What should I ask Ruth Scurr?
Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL (born 1971, London) is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.
Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 2006; Metropolitan Books, 2006) won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize (2006), was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize (2006), long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2007) and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009. It has been translated into five languages.
Her second book, John Aubrey: My own Life (Chatto & Windus, 2015; New York Review of Books, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It was chosen as a 2015 Book of the Year in fifteen newspapers and magazines, including: the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Sunday Express, the Guardian, the Spectator and the New Statesman. It was chosen as a 2016 Book of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Review and the Washington Post.
Scurr began reviewing regularly for The Times and The Times Literary Supplement in 1997. Since then she has also written for The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, New Statesman, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Observer, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal.
That is from her Wikipedia page. She is an expert in the philosophy of biography and her new biography of Napoleon, which views his life through the medium of his involvement with gardens, has been receiving rave reviews. And here is her home page, and her article on her Cambridge house.
So what should I ask her?
“How Britney Spears was trapped in a web of injustice”
That from the FT is the kind of headline we should be seeing. From Henry Mance:
…for 13 years, courts in California have rewarded Spears’s father Jamie, a failed businessman who struggled with alcoholism, once filed for bankruptcy and who, according to the documentary Framing Britney Spears, was often absent from his daughter’s childhood. They have enabled arguably the most egregious villain of them all. In 2008, when his daughter suffered an apparent mental health crisis, Jamie asked a court to make him her conservator — that is, legal guardian. He has mostly kept the power since. He has decided which friends she sees, what medical treatment she receives and what happens to her fortune, estimated at $60m.
…They had made her work seven days a week, taken her credit cards and given her no privacy when undressing. “In California the only similar thing to this is called sex-trafficking,” she said. They would not let her have an intrauterine device removed, because they didn’t want her to have more kids. But they did allow a doctor to prescribe her lithium “out of nowhere”.
I get that you might have doubts about this case, or be able to cite many other cases where some form of guardianship might be useful. But if something like this is possible at all, it is time to realize the whole system is broken and we need to work much harder to root out its abuses.
Time to wake up! Be woke! Really woke.
#FreeBritney
The UAPs [UFOs] report
You can read it here. I don’t think it clarifies much, other than to stress the multiple sources of sensor data for the observations and the inexplicability of some number of the sightings, well into triple digits. So you can put aside Mick West, PewdiePie, and the like. It is “real stuff” being measured, no matter how you might account for the observations, not just shaky camera movements and flocks of birds.
The report also makes clear how poorly funded and chaotic the investigation has been to date. That is hardly a surprise, but isn’t it about time we did something properly right off the bat?
I’ll fall back on my “sincerity is the most underrated political motive” view. I think our own government is genuinely puzzled, as I am, and as you should be. I would stress my earlier points that we don’t have many reliable intuitions to fall back upon for thinking through this problem.
I believe the governmental message will be: “We are not sure, so for reasons of national security we have to move forward assuming some of these devices are from foreign powers.” That will rather rapidly meld into “foreign powers.” In any case that will keep the issue alive. Furthermore, if it is our earthbound adversaries, at some point we will know this for sure, for reasons of intelligence or eventual public use of the devices, or our ability to construct the same. By the way, if you are convinced by the “adversaries” take, you should update lots of your views on foreign policy! (Will you? Will anyone?) America would have a lot more to be afraid of.
It is important to resist jumping to conclusions here, if only because doing so will dull your critical faculties on this issue. In any case I will continue to follow developments in this area.
Friday assorted links
Is blockchain puny?
Here is a new and intriguing idea (link now fixed) from StarkWare, a blockchain start-up based in Israel. Authored by Eli Ben-Sasson, here is one excerpt:
Imagine if we accepted, for the foreseeable future, that we can only write on a given blockchain ten times per second, but instead of writing ten single transactions, made ten additions to the blockchain, each attesting to thousands of transactions. Despite the scale-up, there would be no significant rise in the number of kilobytes being added to the chain.
In short, I’m talking about a fix that would mean the same blockchains that I brazenly called puny would suddenly become mighty.
This fix is the adoption of cryptographic proofs — a concept that captured my imagination when I was a PhD student under Professor Avi Wigderson, one of the pioneers of this area of mathematics, and when I was a postdoc under Professor Madhu Sudan, another of the founding fathers of this field. After 20 years in academia, today I am president of StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd on Twitter), a company I co-founded to move this fix from the realm of theory to reality – a reality that will scale-up blockchain to an unprecedented degree.
