*The Dawn of Eurasia*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Bruno Maçães, due out in January.  I was asked to blurb it, I’m going to go “off the reservation” and call it so far the best and most important book I’ve read so far this year.  From Amazon:

In this original and timely book, Bruno Maçães argues that the best word for the emerging global order is ‘Eurasian’, and shows why we need to begin thinking on a super-continental scale. While China and Russia have been quicker to recognise the increasing strategic significance of Eurasia, even Europeans are realizing that their political project is intimately linked to the rest of the supercontinent – and as Maçães shows, they will be stronger for it.

The Kindle edition at least you can pre-order.

Which are the most and least walkable countries?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In a recent study by researchers at Stanford University, Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most-populous nation, came in last among 46 countries and territories for the number of walking steps its citizens take, averaging only 3,513 a day.

By comparison, Hong Kong was first with 6,880, and China second with 6,189. Ukraine, Japan and Russia rounded out the top five. The study tracked 717,000 people in 111 countries, who voluntarily monitored 68 million days of activity using an app on their smartphones and watch devices that was designed by Stanford researchers — the largest such tracking study ever, the researchers said. Each place needed to have at least 1,000 participants to be ranked in the report.

Jakarta, an urban sprawl of approximately 10 million people, with a metropolitan region of about 30 million, is the poster child of the nation’s walking woes.

Only 7 percent of the capital’s 4,500 miles of road have sidewalks, according to local government data.

That is from Joe Cochrane at the NYT.  Those results are consistent with my intuitions, noting that I sometimes find India difficult to walk in. By the way, the two countries with the highest “Activity Inequality” are the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Here are data on the walkability of various American cities.  The estimable Chug refers me to this short piece on the walkability of the Jersey shore.

Those new service sector jobs

by  Tyler Cowen in

Plastic surgeons who give you Vulcan and elfin-like ears:

Of course, looking naturally elflike is not everyone’s goal. Luis Padron, 25, who owns a cosplay business in Argentina, said he has spent over $35,000 in surgeries and procedures including skin lightening, nose surgery and hair removal for his sylvan shape-shifting. His look has been influenced by Katherine Cardona, a contemporary illustrator specializing in fairies, and Sakimichan, a gender-bending fantasy digital artist.

Padron plans to change his eye color to violet using an intraocular implant procedure in New Delhi (not approved by the Food and Drug Administration) because “it is the color of magic, fantasy, dreams and imagination,” he said. The idea is on point, elfishly speaking, when you consider that Bloom, who wore blue contact lenses in the Tolkien film, once described elves as “incredible angelic spirits who create and appreciate great beauty.”

To complete his elflike transformation, Padron is planning a heart-shaped hairline implant and PRP scalp injections in Beverly Hills, California, because “elves have long hair,” he said. He is also planning more plastic surgery in South Korea, including Adam’s apple reduction, jaw reshaping and limb lengthening, and plans to finish his look with ear pointing surgery, which he calls “the cherry on top.”

Waiting time for ear pointing, however, is over a year, and over 40 percent of elf-ear wishers don’t have the right cartilage to perform the modification, Von Cyborg said. Black was one of the lucky ones.

Here is the full story.  Should this be subsidized or taxed?

Who should be shamed, and who not?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Let’s start with the distiction between people and their ideas and also their behavior.  We might condemn the ideas of a person without condeming the person himself.  Of course, if the ideas are very, very bad, sometimes we condemn the person too.

We seem to mind less when the bad ideas come from another time and space altogether.  For instance, hardly anyone seems to mind if a Mexican migrant has incorrect and deeply offensive views on the Oapan-Sam Miguel land disputes.  Those beliefs, even if they sanction violence against innocents for the purposes of land grabs, don’t impinge much on current American status competitions.  Similary, I don’t see that many objections to intellectual “monuments” erected in favor of classical Athens, in spite of the significant role of slavery in that society.  The pro-Athenian faction isn’t going to command any electoral votes the next cycle.  Was Joan of Arc problematic?

How many people object if a high percentage of the best jobs for Indian-Americans go to members of higher castes?  Does anyone push for affirmative action within the Indian-American community?  Not that I am aware of.  Those status contests aren’t salient for most of us.

