Month: October 2022
The new *Revolver* boxed set
Not nearly as good as the White Album “Esher” sessions. I enjoyed the original, much speedier version of “Rain” (not actually good, but the slowed down, distorted track we all know suddenly makes more sense), hearing the evolution of “Yellow Submarine” through early acoustic John demos to the almost finished song, and George’s “Love You To” with acoustic guitar rather than Indian instrumentation.
I don’t like the newer remixes of Beatles and John Lennon material, and yes I mean you Giles Martin. In contrast, I am pleased to own a version of the Mono mix of the album.
I’m one of those who prefers The White Album to Revolver. The Revolver songs do not flow organically for me, and it is perhaps the Beatles’s fourth greatest creation? The three George songs are not outstanding, and I sympathize with “Yellow Submarine” more than wishing to hear it again. “Eleanor Rigby” runs the risk of sliding into that same status. The very greatest track in the box — “Rain” — wasn’t even on the album.
I don’t regret having spent more than $100 on these five CDs (could have been fit on two discs!), but Coase’s theory of durable goods monopoly was nonetheless foremost in my mind.
Monday assorted links
Do students choose majors rationally?
And if not, what kind of errors do they make?
Students appear to stereotype majors, greatly exaggerating the likelihood that they lead to their most distinctive jobs (e.g., counselor for psychology, journalist for journalism, teacher for education). A stylized model of major choice suggests that stereotyping boosts demand for “risky” majors: ones with rare stereotypical careers and low-paying alternative jobs…The same model predicts—and the survey data confirm—that students also overestimate rare non-stereotypical careers and careers that are concentrated within particular majors. The model also generates predictions regarding role model effects, with students exaggerating the frequency of career-major combinations held by people they are personally close to.
That is all from the job market paper of John Conlon, Business Economics at Harvard University.
What I’ve been reading
Paul Scharre, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. This book bored me, but here I mean that as a positive statement. It bored me because I knew a lot of the content already, and that is because this is such important content that I have put a lot of time into trying to know it. Both the author and I thought it was very important to know this material. AI and the military is right now is a critical issue, and this is the book to read in the area. Whether or not you are bored.
Perry Mehrling’s Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System is a definitive biography, and also a good look at the “rooted in academia but mostly in the policy world” branch of macro and finance that was so prominent in the postwar era.
I read only a small amount of Philip Short’s Putin, at more than 800 pages. It seemed entirely fine, and useful, and surely the topic is of importance. Yet I didn’t find myself learning conceptual points from it, or even new details of significance. In any case it is now the biography of Putin, and some of you will want to read it.
Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole, and Other Living Treasures is a series of short, fun takes on strange animals including the wombat (runs faster than Usain Bolt) and the pangolin, among others. Good for both adults and children.
When I first saw the title of Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, I thought it was some kind of satire, or perhaps GPT-3 run amok. Nonetheless some of the book is a serious economic history of the 1920s and its fiscal and credit policies, and you should not dismiss it out of hand. That said, mechanisms such as the supposed “logic of capital accumulation” are assigned too much explanatory power. The book also will convince you that “austerity” is almost always poorly defined.
There is Julian Gewirtz, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s. Somehow this book felt naive to me. Yes, many Chinese paths were discussed in the 1980s, but the system nonetheless had an underlying logic which reasserted itself rather brutally…
Peter H. Wilson, Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500. I thought I would love this lengthy tome (913 pp.), and it is quite a catalog, and impressively objective to boot. Yet something is missing, and I skipped around and ended up putting it down with few regrets.
Michael Pritchard, FRPS, A History of Photography in 50 Cameras is very useful and very good, exactly what it promises, good photos too (better be good!) I think of photography as one of those innovations that started 20-30 years earlier than I might otherwise have expected, had I not known the historical record. 1839 for basic daguerreotype, that is impressive.
Roger D. Congleton, Solving Social Dilemmas: Ethics, Politics, and Prosperity is a good book on classical liberalism and how it is embedded in stories of the historical evolution of cooperation.
More Sunday Chinese translation links
1. More on the Chinese translation issue. And more here. I don’t feel I am at all able to adjudicate this issue. Pointers are from KZ. And more on China and Strauss.
Sunday assorted links
1. Encyclopedia Britannica commercial from 1988.
2. Lab Leak translation squabbles.
3. What predicts Wordle cheating.
4. GPT-3 answers Cowen-Gross interview questions.
5. Best article I’ve seen on prediction market issues in DC (FT). Here is another (ungated) article.
6. Vitalik on crypto regulation.
7. Can Jack White name any Beatles song from one second of the music?
8. Is Harpy the largest eagle in the world?
9. Drone proliferation, what did they say about the next world war being fought with sticks and stones?
People are Taking the Robots’ Jobs
In How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe Derek Thompson offers this arresting anecdote:
“Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent,” the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an interview for my podcast, Plain English. “It’s more like the people are taking the robots’ jobs.”
That might sound like a quirky example, because the British economy is obviously more complex than blokes rubbing cars with soap. But it’s an illustrative case. According to the International Federation of Robotics, the U.K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovakia. One analysis of the U.K.’s infamous “productivity puzzle” concluded that outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers.
