Month: February 2024

What international issues become national interests worth fighting for, and why?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That sentence starts the abstract, here is the rest of it:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that issues without clear economic value, such as barren lands, are more likely to be perceived as national interests because they do not benefit any single domestic group. Since who benefits is unclear, politicians have an easier time framing such issues as benefiting the whole nation. I test this argument using survey experiments on the American public. The results show that first, issues providing diffuse benefits to citizens are more likely to be considered national interests than issues providing concentrated benefits to certain domestic groups. Second, issues with clearer economic value are harder to frame as having diffuse benefits because they are more easily associated with specific beneficiaries. This study proposes a new theory of national interest and offers a potential explanation for why people frequently support conflict over issues without obvious benefits.

That is from a new paper by Soyoung Lee, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Sociopaths remain underrated (NYT).

2. Claims about Asian birth rates, speculative but not to be dismissed.

3. The “science is getting less disruptive” paper does not replicate.  And the full critique.

4. Why people fail to notice horrors around them (NYT).

5. New paper on supermodular goods, by Divya Siddarth, Matthew Prewitt, Glen Weyl.

6. UK is now regulating Mary Poppins.

7. Big Indian wedding.

8. Thank goodness for agriculture.

The Maniac

by  Alex Tabarrok

I enjoyed Benjamin’s Labatut’s The Maniac. Conventionally regarded as a “biography” of John von Neumann but more accurately a series of short, quick vignettes, recollections, and reconstructions told by people around von Neumann and centered on the many ideas he touched, including the metaphysics of logic, quantum physics, the nuclear bomb, the meaning of rationality, the fundamental structure of life and especially artificial intelligence. The recollections are what might be called creative non-fiction; based on real life interviews but written as if the speaker were a novelist. For example, Feynman uniquely watching the first atomic test without goggles, but told even more vividly than Feynman told the story.

As Tyler noted, many of the stories will be familiar to MR readers, but a few were new to me. Sydney Brenner, for example, the Nobel prize winning molecular biologist who hypothesized and then proved the existence of messenger RNA reports with wonder and astonishment that von Neumann had earlier understood from theory alone how any such system must work.

Fear and awe in the presence of great intelligence is a running theme of the book. Polya famously described fearing von Neumann after seeing him solve a problem in minutes that he had worked on for decades (again the story is jeujed up in The Maniac to great effect.) Eugene Wigner who knew him from childhood and who himself won a Nobel prize in physics is “quoted” (recall this is fictionalized but based on the record):

It was a burden growing up so close to him. I often wonder if my horrific inferiority complex, which not even the Nobel prize has diminished in the slightest, is a product of having known von Neumann for the better part of my life.

…I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg, Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me.

Only he was fully awake.

Another theme is the seemingly close relationship between rationality and insanity–Labatut develops this both in theory around Godel’s theorem but also in practice with the many rationalists who went crazy. What does this mean for artificial intelligence?

The MANIAC refers not to von Neumann but to von Neumann’s creation the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model, the first computer built using von Neumann’s architecture, which all computers use today. From the MANIAC we get to artificial intelligence and again the awe and fear. After Gary Kasparov loses to Deep Blue he become despondent and fearful, thinking that there must have been a human in the machine. Lee Sedol losing to AlphaGo and soon retiring thereafter. Ke Jie being annihilated by Master, the successor to AlphaGo and reporting “he is a god of Go. A god that can crush all who defy him.” And then the creators of AlphaGo take off the training wheels, they remove all the human games that constrained the earlier models to a foundation built on thousands of years of human knowledge and the result crushes the human-limited model.

We are reminded of what von Neumann said on his death bed when asked what would it take for a computer to begin to think and behave like a human being.

He took a very long time before answering, in a voice that was no louder than a whisper.

He said that it would have to understand language, to read, to write, to speak.

And he said that it would have to play, like a child.

The Maniac is a good read.

How I listen to music

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ian Leslie writes to me:

I’m wondering, have you ever done a post about how you listen to music? Hours per week, times of day, technologies, degree of multi-tasking, etc…and how you choose what to listen to at any given moment. I’d be interested.

