*Blade Runner 2049* (some Straussian spoilers)
I hardly expected the movie to be so drenched in Tarkovsky (“The Zone” and Solaris, maybe a bit of The Sacrifice), and the now-famed sex scene draws from Bergman’s Persona. Overall, the colors and palette were stunning, and the use of sound was as impressive as in any movie, do see this one in IMAX. It hardly makes any concessions to the Hollywood vices of this millennium and indeed much of the Tysons Corner audience seemed to be baffled.
Think of the main plot line as showing a world where the Christ miracle is inverted and what that would have to mean for everything else. Much of the plot is sprawling, some of the references are too heavy-handed or scattered (Moses and the Dalai Lama and Kafka and Star Wars 1-2 are thrown in for good measure, and few will grok the Galatians reference), and the whole thing could have been fifteen minutes shorter. Still, this is a worthy sequel to one of the best movies of the 1980s or is that the 1990s? Carla Juri steals the show, and furthermore it resolves the main plot puzzle of the original Blade Runner rather economically.
Also on the plus side, Adam Driver does not appear in this movie.
A simple theory of baseline mood
During much of the 1982-2001 period, the Western world seemed to be moving in a very favorable direction, indeed most of Asia too. Over time, Westerns intellectuals and commentators came to expect triumphant feelings and relatively low levels of stress.
9/11, the financial crisis, and now Brexit/Trump/populism/nationalism have upset this feeling. The level of stress is now especially high in part because it was, not long ago, especially low. The contrast is difficult for us to stomach, and comparisons with say Richard Nixon or Andrew Jackson help only a little.
In the postwar era, running up through the 1980s, the objective level of stress was much higher than today. The risk of nuclear war was pretty high, overt racism was much more common, the safety net was much weaker, and it was far from clear that so much of the world would develop economically or become democratic. Yet all this came right after the easily-remembered stress of World War II, and so it felt like a relief nonetheless.
As a kind of coincidence, memories of World War II wore off just as stress-relieving positive events were kicking into full gear. That gave America an especially long period of low stress, unprecedented by historical standards.
We are not used to feeling as much stress as we do today. Yet even in the optimistic scenarios in my predictions, the level of stress today is relatively low compared to what we can rationally expect for the next few decades.
Saturday assorted links
1. “Jutras has been working on the trifecta for a decade, since his pumpkin win.” (who’s complacent!?) And did Iranian ballistic missiles violate the nuclear deal?
2. This is not Arthur Laffer’s napkin. And “Five countries have higher tax rates than the peak of the Laffer curve.”
4. Laibach plays North Korea. And here is Laibach singing “Across the Universe.”
5. Wiblin and Beckstead podcast on how to give away billions.
6. Profile of Kevin Hassett in his new job.
7. “The fish in aquariums is a sort of entertaining bait to catch the attention of travelers for the hidden cameras to scan their faces and irises.” File under The Airport that is Dubai.
*The High Cost of Good Intentions*
The subtitle is A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs, and the author of this new and excellent book is John F. Cogan of Stanford University and the Hoover Institution. It is the single best history of what it covers, and thus one of the best books to read on the history of U.S. government or for that matter American economic history more generally.
How did the American entitlement state get built? In multiple, discrete pieces:
The House and Senate overwhelmingly approved a modified version of President Truman’s Social Security proposals in June 1950. The Social Security Amendments provided a mammoth across-the-board increase in monthly benefits. The law’s sliding scale of benefits…averaged 77 percent per recipient…The 1950 Act also rewrote Social Security’s eligibility rules to enable hundreds of thousands of workers with little history of contributing payroll taxes to begin collecting benefits.
And:
…from 1969 to 1975, inflation-adjusted federal entitlements pending grew annually at a remarkable 10 percent, registering an 86 percent increase in six years…Total annual inflation-adjusted entitlement expenditures grew 20 percent faster under President Nixon than they had under President Johnson.
