Category: Current Affairs

Sticky norms

Shanhong Luo, a professor at Fayetteville State University, studies the factors behind attraction between romantic partners, including the norms that govern relationships. In a paper published in 2023 in Psychological Reports, a peer-reviewed journal, Dr. Luo and a team of researchers surveyed 552 heterosexual college students in Wilmington, N.C., and asked them whether they expected men or women to pay for dates — and whether they, as a man or a woman, typically paid more.

The researchers found that young men paid for all or most of the dates around 90 percent of the time, while women paid only about 2 percent (they split around 8 percent of the time). On subsequent dates, splitting the check was more common, though men still paid a majority of the time while women rarely did. Nearly 80 percent of men expected that they would pay on the first date, while just over half of women (55 percent) expected men to pay.

Surprisingly, views on gender norms didn’t make much of a difference: On average, both men and women in the sample expected the man to pay, whether they had more traditional views of gender roles or more progressive ones.

Here is more from the NYT.

How much of our boom has been an immigration boom?

From Scott Sumner:

Matt Yglesias directed me to a new CBO report, which confirms that immigration explains the recent GDP boom:

In our projections, the deficit is also smaller than it was last year because economic output is greater, partly as a result of more people working. The labor force in 2033 is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise. We are continuing to assess the implications of immigration for revenues and spending.

And Scott compares Abu Dhabi and Orange County, CA.

What should I ask Coleman Hughes?

I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part around his new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.  On Coleman more generally, here is Wikipedia:

Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.

Also from Wikipedia:

Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.

I saw Coleman perform quite recently, and I can vouch for his musical excellence, including as a singer.  So what should I ask Coleman?

Is El Salvador special?

But Bukele copycats and those who believe his model can be replicated far and wide overlook a key point: The conditions that allowed him to wipe out El Salvador’s gangs are unlikely to jointly appear elsewhere in Latin America.

El Salvador’s gangs were unique, and far from the most formidable criminal organizations in the entire region. For decades, a handful of gangs fought one another for control of territory and became socially and politically powerful. But, unlike cartels in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, El Salvador’s gangs weren’t big players in the global drug trade and focused more on extortion. Compared to these other groups, they were poorly financed and not as heavily armed.

Mr. Bukele started to deactivate the gangs by negotiating with their leaders, according to Salvadoran investigative journalists and a criminal investigation led by a former attorney general. (The government denies this.) When Mr. Bukele then arrested their foot soldiers in large sweeps that landed many innocent people in prison, the gangs collapsed.

It would not be such a simple story elsewhere in Latin America, where criminal organizations are wealthier, more internationally connected and much better armed than El Salvador’s gangs once were. When other governments in the region have tried to take down gang and cartel leaders, these groups haven’t simply crumbled. They have fought back, or new criminal groups have quickly filled the void, drawn by the drug trade’s huge profits. Pablo Escobar’s war on the state in 1980s-90s Colombia, the backlash by cartels to Mexican law enforcement activity since the mid-2000s, and the violent response to Ecuador’s government’s recent moves against gangs are just a few examples.

El Salvador also had more formidable and professional security forces, committed to crushing the gangs when Mr. Bukele called on them, than some of its neighbors. Take Honduras, where gang-sponsored corruption among security forces apparently runs deep. That helped doom Ms. Castro’s attempts to emulate Mr. Bukele from the start. In other countries, like Mexico, criminal groups have also reportedly managed to co-opt high-ranking members of the military and police. In Venezuela, it has been reported that military officials have run their own drug trafficking operation. Even if presidents send soldiers and police to do Bukele-style mass roundups, security forces may not be prepared, or may have incentives to undermine the task at hand.

Here is more from Will Freeman and  (NYT), interesting throughout.

Will the Argentina province of La Rioja print its own currency?

Maybe so:

Milei’s austerity is biting hard in La Rioja, an olive and wine region home to 384,000 people — out of a population of 46mn — where intense heat pushes many businesses to take a siesta from 1 to 6pm. Almost 75 per cent of the province’s budget comes from redistributed taxes collected by the national government, and 67 per cent of registered workers are employed by the state.

