Month: November 2022

My Conversation with Ken Burns

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the transcript, audio, and video.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Ken joined Tyler to discuss how facial expressions in photos have changed over time, where in the American past he’d like to visit most, the courage of staying in place, how he feels about intellectual property law, the ethical considerations of displaying violent imagery, why women were so prominent in the early history of American photography, the mysteries in his quilt collection, the most underrated American painter, why crossword puzzles are akin to a cup of coffee, why baseball won’t die out, the future of documentary-making, and more.

And an excerpt:

COWEN: Why are women so prominent in the early history of American photography — compared, say, to painting or sculpture?

BURNS: It’s interesting, I think, because at the beginning we’re recording ourselves, our families. The first one is a self-portrait. (Of course, being an American it would be a self-portrait.) But families are involved.

There’s so many ways in which we transcend — the Declaration of Independence did not apply to any women. It’s 144 years after the Declaration that women get the right to vote: basic thing. When the Declaration and the Constitution were there, they had no rights. But they were part of the landscape.

They are a majority of the population, and have been. What you have is the beginning of photographs being a much more democratic and accessible medium, that is going to be populated by the people who actually exist. I think it’s that that’s helpful to break down.

As you see in this book, there are lots of images of women from the earliest time involved in things like abolition, involved in things like slavery unions, involved in things like women’s suffrage, involved in just playing, having a good time on the beach in Massachusetts in your bloomer swimming suits dancing, or three gals stealing a cigarette in the early part of the 19th century.

This film is about darkness and light, about black and white — both in the photographic process but in the American dynamic: there are many Native Americans, there’s lots of landscapes of the beauty of the country. There’s lots of horrible signs of discrimination and war and death and suffering and grief.

And that’s us. That’s the story of us. I’ve been trying to tell that complicated history with my films, and this was an opportunity to stop and allow the viewer this time to be the director. That is to say, in most performance art, as film is, I set the time that you get to look at that photograph and you see what you’re able to see in that. If you want to spend an hour with one photograph in this book, you’re welcome to.

If you want to go through this over-amount of time, these photographs, and then hold your thumb in the back matter and go back and forth between the full page of the photograph, that might say “Gettysburg, 1863,” and then the description of people reading the list of the dead outside a newspaper in New York City just after the Battle of Gettysburg in July of ’63 — you can learn a lot more about the photograph, but in a different way. I first wanted the photographs to speak for themselves, un- . . . diminished — I guess, is the word — by words.

There is much more at the link.  And I liked Ken’s new book Our America: A Photographic History.

Simple remarks on British fiscal policy

by  Tyler Cowen

The required recapitalization of the NHS is a major pending expenditure, and it is not playing a sufficiently large role in budget discussions.  The system was never as cheap as it looked, and now the bill is coming due.

If you think austerity is required (NB: not my view), the Hunt plans seem to be doling this out in dribs and drabs.  Better to rip off the band-aid and get it all over with.  Conditional on the view that austerity is correct, the current plans would not be nearly enough.

Even the U.S. Treasuries market is not entirely liquid and stable at the moment, so any market reaction to any policy in Britain has to be given a very careful forensics.  Don’t assume that you know what the market is telling us.

Muddling through remains the most likely outcome.

Videos from the Stanford academic freedom conference

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here they are, so many figures well-known to MR readers.  The Peter Thiel talk was quite interesting, you can think of it as his concessions to Greta, with a new twist on the great stagnation and its causes.  My ten-minute talk is in here, following Niall Ferguson and John Cochrane, and it was my favorite of the conference (not always the case).  I had great fun trolling Steven Pinker, most of all.

*Love and Let Die*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is John Higgs, and the subtitle is Bond, the Beatles and the British Psyche.  I loved this book, and reading it induced me to order the author’s other books, the ultimate compliment.  It is not for everyone, nor is it easy to describe, but imagine the stories of The Beatles and James Bond films told as “parallel careers.”  After all, “Love Me Do” and Dr. No were released on the same day in 1962.

It is striking that they have been making James Bond films for sixty years now, and every single one of them has made money.  We are still talking about the Beatles too.  Will anything from current Britain have such staying power?

From the book here is one excerpt:

Had Paul not then finally found success outside the band, it is possible they may have agreed to a reunion.  The success of ‘Live and Let Die’, followed by the album Band on the Run, made Paul McCartney and Wings a going concern at exactly the point when a Beatles reunion looked most plausible.  Bond didn’t kill the Beatles, but it is a strange irony that once they had split , he kept them dead.

