CIVIL and the future of media?
David Siegel emails me:
CIVIL is a new start-up from Consensys, whose goal is to change journalism.
The Civil marketplace is built on a protocol that in turn is built on the Ethereum blockchain.
This ecosystem is built around a token-curated registry, using what we call a “skin-in-the-game coin,” the CVL. This is an application of mechanism design to blockchain-based tokens that can be acquired, exchanged, and go up in value, creating a new micro-economy for – in this case – truthy journalism. The basic unit of Civil is a newsroom. A newsroom is a person or group who can publish anything they like. They can charge readers using CVL tokens or credit cards or anything else. What makes Civil interesting is that anyone can challenge a story’s veracity.
To challenge a story, you send some CVL coins to a smart contract. The community then votes on the veracity of the story, or even the newsroom itself. Anyone who votes must stake coins. If the story is voted true, those who voted true take the pot – they win all the staked tokens. If the community finds it’s false, then those who voted for false share the purse. This skin-in-the-game mechanism is the next evolution of communities like Steem and is game-theoretically far more advanced than Reddit or Quora. It promises to eliminate fake ratings, reviews, and content farms pumping out propaganda. By creating token-based games that reward virtuous behavior – the first one of which was Bitcoin – today’s blockchain entrepreneurs promise to bring us a new era of less biased news, better blogging, more accurate ratings, and potentially better science.
Sunday assorted links
1. Apply for the next Coase Institute workshop.
2. Why IVF proved to be so important. A good piece.
3. Guardian best summer books lists. Frankly, very little in these lists seemed to appeal to me, so I offer this to you all as an alternative perspective on what to read.
Trump’s gender gap also concerns intensity of preference
Among self-identified Republicans, Trump’s approval is 91 percent among men and 82 percent among women. But the gap in intensity of support is what is particularly telling. While 68 percent of male Republicans say they strongly approve of the way Trump is handling his job, just 31 percent of female Republicans say the same — a whopping 37-point difference.
There is a double-digit difference between all men and women in their evaluation of Trump’s handling of immigration, and likewise among Republican men and women. On trade, Republican men and women are in general agreement in giving positive marks, but they are widely separated in whether they feel strongly about that support.
On his handling of the economy, the gap is even larger. Across the entire population, more than 6 in 10 men give him positive marks for the economy, but fewer than 4 in 10 women say the same. Among Republicans, there is a 27-point difference between men and women in the level of strong approval expressed for the way the president is dealing with the economy.
Here is the full story by Dan Balz.
Theo asks, and I intersperse my answers
Dear Tyler,
Due to the asymmetry of fame I feel that I know you quite well so I am just going to bombard you with random questions and hope that you see fit to answer some of them.
You seem to value journalism very highly. Is it just out of necessity as a generalist, or does popular writing on a topic have important information that can’t be learned from the academic/scholarly side?
Journalists have to try to explain things that actually happened to other human beings, often educated ones but not specialists either. It is hard to overrate the importance of that process to developing one’s thoughts and self, no matter what you may think of particular journalists in today’s MSM.
Related: Which elite profession or slice of society is most opaque to journalists and “book-learning” in general? (Oddly some of the categories that come to mind are those which are some of the most written-about – food, sex, friends, law, politics. But it’s probably maths.)
Making things. Archaeology. These days, tech. Maths. Journalism.
How much less interesting would it be to read Shakespeare if no-one else ever had? Does the answer differ much across top-tier “great” artists?
It would not be less interesting at all, maybe more interesting, because the shock of discovery would be all the greater. Admittedly, many artists require lots of discussion with other people, maybe rock and roll most of all? But not Shakespeare.
Overrated vs underrated: The New Yorker. How about Samin Nosrat?
The New Yorker has had a consistent voice and remarkable brand for more decades than I can remember (I recall Patrick Collison making a similar point, perhaps in a podcast?). Since I am now above the median age for the United States, that makes them underrated. The literariness of the historical New York and Northeast and the integration of American and European culture also have become underrated topic areas, and The New Yorker still does them, so that too makes the magazine underrated.
And who is Samin Nosrat? She must therefore be underrated.
Does the world have too many writers, or not enough? What about comparative literature professors? How should we think about the future of literary culture when the written word is becoming so much more culturally dominant at the same time as books and journalism are falling apart?
What variable are we changing at the margin? If people watch less TV and write more, that is probably a plus. I also would favor fewer photographs and more writing. But I wouldn’t cut back on charity to increase the quantity of writing. If only comparative literature professors were people who simply loved books — at the margin a bit more like used book store owners and somewhat less like professors — and would compare them to each other…then I would want more of them. Until then, I don’t know how to keep the extra ones busy.
Why does the USA not have open borders with Canada?
