Month: September 2022
John Stuart Mill was Woke and Based
I love that John Stuart Mill was woke and based:
Looking at democracy in the way in which it is commonly conceived, as the rule of the numerical majority, it is surely possible that the ruling power may be under the dominion of sectional or class interests, pointing to conduct different from that which would be dictated by impartial regard for the interest of all. Suppose the majority to be whites, the minority negroes, or vice versâ: is it likely that the majority would allow equal justice to the minority? Suppose the majority Catholics, the minority Protestants, or the reverse; will there not be the same danger? Or let the majority be English, the minority Irish, or the contrary: is there not a great probability of similar evil? In all countries there is a majority of poor, a minority who, in contradistinction, may be called rich. Between these two classes, on many questions, there is complete opposition of apparent interest.
What is happening to American youth?
These numbers are for high schoolers:
From 1991 to 2015, seat belt use was about 3.3% higher each survey cycle compared with the previous survey cycle, adjusting for gender, race/ethnicity, and age. After 2015, seat belt use was about 1.8% lower each survey cycle than the previous survey cycle, adjusting for the same covariates.
Here is the article, and for the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Markets in everything
That John is on his feet at all is impressive—and probably foolish—considering that only eight months prior, he was five feet eight and a half. Back in September, he paid $75,000 for the agonizing privilege of having his legs surgically lengthened. That entailed having both his femurs broken, and adjustable metal nails inserted down their centers. Each nail is made of titanium, which is both flexible and sturdy, like bone, and about the size of a piccolo. The nails were extended one millimeter every day for about 90 days via a magnetic remote control. Once the broken bones heal, ta-da: a newer, taller John.
Here is the full story. Oh and this:
With a procedure like this, there are, of course, some caveats. All the height gain obviously comes from your legs, so your proportions can look a little weird, especially when you’re naked. Also, the recovery can be long and taxing. When we meet, the bones in John’s legs are not yet fully healed, and a small section of his right femur is still a little soft, like al dente spaghetti; the smallest stumble could snap a bone in two. And it’s especially dangerous since he’s a big guy, over 200 pounds.
Then there’s the pain, which is relentless, ambient. The extension of the nails in his legs stretched the nerves and tissue around the bones—especially the thick, meaty muscles like the hamstrings—to an almost excruciating degree. He couldn’t walk for months. “They fill you with enough painkillers that it’s bearable,” John explains, but his biggest fear was becoming addicted to the drugs, so he weaned himself off the regimen earlier than he should have.
File under: “The costs of lookism.” The technique is originally a Soviet one. Via Anecdotal.
*Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain*
By Richard Vinen, do not forget that the Lunar Society (subject of the very first MR post!) was based there. Here is one excerpt:
What has come to be called the Birmingham or Midlands Enlightenment brought together an unusually curious and energetic group of men…Joseph Priestly and William Hutton epitomized the atmosphere of optimism, uninhibited enquiry and material prosperity some associated with Birmingham in the eighteenth century. The former was a minister of religion, though mainly known to posterity as a scientist; the latter was a well-to-do bookseller, though mainly known to posterity as a writer, particularly as the author of the first history of his adopted city. Both men, however, came ot have less happy memories of Birmingham than those implied by the quotations above because both their houses were burned down in the Church and King riots of 1791.
Strongly recommended to all those who care about such things, you can order here.
Prediction Markets Should Be Legal
I submitted a public comment on Kalshi’s request to the CFTC to create a prediction market on which political party will be in control of each chamber of the U.S. Congress.
Political election markets have proven themselves to be a powerful tool for forecasting elections and are typically more accurate, timely and complete than alternative methods such as polls. These markets have been widely used by researchers to understand political behaviour, institutions and events. e.g. see the research summarized here
https://www.nber.org/papers/w18222
and an important application to understanding the costs of war here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0335.2008.00750.x
Political election markets are also useful to hedgers, traders and other market participants to help them predict and incorporate information about risks into asset prices.
Markets similar to political election markets have been used to predict other important events such as the prospects for war or scientific breakthroughs and have been adopted by firms to better estimate sales forecasts and other relevant events.
The United States has pioneered the use of these innovative markets and we should continue to lead in creating better means of aggreating information to improve the quality of decision making.
The David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy: Job Opportunity
The Independent Institute is seeking a capable intellectual leader with a deep and energetic commitment to classical liberal principles, an ability to communicate and connect with others, and the qualities and drive to help perpetuate David J. Theroux’s vision in the research program of the organization in the decades ahead.