I also liked this pithy sentence of wisdom:
Today, Britain seems trapped between a left-wing aversion to growth and a right-wing aversion to openness.
Read the whole thing.
*Risky Business*
The subtitle is Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It, and the authors are the highly regarded Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Ray Fisman. The level is a bit above what could make this book a bestseller, but I consider that a good thing. The book in fact is a classic example of how to present economic research in readable, digestible form and should be regarded as such.
I do have a few qualms, but please note these are outweighed by the very high quality of the core material:
1. I think the authors underestimate how rapidly “Big Data” is shifting the information asymmetries away from consumers/policyholders. This is related to my recent remarks on AI.
1b. For reasons stemming from #1, insurance/surveillance/control, including from employers, will rise in importance as an issue, and soon. I don’t get a sense of that from reading this book. We might alleviate selection problems, while creating other difficulties including ethical dilemmas.
2. I would like to see more on moral hazard.
3. I also would want to see more — much more — on the public choice reasons why government insurance markets so often fail — the authors should consider their own title! Should the Florida government really be propping up insurance contracts and insurance markets to protect homeowners against climate change-related losses? No matter what your view, this kind of issue is under-discussed. How about the FDIC? Bailout-related moral hazard issues? Those are hardly “small potatoes.” I get that isn’t “the book they set out to write,” but still I worry that the final picture they present is misleading when it comes to market failure vs. government failure. Adverse selection is really just one part of insurance markets, but this book doesn’t teach you that.
3b. Isn’t excess liability through our court system another major reason why insurance markets fail? We needed a Price-Anderson Act, where government assumes a lot of the liability, to support our nuclear power sector, even though coal alternatives were riskier and more harmful, both short run and long run. In terms of actual importance, hasn’t this been a major, major factor?
3c. Are restrictions on “boil in oil” contracts (no matter what you think of them ethically) another factor in institutional failure here? Maybe that is one way of making America safe for bungee jumping. Or we can follow New Zealand, and limit liability here altogether. The interaction of insurance and liability law is a major issue, and we have not been getting it right.
4. The authors absolutely do consider “positive selection” (e.g., it is the responsible people who buy life insurance, thus leading to a favorable customer pool), but I would give it more emphasis. If you believe that income inequality, “deaths of despair,” and educational polarization are growing problems, this phenomenon likely is becoming more important.
4b. How about more concessions in the Obamacare analysis? For years I read that a weaker mandate would cause the system to collapse. Yet the Republicans significantly cut back on mandate enforcement and the system seems to be getting along OK, at least from that point of view. (In fact, politically speaking Trump arguably saved Obamacare.) What did everyone miss? Did they overrate adverse selection arguments and underrate positive selection? It seems that was a major failing of the economics profession, which if anything was more insistent on “the three legs of the stool” than policymakers were. The authors do cover this all at length, but they can’t bring themselves to note “we got down to 7-8 percent uninsured, the whole thing actually worked out OK, and the economists didn’t quite get it right.”
5. There are plenty of cases when expected “insurance” markets do not exist, and we cannot boil those down to adverse selection. Why don’t all those Bob Shiller proposals happen? (Is it really inside information about gdp? That seems doubtful.) Why aren’t there more prediction markets? Why have so many proposed futures contracts on exchanges failed? These all would seem to serve insurance-like purposes, among their other functions. Yet their supply seems skimpy, at least relative to an economist’s expectations. Why? Perhaps there is more to failed insurance markets than meets the eye.
I know authors can fit only so much into a book, but if I can fit this much into a blog post…I would like to see more! And I think that would result in a more realistic policy balance as well, and draw attention to major issues other than adverse selection.
Rubell Museum, Washington, D.C., review
I give it an A+/A. DC now has a new museum, taken from one family collection, namely the Rubells, who already opened a large and excellent private museum in Miami. If you know that place, this one will not surprise you.
The DC branch is in Southwest, in a former junior high school with a nice brick look (supposedly Marvin Gaye’s junior high), and it has 25 or so galleries. All but one or two of those work extremely well. More than half of the art on current exhibit is American “black art,” typically of recent vintage and on average with a representational and sometimes expressionistic bent. Some of it might count as “Woke,” but it is all there because of its quality, not its politics.
Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Cecily Brown, Carrie Mae Weems, Purvis Young, and Keith Haring would be some of the better-known artists represented in the current display. But the Rubells own thousands of works, so change is to be expected.
Some of the smaller rooms come across as cramped, but overall the curatorial impulse is nearly perfect. The right paintings are hung next to the right paintings, and each room has its own identity. Most of all, this is an excellent museum for appreciating the consistency of their taste and the consistency of their eye. The entire time you are aware that you are observing a collection.
SW will never be the same again, and it is not so far from The Wharf and Gordon Ramsey Fish n’ Chips. Admission is free for DC residents, $15 for others.
Addendum: Here is decent NYT coverage, with some photos, so far there are oddly few substantive reviews. However Garett Jones in his wisdom likes it too, don’t forget he has a new book coming out in two weeks.