I hadn’t known that the Soviet edition of the Band on the Run album replaced the title track with “Silly Love Songs” as the lead song, as the lyrics to the “Band on the Run” song were considered too subversive.  There is for instance talk of a prison break in the song.  And when Paul much later performed a short solo concert for Vladimir Putin, he chose to play “Let It Be.”

The book excels in its portraits of George Harrison, especially in his solo career.  I enjoyed this tidbit about the Harrison family:

In 1978, George married Olivia Arias and in the same year they had a son, Dhani.  Dhani only discovered his father’s past when he was at school.  ‘I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn’t understand why,’ he has said.  ‘It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me?  I came home and freaked out to my dad: “Why didn’t you tell me you were in the Beatles?”  And he said: “Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.”  It’s impossible to imagine, John, Paul or Ringo neglecting to mention they were in the Beatles to their children.

Recommended, for me at least.

*What Makes Us Human?*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The authors are Iain S. Thomas and Jasmine Wang, here is one excerpt:

What is the proper response to suffering?

If this life is all there is, then the proper response to suffering is to embrace it

and be transformed by it.

If there is more than this life, then the proper response to suffering

is to take the next step in your journey.

It’s not simply for punishment. Pain is an opportunity for spiritual growth.

We suffer from the growth that comes from suffering.

The subtitle of the book is An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions.

Whither Keynesianism?

by  Tyler Cowen

A second problem with the Keynesian recommendations is that governments did not do enough to build up surpluses in good times. Many governments therefore are running out of fiscal space, or at least markets perceive that to be the case. Even if Keynesian theory says they ought to be expanding with their fiscal policy, they can’t always do so with impunity.

The recent history of the UK government is a paradigmatic example. Under Prime Minister Liz Truss, the plan was to boost spending on energy subsidies and cut some taxes. Whatever else you might say about the details of those policies, they did fit the Keynesian recipe for fiscal expansion in tough times (though it is noteworthy that many leading Keynesian economists strongly opposed them).

The problem is that markets didn’t like the policies, and the British pound fell and borrowing rates on government bonds rose. Financial markets were roiled, and now the Truss days are over.

Now Rishi Sunak is prime minister. What exactly is he supposed to do? He might try the opposite of the Truss plan, namely raise some taxes and cut some spending, or at least bend downwards the trajectories for future spending. In Keynesian terms, however, that policy is ill-advised. The UK is likely entering a recession, and the Bank of England has declared it may be the longest recession on record. Is it really wise to engage in austerity when times are turning bad?

Furthermore, the extant numbers do not indicate that the UK has to engage in austerity. Its debt-to-GDP ratio is about 80%, which is not astronomical. For a while economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff tried to convince the profession that debt levels are dangerously high at 90% of GDP, but those arguments were shot down for having data errors and now those claims are discredited. It is not easy to now argue that a debt-to-GDP of 80% requires austerity.

Here is the remainder of my Bloomberg column on the topic.

What rises and falls in status through the FTX story?

by  Tyler Cowen in

More than one MR reader has requested this post, so here goes:

Rises

  • Common-sense morality
  • Common-sense investing rules
  • American corporate governance
    • Boards, and nervousness about related-party transactions
  • Coinbase
    • Seen as stodgy and bloated for much of the past year. But run in the US, listed in the US, and properly segregating customer funds.
  • Elon Musk’s ability to judge character
  • Vitalik and Ethereum
  • Circle, Kraken, and Binance
  • Anthony Trollope, Herman Melville, and the 19th century novel.  Books more generally.
  • U.S. regulation of domestic exchanges – it is one of the things we seem to do best, and they created little trouble during 2008-2009, or for that matter during the pandemic
  • CBDC, and sadly so
  • Crypto forensics
  • Twitter and weird anon accounts
    • When would the trouble have been exposed if not for Twitter? And much of the best coverage came from accounts with names like Autism Capital.
    • Some critics (like Aaron Levie), too.
  • Bitcoin
    • After a cataclysm for the crypto sector, it’s down about 15% over the past month. That’s less than the S&P 500 lost during the worst month of the GFC.

Falls

  • Effective Altruism
    • A totalizing worldview that has enabled some undesirable weirdness in different places.
    • Valorizing “scope sensitivity” and expected value leads people violently astray.
  • Being unmarried (and male) above the age of 30
  • Being on the cover of magazines
  • Appearing with blonde models
  • Buying Super Bowl ads and sponsoring sports and putting your name on arenas
  • “Earn to give” as both a concept and a phrase
  • Mrs. Jellyby
  • The concept of self-custody
  • Weird locations for corporate offices
  • Venture capital
  • Our ability to see crazes for what they are in the moment
    • This is not just, or even mainly, about crypto
  • Drugs
    • Adderall and modafinil, perhaps stronger stuff also played a role.
  • The children of influential faculty
    • Do they grow up witnessing low-accountability systems and personality behaviors?