Currently, Bitcoin establishes integrity the way you do it with your waiter or waitress. As you sit at your table, the waiting staff present a bill with the food you ordered, taking up the role of the “prover.” You check the calculation — making you the “verifier.”
With Bitcoin, the miner of a new block is the “prover.” Every block acts as proof that the payments contained in it are valid. And the nodes, meaning the many computers which host and synchronize a copy of the entire Bitcoin blockchain, naively replay each transaction in the block to verify that it is correct.
With cryptographic proofs, instead of recording this data-heavy information to the blockchain, we write on the chain in a kind of shorthand — proofs which verify that transactions have been conducted with integrity. All the heavy computational lift, meaning the work done to obtain the proof, happens in the cloud, not the blockchain.
It is logic we’re all familiar with in other areas of life. A large company may have its flagship office in central Manhattan, but wouldn’t dream of using such prime real estate for its huge factory, where the heavy lifting takes place.
Stay tuned….
Why is it OK to be mean to the ugly?
That is the new NYT David Brooks column, here is one excerpt:
Not all the time, but often, the attractive get the first-class treatment. Research suggests they are more likely to be offered job interviews, more likely to be hired when interviewed and more likely to be promoted than less attractive individuals. They are more likely to receive loans and more likely to receive lower interest rates on those loans.
The discriminatory effects of lookism are pervasive. Attractive economists are more likely to study at high-ranked graduate programs and their papers are cited more often than papers from their less attractive peers. One study found that when unattractive criminals committed a moderate misdemeanor, their fines were about four times as large as those of attractive criminals.
Daniel Hamermesh, a leading scholar in this field, observed that an American worker who is among the bottom one-seventh in looks earns about 10 to 15 percent less a year than one in the top third. An unattractive person misses out on nearly a quarter-million dollars in earnings over a lifetime.
The overall effect of these biases is vast. One 2004 study found that more people report being discriminated against because of their looks than because of their ethnicity.
In a study published in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Ellis P. Monk Jr., Michael H. Esposito and Hedwig Lee report that the earnings gap between people perceived as attractive and unattractive rivals or exceeds the earnings gap between white and Black adults. They find the attractiveness curve is especially punishing for Black women. Those who meet the socially dominant criteria for beauty see an earnings boost; those who don’t earn on average just 63 cents to the dollar of those who do.
Recommended.
Liquidity trap for me but not for thee?
The idea has not held up. As I write the rate on 6-month T-Bills is 0.06%. That is pretty close to zero, right?
And yet everyone is debating what will happen with the rate of price inflation. No one is claiming it is indeterminate, as the simplest liquidity trap models suggest. Nor, with rising rates of price inflation, can it be argued that inflation inertia is dominant. Instead, it is obvious that the Fed has let the current inflation happen. It is true that the inflationary pressures stem from (roughly) coordinated acts of monetary and fiscal policy, rather than monetary policy alone. But no one is doubting that the Fed is in charge of forthcoming rates of inflation.
(And if the T-Bill rate is ever so slightly above zero, rather than at or below zero, that too seems to stem from higher expected rates of price inflation in the first place.)
I agree with those individuals who suggest that the currently higher rates of price inflation will not be with us 4-5 years from now, and that is because the Fed does not want that to happen.
Paul Krugman recently wrote (NYT):
Seriously, both recent data and recent statements from the Federal Reserve have, well, deflated the case for a sustained outbreak of inflation. For that case has always depended on asserting that the Fed is either intellectually or morally deficient (or both). That is, to panic over inflation, you had to believe either that the Fed’s model of how inflation works is all wrong or that the Fed would lack the political courage to cool off the economy if it were to become dangerously overheated.
In other words, the Fed to a considerable degree can indeed control the rate of price inflation, and with nominal T-Bill rates very close to zero. Open market operations on T-Bills alone won’t do it, but of course the Fed can use the expectations channel, and can deal in other assets as well — just as they do when they wish to be more expansive. Or maybe you think it is the promised currency path (not my view), but that too would be effective in either direction, if desired. Thus the liquidity trap doctrine is dead, discarded once it no longer provides an argument for an ever-more expansive fiscal policy.
