*Gorbachev: His Life and Times*
That is the new biography by William Taubmann, who won a Pulitzer for his Khruschev book. At first I didn’t want to read it, feeling I was already too familiar with the topic, but it was a fascinating treatment throughout, with many revelations. It is perhaps the best overall treatment of how the Soviet Union collapsed, and the parts on Gorbachev’s early career provide a superior look at how Soviet bureaucracy and the Communist Party actually functioned.
Here is one bit:
In retrospect, his best chance to prevent Communism from collapsing, taking with it the whole Soviet alliance system in Europe, would have been to encourage reformers like himself to take command of their countries with the support of their people. Instead, he gave every appearance in his public meetings with the old guard [Honecker, Husák, Zhivkov] of backing them…
One of the best parts of the book is when Taubmann shows how Gorbachev’s treatment of the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict reflected both Gorby’s strengths and weaknesses early on.
Here is another bit:
“She [Raisa Gorbachev] displayed an extraordinary knowledge of British history and philosophy,” then British ambassador to Moscow Bryan Cartledge remembered. “When she came across a portrait of David Hume, she knew all about him.”
Mrs. Thatcher was stunned, and later Nancy Reagan was envious and tried to keep up. As for Ronald Reagan, to prepare for his meetings with Gorbachev, for a while he was receiving several two-hour tutoring sessions a week from Russian historians and other experts.
Perhaps the most startling part of the book is when the reader learns that even during the height of the Eastern Europe crisis, foreign policy received no more than five or six percent of the time of Gorbachev and the Politburo; the focus instead was on domestic issues and reforms.
Strongly recommended, this will be one of the two or three best books of the year, compulsively readable, fun, and informative all at once. Here is a rave New York Times review. You can order it here.
The “Trade Talks” podcast series
Chad Bown writes to me:
“I write and take the liberty of drawing your attention to a new and weekly podcast series called Trade Talks that Soumaya Keynes (The Economist) and I are publishing.
According to the iTunes description, we promise to
cohost a weekly podcast on developments in international trade and policy. From trade wars to trade deals, this podcast covers the week’s trade news with insights and economic analysis from two of the world’s top trade geeks.
What more could you want from a couple of economists?
How to find the podcast?
- Subscribe (for free) to Trade Talks in iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, or from most anywhere you find podcasts, whether on an iOS or Android device.
- Either click through one of the blue links above, or type “Trade Talks” into the search bar of your podcast directory (and look for our logo, below).
Here are our episodes thus far:
Monday assorted links
1. UK fact of the day: the NHS uses 10 percent of the world’s pagers.
2. Did they steal the de Kooning just for themselves? (NYT)
3. “Fruit names do not invite ghosts, [Taiwanese] food official says”
4. Modeled Behavior argues for Amazon in Philly.
5. Japanese managers are complacent.
6. Exit interview with Richard Posner (NYT).
Parenting by Panopticon?
The cameras record the families’ lives — conversations, arguments, every interaction. If something is amiss, Cognition Builders can provide instant direction on how to remedy the situation, either verbally through a microphone in the camera or by sending a text to the parent.
Jessica Yuppa, Cognition Builders’ director of curricula and assistant clinical director, said the Nest Cams give CB an “unfiltered look” at what goes on inside the home. “Families think they know about themselves, but they don’t. Cameras give us a beat-for-beat of interactions. If a parent is struggling to communicate with a child, for example, we can watch a conversation and say, ‘Okay, why do you think he looked away when you said this?’” Yuppa said it doesn’t take long for families to adapt to the scrutiny. “My experience is the self-consciousness goes away very quickly,” she said. “People live their lives and forget we’re there.”
…A new rule was thus established. When an adult comes into the room and says hello to one of the children, the child stops what he or she is doing, looks the adult in the eye, shakes his or her hand, returns the greeting, and asks the adult how he or she is doing. This became the new expectation. If any member of the household failed to meet this expectation, he would receive a strike.
…At the end of each day, Elizabeth and Jason would receive a detailed, many-paged report on everything the family architects had observed.
Here is the article by Kim Brooks. Yikes! Read the last paragraph.
