Month: November 2019
Saturday assorted links
2. Converting dog years into human years kind of like a price index problem Eric Weinstein would say use gauge theory. Yet “The new formula says a canine’s human age = 16 ln(dog age) + 31.”
3. Is the Fed permanently stepping up its involvement in money markets?
4. Alexey Guzey on sleep fallacies.
5. Is a living whale worth $2 million in fighting climate change?
6. The worst economic policies of any candidate in my lifetime: “Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has unveiled sweeping tax proposals that would push federal tax rates on some billionaires and multimillionaires above 100%.” (WSJ)
Pretty stunning data on dating
Interesting throughout, but most of all see pp.5-6, comparing how men rate women to how women rate men. Here is half of that story:
Here is the link, by Dan McMurtrie, via David Perell. The top of p.2 will indicate why friendship may be in decline:
You also can see that meeting on the job peaked in the 1990s, and do I need to tell you about meeting through church and the neighbors? Recommended.
*The Decadent Society*
The author is Ross Douthat and the subtitle is How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Excellent book! It has a real dose of Peter Thiel (and some Tyler Cowen), and most of it comes as fresh material even if you have read all of Ross’s other columns and books. Imagine the idea of technological stagnation tied together with a conservative Catholic critique of decadence, and in a convincing manner with a dose of pro-natalism tossed in for good measure. There is commentary on Star Wars, Back to the Future, Jordan Peterson, and much more.
America’s problems are not what you think they are!
Definitely recommended, due out February, and you can pre-order here.
Wojciech Kopczuk on wealth taxation
His comment on Saez and Zucman is one of the best pieces of policy economics I have read in the last few years. Many of the main arguments have been debated on Twitter, or expressed by Larry Summers, so here I will stick with a few side points that have not received full attention.
First, if you hate monopoly rents, excess IP income, and the like, you should not be in love with a wealth tax, at least not in the steady state! A wealth tax hits the base and the safe rate of return as well. Ideally the anti-monopoly crowd should most of all favor higher taxes on net income. Not taxes on wealth.
Second, a wealth tax will encourage the shifting of much more production into non-profit institutions, or perhaps even into nationalizations of industry. Lots of hospitals would switch back to the not-for-profit form, not obviously a beneficial development in my view.
As a side note, many more non-profits would hire famous musical acts to play at their donor galas. The quality of champagne and cheese at those events will rise too. There would be much more pressure on non-profits to create private (non-taxed) benefits for their donors. I predict government regulation of non-profits would end up rising considerably as well, and not for the better.
Privatizing government assets such as land or spectrum would become more difficult — people would buy only at much lower prices. So the wealth tax is a recipe for greater statism in more ways than one.
Third, under a wealth tax Jeff Bezos would have lost de facto control over Amazon some time ago.
Those are my words rather than Kopfczuk’s, do read his entire paper.
I would add one final point. I think we are at the margin where advocacy of a wealth tax is more of a performative exercise — “we hadn’t poked rich people in the eye with this rhetorical needle yet, therefore I won’t really speak against it” — than any kind of substantive analytic debate.
Mortality sentences to ponder paging Ross Douthat too
This paper uses complete death certificate data from the Mortality Multiple Cause Files with American Community Survey data to examine age-specific mortality rates for married and non-married people from 2007 to 2017. The overall rise in White mortality is limited almost exclusively to those who are not married, for men and women…
That is from Philip N. Cohen, via Arnold Kling.
Friday assorted links
1. Markets in everything billionaire tears mug.
2. Video of new Peter Thiel speech.
3. Acuity covers contemporary defenders of American big business.
4. Very excited to announce the new Tim Harford podcast Cautionary Tales, affiliated with the Malcolm Gladwell podcast enterprise.
5. Measuring soccer player quality.
6. New or old spire for Notre Dame?
7. States are sealing criminal records and for the better (The Economist).
Garett Jones on open borders
I am very pleased that the new Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith open borders graphic novel has hit #1 on The Washington Post non-fiction bestseller list. I am also pleased to see Garett Jones examine the idea in a new short paper, here is part of his critique:
I use the same constant returns to scale framework as Caplan, in which the migration of every human being to the United States would increase global output per capita by about 80%. I then estimate that in the benchmark model, where IQ’s social return is much larger than its private return, the per-capita income of current U.S.residents would permanently fall by about 40%. This is not an arithmetic fallacy: this is the average causal effect of Open Borders on the incomes of ex-ante Americans. This income decline occurs because cognitive skills matter mostly through externalities: because your nation’s IQ matters so much more than your own, as I claim in 2015’s Hive Mind. Therefore, a decline in a nation’s set of average cognitive skills will tend to reduce the productivity of the nation’s ex-ante citizens.
I will be sure to link to Bryan’s reply when it comes.
USA fact of the day
More than a third of Ph.D. students have sought help for anxiety or depression caused by Ph.D. study, according to results of a global survey of 6,300 students from Nature.