USA facts of the day
A survey of almost 200 police departments indicated that retirements were up 45 percent and resignations rose by 18 percent in the year from April 2020 to April 2021 when compared with the previous 12 months, according to the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington policy institute.
New York City saw 2,600 officers retire in 2020 compared with 1,509 the year before. Resignations in Seattle increased to 123 from 34 and retirements to 96 from 43. Minneapolis, which had 912 uniformed officers in May 2019, is now down to 699. At the same time, many cities are contending with a rise in shootings and homicides.
Asheville was among the hardest hit proportionally, losing upward of 80 officers, more than one third of its 238-strong force.
Thursday assorted links
1. Do mongooses sit behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance?
2. “…despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans.” And how about this clincher: “…and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.”
4. Solve for the fungi equilibrium?
5. Please let’s not regulate private space tourism.
6. Good piece on why the Benin bronzes should be returned (NYT).
China fact of the day
China is still wrestling with how to rule over a diverse, ethnically mixed population that does not necessarily accept the dominance of the Han or the CCP narrative. The challenge for the CCP is that ethnic minorities constitute only about 10 percent of the total population but inhabit 60 percent of the land mass, much of which is in sensitive border areas (the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The national language is a recent construct and has priority in schools over the local languages. About 30 percent of the population speaks a language at home other than the national language.
That is from the new and “must read” From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of Chinese Communism, by Tony Saich. Keep in mind that the CCP is the most important institution in the world today — have you ever read a book on it?
John Stuart Mill on America
I call this Mill’s Conjecture:
High wages and universal reading are the two elements of democracy; where they co-exist, all government, except the government of public opinion, is impossible.
That is from Mill’s State of Society in America. But is it true about China?
Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients
Long-term complications after coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are common in hospitalized patients, but the spectrum of symptoms in milder cases needs further investigation. We conducted a long-term follow-up in a prospective cohort study of 312 patients—247 home-isolated and 65 hospitalized—comprising 82% of total cases in Bergen during the first pandemic wave in Norway. At 6 months, 61% (189/312) of all patients had persistent symptoms, which were independently associated with severity of initial illness, increased convalescent antibody titers and pre-existing chronic lung disease. We found that 52% (32/61) of home-isolated young adults, aged 16–30 years, had symptoms at 6 months, including loss of taste and/or smell (28%, 17/61), fatigue (21%, 13/61), dyspnea (13%, 8/61), impaired concentration (13%, 8/61) and memory problems (11%, 7/61). Our findings that young, home-isolated adults with mild COVID-19 are at risk of long-lasting dyspnea and cognitive symptoms highlight the importance of infection control measures, such as vaccination.
That is from a new Nature paper by Bjørn Blomberg, et.al. Via SK. On vaccinating the young, here are further relevant observations from Francois Balloux.
The economics of peer review
Springer-Nature, the Anglo-German publisher of the world’s leading scientific journal Nature, announced in 2017 that in some of its publications it was censoring articles that used words like “Taiwan”, “Tibet” and “cultural revolution”, when printing in China.
In April 2020 Nature ran an editorial apologising for its “error” in “associating the virus with Wuhan” in its news coverage.
…The magazines that publish scientific papers have become increasingly dependent on the fees that Chinese scientists pay to publish in them, plus advertisements from Chinese firms and subscriptions from Chinese institutions. In recent years observers have noticed that the news coverage of China in these magazines has begun to look a little less objective than it once did.
Here is the full Matt Ridley piece.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Noah Smith interviews @pmarca.
2. Glad to see so many economists waking up to the potential tyranny of administrative law (in Spanish). If there should be a jury trial for anything, it is sedition.
3. Early days of the comic book industry. And the rise of the $10 million disc golf celebrity.
4. Way back when, the major Keynesians endorsed Nixon’s wage and price controls. Sigh…
5. Free Britney Spears! Really (NYT). “Ms. Spears, 39, expressed serious opposition to the conservatorship earlier and more often than had previously been known, and said that it restricted everything from whom she dated to the color of her kitchen cabinets.” Now imagine being in this same position without her fame and her (only partially controlled) resources. I find it remarkable how little our world cares about this issue.
Rent-seeking within organizations
What are the best books and articles to read on this public choice topic? I am not looking for critiques of democracy per se. Your recommendations would be most welcome, government, corporate, and non-profit settings are all welcome…