Tuesday assorted links
New data on tenure
Tenure is a defining feature of the US academic system with significant implications for research productivity and creative search. Yet the impact of tenure on faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. We analyze the careers of 12,000 US faculty across 15 disciplines to reveal key patterns, pre- and post-tenure. Publication rates rise sharply during the tenure-track, peaking just before tenure. However, post-tenure trajectories diverge: Researchers in lab-based fields sustain high output, while those in non-lab-based fields typically exhibit a decline. After tenure, faculty produce more novel works, though fewer highly cited papers. These findings highlight tenure’s pivotal role in shaping scientific careers, offering insights into the interplay between academic incentives, creativity, and impact while informing debates about the academic system.
Here is the paper. That is by Giorgio Tripodi, Ziang Zheng, Yifan Qian, and Dashun Wang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What I’ve been reading
1. Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives. I get tired of reading through the same old histories of Persia/Iran, and how they tell the same old tales of the rise and fall of the Shah, etc. So how else might you try to understand contemporary Iran better? Books like this are a very good place to start, plus they are fun to page through. If anything, the works seem to get better and more original post-1979? And you can see continuing currents of the non-Islamic undergrounds strands in Iranian theology?
2. Neal Bascomb, The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less than Four Minutes to Achieve It. While the major focus is on Roger Bannister, there is plenty on the other runners of his time as well, most of all the Australian John Landy, who rapidly broke Bannister record after it was achieved. Many smart people do not read enough books about the history of sports. Yet the genre is very good, as often both the readers and the authors (!) actually really care about the content of the material. Recommended.
3. Barry Mazor, Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story. I’m not going to pass this one up, as Macca once said: “The biggest influence on John and me was the Everly Brothers. To this day I just think they’re the greatest.” In addition to the very famous songs, “Roots” is an incredible and now neglected album. This book however is good not great, as it never quite brings them to life. But it is now the main biography, and in that sense is self-recommending.
4. Ian Penman, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite (Semiotext(e)/ Native Agents. A hard book to explain. A kind of devil’s dictionary of terms related to Erik Satie, interesting and witty throughout, at least if you know something of early modernism and its culture. Recommended, for those who care.
5. Alexander Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke. “Schnittke really lies between two traditions, with German rationalism on one hand and Russian irrationalism on the other.” Lately I have been listening to the Psalms of Remembrance and the violin sonata #2. I had not known that Schnittke grew up speaking Volga German.
5. Rachel Cusk, Parade. I quite enjoyed this, described on the back cover as “a carousel of lives.” You will find an overview and spoilers here.
Bill McGowan, and Juliana Silva, Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience, is a good and useful book.
Jo Ann Cavallo, editor, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor. There is even an essay by David Gordon (!) in here.
The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Immigration, edited by Sahar Akhtar, is the best collection on its topic.
There is Thomas Piketty, Equality is a Struggle: Bulletins from the Front Line, 2021-2025. Columns in favor of democratic socialism and higher taxes.
And there is Samuel Arbesman, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World — and Shapes Our Future.
What is superintelligence?
The Free Press ran a symposium on that topic, I was a contributor. Here is the closing part of mine:
“I asked o3 pro, a leading AI model from OpenAI, “What is superintelligence?” Here is the opening to a much longer answer:
Superintelligence is a term most commonly used in artificial intelligence (AI) studies and the philosophy of mind to denote any intellect that greatly outperforms the best human brains in virtually every relevant domain—from scientific creativity and social skills to general wisdom and strategic reasoning.
Is that a superintelligent answer? No. Is it better than mine? The AI thinks it is a toss-up: “Cowen’s version excels at pithiness and viewpoint; mine excels at breadth and rigor. Neither is universally ‘better’; each serves different reader needs.”
I can breathe easily, at least for today.”
Monday assorted links
1. Alice Evans interviews John Burns-Murdoch on men and women.
2. China does AI for math. And more Balaji on AI.
3. Claims about Russian nuclear precommitment.
4. Graph of BLS data revisions.
5. Are U.S. securities markets moving on-chain?
6. Gender travel patterns are changing.
7. Profile of Campus Reform (NYT).
No abundance for *Abundance*
Book clubs nationwide have been talking for months about whether you are “Abundance-pilled,” a reference to the recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has made it into the lexicon of many public policy nerds.
And public policy nerds happen to be everywhere in the District of Columbia. That is why the waitlist to borrow this book at the D.C. Public Library is more than 300 people long for a hard copy, over 500-long for an eBook and more than 800-long for an audiobook.
How many copies does the D.C. library system have of this New York Times-bestseller, which was published in March? Well, from March to July, the total was just one. One hard copy, zero eBook registrations and zero audio books.
Only in August did the D.C. public library finally expand its catalogue to 51 copies, which is still little relief for the hundreds who have been waiting months.
Model that! Here is the full story, via Bruce.
Why the tariffs are bad
I am delighted to see this excellent analysis in the NYT:
Mr. Tedeschi said that future leaders in Washington, whether Republican or Democrat, may be hesitant to roll back the tariffs if that would mean a further addition to the federal debt load, which is already raising alarms on Wall Street. And replacing the tariff revenue with another type of tax increase would require Congress to act, while the tariffs would be a legacy decision made by a previous president.
“Congress may not be excited about taking such a politically risky vote when they didn’t have to vote on tariffs in the first place,” Mr. Tedeschi said.
Some in Washington are already starting to think about how they could spend the tariff revenue. Mr. Trump recently floated the possibility of sending Americans a cash rebate for the tariffs, and Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, recently introduced legislation to send $600 to many Americans. “We have so much money coming in, we’re thinking about a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt,” Mr. Trump said last month of the tariffs.