The province’s finances had been “decimated” in recent months, governor Ricardo Quintela said in an interview, citing Milei’s halting of public works projects and his refusal to transfer the 20.8bn pesos ($26mn) that he says La Rioja is owed based on historical agreements with the central government…

In an effort to pay public workers, La Rioja’s state legislature, dominated by Quintela’s left-leaning Peronist movement, has approved a plan to issue 22.5bn pesos ($28mn) worth of so-called “bocades”. These provincial government bonds can be used to pay local taxes, bills for public services such as energy and water and — in theory — to buy goods from private companies. Bocades — nicknamed a “quasi-currency” in Argentina — will be used to top up public employees’ salaries by 30 per cent. Quintela said they would start to be issued within 90 days, though La Rioja may opt to issue them only digitally.

Quintela said that Bocades would be exchangeable for pesos at the provincially-owned bank. However, given the province’s scarce supply of pesos, the plan relies on “people starting to trust in the bonds’ value” so that they don’t exchange them immediately.

And:

Argentina’s provinces have dabbled in quasi-currencies before. In the early 2000s, amid a severe recession and several years of deflation, more than a dozen provinces including La Rioja issued bonds that functioned as currencies.

The logic of this is not surprising.  When very strong disinflationary pressures are in place, liquidity is quite scarce.  Suppliers will step into the void to try to supply it, even if the overall macroeconomic consequences are negative.  Such “local currencies” were common in the 1930s, though most of them did not last long.  Expect scrip and gift certificates to make a comeback as well, although this version of the idea transfers seigniorage to a very strapped local government.

Here is more from the FT.

Addendum: Congress just dealt with Milei agenda further setbacks.

Amsterdam urban engineering

An average of 18 people a year reportedly drown in the city’s canals: often men, late at night, falling to their deaths while apparently taking a “wild wee”.

Last week, councillors demanded answers to questions on water safety, prompted by the death of Sam van Grondelle, a 29-year-old Amsterdammer who disappeared in October and whose body was discovered three days later in the Veemkade waterway.

As part of a multibillion-euro renovation of the city, the authorities are putting in extra ladders and grab ropes along 200km of crumbling canal wall. However, most of the walls remain high, are poorly lit and are often flanked by an ankle-high “car rail” to stop vehicles rolling in. They form a perfect trip hazard for distracted wanderers.

The authorities are focused on: “…prevention techniques and safety campaigns in the UK and Ireland.”  About ten percent of the drowned men had their flies open.  Here is the full Times of London story.

Non-random splat

It is heresy to say this, but I don’t think many people will be listening to the music of Jelly Roll Morton in the future.  It feels “too archived” and less vital than say Haydn, much less Mozart or Beethoven.

So many people are defending Luka on Twitter, but he doesn’t do much to make his teammates better.  And why didn’t Jalen Brunson stick around on the Mavericks?  “Who wants to play with you?” is an underrated metric for assessing player quality, not to mention hire quality more generally.  Luka is on track to be one of the five (three?) greatest scorers of all time, but not one of the fifteen greatest players.  (Are Kevin Durant and Kobe the other two?  Is Dominique Wilkins another great scorer who also was less of a complete player?)

There are various rumors about Taylor Swift and her beau.  But no one says “If those rumors were true, they would just admit it!  It wouldn’t cost them anything in terms of income or endorsements.”  That indicates there is still a significant shortage of tolerance and equal treatment in American society.

Fabio Caruana as an articulate thinker is very underrated.

In the late 1990s I went to visit the Houthis in Yemen, and I don’t think deterrence is going to work against them.

Have any economists or pundits stepped forward and admitted that they underestimated Milei?

My current reason for not buying the Apple Vision Pro is that I am afraid I won’t know how to turn it on and get it working.

Quite possibly Senegal is not a democracy any more.

The Chess Olympiad already (de facto) allows performance enhancers, though not computers.

Steakhouses are now underrated, most of all if you don’t order steak.

There is a (suddenly well-known) person on social media who so embodies modes of argumentation I find objectionable that at first I thought his was a parody account.

Vaccine Induced Social Amnesia

Source: Clinique CME

NYT: In 2022, there were 941 reported cases of measles in the World Health Organization’s European region. Over just the first 10 months of last year, according to an alarming bulletin the W.H.O. issued in mid-December, there were more than 30,000.