I see many people who have behaved very badly — and here I mean legally convicted criminals — but where the prevailing “mood affiliation” among American liberal intellectuals is to favor their rehabilitation.  For instance, if a company does not ask job applicants if they have criminal records, this is considered to be good, and maybe it is.  For one thing, many of those criminals are the products of bad circumstances and we may have various (true) theories that help to excuse their behavior.  So we don’t go to the nth degree to shame and disgrace those ex-criminals, even if they have been convicted of prior violent activities.

How are we then to feel about contemporary neo-Nazis?  Most of them have not been convicted of anything at all.  Yet right now we are going to great lengths to shame and disgrace them.  We regard them as on a lower moral rung than the convicted criminals.  But is wishing for violence that much worse than having committed it yourself?

Or sometimes those two qualities go together.  If you are a neo-Nazi and you have committed a violent act, like the guy who drove that car into the crowd, it seems OK to put your photo on the internet in any kind of stereotypically despised, lookist, “white filth” portrayal that is possible, with maximum scorn and contempt.  Should we cover a prisoner on Death Row the same way?  What about someone who has been judged mentally ill?  What if in the meantime we simply do not know?

There may be a good utilitarian reason for the distinctions we draw, namely that we wish to discourage neo-Nazi behavior, and the behavior of potential copycats, for future-oriented reasons.   (Is that shaming even the most effective way to do so?  We don’t seem to obsess over shame threats for convicted criminals, to keep them — and others — on “the right track.”).  Perhaps shaming and disgracing them is necessary because they hold very bad ideologies, and perhaps potentially contagious ideologies, ideologies that most violent criminals do not seem to promulgate.

Maybe this utilitarian view is correct, namely that the shaming of an individual should depend on social context and political impact, and not just on the prior behavior of that individual.  But then notice what we are doing, we are moving away from moral individualism ourselves, and treating the shamed person as a means in the Kantian sense.  I even feel that such shaming makes me a slight bit like them, in a way I wish to avoid.

Do I have the option of just feeling sorry for the neo-Nazis, and at the same time dreading their possible social impact, in the way one might dread and hate a tornado?  But not shaming or scolding them?

Or should I feel bad about benefiting from the shaming activities of others, and being a kind of free-riding Kantian moral purist?

What if deterrence is not your actual goal with the shaming, but rather you are shaming for the purposes of motivating your own “troops”?

Another group being shamed over the course of the last week has been the misogynistic EJMR posters.  But I am curious as to the implicit theories held by the shamers here.  Why do those men write such nasty things?  Is it all just bad socialization, or might some of them them have a genetic inclination toward such behavior?  But once we consider the latter, we seem dangerously into the kind of stereotyping we were objecting to just a moment ago, when we sought to shame them.

What if sexual bullying lies deep in male DNA?  Not for everyone of course, but for some people.  And those same people may well have grown up in disadvantageous circumstances, surrounded by the wrong kinds of nerds, and then they ended up sad and broken on EJMR, for lack of having had the right role models.

Overall I am not impressed by how most of you are writing and thinking about these issues.  I wish to shame you a bit.  Everyone wishes to shame someone.  For me it’s you — sorry!

Germany fact of the day, the growing north-south divide

by  Tyler Cowen in

The gap between the unemployment rates in north and south, for instance, will soon be wider than that between east and west (see chart 2). In the New Social Market Economy Initiative’s education rankings, Saxony and Thuringia took the two highest places among Germany’s 16 states while Berlin and Brandenburg, also eastern states, took the two lowest. The north-south divide on life expectancy is now greater than the east-west one; women in Baden-Württemberg and Saxony live the longest. According to André Wolf of the Hamburg Global Economics Institute, “in the medium term the north-south differential could definitely supersede the (current) east-west one.”

In 1960, however, Bavaria was the poorest part of West Germany.

That is from The Economist.