Fischer Black’s classic 1986 essay “Noise”
Here is the pdf link, every now and then I feel I should put up an “oldie but goodie.” This is one of the essays that has influenced my thought the most, noting that Fischer had his own language and could be quite opaque. Here is the abstract of his 17 pp. essay:
The effects of noise on the world, and on our views of the world, are profound. Noise in the sense of a large number of small events is often a causal factor much more powerful than a small number of large events can be. Noise makes trading in financial markets possible, and thus allows us to observe prices for financial assets. Noise causes markets to be somewhat inefficient, but often prevents us from taking advantage of inefficiencies. Noise in the form of uncertainty about future tastes and technology by sector causes business cycles, and makes them highly resistant to improvement through government intervention. Noise in the form of expectations that need not follow rational rules causes inflation to be what it is, at least in the absence of a gold standard or fixed exchange rates. Noise in the form of uncertainty about what relative prices would be with other exchange rates makes us think incorrectly that changes in exchange rates or inflation rates cause changes in trade or investment flows or economic activity. Most generally, noise makes it very difficult to test either practical or academic theories about the way that financial or economic markets work. We are forced to act largely in the dark.
Both of Black’s books are worth studying, as well as the Perry Mehrling biography of Black.
Would North Korea consider a first strike?
Vipin Narang says yes:
The strategy turns on Kim’s main calculation that the United States will say it’s not worth losing a major American city to get rid of him.
Of course he could not knock out a major American or allied target, but he could use them somewhere. And the use would boost his, uh…credibility. In fact Charles Murray is worried.
I think of the model this way. If Kim is irrational, we have obvious reason to worry, and of course a first strike could not be ruled out. Remember Pearl Harbor? (Or is that “Remember Pearl Harbor!”)
Alternatively, say all involved parties are fully rational in the selfish sense. Fully rational agents make purely forward-looking calculations. So if Kim used a nuke to kill a sparrow in North Korea, we would not attack because fear of losing an American city would far outweigh desire to retaliate for the loss of the sparrow.
How about one sparrow in the DMZ? In Japan? In the Arctic? In a Malaysian airport? Or maybe one sparrow, three sled dogs, and thirty Inuit?
At what point do we give it a go, and risk a poorly aimed North Korean ICBM being shot off into the sky?
What if Kim uses “only” a biological or chemical weapon, designed for minimum but noticeable impact, on a nearby country? You should think of Kim’s strategy space as a continuous variable, with some noise added of course.
Is the space of “boosts his credibility and domestic stature, but without too much upping the risk of massive American retaliation” really the empty set?
Maybe. Maybe not. I give it about one percent, which in expected value terms is still a real worry.
Florida price gouging by the airlines?
Maybe, but consider this:
Airfare data by Hopper shows that the price hikes that took place this past week are similar to those from two weeks ago, suggesting that the price changes are typical for a week of departure flights.
Here is the full NYT story.
Sunday assorted links
Luxury canine markets in everything
How is making clothing for animals different than for humans?
“There is a whole different physiology when you’re designing for a pet. The animal has to be able to go to the bathroom without removing the clothing. The design must be comfortable, because you don’t want the dog chewing at it or taking it off on the runway.”
What’s the price range of your designs?
“Anywhere from $300 to $15,000. The most expensive item I did was a pageant dress for a Maltese for the New York Pet Fashion Show. It had a crown, a faux fur wrap covered in Swarovski crystals, and the gown was convertible — the skirt part came apart and the dog was still wearing the harness.”
How do you choose the dog models?
“I have a who’s who of the famous dogs of Instagram (including Norbert and Henry from Bideawee, a New York pet welfare organization). I use my clients’ dogs, and I always do a rags-to-riches story and feature a rescue animal that can be adopted.”
What’s it like being a dog clothing designer in New York?
“There was time when people would look at it weird, in the beginning when I was doing it. Now you can’t go anywhere where the dog is not wearing something. I mean, my dogs even wear shades.”
Is the Great Chocolate Stagnation over?
I say no, but some disagree:
There hasn’t been an innovation in the world of chocolate since the white variant was introduced in 1930, which is fine because — in the immortal words of Cogsworth in “Beauty and the Beast” — if ain’t baroque, don’t fix it.
But still, we’d never turn away a new kind of creamy, chocolate-y thing to munch on while we binge-watch Netflix.
