Month: February 2022
What is so great about *Pet Sounds*?
That question is the subject of this short Holden Karnofsky essay. Many people told Holden it is the best album ever, some citing its use of the recording studio, and he tried to work his way through that claim, basically remaining skeptical. Here are various responses to him. Here is a piece explaining the wonders of Pet Sounds, it is OK enough but not so insightful. I would stress the following points:
1. It is an album of sadness, loss, and infinite longing. Melancholy. Do I know of a sadder album? Listen to the lyrics. And yet it is all set amongst the sunshine and girls and southern California. As for the harmonies, they are continually building up expectation and never satisfying it. It is necessary for the album to end on the down note of “Caroline, No,” a song which itself just fades away and ends, merging into the “pet sounds” that give the album its name. I think of the combination of the sadness and the rising and swelling but never satisfied expectations as the key feature of Pet Sounds.
2. It is worth a listen-through following only the bass lines. You also will hear the huge influence on Paul McCartney.
2b. It is worth a listen-through following only the harmonies. The bells. The percussion. The woodwinds.
3. I don’t even think it is the best Beach Boys album. Or sort of it is. Overall I find the Smile period to be more profound, noting that this material ended up spread out over a number of separate albums. That said, every single composition on Pet Sounds is excellent.
4. “You Still Believe in Me” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” I both prefer to “God Only Knows,” which perhaps I have heard too many times.
5. Overall I find the secret to the Beach Boys (and some Beatles) listening to be their sound world. Interpret the Beach Boys through John Cage! Listen to a simple song such as “Vegetables,” but on a very good sound system or with head phones. Surrounded by silence. Or pick some of the other works from the Smile period, or even Wild Honey or the top cuts on Sunflower, such as tracks 7-10. Try to discern the sound of the air behind the music, the silences, and the tautness of the sounds that are sent your way. Internalize that understanding (if you are trying this for the Beatles, pick the noises at the end of “You Never Give Me Your Money.”) Carry that understanding of the sound world with you every time you hear a Beach Boys song. At first you will hear that sound world in the “pet sounds” at the end of the album, most of all the train, and then will you will hear it throughout the entire album.
Musical life will never be the same again.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Democrats talking about their political problems, circa 1989. (That was then, this is now!)
3. Kinds of people, in universities. Or is there only one?
4. Will inter-state war take place in cities? And some reasons why India supports Russia. And one Ukraine book list.
5. Correlations. Cowen’s Second Law. And regulatory diffusion.
Will Our Military State Fail Us? II
A few years ago I reported on how the US repeatedly loses to China in war games (no indent):
David Ignatius writing in the Washington Post:
Redistribution sentences to ponder
After accounting for indirect taxes and in-kind transfers, the US redistributes a greater share of national income to low-income groups than any European country.
Here is the full paper by Thomas Blanchet, Lucas Chancel, and Amory Gethin. Please also note that “context is that which is scarce,” and the authors probably attach a different interpretation to this sentence than I do.
Via Ilya Novak.
Bryan Caplan is starting his own blog
I began blogging for EconLog in 2005. I hadn’t even published my first book, but Liberty Fund took a chance on me and made me a regular blogger. After seventeen years and thousands of blog posts, I’m supremely grateful to Liberty Fund, my fellow bloggers, and of course you, dear EconLog readers.
Starting on March 1, however, I have accepted a position running an all-new blog, Bet On It, hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas. I will be the chief blogger as well as the editor. As you may know, I’ve spent about four months of Covid as a visiting scholar at the University of Texas. It’s been a great home away from home, thanks to Executive Director Carlos Carvalho. And since the Salem Center is energetically expanding, this was a natural move. Part of the deal is that I’ll continue to spend several weeks in Austin every year – and work with Salem to recruit other visiting scholars, hold public events, and much more.
The upshot is that this will be my last week as an EconLog blogger. I sincerely hope you all keep following EconLog, but I’m also hoping that you’ll add Bet on It to your regular reading.
Here is the full post. The discussion is interesting more generally, mostly about how Bryan has become more pessimistic about many aspects of the world, including economics research.
Labor supply still really matters
We also document a sharp decline in desired work hours during the pandemic that persists through the end of 2021 and is roughly double the drop in the labor force participation rate. Ignoring the decline in desired hours overstates the degree of underutilization by 2.5 percentage points (12.5%). Our findings suggest that, as of 2021Q4, the labor market is tighter than suggested by the unemployment rate and the adverse labor supply effect of the pandemic is more pronounced than implied by the labor force participation rate.
That is from a new NBER working paper by R. Jason Faberman, Andreas I. Mueller, and Ayşegül Şahin.
