paper presents on three new styled facts: first, schools of public affairs hire many economists; second, those economists are disproportionately female; and third, salaries in schools of public affairs are, on average, lower than salaries in mainline departments of economics. We seek to understand the linkage, if any, among these facts. We assembled a unique database of over 2,150 faculty salary profiles from the top 50 Schools of Public Affairs in the United States as well as the corresponding Economics and Political Science departments. For each faculty member we obtained salary data to analyze the relationship between scholarly discipline, department placement, gender, and annual salary compensation. We found substantial pay differences based on departmental affiliation, significant differences in citation records between male and female faculty in schools of public affairs, and no evidence that the public affairs discount could be explained by compositional differences with respect to gender, experience or scholarly citations.

That is the abstract of a new NBER working paper by Lori L. Taylor, Kalena E. Cortes, and Travis C. Hearn.  I have a vague sense that the same might be true of public policy schools as well.  Why?

Learn like an athlete, knowledge workers should train

LeBron James didn’t always have thick calves, a raging six-pack, and arms like the Incredible Hulk.

Ask LeBron about his off-season training regimen, and he’ll share a detailed run-down of his workout plan and on-the-court practice routine. When he entered the NBA, LeBron wasn’t a strong shooter. I’d bet the house that early in his career, LeBron built his off-season training regimen around his weak jump shot and disappointing 42% field goal percentage during his rookie season. As his Instagram posts reveal, LeBron worked for his strength, agility, impeccable history of injury avoidance, and an outstanding 54% field goal percentage during his 14th NBA season.

Athletes train. Musicians train. Performers train. But knowledge workers don’t.

Knowledge workers should train like LeBron, and implement strict “learning plans.” To be sure, intellectual life is different from basketball. Success is harder to measure and the metrics for improvement aren’t quite as clear. Even then, there’s a lot to learn from the way top athletes train. They are clear in their objectives and deliberate in their pursuit of improvement.

Knowledge workers should imitate them.

That is from David Perell, more at the link.  Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”  If you don’t know the answer to that one, maybe you are doing something wrong or not doing enough. Or maybe you are (optimally?) not very ambitious?

Thursday assorted links

1. Whose advice should you take?

2. Buddhists go to war (NYT): “But Buddhism, whose adherents make up only 7 percent of the global faithful, is the only major religion whose population is not expected to grow in absolute numbers over the next few decades…”

3. Taiwan’s status is a geopolitical absurdity.

4. Minimum wage effects and monopsony?

5. My *Big Business* podcast with Michael Baranowski.

6. How Prohibition came about.  And how Prohibition ended.