This is the kind of spike — a 3,000 percent increase — that looks implausible in headlines….But as the year drew to a close, the European measles outbreak kept growing. Through December, case numbers in the region eventually reached over 42,000, and although the largest outbreaks were in countries most Americans regard as pretty remote (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia), there is also a vicious surge in Britain, which may look plausibly to us as the canary in a coal mine. There, in just one of England’s nine regions, the West Midlands, 260 cases have been confirmed and dozens more suspected, in a country which, as a whole, recorded just two cases as recently as 2021.

As David Wallace-Wells explains, vaccination rates are still 90%+ and down only slightly but measles is so infectious that even amid an otherwise well-vaccinated population, it can sometimes find pockets of low vaccination populations and spread like wildfire.

Measles is an especially nasty infection because it can induce “immunological amnesia, thereby making individuals more susceptible to pathogens that they previously were able to resist.

Ironically, just as measles can induce immunological amnesia, vaccines can induce social amnesia about the severity of diseases, thereby making society more susceptible to pathogens that they previously were able to resist.

Why it is difficult for Milei to rein in inflation

Like the heat in the austral summer, inflation in Argentina is high and showing no sign of meaningful relief anytime soon. It rose from a monthly 13% in November to 25% in December and, according to the latest central bank survey, may come in at around 20% in both January and February…

Argentina’s central bank in December lowered real interest rates to deeply negative territory, hoping to reduce the issuance of pesos to pay for those interests—a move that pushes consumers to spend or dollarize their savings, adding to inflation and to the exchange rate premium. In addition, the early lifting of price controls, including administered prices such as health insurance or gas, frontloaded the relative price correction at the expense of inflation.

All this, combined with the lack of a price reference—the central bank is still working on its monetary program—may have led to a so-called “repricing overshooting.”

And:

Moreover, if inflation persists, the December devaluation may soon look insufficient, feeding expectations of a new realignment that, in turn, would give inflation inertia a new push—ultimately leading to a stop-and-go exchange rate pattern that sacrifices the only remaining nominal anchor of the economy.

Add to that that a large portion of the fiscal plan has just been withdrawn from the Omnibus Bill currently under heated debate in Congress, and we are left with only one bullet to bring monthly inflation back to single digits in the near term: a severe—and politically fraught—economic recession.

That is all by Eduardo Levy Yeyati, there is much more and the piece is useful throughout.

In Praise of Non-conformity

In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

John Stuart Mill

I saw this quote on Facebook and thought immediately of my friend Bryan Caplan. Bryan’s book of essays, You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism is an excellent guide not simply to Bryan’s non-conformism but also on how to be a successful non-conformist in a conformist world.

Did the Trump tariffs help the heartland?

No, but they did get him some votes there:

We study the economic and political consequences of the 2018-2019 trade war between the United States, China and other US trade partners at the detailed geographic level, exploiting measures of local exposure to US import tariffs, foreign retaliatory tariffs, and US compensation programs. The trade-war has not to date provided economic help to the US heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered US employment in newly-protected sectors; retaliatory tariffs had clear negative employment impacts, primarily in agriculture; and these harms were only partly mitigated by compensatory US agricultural subsidies. Consistent with expressive views of politics, the tariff war appears nevertheless to have been a political success for the governing Republican party. Residents of regions more exposed to import tariffs became less likely to identify as Democrats, more likely to vote to reelect Donald Trump in 2020, and more likely to elect Republicans to Congress. Foreign retaliatory tariffs only modestly weakened that support.

That is from a new NBER working paper by David Autor, Anne Beck, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson.

Milei update, a further report will be pending

Central African Republic estimate of the day

Published in the journal Conflict and Health last April, the report suggests that the world’s deadliest humanitarian crisis in 2022 was not in Afghanistan, Ukraine, or other places featured regularly in the news — but in CAR.

The Central African Republic has neither reliable birth and death registries nor regular censuses. To figure out how many people were dying, Karume’s team traveled by car, boat, motorcycle, and foot to conduct interviews across the country. When they analyzed their survey data, they estimated that nearly 6 percent of CAR’s population died within 2022, in a country with a median age around 15. Scaling for population size, this toll would amount to a loss of more than two New York Cities. And yet, the world outside of Africa is barely aware that CAR is a country. The title of the team’s report asks: “How can we not know?”