Monday assorted links
1. “Amid escalating concern over global access to Covid-19 vaccines, BioNTech (BNTX) disclosed details about its plans to boost production in Africa. But the effort was met with a mixed reaction because the approach snubs a parallel effort by the World Health Organization.” No need to even click on the link, really (plus it is gated).
2. New study of the English Enclosures.
3. Maybe he should be on Metaculus? And good Ulrich Speck thread on Putin and Ukraine. Speck’s view is very close to my own.
5. Does the marshmallow test replicate?
6. Very good Noah Smith interview with Emi Nakamura on macro.
Who has the power?
The WSJ has several good piece on electric power in the United States, many of which are relevant to my recent podcast with Ezra Klein. Starting with the increased unreliability of America’s electric grid.
The U.S. power system is faltering just as millions of Americans are becoming more dependent on it—not just to light their homes, but increasingly to work remotely, charge their phones and cars, and cook their food—as more modern conveniences become electrified.
… Much of the transmission system, which carries high-voltage electricity over long distances, was constructed just after World War II, with some lines built well before that. The distribution system, the network of smaller wires that takes electricity to homes and businesses, is also decades old, and accounts for the majority of outages.
We need more power but are relying on transmission lines we put into places decades ago when we could still build things. The second WSJ article is on the 17-year travail to get a new power cable from hydropower rich Quebec to Boston.
Blackstone made other discoveries that altered the project. Its environmental consultants spent the summer of 2010 watching patches of blue lupine for endangered Karner blue butterflies and frosted elfins, a threatened species. They spotted two Karners and wrote a plan for avoiding damage to the wildflowers upon which the butterflies rely. Arrangements were also made to protect bald eagle nests that might be present during construction and identify shagbark hickories big enough for the endangered Indiana bat to roost.
When it became clear developers wouldn’t get state approval to dig beneath Haverstraw Bay, where endangered Atlantic sturgeon live, they redrew the route again.
These adjustments weren’t enough to stop opposition from several groups that normally aren’t aligned: the Sierra Club, energy companies, a bipartisan group of lawmakers and a labor union. Sierra Club argued that importing power threatened the development of in-state renewable-energy projects and could cause environmental damage in Canada.
That stand put the environmental advocacy club on the same side as the operator of a soon-to-close nuclear power plant called Indian Point as well as the Business Council of New York State and the Independent Power Producers of New York Inc., which fought the line on behalf of entrenched electricity providers.
Lawmakers objected for local reasons, with one saying he didn’t like that the power line’s energy would bypass dozens of upstate counties. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 97 argued it threatened upstate renewable projects, would eliminate the need for additional gas-fired plants and “be deleterious of New York state energy jobs.”
The developers pledged $40 million to train New Yorkers for green-energy jobs and agreed to fund an environmental trust with $117 million. The trust would help pull invasive plants from Lake Champlain, restore oyster reefs around New York City and pay for implanting acoustic transmitters in adult sturgeon so scientists could study the fish.
Blackstone still faces one last step: That supply contract needs the approval of the New York Public Service Commission. One group that still opposes it is Riverkeeper, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Hudson. Riverkeeper initially supported the project before turning against it in 2019, saying the transmission line could lead to additional dams in Quebec that would possibly expose indigenous groups to methylmercury—a neurotoxin created by microbes in freshly flooded soils that can pass up the food chain to people who live off the land.
Hydro-Québec, the supplier of power to Champlain Hudson, has no plans for new hydropower facilities, its CEO said. There have also been no reported cases of mercury poisoning resulting from consuming fish caught in Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs during more than 40 years of monitoring, according to a spokeswoman.
…“The last thing we want is more dams because of new markets,” said John Lipscomb, a patrol-boat captain and vice president for advocacy for Riverkeeper. “We are investigating and will continue to look at opportunities to stop the project.”
So there you have it, a power line that could benefit millions is threatened by a brew of “Baptists” defending a few flowers and fish, bootleggers protecting their rents, shakedown artists trying to get a share of the proceeds and hysterics longing for a return to the state of nature.
Addendum: Oh yes, the third relevant piece is about how Americans are turning to their own generators and batteries (expensive and not exactly environmentally friendly) to try to deal with the unreliable grid. I will be getting one of these systems for my own home, which also came up in the podcast with Klein.
Model this Afghanistan policy
But in both the sanctions and the seizures, you can see an almost Kafka-esque madness in the American position. They are expending all this effort to ameliorate the consequences of a sanctions regime they are implementing. They are desperately brokering deals to preserve foreign reserves that they are freezing. When I ask why they continue to impose these policies at all, the administration says that the Taliban has American prisoners, that it is a brutal regime that murders opponents and represses women, that it has links to terrorists, and that our sanctions grant us much-needed leverage.
Here is more from Ezra Klein (NYT) on the debacle of starvation unfolding in Afghanistan.