And:
The eligibility liberalizations from 1997 to 2008 produced sharp increases in the food stamp and Medicaid rolls. From 1998 to 2008, the food stamp rolls increased to 28 million people from 20 million and the Medicaid rolls increased to 59 million from 40 million people. The liberalizations enacted during the Great Recession have lasted well beyond the recession’s end in 2010. In 2016, the number of food stamp recipients ballooned to 44 million, and the number of Medicaid recipients rose to 73 million in 2016.
Here is a good sentence:
In 2015, 41 percent of the nation’s nonelderly-headed households received entitlement benefits.
This book is well-written and has useful and important information on virtually every page.
Megan McArdle on the collapse of Obamacare
Her earlier prediction:
Obamacare would not, and could not, be the program that had been promised or intended. It had already failed to deliver on key promises for coverage, affordability and of course, the infamous promise that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” It was also dangerously unstable, requiring steady executive intervention just to keep the program from collapsing. I argued that these executive interventions, enthusiastically supported by the law’s proponents, were setting a precedent that would eventually be used against it. Worried that health care was too hostage to the vicissitudes of the markets, Democrats had instead made it the prisoner of politics.
“Essentially they’ve made it so that Republicans can undo two-thirds of this law with a stroke of the presidential pen,” I said at the close of my opening statement. “Obamacare is now beyond rescue. The administration has destroyed their own law in order to save it.” Four years later, we are watching those dominos fall.
Here is the full Bloomberg piece.
Some reasons why the electricity in Puerto Rico is not working
- The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) declined to ask for help from mainland electric utilities in the days after Hurricane Maria, instead turning to a small Montana-based contractor to carry out grid restoration practices.
- Earlier this week, PREPA CEO Ricardo Ramos told E&E News that his bankrupt utility did not reach out to munis on the continental U.S. because he was unsure it could pay them back for assistance. About 90% of the island remains without power weeks after the storm hit.
- The American Public Power Association (APPA), the trade group for U.S. munis, confirmed that mutual assistance programs were not activated, but said PREPA had already contracted with Whitefish Energy by the time the trade group convened a conference call to coordinate aid. PREPA did not respond to requests for comment.
Here is the full story, and here is a related piece, via Brian S.
Friday assorted links
1.Yuval Levin on the new Trump health care changes. Here is more from Timothy Jost.
2. Somebody should consider this picture. Trump is not entirely wrong on this one.
4. Maria Konnikova on Betsy Levy Paluck on how social norms change.
6. What would happen if the United States withdrew from NAFTA? (NYT)
“Sachs looks to turn conservative tide in US state governments”
Economist Jeffrey Sachs is joining with a scion of the wealthy Pritzker family and a former New York state legislator to fund candidates for local offices in the hope of reversing a conservative tide that has put Republicans in control of most US state governments.
Their group, called Future Now, was scheduled to announce its first donations on Monday — about $160,000 to be distributed to 10 Democratic candidates running this year for Republican-held seats in the Virginia state legislature.
…To qualify for Future Now’s funds, candidates must agree to pursue 21 objectives ranging from a “liveable” wage for all jobs to universal health coverage, an end to the mass incarceration of non-violent offenders and support for “clean, safe energy”.
Future Now’s founders say their goals are meant to be reached by 2030. In the meantime, they say they will measure progress through such means as the publication of state-by-state statistics.
Here is more from Gary Silverman at the FT.
New results on total factor productivity and the import of creative destruction
I am not sure I trust any TFP measures (what if innovation is simply embodied in investment?), but this paper by Gerben Bakker, Nicholas Crafts, and Pieter Woltjer is worth a ponder:
We develop new aggregate and sectoral Total Factor Productivity (TFP) estimates for the United States between 1899 and 1941 through better coverage of sectors and better-measured labor quality, and find TFP-growth was lower than previously thought, broadly based across sectors, and strongly variant intertemporally. We then test and reject three prominent claims. First, the 1930s did not have the highest TFP-growth of the twentieth century. Second, TFP-growth was not predominantly caused by four ‘great inventions’. Third, TFP-growth was not driven indirectly by spillovers from great inventions such as electricity. Instead, the creative-destruction -friendly American innovation system was the main productivity driver.
For the pointer I thank David Levey.