A web site in honor of UCLA economist Earl Thompson

by  Tyler Cowen in

It was created by Josh Hendrickson, here is the whole thing.  I excerpt one part of it, I’ve done no additional indent but all of this following is from Hendrickson:

Institutions and Public Choice
 
In the 1970s, Earl Thompson started down a path of research that would continue through his career. This research represented the intertwining of institutions and public choice.
  • “Taxation and National Defense“, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 82, No. 4, p. 755 – 782, (1974). In this paper Thompson argues that the optimal tax structure for a country should be one that is structured around national defense. He presents evidence that the U.S. tax system is the approximately optimal tax system using this criteria.
  • “An Economic Basis for the `National Defense Argument’ for Aiding Certain Industries,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 87, No. 1, (1979). This paper is essentially an extension of the previous paper in that Thompson argues that many protectionist policies are optimal when considered in the context of national defense. He again shows that U.S. policy is approximately optimal in this context.
  • “On Labor’s Right to Strike“, Economic Inquiry, Vol. 28, p. 640 – 653, (1980). In this paper Thompson argues that under certain conditions a strike by workers will actually benefit capital owners. He argues that the right of labor to strike and the existence of strikes are often explained by the profitability of the strike to capital owners.
  • “Characteristics of Worlds with Perfect Strategic Communication“, Journal of Economic Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1, p. 111 – 119, (1980). This paper as well as the one that follows are designed to discuss how institutions emerge in society. Thompson posits the idea of a hierarchical structure in society in which each group commits to a reaction function. The resulting institutions are Pareto optimal, given those reaction functions. This model pops up throughout Thompson’s subsequent work to explain why we get efficient institutions (like the defense-based tax system) despite the fact that very few people would be able to articulate its purpose. The paper below is a more popular extension of this paper.
  • “A Pure Theory of Strategic Behavior and Social Institutions” (with Roger Faith), American Economic Review, Vol. 71, No. 3, p. 366 – 380, (1981).
  • Ideology and the Evolution of Vital Economic Institutions: Guilds, The Gold Standard and Modern International Cooperation. (with Charles Hickson). Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. This book is an attempt to summarize and extend Thompson’s work on institutions, growth collapses, and globalization. The book is exploding with ideas. Some of them you will find convincing. Others you might find crazy. However, the book will make you think. You won’t get these types of arguments or this type of thinking from any other economist.
  • “What Globalization is Really All About.” This was a keynote address that Thompson gave at a conference. It is a short summary of Thompson’s career and his perspective on globalization.
Other Work
 
This is far from an exhaustive account of Thompson’s work. For a summary of his work, see “A tribute to Earl A. Thompson and, in his own words, a summary of his general economic and social theory” by Don Allison Jr. and Thomas Borcherding in Public Choice, (2013).

Who’s complacent?, sloth worship edition

by  Tyler Cowen

What’s the perfect form of therapy for a world that’s more frantic than ever? An animal that appears to do absolutely nothing.

One freezing February morning this year, Kayla Premack, 27, arrived at 3:30 a.m. and waited for hours in a sleeping bag at Denver’s Downtown Aquarium. Never mind the sharks, otters and turtles. She’d come to take a selfie with Aspen, a two-toed sloth.

Only the first 100 people in line that day would get photo opportunities with the aquarium’s most popular resident, and Ms. Premack, an office manager, was determined to be one of them. It didn’t matter that she already has at least 50 photos of him. “Sloths just invoke this happiness inside of me,” she said.

The slow-moving mammal, which has exploded in popularity in recent years, has caused some unusual reactions from its fans. MaryCharles Wolfe, 21, lost her breath and started sobbing when she saw a sloth for the first time last month at The Houston Zoo.

“How do you look at that and not think it’s the sweetest?” she said. “In this world with chaos and grossness everywhere, sloths don’t do any wrong. They can’t do anything.”

…Animal keepers have grown accustomed to people shedding tears upon seeing a sloth, even bawling hysterically on the ground. “They’re just overcome with emotion,” said LynnLee Schmidt, a curator at Denver’s Downtown Aquarium. “I think to myself: What do I love that much?”

Here is the story by Nicole Hong.  The article seems to suggest that sloths are worshipped as an offset to the frenetic pace of modern life, but what is cited is smart phones, and it is not the Silicon Valley CEOs lining up to pay their homage, and so I would give this story a slightly different spin…

Who is the modern-day Frantz Fanon?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Chris Blattman tweets:

Is there a modern day Fanon or Memmi writing about dvpt & globalizn as they wrote about colonialization? Doesn’t only have to be leftist.