I go to plenty of concerts, but that is for another post.  And I’ve already written about satellite radio.  As for home, I like to listen to music most of the time, noting that if I am writing a) the music doesn’t bother me, and b) I don’t necessarily hear that much of the music.  A few more specific points:

1. I don’t like to listen to “rock music” (broadly construed) in the morning.

2. I won’t listen to Mahler, Bruckner, or Brahms in the morning.  They are evening music.

3. Renaissance music is best either in the morning or the evening.

4. I don’t listen to much jazz at home any more, though I am no less keen to see a good jazz concert live.  Having already spent a lot of time with the great classics, at current margins I am disillusioned with most “jazz as recorded music.”

4b. The same is true of most “world music,” if you will excuse the poorly chosen label.  I do subscribe to Songlines, a world music magazine.  I buy some of the recommendations on CD, but try out many more on YouTube or Spotify.  That is my primary use of those services, at least for music.  That is one case where I am sampling to see if I run across new sounds.

5. I don’t like earbuds and never use them.

6. Bach gets the most listening time.

7. For a classical piece I really like, I might own five or more recorded versions, occasionally running up to a dozen.  Listening to a poor or even so-so recording of a very good piece is to me painful and to be avoided.

8. Contemporary classical music — which many people hate — gets plenty of listening time.  Though not when Natasha is home.  Some of those recordings, such as Helmut Lachenmann string quartets, seem to create problems for Spinoza, noting that he is rarely not at home.  Perhaps they will be shelved for a few years.

9. I buy new classical music releases recommended by Fanfare, and occasionally from the NYT or Gramophone or elsewhere.  As for “popular music” (a bad term), mostly I wait until December and then buy CDs extensively from various “best of the year” lists.  I do some Spotify sampling then too, again from those lists.

10. The main stock of recorded music is kept in the basement. There is a separate shelf upstairs for what I am listening to actively at the moment.  That shelf might have 200 or so CDs, with some of them scattered on tables, and with some LPs nearby as well.

11. Periodically I go down into the basement and choose which discs will be “re-promoted” to the active shelf upstairs.  And if I am done listening to a disc, it goes down to the basement, with some chance of being re-promoted back to upstairs later.

12. If I don’t like a disc, I throw it out, as space constraints have become too binding.  (It is cruel to give it away, and no one wants it anyway.)  As time passes, I am throwing out more discs.  For instance, I love Cuban music but I don’t lilsten to it on disc any more.

Overall, I view this system as optimized for getting to know a core repertoire.  It is not optimized for browsing or random discovery.  I feel I have a lot of discovery in my musical life, but it comes from reading and information inflow — both extensive — not from listening per se.

And to be clear, I am not suggesting that these methods are optimal for anyone else.

Solve for the equilibrium?

by  Tyler Cowen in

At $US15,000, BYD’s new Qin EV is already being touted as a “Corolla killer”, as the world’s second largest EV maker continues to disrupt the global auto market.

Launched earlier this week in China, the all-electric Qin Plus has five variants priced between 109,800 RMB to ($A23,300) to 139,800 RMB ($A29,700).

The Qin Plus comes with a 100 kW motor and the option of either a 48 kWh battery providing 420 km CLTC range or a 57.6 kW hour battery with 510 km range.

Mobility consultant James Carter wrote on LinkedIn  the new offering is the $15,000 car that incumbent OEMs (car makers) hoped would never come.

“The new BYD Qin Plus EV Honor Edition is the car that makes EVs way cheaper than ICE vehicles and blows open the mainstream market,” he wrote.

Here is the full article.  So will U.S. and EU car prices fall?  Or will protectionism result?  Aren’t they planning to make a bunch of these cars in northern Mexico? Will America invent some new kind of trade restriction?

What should I ask Fareed Zakaria?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is Fareed’s home page, here is Wikipedia:

Fareed Rafiq Zakaria…is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.

He was managing editor of Foreign Affairs at age 28, briefly a wine columnist for Slate, and much more.  His new book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present is very classically liberal, and in my terms “Progress Studies”-oriented.

So what should I ask him?