What I’ve been reading
1. J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays 2006-2017. The pieces on Robert Walser, Ford Madox Ford, Patrick White, Gerald Murnane, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Ramón Jiménez make this worth buying, the rest are mixed in quality. Coetzee remains minimalistically grumpy in the right way.
2. Grant N. Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique. Havers argues against Strauss from “the Right,” but sympathetically. He suggests Strauss underrated Christianity and had too high an opinion of antiquity, and was a true liberal democrat, while the American founders consciously rejected ancient political thought.
3. Neil Monnery, Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong. I didn’t find this inspiring to read, but still it is a useful account of the under-covered early days of how Hong Kong evolved into a freedom-oriented economy after World War II. Here is a review from The Economist.
4. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. “As Dolot remembered it, the presence of the Soviet state in his village in the 1920s had been minimal.” And “Initially, collectivization was supposed to be voluntary.” And “When their potatoes were gone…people began to go to the Russian villages and to exchange their clothing for food.”
I have only browsed my library copy of Masha Gessen’s The Future of History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, but it looked very good and so I ordered it from Amazon.
William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is a beautiful exhibition catalog, with text, edited by Stephen F. Eisenman, for a show currently on at Northwestern University.
David Kynaston, Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013, seems to be a fine work of history, but it is not organized analytically in the way I might wish. Still, some of you should be interested, as this is 796 pp. of well-written, carefully researched material on the BOE.
Thursday assorted links
1. Behavioral economics should be most important for education.
2. The New York Review of Books discovers the Israeli TV show Srugim.
3. Trust within the diamond trade is eroding.
5. Toward a public choice theory of the Screen Actors Guild. Union much?
6. Did standardized languages help drive the Industrial Revolution?
The wisdom of Alex Tabarrok
From Lisa Abramowicz on Twitter:
“We seem to be living in the riskiest moment of our lives, and yet the stock market seems to be napping:” Thaler [link]
It’s funny that the behavioral critique of the market is now that it is not volatile enough!
USA fact of the day
The top 0.1 percent of earners projected to pay more to the IRS than the bottom 80 percent combined. This year, official government data show, the top 20 percent will pay 95 percent of all income taxes.
And:
Not just that: It’s hard to cut tax rates on moderate-income people without simultaneously benefiting the rich. That’s because everyone pays the same marginal tax rates on, say, their first $50,000 in income, regardless of how much they make in total. So cutting, for example, the 15 percent tax bracket helps the poor and rich alike.
That is all from Brian Faler at Politico.
You too can now relax
People have stopped worrying about covered interest parity.
This worry has expired along with the cross-currency basis. Here’s Matt Klein at Alphaville explaining that for much of 2016, it was much cheaper to borrow dollars in the U.S. and hedge them into yen than it was to borrow yen in Japan, creating an obvious arbitrage that nonetheless didn’t go away. But then it did, due to declining dollar strength or the full phasing-in of money-market-fund reform or changes in Federal Reserve balance-sheet policy. I look forward to other recurring Money Stuff worries being so fully and satisfactorily resolved.
That is from the “no one else could do what he does” Matt Levine at Bloomberg. And Matt points out that Stephen Curry is reading Ray Dalio’s Principles.
The culture and polity that is China
Those who fail to repay a bank loan will be blacklisted, and they will have their name, ID number, photograph, home address and the amount they owe published or announced through various channels – including in newspapers, online, on radio and television, and on screens in buses and public lifts.
…In the southern city of Guangzhou, the personal details of some 141 debt defaulters have so far been displayed on screens in buses, commercial buildings and on media platforms at the request of local courts.
Meanwhile in Jiangsu, Henan and Sichuan provinces, the courts have teamed up with telecoms operators to create a recorded message – played every time someone calls – for those who fail to repay their loans. The message tells the caller: “The person you are calling has been put on a blacklist by the courts for failing to repay their debts. Please urge this person to honour their legal obligations.”
That is from SCMP, via Viking.
Elsewhere in the Middle Kingdom, Shanghai adopts a facial recognition system to name and shame jaywalkers.