What else?  I thank several individuals for their assistance with this post.

Motivating Creativity

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am interested in Danil Dmitriev’s job market paper from UCSD:

How should one incentivize creativity when being creative is costly? We analyze a model of delegated bandit experimentation where the principal desires the agent to constantly switch to new arms to maximize the chance of success. The agent faces a fixed cost of switching. We show that the principal’s optimal reward scheme is maximally uncertain—the agent receives transfers for success, but their distribution has an extreme variance. Despite being stationary, the optimal reward scheme achieves the principal’s first-best outcome provided that the agent’s outside option is sufficiently valuable. Our results shed light on the non-transparent incentives used by online platforms, such as YouTube, and guide how to design incentives for creativity in such applications.

One feature of this model is that extreme uncertainty about rewards motivates project-switching, which is what the principle wants.  Most projects should offer low rewards, but a small percentage of winners should offer very high rewards.  In this model it is also the case that opaque bonus schemes perform better than transparent ones.  As I understand this result, the principal wants the agent to keep on switching and thus does not want to offer any kind of “safe haven” where the agent can rest securely.

*Edible Economics*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Ha-Joon Chang, and the subtitle is A Hungry Economist Explains the World.  This is an economics of food book with a Korean emphasis, and arguing in favor of protectionism and industrial policy, in line with the author’s earlier works.  Here is one excerpt:

South Koreans went through a staggering 7.5kg of garlic per person per year between 2010 and 2017.  We hit a high in 2013 of 8.9kg.  That’s over ten times what the Italians consume (720g in 2013).  When it comes to garlic consumption, we Koreans make the Italians look like ‘dabblers’.  The French, ‘the’ garlic eaters to the British and the Americans, only manage a paltry 200g per year (in 2017) — not even 3% of that of the Koreans.

Chang does note that the Korean figure also includes a lot of garlic used to make stocks and then (in part) not consumed.

How to process the FTX news — a test

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one MR comment that illustrates my point:

How noble—stealing people’s life savings to increase African birth rates, navel-gaze about AI risk, make cows happier, and all the other nonsense.

Mostly a bunch of lost, hideous people with terrible moral intuitions proclaiming themselves the most holy tribe in existence.

Not a single worthwhile cause in there.

From MR commentator Ineffective Grifterism.

I would say if the FTX debacle first leads you to increase your condemnation of EA, utilitarianism, philosophy, crypto, and so on that is a kind of red flag for your thought processes.  They probably could stand some improvement, even if your particular conclusion might be correct.  As I’ve argued lately, it is easier to carry and amplify damning sympathies when you can channel your negative emotions through the symbolism of a particular individual.  Especially when others are doing the same — do not forget Girard!

It is better to simply file the data point away and add it to your mental regressions, but not right now to get too emotional or condemnatory about it.

If you would like, here are a few better questions for occupying your time:

1. Which 19th century novel does this story most resemble?

2. If you had to flee the Bahamas, and sought out a locale with no extradition treaty, which one would you choose?  (Indonesia, for me, not Dubai.)

3. What kind of love story exactly is that of Sam and Caroline?  I mean this query seriously and I am not looking for a hostile or sarcastic answer.

4. Which parts of the SBF worldview remain correct and will end up undervalued?

5. What does the scenario look like where this is good for crypto as a whole?

6. How should remaining EA philanthropists rethink their giving and also their PR?

7. How will this affect economic development in the Bahamas?

You can work yourself on completing this list.  My claim is that, over time, you will end up much smarter if you focus on questions like these rather than “reliving” collective condemnations like those of Ineffective Grifterism.  Nominative determinism occasionally does hold!

A simple point about existential risk

by  Tyler Cowen in

Hardly anyone associated with Future Fund saw the existential risk to…Future Fund, even though they were as close to it as one could possibly be.

I am thus skeptical about their ability to predict existential risk more generally, and for systems that are far more complex and also far more distant.  And, it turns out, many of the real sources of existential risk boil down to hubris and human frailty and imperfections (the humanities remain underrated).  When it comes to existential risk, I generally prefer to invest in talent and good institutions, rather than trying to fine-tune predictions about existential risk itself.

If EA is going to do some lesson-taking, I would not want this point to be neglected.