I believe America should have open borders with any nation that has a more generous welfare state than we do. That covers Canada, even though Canadian insurance coverage for mental health and dentistry isn’t nearly as good as you might think. As to why we don’t have open borders with Canada, I don’t think American voters would see that as solving any concrete problem (can’t we get many of the best Canadians anyway?), and it would feel a bit like giving up control, so why do it?
To what extent are Trump, Brexit, Orban, Erdogan, rising murder rates and stalling trade growth worldwide part of the same phenomenon? If they aren’t completely separate, which way does the contagion run?
Yes, no, and maybe so, get back to me in a few years’ time.
Have a great day…
You too!
Saturday assorted links
1. My appreciation of Mario Rizzo on his 70th birthday.
2. I am hardly the expert, still I predict that most billionaire honeymoons are not this unusual.
3. The emoji oracle.
Mobile money in Somaliland
Since its launch in 2009, Zaad, which means “to grow” in Somali, has swelled to 850,000 users—roughly one-quarter of the nation’s population. Locals use the platform on battered old cellphones and, less frequently, on smartphones and a designated app.
Without mobile money, cash has a hard time flowing through the country. No commercial banks really operate here, and hauling physical cash over rough roads is time-consuming. Companies use Zaad for their monthly payrolls, instead of handing wads of cash to their employees.
Today, each user on average makes 35 Zaad transactions a month, and Somalilanders say they try to use Zaad for most transactions. A rudimentary texting system makes it easy even for the many Somalilanders who are illiterate.
It seems to be a kind of free banking:
Apart from phone-to-phone transactions, users can top up their mobile wallets by handing cash—shillings [the Somaliland currency] or dollars—over to an official agent, who is often a single person in a shack on the side of the road.
“This service has been a driving force for the smooth operation of our economy,” said Abdikarim Dil, Telesom’s chief executive.
Since mobile-money services aren’t regulated by the central bank, they aren’t subject to the restrictions that traditional banks face, including requirements meant to block terror financing.
Here is the story (WSJ) by the consistently interesting Matina Stevis-Gridneff (there are few journalists better to read these days), via the excellent Samir Varma.
Informational autocrats
That is a new and important paper by Sergei M. Guriev and Daniel Treisman, here is the abstract:
In recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new model based on the manipulation of information. Instead of terrorizing citizens into submission, “informational autocrats” artificially boost their popularity by convincing the public they are competent. To do so, they use propaganda and silence informed members of the elite by co-optation or censorship. Using several sources–including a newly created dataset of authoritarian control techniques–we document a range of trends in recent autocracies that fit the theory: a decline in violence, efforts to conceal state repression, rejection of official ideologies, imitation of democracy, a perceptions gap between masses and elite, and the adoption by leaders of a rhetoric of performance rather than one aimed at inspiring fear.
Again, here is my related Bloomberg column from June 18.
If technology has arrived everywhere, why has income diverged?
That is the topic of a new paper by Diego Comin and Martí Mestieri, published in AEJ: Macroeconomics, here is the abstract:
We study the cross-country evolution of technology diffusion over the last two centuries. We document that adoption lags between poor and rich countries have converged, while the intensity of use of adopted technologies of poor countries relative to rich countries has diverged. The evolution of aggregate productivity implied by these trends in technology diffusion resembles the actual evolution of the world income distribution in the last two centuries. Cross-country differences in adoption lags account for a significant part of the cross-country income divergence in the nineteenth century. The divergence in intensity of use accounts for the divergence during the twentieth century.
I am struck by the strength of the two major stylized facts in this paper. The mean adoption lag for spindles, classified as a 1779 technology, was 130 years, or in other words that is how long it took for the technology to move to poorer countries. For ships, listed as a 1788 technology, the mean lag is 110 years. Synthetic fiber is a 1931 technology, with a mean adoption lag of 29 years. For the internet, a 1983 technology (is that right?), the mean adoption lag is only 6 years.
But the overall story is not so simple. The more advanced countries use more of these technologies, and use them more effectively (“intensity”), and that gap has been growing over time. Yes, Ghana has the internet, but it is Silicon Valley that is working wonders with it. Some technology use begs more technology use.
If you calibrate those parameters properly, it turns out you can explain about 3/4 of the evolution of income divergence across rich and poor countries.
*Three Identical Strangers*
Few movies serve up more social science. Imagine three identical triplets, separated at a young age, and then reared separately in a poor family, in a middle class family, and in a well-off family. I can’t say much more without spoiling it all, but I’ll offer these points: listen closely, don’t take the apparent conclusion at face value, ponder the Pareto principle throughout, read up on “the control premium,” solve for how niche strategies change with the comparative statics (don’t forget Girard), and are they still guinea pigs? Excellent NYC cameos from the 1980s, and see Project Nim once you are done.
Definitely recommended, and I say don’t read any other reviews before going (they are mostly strongly positive).