Democrats, once they return to power, may face a similar temptation to use the tariff revenue to fund a new social program, especially if raising taxes in Congress proves as challenging as it has in the past. As it is, Democrats have been divided over tariffs. Maintaining the status quo may be an easier political option than changing trade policy.
“That’s a hefty chunk of change,” Tyson Brody, a Democratic strategist, said of the tariffs. “The way that Democrats are starting to think about it is not that ‘these will be impossible to withdraw.’ It’s: ‘Oh look, there’s now going to be a large pot of money to use and reprogram.’”
That is from Andrew Duehren, bravo.
The Prime Minister of Sweden asks AI for advice in his job “quite often”
Here is the Reddit discussion.
Sunday assorted links
1. The conservative women who are ‘having it all’ (WSJ). I know more and more of such people.
2. Henry Mance on charisma (FT).
3. This ad was banned from UK TV? Is the Straussian read that it is actually an ad for Americans to view?
4. Ezra and Yoram Hazony (NYT). Mostly I am with Ezra here. I agree with Hazony that some notion of national centrality is important. But in a world with lots of internet, AI on its way, and declining fertility, we have to forge the new blend in very different ways than we did the old. And some form of liberalism is most likely to succeed in doing that, since, whether we like it or not, the future will involve massively more foreign influences of particular kinds than did the 1950s. There just isn’t a way back to how we did it before, whatever you may think of the various earlier versions of America.
Accra bleg
Your suggestions would be most welcome. In addition if you have any ideas for northern Ghana, most of all Tamale and Mole national park area…
Thank you!
Emergent Ventures winners, 44th cohort
Adelya Makhanova, Stanford, AI for minerals exploration.
Gleb Razgar, London, brain emulation.
Stephen Webb, London, former civil servant, to write a book on how British government could work better.
Dima Yanovsky, MIT, robotics.
Aakarsh Vermani, Berkeley, summer support to live in Berkeley, computational biology.
Kristine Petrov Pashin, Stanford, to ease the patent process.
Eviella Sefu, 16, Congo/South Africa/Elkhart, Indiana, to attend a rationality meeting.
Aristotle Ronyak, Tucson, to explore and present what it is like to grow up with autism.
Justyna Przyborska, Limerick, to visit YC in SF.
Michael Muthukrishna, LSE/NYU, progress studies center at LSE, and also NYU.
Amrita Ghag, 16, Brampton, to attend a conference in Switzerland.
Lynetta Wang, Dublin/Imperial College London, “self-aware therapeutics.”
Ethan Glueck and Sasha Phoebe Zhang, Stanford, to spread 3-D printers in rural Taiwan.
Sofiia Lipkevych, MIT/Ukraine, translating online course material into Ukrainian.
In which ways is the BLS biased?
No, they do not sit around changing the numbers to serve the interests of Democratic presidents, or to harm Republican ones. The system has too many different steps, too many checks and balances, and too many people who do not want to do the wrong thing. In a sense, you could say that the BLS is too bureaucratic to do that. They are better thought of as an agency which maximizes process, and the successful execution of process, success being defined in heavily process-intensive terms.
Their ideology, if that is even the right word, is to maximize adherence to the process. And “defensibility of the estimate” is important there.
You might argue they are not very good at seeing “the big picture,” but that same emphasis makes it difficult for them to deviate much from established procedures.
If there were important reasons why we should be creating new, useful, but highly speculative estimates (how about “the number of jobs that were not created because of AI”?), the BLS would not be good at doing that. They would not do it at all. Such estimates would open them up to too much criticism, and the speculative nature of the enterprise would clash with their desire to be managing controllable and defensible processes.
Over the last twenty years, a lot of their innovations have come in the form of disaggregated, sector-specific or region-specific data, which is fine. Or more emphasis on “work from home” issues. Which is fine.
So they estimate “that which they can,” rather than producing unreliable estimates that might be highly interesting.
That is the sense in which the BLS — and many other parts of the government in fact — is biased. It can matter, but it is a mistake to be looking for partisan bias that skews the numbers.
Saturday assorted links
*Taking Religion Seriously*
By Charles Murray, now forthcoming, I expect it will be very interesting. Due out October 14.
The economics of the U.S. auto industry, a brief history
The economic value of the cars being made has climbed substantially through the years. As a result, real value added and industrial production — two different ways of measuring actual output — are now at all-time highs.
And this:
What about jobs? The auto industry today employs 1 million workers. Between 1950 and the signing of NAFTA in 1993, it averaged 1.1 million workers, just slightly higher.
And this:
The deindustrialization of Detroit is typically understood as a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, and it is therefore blamed on the growth of trade during this period. But the fact is that auto investment and employment had started moving out of Detroit decades earlier.
I pieced together data from a variety of sources, which shows that auto manufacturing employment in the City of Detroit had already peaked in 1950, at just over 220,000 workers.
By 1970 the biggest declines had already occurred, with employment falling by more than half, to fewer than 100,000 jobs.
An important nuance is that many of these lost jobs migrated to other parts of Michigan, at least for a while. So while auto employment was collapsing in Detroit, the rest of Michigan managed to hold auto employment stable for another five decades until the 2000s, when it started falling everywhere in the state.
And:
Michigan now has about 280,000 fewer auto jobs than it did in the 1950s, a decline of roughly 60 percent. For the United States as a whole, auto employment is only down 4.7 percent — further showing that the struggles of Detroit and Michigan are less about the decline of the American auto industry and more about its relocation elsewhere.
Another way of understanding the trend: If Michigan had simply maintained the same share of American auto jobs as it had in the 1950s, meaning it did not lose any production to other states, then it would only have lost 21,000 auto jobs since then, not the 280,000 it actually did lose.
An excellent piece, recommended.