Month: February 2022
Tabarrok on the Ezra Klein Podcast
Late last year I responded to an excellent tweet storm from Ezra Klein by in effect saying he should read Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations. And you know what? He did! Ezra then kindly invited me on to his New York Times podcast to discuss public choice, liberalism, and the rise and decline of nations.
A few good quotes from me:
Japan has caught up to us in slowing down.
And
Let me put it in a way that progressives can understand, there is an inequality of voice and that inequality of voice also goes to the rich and the powerful and the people who can hire lawyers and the people who can use these so-called equitable institutions to their advantage—even the people in the marginalized communities have not benefited.
Ezra asked challenging questions and had lots of interesting things to say. I was especially struck by his argument that people want to tell heroic stories about themselves and so rent seeking comes to be redefined as something heroic. I think that’s an important insight which public choice scholars are likely to overlook–it becomes harder and harder to break out of a rent-seeking equilibrium not just because of transitional gains traps and the like but because the equilibrium comes to be seen as virtuous.
You also get to hear me rant about new hiring procedures at GMU and my HOA.
Ezra asks a good question about why developer interest groups don’t dominate the planning process.
We also talk about crypto and decentralized consensus as well as other topics.
Whether you call it state capacity libertarianism, creating the innovation nation, or supply side progressivism, I think this movement, which Ezra is leading from the left, is one of the most important movements today.
Podcast: Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript here.
The Covid pandemic, circa February 2022
It is widely believed that speaking helps to spread Covid, including in public places. Yet if you try to book a ticket on the Acela (a term also used sarcastically to describe a particular brand of Eastern elites), you can get tickets only in the Quiet Car. The rest of the train is already sold out, because people prefer to be able to talk.
You may not think that is how things should be, but that is how they are. And no, the Acela does not run from Alabama to West Virginia.
Covid markets in everything, foreign intelligence edition
A government-approved Covid testing firm is being investigated by the UK’s data privacy watchdog after it emerged that it plans to sell customers’ DNA to third parties.
Cignpost Diagnostics, which trades as ExpressTest and offers £35 tests for holidaymakers, said it holds the right to analyse samples from seals to “learn more about human health” – and sell information on to third parties.
Individuals are required to give informed consent for their sensitive medical data to be used – but customers’ consent for their DNA to be sold now as buried in Cignpost’s online documents.
When buying tests, customers were asked to tick a box agreeing to a 4,876 privacy policy which links to a separate document outlining the research programme, The Sunday Times reported…
Cignpost was founded last year and is believed to have sold as many as three million tests. It supplies pre-departure and arrival tests for travellers, with walk-in centres at sites including Gatwick and Heathrow.
Here is the full story, via Michael J.
Friday assorted links
Wokeism has peaked
Virginia has gone Republican (temporarily, because of school-related issues), San Francisco recalled its school board by a decisive margin, Joe Rogan wasn’t cancelled, and there may be a significant war in Ukraine. That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt:
The turning point for the fortunes of the woke may be this week’s school board election in San Francisco, where three members were recalled by a margin of more than 70%. Voters were upset that the school board spent time trying to rename some schools in a more politically correct manner, rather than focusing on reopening all the schools. There was also considerable opposition to the board’s introduction of a lottery admissions system for a prestigious high school, in lieu of the previous use of grades and exam scores.
And:
Another trend is how relatively few immigrants are woke. Latinos in particular seem more open to the Republican Party, or at least don’t seem to have strong partisan attachments. More generally, immigrant political views are more diverse than many people think, even within the Democratic Party.
And:
Wokeism is likely to evolve into a subculture that is highly educated, highly White and fairly feminine. That is still a large mass of people, but not enough to run the country or all its major institutions. In the San Francisco school board recall, for instance, the role of Asian Americans was especially prominent.
In addition:
The woke also are likely to achieve an even greater hold over American universities. Due to the tenure system, personnel turnover is low, and currently newer and younger faculty are more left-wing than are older faculty, including in my field of economics. The simple march of retirements is going to make universities even more left-wing — and even more out of touch with mainstream America.
I hereby inscribe this prediction in The Book of Tetlock.
*The Invention of Power*
The author is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and the subtitle is Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West. Here is the main thesis:
Why Europe became distinct after the year 1000 and not before can be reduced to this surprisingly simple reason: in Europe, the head of religion and the head(s) of state were different people who faced off against one another in long-standing, long-lasting, intense competition for political control. Certainly, the rulers of China and Japan were thought to be gods.
I consider this broadly consistent with my own views, although I see many other significant factors in the broader history, including natural geography and political fragmentation. Nor can you dismiss the role of imperialism entirely, plus that the growth of the West came “at the right time” (for the West at least). I like this book, but I don’t think it quite has the knockdown proof of its thesis that it pretends to. And the book is oddly silent about Christianity as a general phenomenon. There is talk of popes and churches on almost every page, and yet Christianity as an intellectual innovation, helping to make liberalism more likely, does not play much of a role in the narrative. And given how general and deeply rooted some of the mechanisms are, I don’t quite understand why so much stress is placed on the 1122 Concordat of Worms — surely that is endogenous too? It is an odd philosophy of history in which so much hinges on a single event and then for almost a thousand years the rest that follows is locked in.
Jessica Flanigan interviews me and I interview her back
She teaches at University of Richmond, and writes philosophy from perspectives that are broadly libertarian and also Christian. We spoke about many different matters, as she interviewed me as I interview guests on CWT. Some of the chat focused on my views on higher education. When I interview her back, it is mostly about the scope and limits of paternalism.
It was very nice to do another public event with a live audience. And ignore the talk title, it was about only five percent of the session.