Saturday assorted links
1. To be clear, I do not object to the world idolized by The New York Times (NYT). And, as a side note, maybe I’ve been thinking too much about AI lately, but does anyone else have the impression that article was written by GPT-???.
2. Five more boxes of Hegel discovered. I am curious to see how much people will care.
3. The growing import of Indian talent (Bloomberg column).
4. Talk is cheap, but I did notice this: “Sinn Fein officials have said that because of the changed political landscape, the Irish Republic should have a consultative role in running Northern Ireland, along with Britain, if the deadlock over power sharing cannot be broken.” (NYT)
A “Safety Emergency” Happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019
Pro-Publica (with Vanity Fair) is putting their reputation on the line with a very damning report suggesting COVID emerged from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The new information isn’t about the virus but about political reports that indicate that there was some kind of emergency at the lab in November of 2019, an emergency that was so serious Xi himself got involved.
… we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.
…[we] separately got three experts on CCP communications to review the WIV meeting summary. All agreed that it appeared to be urgent, nonroutine and related to some sort of biosafety emergency. Two also agreed that it appeared Xi himself had issued a pishi.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official said that, while the pishi [link, AT] in the dispatch is not necessarily a smoking gun, he reads it as saying that “there is some issue related to lab security, which doesn’t come up very often, that needed to be seen by Xi Jinping.” He added, “Something signed off on by the General Secretary (Xi) and Premier (Li) is high priority.”
there is also this, which I have long found surprising:
The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.
Vanity Fair and ProPublica spoke to experts who said that the timeline of Zhou’s vaccine development seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. Two of the three experts said it strongly suggested that his team must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.
In other news, the authors of the wet-market “orgins” preprint that received a lot of positive mainstream press have substantially moderated their conclusions in the published (peer-reviewed) article which now only pinpoints the seafood market as an epicenter, which everyone already knew.
The finite pool of worry
These rents are more than exhausted:
According to Weber’s psychological theory of the finite pool of worry, people avoid dealing with multiple negative events at the same time. Consistent with this theory, as people worry more about the COVID-19 pandemic, they tend to neglect the problem of climate change. Here, we examine the number and content of climate change discussions on Twitter from 2019 through 2021. We show that as COVID-19 cases and deaths increase, climate change tweets have a less negative sentiment. There is also less content associated with fear and anger, the emotions related to worry and anxiety. These results support the finite pool of worry hypothesis and imply that the pandemic redirects public attention from the important problem of climate change mitigation.
Here is the full article, via tekl. Perhaps I could induce you to worry about the finite pool of worry?
Interrupting Janet Yellen
How prevalent is gender bias among U.S. politicians? We analyze the transcripts of every congressional hearing attended by the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 2001 to 2020 to provide a carefully identified effect of sexism, using Janet Yellen as a bundled treatment. We find that legislators who interacted with both Yellen and at least one other male Fed chair over this period interrupt Yellen more, and interact with her using more aggressive tones. Furthermore, we show that the increase in hostility experienced by Yellen relative to her immediate predecessor and successor are absent among those legislators with daughters. Our results point to the important role of societal biases bleeding into seemingly unrelated policy domains, underscoring the vulnerability of democratic accountability and oversight mechanisms to existing gender norms and societal biases.
That is from a new paper by James Bisbee, Nicolò Fraccaroli, and Andreas Kern. The recurring strength of the daughter effect remains under-discussed in the social sciences!
All via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
1. One painting from every year of the 19th century.
2. The FT on AI-generated art. I genuinely find I don’t know how good an artwork is until I learn much about about it. This is one of the major obstacles standing in the way of AI-generated art. “A good image” is in fact not nearly enough.
4. Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years. (I enjoyed the new Mondrian biography by the way. Mondrian is one of my heroes.)
5. David Brooks on rising emotional inequality (NYT).
6. Bret Stephens revising his views on climate change (NYT).
*A Man of Iron*
The author is Troy Senik and the subtitle is The Turbulent Life and Improbably Presidency of Grover Cleveland. Here is one excerpt:
At the age of forty-four, the only elected office Grover Cleveland had ever held was sheriff of Eric County, New York — a role he had relinquished nearly a decade earlier, returning to a rather uneventful life as a whorkaholic bachelor lawyer. In the next four years, he would become, in rapid succession, the mayor Buffalo, the governor of New York, and the twenty-second president of the United States. Four years later, he would win the popular vote but nevertheless lose the presidency. And in another four, he’s become the first — and to date, only — president to be returned to office after having been previously turned out.
His normal work hours were from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. (p.31). And he was broadly libertarian:
He would be the final Democratic president to embrace the classical liberal principles of the party’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Cleveland believed in a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, a limited role for the federal government, and a light touch on economic affairs. To casual observers, such an approach is often mistaken for do-nothing passivity…that epithet, however, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of his presidency.
…Over the course of his two terms, this led to an astonishing 584 vetoes, more than any other president save Franklin Roosevelt…In his first term alone, Cleveland vetoed more bills than all twenty-one of his predecessors combined.
I am happy to recommend this book, you can buy it here. I am also happy to recommend the new book by Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, New Yorker coverage here.