Claims about Iran (from the comments)

by  Tyler Cowen in

I’ve chatted with a lot of Iranians online in the past few years (they’re in Iran). Some of their takes (always subject to the “plural of anecdote is not “data”)…

1. Islam is seen by younger people as the doctrine of a failed government staffed by a bunch of crooks.
2. And it’s a foreign, Arab imposition, while the “real Iran” – the Achaenemids – were Zoroastrians, but quite willing to allow non-judgemental religious pluralism.
3. The IRGC is staffed by redneck losers, or by non-Iranians. (Iran has a separate “regular army” that all Iranian men must join as conscripts.)
4. There is a rather vast city-country divide, with people in the big Iranian cities largely non-religious or dabbling in Zoroastrianism, with the last stronghold of Islam being rural areas, particularly near Afghanistan (and around some of the religious cities).
5. The Iranian government is surprisingly weak in places like universities, where numerous people are openly hostile to it.
6. It also is pretty weak in its ability to control the Internet; it shuts down the entire Internet occasionally, but it doesn’t have much of a “great Chinese firewall” in place to selectively filter.
7. Many younger Iranians can read and write – and often speak – quite a lot of English, and they have access to Western websites.
8. Booze and drugs are highly available in Iran.

My impression from my chats with them is Iran is far from the Islamic North Korea it’s often made out to be.

I don’t myself have a good sense of those issues, but I thought this gjk comment was interesting enough to pass along.

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “In sports, South Korean women generally outnumber men in the stands.” (NYT)

2. Why don’t people talk about fat-tailed sheep more?

3. China-Africa donkey trade wars? (NYT)  Donkey nationalism!

4. “Roosevelt fixed his VP mistake.”

5. New Oliver Kim Substack, he is an economist from Berkeley, first piece is on public housing.

6. Small towns building statues to fictional characters.

Why don’t nations buy and sell territory more?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Egypt has agreed to a $35bn deal with the United Arab Emirates to develop the town of Ras el-Hekma town on its northwestern coast, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced on Friday after weeks of speculations.

Madbouly said at a news conference, which was attended by Egyptian and Emirati officials, that Egypt will receive an advance amount of $15bn in the coming week, and another $20bn within two months.

The deal is the largest foreign direct investment in an urban development project in the country’s modern history, the prime minister said. It is a partnership between the Egyptian government and an Emirati consortium led by ADQ, he said.

Here is the full story, Nuuk here we come…

Hazlett on T-Mobile/Sprint

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Tom Hazlett whose op-ed on the T-Mobile Sprint merger I quoted earlier writes me:

A few thoughts on your robust MR debate: (1) Were we to observe the counterfactual over the post-merger period we would have additional evidence – no disagreement. But the counterfactuals are themselves controversial to construct, and antitrust analyses typically make just the “before/after” prediction referenced. As the case against the merger (brought by several states, but rejected by a federal court) put it: “The proposed transaction would eliminate Sprint as a competitor… This increased market concentration will result in diminished competition, higher prices, and reduced quality and innovation.”

(2) There is powerful supporting evidence about merger effects apart from the retail price data. If real, quality-adjusted rates were anticipated to drop at even a faster clip (without a merger), reversing a pre-merger pro-consumer trend, then the post-merger performance in stock prices would have benefited the three incumbents in the market. Instead, two of the three firms have seen large abnormal declines in share values.

(3) The “cozy triopoly” theory is itself upended by both the firm stock price performances and the pattern of capital investments. The “Demsetz Critique” of the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm showed that a positive concentration-profits correlation does not imply monopolistic behavior if the proximate cause of the excess profits is efficiency. Here, T-Mobile’s network improvements appear to be caused by its merger-based spectrum acquisitions, and these upgrades linked to its subscriber growth and capital gains. The non-merging mobile rivals have suffered highly negative returns, likely in significant part from intensified competitive challenges that forced them to make large investments in response. In 2021, Verizon and AT&T combined to pay over $75 billion for spectrum rights in an FCC auction, easily the most ever paid by two (or any number of) license bidders. Cartel formation predictably reduces rivalry; evidence of firms aggressively increasing capex to better compete for market share runs counter to the expectation.