Thirty-six percent is a very large share, considering that many students who suffer don’t reach out for help. Still, the figure parallels those found by other studies on the topic. A 2018 study of mostly Ph.D. students, for instance, found that 39 percent of respondents scored in the moderate-to-severe depression range. That’s compared to 6 percent of the general population measured with the same scale.
And this:
Twenty-one percent of respondents said they’d been bullied in their programs. Of those, 48 percent said their supervisor was the perpetrator.
Here is the full story from Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed.
What should I ask Abhijit Banerjee?
I will be recording a Conversation with him, no associated public event. So what should I ask him?
I thank you all in advance for the assistance.
Sir Rod Stewart
He’s one of rock’s biggest stars, but Sir Rod Stewart has finally revealed the fruits of his other great passion – model railways.
In between making music and playing live, Sir Rod has been working on a massive, intricate model of a US city for the past 23 years.
He unveiled it as part of an interview with Railway Modeller magazine.
He then phoned in to Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 show to rebuff the host’s suggestion he had not built it himself.
“I would say 90% of it I built myself,” he insisted. “The only thing I wasn’t very good at and still am not is the electricals, so I had someone else do that.”
Sir Rod has released 13 studio albums and been on 19 tours during the time it took to build the city, which is modelled on both New York and Chicago around 1945.
Here is more, via the BBC. Via Ilya Novak.
$1 billion in talent identification and support from Schmidt Futures
Eric Schmidt, that is:
Rise cohort members, who will apply between the ages of 15 and 17, will be eligible for various types of support. They will be invited to attend a residential fellowship before their final year of high school that will support them as they consider how to serve others, how to become leaders, and how to transition to higher education and careers. Participants may also receive scholarships to continue their education, mentorship and other assistance tailored to their specific needs and interests, and a variety of career services as part of the Rise network.
To encourage service, Rise will invite its community members to make service commitments together and develop a platform to match network members with common interests. Among a range of pursuits, we envision that Rise winners will create policy, build new enterprises that benefit the public, catalyze new interdisciplinary areas of study, and develop new solutions to the world’s hardest problems.
Here is more information.
Thursday assorted links
1. “OK Boomer” escalated rapidly.
2. Blackpink has 31.3 million YouTube subscribers, more than any other musical group. Do you even know who they are? By the way, are they feminist or anti-feminist?
3. Wherein lies Otomí intellectual property? (NYT)
4. Markets in everything cereals that should not exist (Twinkies).
Bonus CWT episode with Fuchsia Dunlop
Here is the transcript and audio, and wonderful photos, over a Chinese meal at Mama Chang in Fairfax, run by the famous Peter Chang. I am not acting as lead interviewer, so this is more like a “Conversation with Tyler chiming in,” nonetheless numerous D.C. area food luminaries are present, as are other members of the Cowen family. Here is one brief excerpt:
T. COWEN: You learned Chinese food in China, of course, much of it in Sichuan province, Hunan province. As Chinese teach food, how is the method of education and training different from, say, Great Britain or the United States?
DUNLOP: Well, I haven’t been to culinary school in Great Britain or the United States, so I’m not sure.
T. COWEN: You’ve been to school in these countries.
DUNLOP: The first thing is that when you go to cooking school, you are learning the building blocks of a cuisine, which is like the grammar of a language. So the basic components, the basic processes and flavors, which you then put together to make a multitude of dishes.
Whereas, I guess, if you were studying French cuisine, you will learn some classic sauces, a bit of knife work, techniques of pastry making. In China, in Sichuan, absolutely fundamental was dao gong (刀工), the knife skills.
[Lydia] CHANG: I actually have a story to share about Dad’s cutting knife. He said when he first started learning, in school, there’s only limited time, but he wants to really excel at it. So he returned back to the dorm, started cutting, using cleaver to cut newspaper to practice.
Some of you will like this a lot, but don’t expect a normal CWT episode. And here is Fuchsia’s wonderful new book The Food of Sichuan, a significantly updated new edition of the old.
The Google checking account?
Google will soon offer checking accounts to consumers, becoming the latest Silicon Valley heavyweight to push into finance.
The project, code-named Cache, is expected to launch next year with accounts run by Citigroup Inc. C -0.70% and a credit union at Stanford University, a tiny lender in Google’s backyard.
Big tech companies see financial services as a way to get closer to users and glean valuable data. Apple Inc. introduced a credit card this summer. Amazon.com Inc. has talked to banks about offering checking accounts. Facebook Inc. is working on a digital currency it hopes will upend global payments…
Google’s approach seems designed to make allies, rather than enemies, in both camps. The financial institutions’ brands, not Google’s, will be front-and-center on the accounts, an executive told The Wall Street Journal. And Google will leave the financial plumbing and compliance to the banks—activities it couldn’t do without a license anyway.
Here is more from Peter Rudegeair and Liz Hoffman at the WSJ.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Can Republicans afford to be pro-immigrant?
3. Deirdre.
4. Maps of American restaurant quality.
5. NBA-China update.
6. Electricity and structural transmission, tweet version here.