There will be three JPEs
We are pleased to announce that the Journal of Political Economy is launching two new journals under the JPE umbrella. The Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics and Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics will broaden the scope of high-quality theoretical and empirical papers published by the JPE journals.
That is from my email. One meta-lesson is that to date brand names in academic journals have been underexploited for a long time!
Thursday assorted links
1. MicroRNAs and the complex octopus brain.
3. How many Covid deaths in Kenya?
4. “Stunning stat from the latest issue of @TheEconomist: Chicago police clear (roughly, “solve”) around 45% of murders. By comparison, London police solve around 98% of murders.” Link here.
A simple model of Putin and the Ukraine crisis
I think the correct model here is “Putin has put down so many chips, he can’t walk away with nothing. He wants to wreck Ukraine (more than taking territory per se). He will do the minimum amount he can that leaves him with a strong probability of having wrecked Ukraine, and no more.”
That still leaves a broad range of possible outcomes, but at the moment that is my mental model for updating with new information.
Fishy Results on Ocean Acidification
The replication crisis isn’t just about social psychology. A meta-analysis of the effect of ocean acidification on fish behavior shows a big decline in effect size as the studies get larger and better.
Using a systematic review and meta-analysis of 91 studies empirically testing effects of ocean acidification on fish behavior, we provide quantitative evidence that the research to date on this topic is characterized by a decline effect, where large effects in initial studies have all but disappeared in subsequent studies over a decade. The decline effect in this field cannot be explained by 3 likely biological explanations, including increasing proportions of studies examining (1) cold-water species; (2) nonolfactory-associated behaviors; and (3) nonlarval life stages. Furthermore, the vast majority of studies with large effect sizes in this field tend to be characterized by low sample sizes, yet are published in high-impact journals and have a disproportionate influence on the field in terms of citations. We contend that ocean acidification has a negligible direct impact on fish behavior, and we advocate for improved approaches to minimize the potential for a decline effect in future avenues of research. [emphasis added, AT]
An underdiscussed biomedical problem?
Including for longevity research, and perhaps most of all for longevity devices:
Neural implants—devices that interact with the human nervous system, either on its periphery or in the brain—are part of a rapidly growing category of medicine that’s sometimes called electroceuticals. Some technologies are well established, like deep-brain stimulators that reduce tremors in people with Parkinson’s disease. But recent advances in neuroscience and digital technology have sparked a gold rush in brain tech, with the outsized investments epitomized by Elon Musk’s buzzy brain-implant company, Neuralink. Some companies talk of reversing depression, treating Alzheimer’s disease, restoring mobility, or even dangle the promise of superhuman cognition.
Not all these companies will succeed, and Los Angeles–based Second Sight provides a cautionary tale for bold entrepreneurs interested in brain tech. What happens when cutting-edge implants fail, or simply fade away like yesterday’s flip phones and Betamax? Even worse, what if the companies behind them go bust?
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal. Was Colonel Steve Austin built out of parts from start-ups? How many of those companies still would be around?
Was Fischer Black right about monetary policy?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column:
Paul Krugman has argued that there was not high inflation after 2008 because the U.S. economy was in a liquidity trap. Black’s rejoinder to the Keynesians was a subtle one: We are always in a liquidity trap. Since banks can bid for reserves, and reserves can pass in and out of banks freely, the net value of additional bank reserves must be equal to other uses of the funds. The monetary expansion of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which operates through banks, is thus like swapping two nickels for a dime. Whether or not nominal interest rates are zero, after the swap banks can still move back to whichever portfolio they wished to hold. Thus any Fed actions will prove neutral if that is what the banks, and the economy as a whole, desire.
And the accompanying footnote?
- Both market monetarists and Keynesians admit that in a traditional liquidity trap, monetary policy still can be effective if the Fed can make credible promises to inflate. I regard this as a substantive concession to the Fischer Black view, even if it is not usually presented as such.
And:
I can’t quite bring myself around to the Fischer Black view on inflation. I was brought up believing in a well-defined quantity of money that causally determines the price level, and I still see central banks commanding a lot of attention from the markets. Nonetheless, as central banks rely more on market expectations to orchestrate macroeconomic outcomes, I no longer see the Fischer Black views as so far from the current mainstream.
Black formulated his basic arguments to cover open market operations, as in his time such fine practices as tri-party repo did not have their current import. What exactly does the Black argument look like for current times? What are the exact mechanisms for “the market undoes the actions of the central bank” and how plausible are they?
Against alcohol, part #6437
Utah’s shift to lower the legal limit for a driver’s blood-alcohol concentration successfully reduced car-crash deaths in its first year of adoption, according to a new report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The law, which took effect on Dec. 30, 2018, made Utah the only state in the country in which a driver can be arrested for having a blood-alcohol concentration between .05% and .079%.
NHTSA’s report found that fatal car crashes in Utah were down 5.1% in 2019 from the year before the law went into effect. Nationally, fatal car crashes fell 2% in the same period. Fatal crashes in which alcohol was detected dropped to 38 from 56 in 2019, the first time such crashes declined in three years, Utah Highway Safety Office data shows.
Here is more from the WSJ, via Tim Gillespie.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Which are the billionaires that Democrats like?
2. “Thousands Pledge To Egg Jeff Bezos’s Mega-Yacht As It Passes Through Rotterdam Bridge.”
3. Award winners from new Mercatus project on pluralism and civil society, with an EV-like application structure (but not selected by me).
5. My podcast excerpt with Joe Lonsdale. And for the full output YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnLPwI9taYA
6. Chatham University reinstitutes tenure after having abolished it.