As part of Independent’s commitment to excellence, continuous improvement and teamwork, the David J. Theroux Chair is responsible for ensuring that all research activities have intrinsic intellectual merit and would have a significant impact in the service of Independent’s mission to boldly advance peaceful, prosperous, and free societies, grounded in a commitment to human worth and dignity.
The Theroux Chair will ensure that Independent’s scholarship, research and peer-reviewed publications adhere to the highest scholarly standards; provide leadership in support of acquisitions, peer review, author relations, and editorial quality; collaborate with Independent’s other experts to ensure that research, content, and promotional plans and activities are appropriately aligned; and in broad terms sustain Independent’s reputation as a well-respected policy institute.
The Theroux Chair will network with scholars, academic and policy organizations, and professional organizations, in leveraging and promoting mutual efforts in advancing classical liberal analytical methods and aspirations. As opportunities present themselves, the Theroux Chair will organize conferences, symposia, and other events.
Friday assorted links
1. Various predictors and their methods and records.
2. Why aren’t obesity breakthroughs receiving more attention?
4. What music will they play at the Queen’s funeral? (NYT)
5. Private insurers are forcing changes on police departments.
6. What you can buy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for half a million dollars. Or can you?
7. Excellent Dwarkesh Patel podcast with Charles Mann. Both highly rated but still underrated!
What is the incentive here for investment in future capacity?
The EU is planning to raise €140bn from energy companies’ profits to soften the blow of record-high prices this winter in what would amount to a new bloc-wide levy in response to the crisis over Ukraine.
A proposed windfall tax on power companies that do not burn gas, the price of which has recently soared, would be accompanied by other measures on fossil fuel groups…
The commission proposal would set a mandatory threshold for prices charged by companies that produce low-cost, non-gas energy, such as nuclear and renewables groups.
Companies would have to give EU states the “excess profits” generated beyond this level, which the commission seeks to set at €180/MWh. But member states would be free to put in place lower thresholds of their own.
Here is more from the FT.
How to get me to side with the antitrust authorities
But “sustainable fashion” is a contradiction, the DealBook newsletter reports. Being “green” in fashion would mean designers and retailers would produce less — and yet companies that band together to advance such goals may run into trouble with antitrust regulators.
In June, Reuters reported that a series of raids by E.U. antitrust authorities on fashion houses was connected to companies’ discussions of limiting sales for sustainability. The European Commission has not named the companies involved or commented further on the purpose of the raids.
“There are emerging tensions between E.S.G. and antitrust,” said William Kovacic, a former Federal Trade Commission chairman, referring to environmental, social and governance goals.
Here is more from the NYT, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Thursday assorted links
1. MIE: there are more floppy disks on the market than you might think.
2. Due to shoplifting, Wegman’s is discontinuing its scan-and-go app.
4. To whom do the Benin bronzes belong? (Atlantic)
5. Percentage of Congress over the age of 70, over time.
6. New Matt Yglesias podcast with Laura McGann.
8. Hooper and Henderson on pharma markets and price controls.
The “Little Scandinavia” Prison Project
The Scandinavian Prison Project…seeks to empirically assess what happens when certain practices and principles from Scandinavian corrections are implemented in an American prison setting. The project focuses on an ongoing collaboration between the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC), the Norwegian Correctional Service (Kriminalomsorgen), the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (Krimnalvården), and the Danish Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalforsorgen).
…The “Little Scandinavia” unit differs from the regular conditions of confinement at SCI Chester in many important respects. With single cells, custom furniture, a communal kitchen, redesigned common areas, and an outdoor green space, the unit looks unlike any other. Moreover, the officers on the project have, in addition to travelling to Scandinavia to work alongside peer mentors, received training in conflict resolution, suicide prevention and other relevant skills. The uniquely low ratio of trained staff to incarcerated men is intended to facilitate positive interactions and encourage meaningful communication between the people living and working on the unit.