Woke, feminized CIA sentences to ponder
From River Page:
The CIA, likewise, has been most successful in its own kind of culture war, whether it be through the CCF, anti-Soviet propaganda, or the lead-up to the Iraq War. Regardless of their failures, both the CIA and the professional class use their adeptness at culture war as a means of self-justification. The CIA utilizes the new dialect of power because it grants the agency legitimacy within the ruling elite; the Left and its professional-class vanguards cry foul because they do not want to admit their own involvement in the credentialing and reproduction of this elite.
Right-wing critics acknowledge the power of wokeness but, like leftists, mistakenly believe that it is a bona fide political project capable of changing institutions rather than merely reifying them. The conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari’s dystopian fantasy about a future Kamala Harris presidency, in which America is in danger because, among other things, “the vast majority of our spooks spend their days analyzing their identities along intersectional lines of race, gender and sexuality,” presupposes a level of competence in the pre-woke CIA that is far beyond what it deserves given the historical record—the pre-woke spooks hardly kept America safe from danger. There is, however, an illuminating portion of Ahmari’s hypothetical that reveals an essential truth about “wokeness.” In the future imagined by Ahmari, the American military is ill-prepared to execute its mission, having been busy naming and renaming bases. When discussing Guantanamo Bay—now appropriately called Naval Base Mumia Abu Jamal—a staffer passively notes that the mission of the base hasn’t changed. This suggests that even the most aggressive right-wing critics of “wokeness” question its ability to change anything beneath the surface of American politics; it can change appearances, not purposes.
And this:
As the public face and self-understanding of the CIA has changed, sympathetic popular culture depictions of the organization have relied on similar themes of feminism, wokeness, and self-actualization to portray the agency’s work as morally complicated but necessary.
Here is the full piece, and for the pointer I thank a loyal MR reader.
Metaculus should restart its Lab Leak prediction aggregator
Here is the site. The forecast never went above twenty percent, and then fell consistently, with the aggregator being discontinued in May and resolved as ambiguous. I think the chance is below fifty percent, but still I would like to see this reopened, as the question does not seem to be going away. Metaculus, how about it?
Sunday assorted links
Talent Hoarding in Organizations
Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers. However, because managers are evaluated on team performance, they have an incentive to hoard talented workers, thus jeopardizing the efficient allocation of talent within firms. This study provides the first empirical evidence of talent hoarding using a unique combination of personnel records and application data from a large manufacturing firm. When managers rotate to a new position and temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers’ applications for promotions increase by 123%. Marginal applicants,who would not have applied in the absence of manager rotations, are three times as likely as average applicants to land a promotion, and perform well in higher-level positions. By reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers, talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent. Because female workers react more to talent hoarding than males, talent hoarding perpetuates gender inequality in representation and pay at the firm.
That is a new paper by Ingrid Haegele, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The new culture that is Virginia public high school
“I see these people just not wearing a mask, or wearing one pulled down, like, under their chin,” said Swan, “and my brain just immediately goes, ‘That person does not share the same ideals as me. We won’t get along.’ ” She added: “They may not be a bad person. They may just be thinking the same things as their parents.”
…School now feels, Swan said, “like a war zone”: a raging partisan battle that no one can opt out of, because every single student arrives with evidence of their politics — those without masks typically lean right, she said — written across their faces. Swan said she has stopped speaking with students who go maskless because they are dismissive of the decision to mask and unwilling to hear a different opinion.
Here is the full story, which is interesting throughout. Perhaps the French solution would be to ban masks! In the meantime, how about a policy of mandated no-masks for the teachers and administrators, unless they have health exemptions, and mask choice for each student? Or how else might we limit social strife over masking decisions? How can we move closer to the no-school masking equilibria of much of Europe>
As a side note, I believe masks have some effectiveness, but not total effectiveness, and so it is striking to me how much those in real danger think the masked environment is somehow acceptable. Some amount of risk is totally, absolutely fine, as they are not home schooling (which still would involve risk, I might add). But risk beyond that level is somehow a complete no-no — is it that they all have so accurately done the cost-benefit calculations using expected utility theory? Keep in mind that along a great number of the equilibrium paths, masks delay but do not prevent infection.
Saturday assorted links
1. Very nice Spectator coverage of Conversations with Tyler; I believe the author is an undergraduate. My favorite sentence was “He embodies the American work ethic.”
2. The guy who creates the Planet Money economics videos on TikTok (NYT).
3. Ivermectin efficacy continues to completely fail in the more serious studies. Here are further words of wisdom. This one’s a wrap, and has been for some time now.
4. Very close relatives to Covid-19 found in bats in Laos. Lowers the probability of the “gain of function” hypotheses.
5. Good Nathaniel Popper thread on NFTs.
6. The Pfizer pill is now more available (Bloomberg).