Hardi and Negri come up in the mentions, but I am underwhelmed.  There is the alt right, mostly on the internet rather than in books of note.  To whatever extent they are objectionable, keep in mind Fanon was a Marxist, and in any case agreement is not the metric here.

I also nominate Alexander Dugin.  There is plenty in Islamic theology too, and the environmental movement would be yet another direction.

On the academic and also more liberal side, there is Joe Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik.  Is Roberto Unger going too far back?  Three-quarters of the Bengali intelligentsia?  Arundhati Roy?  Or maybe you think Naomi Klein is not serious enough, but the lower quality of at least some of these answers is itself data.  Does the writer have to be from a developing nation?

Frank Fukuyama would be a subtle answer, as would be “the government of China.”  I am reluctant to categorize Slavoj Žižek, but he is not irrelevant for this question by any means.

And let’s not restrict ourselves to non-fiction.  How about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666?  Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin?  Neill Blomkamp?  Michel Houllebecq of course.

What do you all think? I know I am missing a great deal.  That said, if you look for a very direct parallel and just google “leading Algerian intellectuals,” little of relevance comes up, focus maybe there on rai music and theology.

I would stress that the nature of intellectual fame has changed, and if there are few exact parallels to Fanon it is for that reason.  I do not think there is a more general vacuum in this area of inquiry.

Why is a solar eclipse special?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I recall the eclipse in 1973.  As a kid, I made some kind of cardboard box, so I could view the sun through a little squinting hole.  The entire event was a big disappointment, even given the fact that, at the time, I had hardly seen anything before.  I hadn’t even been to Philadelphia.

I’ve seen it get dark before.  So is it special because we wonder how the others will react?  If traffic will freeze up and wild animals will burrow into the sleep holes for the night?  Or do we care simply because it is rare and publicly observable?  (NB: It is the 3 billionth total solar eclipse.)  Because it upends something about our sense of the world and its underlying orderliness?  Because we somehow find the crossing of the heavenly bodies intrinsically aesthetic?

Because we can see it?  No one much seems to care when various planets line up in what are supposed to be astrologically meaningful ways.  Or maybe because the event is dangerous and capable of damaging our eyes.

Or is it like a football game, namely that you go someplace to watch it and drink a lot of beer?  Would it be a lesser public event if everyone could see it perfectly from their back yard?  Few people get to see it from a plane.

I expect to be underwhelmed.

Forget the Past: Statues Represent Who We Want To Be

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the excellent title they gave to my latest Bloomberg column.  The piece starts by offering a very simple theory of what statues are for, and then I shift to the perspective of a foreigner.  Here is one bit:

Or consider the debates in Macedonia. The city of Skopje went on a major statue-building binge several years ago, both as fiscal policy and to cement national identity. One of the resulting disputes is whether those statues should emphasize the country’s ancient Greek connections (e.g., Alexander the Great) or the Slavic heritage (e.g., Saints Cyril and Methodius). It’s a strange debate to an outsider, yet to many Macedonians and some of their Greek neighbors (who wish to claim Alexander as their own), it is one of the most fraught issues of the day.

Again, you won’t get too far on this one by debating the life and times of Alexander, whether he led aggressive or defensive wars, or by asking how many slaves he owned. It’s better to focus on which political faction you wish to see assume more authority in Macedonia, and then work backward to figure out your preferred statues.

Similarly, if Macedonians were asked to evaluate the relative moralities of historic American leaders, I hope they would consider a similar approach. I don’t find it so fruitful to debate how much Robert E. Lee does or does not have in common with George Washington  — arguably Washington was a traitor of sorts as well, against a relatively benign British ruler, and he fought against Native Americans and owned slaves. American treatment of Native Americans makes it hard to find many truly “good guys” from that period. Still, we can ask what role Washington statues play in today’s politics; few people are using them to lord over Native Americans.

And my conclusion:

So if you’re considering the worthiness of a particular statue, here are three pointers: Pretend you’re from some very distant foreign country and view the dispute through that more objective lens. Second, focus on the future, and third don’t be afraid to make some changes.

Do read the whole thing.