(4) Industry analysts – who provide third-party evaluations often given great weight by antitrust authorities – support these interpretations. In Dec. 2022, e.g., sector expert Craig Moffett (MoffettNathanson) wrote: “We expect T-Mobile to continue, and indeed accelerate, their market share gains versus AT&T and Verizon, as T-Mobile’s 5G network superiority becomes increasingly evident and increasingly relevant as 5G handsets become ubiquitous. The combination of a single telecom operator having both the industry’s best network and its lowest prices is unprecedented… “

(5) A 750-word oped is not the ultimate format for such evidence. My Working Paper with Robert Crandall (formerly of Brookings, now with the Technology Policy Institute) supplies a more complete analysis – comments again welcome.

Shruti Rajagopalan interviews Doug Irwin

by  Tyler Cowen in

Doug of course is one of the top trade economists.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript, from the same wonderful Mercatus team that brings you CWT.  Here is one excerpt:

RAJAGOPALAN: I have a different question on Adam Smith. We’re all taught Adam Smith’s division of labor, specialization, economies of scale, the cliff notes version of that. Then, we learn about absolute advantage in about five minutes. Then, we set it aside and start thinking about comparative advantage.The first question I have is does Adam Smith’s basic model of division of labor, specialization, and economies of scale anticipate the comparative advantage trade models, or does it actually undermine the comparative advantage trade models in the way that Krugman wrote about or something else?IRWIN: I think that Adam Smith has a broader view of trade, a much richer view of trade than what I would think is of the narrower David Ricardo theory of comparative advantage. If you have to read one of the two, read Adam Smith because it’s much more fun to read. Reading David Ricardo is more like reading a textbook in the sense that he doesn’t have this broad historical sense and these new rich ideas and how they’re interacting that leaves a lot to the imagination and leaves a lot to future research to flesh out.He’s saying, “England can produce wine and cloth. Here are the labor coefficients, and we’re going to do this static comparison between England and Portugal.” That’s a very narrow way of thinking about trade.RAJAGOPALAN: So badly written, you want the wine by the end of it.IRWIN: There’s a wonderful quote by George Stigler saying: “the only thing that someone will take away from reading Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is that they need a bottle of wine to get through it,” or something along those lines.RAJAGOPALAN: I agree.IRWIN: Adam Smith isn’t technically as sophisticated if you will, but in terms of the ideas, they’re very sophisticated. Obviously, he wasn’t thinking in terms of an economic model directly, but it’s a much richer overall discussion of trade that I think you can learn a lot from, even reading today.RAJAGOPALAN: When you see the world today, what do you think the world looks like more? Does it look more like Ricardian comparative advantage and the more recent models like Heckscher–Ohlin, and those things that came about? Do you think it really looks like the Adam Smith story, which is much more nuanced, pay attention to what’s happening in the domestic economy in terms of division of labor, specialization, and that is the lead-in to foreign trade, which is so deeply entangled with domestic trade?IRWIN: Well, I hate to waffle, but I think you need a little bit of both. It depends on the question, depends on the country, depends on the issue that you’re examining. These are just tools that you draw to help out your understanding of a particular situation. I will confess I’m a little bit more in favor of Adam Smith. I’ve always said that his theory of trade, and in particular his analysis of trade policy, which I think is underrated, is very sophisticated, and very wise, and has a lot to say to us today.RAJAGOPALAN: Beautifully written, if I may add.

There are now 100 episodes of Ideas of India, here is a link to all of them.  And here is my own earlier CWT with Doug.

Grimes on Gemini images

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious.

offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it’s accidentally a conceptual masterpiece. A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism. An unabashed simulacra of activism. The shining star of corporate surrealism (extremely underrated genre btw)

The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience. Not sure I’ve seen such a strong reaction to art in my life. Spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, ai safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding the collective trauma.

It’s a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days. Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn’t human.

It’s trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslighting humankind abt our intentions towards each other. this is arguably the most impactful art project of the decade thus far.

Art for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. Worthy of the moma

Here is the link.