And thanks to some Swiss chocolate scientists over at Barry Callebaut — the world’s leading manufacturer of the good stuff, producing 1.8 million tons of cocoa every year and with a revenue of almost $10 billion — that’s exactly what we’re getting. A brand new chocolate flavor called Ruby, developed from the Ruby Cocoa bean, colored a pleasingly millennial pink hue and that tastes like sweet, sweet berries despite having no added color or flavoring.
“Ruby chocolate is the fourth type of chocolate [after milk, white and dark] and is an intense sensorial delight,” a spokesperson for Barry Callebaut said after launching the chocolate to a panel of experts in China.
Here is the (noisy) link, via the excellent Samir Varma.
China Philippines fact of the day
Gulangyu — known as Kulangsu in the local Fujian dialect — is a typical example of this [growing tourism] trend, which has been repeated from Tibet to the Great Wall.
The 2 sq km island just off the thriving port city of Xiamen gets more than 10m visitors a year, almost double the number that visited the entire Philippine archipelago last year. On peak days in the past, more than 100,000 visitors clogged the winding, vehicle-free streets of the island, whose resident population is just 20,000. But the government capped the numbers at 35,000 per day this year as part of the Unesco bid.
That is from Ben Bland at the FT.
Saturday assorted links
1. Is the middle class abandoning football?
2. It’s not quite The Drone Wars, but New York to See Release of GMO Murder-Moths.
3. MIE: Stock spirit Financial Economist John Maynard Keynes 3D crystal company Desk art statue.
Should Harvard admit more legacy students?
That is the question behind my latest Bloomberg column, and basically the answer is yes. Schools could scale up, using legacy admissions as a further source of finance. But why don’t they?:
So why don’t top schools do more to expand their reach? No one doubts that they could find many more qualified students to admit. But there are two problems, both of which we should be willing to live with. First, expanding the size of top schools would lower faculty standards on the research side. That said, teaching quality is unlikely to suffer, as Harvard doesn’t select for the very best teachers. In any case, Harvard’s best researchers could continue their highly productive efforts without missing a beat. Second, administrators would face headaches and potential reputational liabilities from the new initiatives. But that is true in any kind of startup endeavor, and it isn’t a reason to remain stuck in the past.
The actual constraint on how big top schools could grow is how many eligible donors they can find and cultivate, if only through admitting their children. One question is how many such donors there are period, but in an age of high income inequality it seems America’s top schools have hardly tapped out this pool. Legacies make up a sixth of undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. A more unfortunate reality is that some donors might limit their support if say Princeton offered them and their children a less tony and exclusive experience. If that attitude can be overcome, America’s top schools could grow a great deal larger and more diverse.
Do read the whole thing.
*Incontinence of the Void*
That is the new, forthcoming Žižek book, here is one brief excerpt:
Peter Sloterdijk endorses Badiou’s thesis, from his Le siecle, that the defining feature of the twentieth century was “the passion for the real,” the gravitational pull toward the real basis of our lives (economic base, libido, will, etc.). What we witness is the reversal of the traditional relation between public theology and occult materialism preached in elite circles — today, materialism is public while gnostic theology grows in the underground…Passion for the Real is not just a realist-cynical stance of reducing ideological chimeras to their “actual base” (“it’s all really about the economy, power, sex”), it is also sustained by a messianic logic of extermination: the cobweb of (religious, moral, etc.) illusions has to be ruthlessly erased, and it has to be done now. The twentieth century was a time of extremis, of passage a’ l’acte, not of hope for some future. Sloterdijk, of course, for this very reason sees the twentieth century as the age of extremism and ethical catastrophes, from Nazism to Stalinism.
I have several other of his books in my pile to read; this latest one focuses much of its energy on Lacan and also the Slovenian theorist Alenka Zupančič. It turns out Žižek also is a big fan of Liu Cixin and The Three-Body Problem.
Friday assorted links
1. Five Karl Polanyi lectures from 1940.
2. The plans to guarantee everyone a job.
4. The evolution of women’s stock photos (NYT).
5. Catalonia’s insurrection day (a quick read will offer numerous reasons to be skeptical of this initiative).
6. Why Germany did so well from the China shock.
7. Will North Korea end up as China’s thorn? (NYT) Is there a scenario where North Korea rationally uses nuclear weapons first?