Friday assorted links
1. What is wrong with Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid?
2. Excellent Jennifer Szalai review of the new Martha Nussbaum book (NYT).
3. How Michael Nielsen reads and records papers. “Avoid orphan questions.” Many of the best parts are later in the essay.
4. Differing opinions on whether behavioral economics is overrated or underrated.
5. Try giving up air conditioning. In fact I did this for years (in Virginia), and on a reasonably high income. I was fine with it, and regarded it as a healthier way to live.
And this story is a metaphor for what, what would Baudrillard say?
The US Postal Service has been ordered to pay $3.5m (£2.6m) for copyright infringement after mistakenly using the wrong Statue of Liberty on a stamp.
The Postal Service used the image of sculptor Robert Davidson’s Las Vegas replica on a 2010 stamp design instead of the New York original.
Mr Davidson called his replica “sexier”, and a judge ruled that the statues were indeed “unmistakably” different.
The Postal Service has not commented on the verdict.
In his original 2013 complaint, Mr Davidson said his work gave the American icon a more “fresh-faced, sultry and even sexier” look, US media reported.
Federal Judge Eric Bruggink ruled on 29 June that Mr Davidson was entitled to a share of the US Postal Service’s (USPS) earnings from the stamp.
USPS sold 4.9bn stamps with the Vegas Lady Liberty image, amounting to profits of $70m before it was retired in 2014, according to court documents.
Here is the link, via Michael Rosenwald, who now has a new history podcast series.
Lviv, Ukraine: a brief recent history
In the twentieth century, L’viv…, now a city in Ukraine, experienced war not just once but many times. Between 1914 and 1947, the city went through seven regime changes and was shelled by Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Soviet artillery and bombed by German and Soviet planes. In November 1918, Poles and Ukrainians fought one another for control of the city. Twnety-five years later, both sides were prepared to battle it out again. During the same period, the city’s Jewish population lived through several pogroms and experienced repeated bouts of anti-Semitic violence up until the time when almost all of Jews of L’viv were murdered by Nazi Germany. After World War II, the Soviet government forced the Polish population to leave the city…In 1914 half of the city’s population was Roman Catholic (mostly Poles), 28 percent were Jewish, and 18 percent were Greek Catholic (about two-thirds of them Ruthenians/Ukrainians). By 1947, L’viv had become an almost homogeneously Ukrainian city…Approximately 80 percent of the city’s’ inhabitants had arrived during or after the war.
That is all from p.1 of Christoph Mick’s study of L’viv.
U.S.A. facts of the day
In 2000, 55 percent of American playgrounds had seesaws, but only 7 percent did by 2004.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation claims it has not installed a new one, except by special request, in over thirty years. There are now only a few seesaws left in the city.
(TC: As a child, I never had an interest in those infernal things, which seemed to me dangerous and not much fun.)
Most of the “monkey bars” in NYC had been installed by master builder Robert Moses, between 1934 and 1960.
Between 2001 and 2008, about two hundred thousand American children sustained playground injuries, 36 percent of them being broken bones.
That said, Helle Nebelong, a Danish landscape architect, argues that too much uniformity in the environment of children creates other risks, because they come to expect the whole world will be smooth and predictable. Nature, in particular, is not.
In 1949, “junk” playgrounds were a trend. They often had paint, nails, and many kinds of secondhand building materials.
The first edition of the Handbook for Public Playground Safety appeared in 1981.
That is all from the new and interesting The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids, by Alexandra Lange.
How well is Germany dealing with the migration crisis?
Anna Sauerbrey offers an optimistic perspective on the actual outcomes (NYT):
For all its shortcomings, Europe has actually managed the crisis quite well, in practice. Its external borders are stronger, and better policed and managed. Cooperation with Libya’s border-patrol militias, however ethically suspect, has brought down the numbers crossing from that country to Italy. So has the agreement with Turkey to host migrants in return for financial aid. In 2015, more than 450,000 pleas for asylum were filed; in 2016, about 745,000. So far this year, there have been only 68,000.
According to figures by the German Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees, only about a quarter of those applying for asylum in Germany in 2018 are already registered in another European country. This means that the C.S.U. risked blowing up the government to push through a regulation that applies to about 100 individuals a day, scattered over all of Germany’s points of entry.
But she is pessimistic about the politics:
Whatever respite Germany may have gained this week is offset, and then some, by the arrival of a new and frightening political dynamic. Mr. Seehofer succeeded by going nuclear; chances are, he won’t be the last. The politics of fear and menace may be here to stay, undermining the foundations of democracy. In sound democracies, policies are the results of compromise between parties representing a majority of the voters. Through the politics of artificial crisis, minorities take the system hostage. They create policies redeeming fictional problems for fictional majorities.
Recommended, this is one of the better takes on the problem I have seen.