…Importantly, we chose to use a lottery as opposed to the more common (and to some more intuitive) approach of only allowing the most motivated or best-behaved incarcerated people to move to the unit for two main reasons. First, from an ethical perspective, we believe it is more fair and transparent to the incarcerated men to allow all—irrespective of their past behavior and current standing with staff or management—an opportunity to take part in new, potentially beneficial programs in the prison if they wish to do so. Second, using a lottery means that we can meaningfully compare the group of men housed at “Little Scandinavia” to those in the general population. Having two groups that are as similar as possible—with the exception of their conditions of confinement—is important when seeking to develop evidence on the direct impact of the unit on both in-prison and out-prison outcomes, including recidivism and other measures of community reintegration. The research team will also focus our efforts in the months and years to come on following the staff who work on the unit. In particular, we are interested in learning more about how the changing working environment impacts their stress levels, motivation, and professional identities.
I am very interested in the results of this experiment. Although people say that America is different, I think less brutal prisons and more work on reintegration can work here in principle. One issue is that I can see the experiment working both better and worse as an island in a sea of American prisons as opposed to in full equilibrium.
Kudos to Arnold Ventures for being one of the supporters of the research.
The photo isn’t from the Ikea catalogue but a room in a high-security Norwegian prison.
Hat tip: Matt Bruenig. Photo Credit.
The supply side of the labor market was indeed a factor
It wasn’t just the demand side at fault, labor supply was misbehaving as well. Put aside the Twitter one-liners about video games, the evidence is now overwhelming, as I argue in my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one excerpt:
Fast forward to the pandemic and early 2021. It was the conventional wisdom that inflation would be very difficult to create, because demand is usually deficient and supply can respond to any surge in spending, thereby offsetting inflationary pressures. That was the consensus formed after the Great Recession, and it turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Now the US is living with its consequences, namely high inflation with a possible recession to follow.
The evidence is piling up that the US has been suffering from a deficit of human capital. For instance, a recent report showed that US life expectancy first stalled and then has been falling. In other words, current Americans — or at least some subset of them — are having trouble just staying alive.
And:
Another trend is that many people are marrying later in life, or not marrying at all, especially in the lower socioeconomic strata. That’s not necessarily bad. Still, an era characterized by fussiness in marriage may also be characterized by fussiness in choice of job. And marriage itself may be a spur for getting a job, especially for men. Again, individual choices — and not just insufficient demand — seem to have been a significant reason that labor markets were so slow to recover in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
It is also instructive to look at what is called “quiet quitting.” The US economy is close to full employment, in part due to an extreme overstimulation of demand. Even so, the human capital problems and labor market malfunctions haven’t gone away — they’ve just been pushed into other facets of the workplace experience. According to a recent Gallup poll, at least 50% of the US workforce are “quiet quitters.” Meanwhile, labor productivity is down dramatically, and though the measure is imprecise, it is hardly a good sign.
Many commentators are quite willing to entertain the hypothesis that there are significant problems with human capital in the US. But when discussion turns to the slow labor-market recovery following the Great Recession, all the blame is put on a weak monetary and fiscal response.
Recommended.
*Paper Belt on Fire*
That is the new Michael Gibson book on the founding and development of the Thiel fellowship program, here are two blurbs:
“Part adventure tale, part manifesto, Paper Belt on Fire is a battle cry for anyone who ever dreamed of wresting power back from corrupt institutions—or of nailing the truth to the cathedral door.”—Peter Thiel, author of Zero to One“Michael Gibson has spearheaded a recent revolution in education, and how to turn it into true learning and achievement. Paper Belt on Fire gives an inside look at how this was accomplished, the people behind the story, and how and why America can do better.”—Tyler Cowen, author of The Great Stagnation and professor of economics, George Mason University
You can pre-order it here, due out November 8. And currently former Thiel fellow Vitalik Buterin is attempting to pull off The Merge, congratulations and let us hope this works out!
Adept
AI and the new world of cheating
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
A subtler truth is that a lot of the cheating will be modest and marginal rather than blatant. Consider computer cheating in chess. If you find a way to consult the computer every move, you will win every game with near-perfect play. You will also be caught immediately. So you might cheat for only a few moves every game — enough to help but not so much to be detected. Given that both sides will employ countermeasures, and detect suspicious instances of clearly superior performance, a lot of cheating will be pretty mediocre, and deliberately so.
As decisive moments approach, games and competitions might become less honest — and tensions in the crowd will rise as people wonder whether they are watching the real thing or some AI-aided simulacrum. Brilliancies will forever be called into question. Dishonest players, in turn, will have to carefully consider when to exercise their de facto “cheating privileges.”
Most of my piece is about non-chess issues, not chess per se. As for chess, here is a Ken Regan podcast with James Altucher, on all of these questions. Ken is the A+ expert on these questions.