Here is more, by Amy Maxmen, via Dylan Matthews.

What are the actual dangers of advanced AI?

That is the focus of my latest Bloomberg column, 2x the normal length.  I cannot cover all the points, but here is one excerpt:

The larger theme is becoming evident: AI will radically disrupt power relations in society.

AI may severely limit, for instance, the status and earnings of the so-called “wordcel” class. It will displace many jobs that deal with words and symbols, or make them less lucrative, or just make those who hold them less influential. Knowing how to write well won’t be as valuable a skill five years from now, because AI can improve the quality of just about any text. Being bilingual (or tri- or quadrilingual, for that matter) will also be less useful, and that too has been a marker of highly educated status. Even if AIs can’t write better books than human authors, readers may prefer to spend their time talking to AIs rather than reading.

It is worth pausing to note how profound and unprecedented this development would be. For centuries, the Western world has awarded higher status to what I will call ideas people — those who are good at developing, expressing and putting into practice new ways of thinking. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions greatly increased the reach and influence of ideas people.

AI may put that trend into reverse.

And on arms races:

If I were to ask AI to sum up my worries about AI — I am confident it would do it well, but to be clear this is all my own work! — it might sound something like this: When dynamic technologies interact with static institutions, conflict is inevitable, and AI makes social disruption for the wordcel class and a higher-stakes arms race are more likely.

That last is the biggest problem, but it is also the unavoidable result of a world order based on nation-states. It is a race that the Western democracies and their allies have to manage and win. That is true regardless of the new technology in question: Today it is AI, but future arms races could concern solar-powered space weapons, faster missiles and nuclear weapons, or some yet-to-be-invented way of wreaking havoc on this planet and beyond. Yes, the US may lose some of these races, which makes it all the more important that it win this one — so it can use AI technologies as a counterweight to its deficiencies elsewhere.

In closing I will note for the nth time that rationalist and EA philosophies — which tend to downgrade the import of travel and cultural learning — are poorly suited for reasoning about foreign policy and foreign affairs.

My Conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, here is the episode summary:

Rebecca F. Kuang just might change the way you think about fantasy and science fiction. Known for her best-selling books Babel and The Poppy War trilogy, Kuang combines a unique blend of historical richness and imaginative storytelling. At just 27, she’s already published five novels, and her compulsion to write has not abated even as she’s pursued advanced degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and now Yale. Her latest book, Yellowface, was one of Tyler’s favorites in 2023.

She sat down with Tyler to discuss Chinese science-fiction, which work of fantasy she hopes will still be read in fifty years, which novels use footnotes well, how she’d change book publishing, what she enjoys about book tours, what to make of which Chinese fiction is read in the West, the differences between the three volumes of The Three Body Problem, what surprised her on her recent Taiwan trip, why novels are rarely co-authored, how debate influences her writing, how she’ll balance writing fiction with her academic pursuits, where she’ll travel next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world?

KUANG: What do you mean by work so much better?

COWEN: Singapore today, per capita — it’s a richer nation than the United States. It’s hard to think, “I’d rather go back and redo that whole history.” If you’re a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, “We’ll take what we got. It was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us.” People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right?

Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China. Now that it’s back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again, so it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism.

KUANG: It’s true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about a historical counterfactual such as, “Oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today?” Or “would Hong Kong have the culture it does today?” Because we don’t really know.

Also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do, as well, because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. It feels like a useless comparison to say, “Oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn’t?” Et cetera.

COWEN: It seems, if anywhere we know, it’s Hong Kong. You can look at Guangzhou — it’s a fairly close comparator. Until very recently, Hong Kong was much, much richer than Guangzhou. Without the British, it would be reasonable to assume living standards in Hong Kong would’ve been about those of the rest of Southern China, right? It would be weird to think it would be some extreme outlier. None others of those happened in the rest of China. Isn’t that close to a natural experiment? Not a controlled experiment, but a pretty clear comparison?

KUANG: Maybe. Again, I’m not a historian, so I don’t have a lot to say about this. I just think it’s pretty tricky to argue that places prospered solely due to British presence when, without the British, there are lots of alternate ways things could have gone, and we just don’t know.

Interesting throughout.