Category: Current Affairs

A few implications

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am not saying these are rational, or not, in any case they are predictions:

1. The momentum for gun control in the United States will weaken.  There is a claim on Twitter that only two percent of Israeli households have guns at hand.  May or may not be exactly true, but many people will become more attached to the idea of gun ownership as a means of defense.

2. We Americans will indeed build The Wall on our southern border.

3. The doctrine of deterrence has taken a beating. Few doubt that Israel can strike back at Gaza in a very powerful way, and yet that wasn’t enough to stop the attacks.  I am still trying to digest this one.

4. A certain kind of military-flavored AI accelerationism will win out.  Given #3, it no longer suffices to think you can deter a drone attack from your enemies, even if your country is very powerful.  Rather you need your own drones, and your intelligence, to forestall major casualties in the first place.

Union Busted

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) just filed for bankruptcy because it lost a case with a port operator in Portland. The back story is amazing.

The ILWU is one of the most powerful unions in the United States. Since bloody riots in 1934 it has controlled all 29 seaports on the west coast of the United States, giving them monopoly power. The ILWU’s 22 thousand workers are known as the “lords of the dock” and they earn an average of just over $200,000 in salary and another $100,000 in benefits, a bit more than the typical CEO. Some ILWU foremen take home half a million a year.

The ILWU has a lock on dockworkers but there are other rival unions. In Portland, for example, there were two jobs for reefers–electrical workers who handle special refrigerated containers–that since 1974 had been held by members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The ILWU, however, wanted control of these jobs and in 2012 one of the heavies of the union, Leal Sundet, threatened the manager of the port operator that if he didn’t help him to take these jobs from the Brotherhood and give them to the Longshoremen he would create havoc. When the port operator didn’t comply–it wasn’t clear even that they could comply as the jobs were not under the port operator’s control–the ILWU followed through on its threat. Repeated shutdowns, slowdowns and discovered “safety violations” disrupted port operations so badly that the entire port closed.

The port operator, however, took the ILWU to court, arguing that the labor actions were illegal. The jury agreed giving the port operator an award of $93.6 million for its losses, later reduced to $19 million. The Union doesn’t have the $19 million, hence the bankruptcy.

Thus, the union has been bankrupted, the port closed, hundreds of millions of dollars lost and shipments slowed all because of a dispute over 2 jobs.

In related news, the just approved ILWU contract raises wages for ILWU workers and ensures that there will be no serious automation of the ports for at least another six years, again putting the United States behind the rest of the world in efficient shipping and logistics.

I am reminded of the day Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for their illegal strike.

*The Genius of Israel*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.  The authors argue that Israel has higher solidarity and also higher social capital than recent media reports might indicate.  They are thus optimistic about the country, and the subtitle is The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Natoin in a Turbulent World.

I do not go to Israel enough to have a strong opinion on this, but their thesis is consistent with my casual observation, and also with my intuition about negative bias in media.  The book comes out November 7.

That was then, this is now (median voter edition)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said this week that the Biden administration planned to waive 26 environmental, public health and cultural preservation laws in order to fast-track constructing sections of the border wall in South Texas.

…The administration would use funds from a 2019 appropriation designated by Congress to construct the wall, which was spurred by a disaster declaration by the Trump administration…

“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States.”

Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey.  And note that an actual jaguar is crossing the border.

The new warfare?

by  Tyler Cowen in

“Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes. The survivability on the move is no more than 10 minutes,” said Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service. “Surprises have become very difficult to achieve.”

…And, in a potential conflict with a lesser power, America’s overall military edge may also not be as decisive as previously thought. “It’s a question of cost,” said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “If you can destroy an expensive, heavy system for something that costs much much less, then actually the power differential between the two countries doesn’t matter as much.”

…Western military planners are taking notice. “We have a lot of lessons to learn. One is that quantity is a quality of its own,” said Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding, the head of Ukraine operations at the German Ministry of Defense. “You need numbers, you need force numbers. In the West we have reduced our military, we have reduced our stocks. But quantity matters, mass matters.”

When it comes to tanks, in particular, the lesson of the Ukrainian war is that tank-on-tank battles have become a rarity—which means that the relative sophistication of a tank is no longer as important. Fewer than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by other tanks, according to Ukrainian officials, with the rest succumbing to mines, artillery, antitank missiles and drones.

Edge to the defense?  Here is more from the WSJ, interesting throughout.  Via Matt Y.

They are solving for the equilibrium

by  Tyler Cowen in

Canada is pushing the United States and other major economies to follow through on pledges to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies, which have soared despite the growing threat of climate change.

Such subsidies hit records last year, according to several watchdog groups, including one that estimated that major world economies — members of the G-20 cooperation forum — surpassed $1 trillion in subsidies for the first time in 2022. That’s a fourfold increase over subsidy levels in 2010, the year after G-20 nations agreed to phase out support for fossil fuels.

Here is more from Timothy Puko at The Washington Post.

What should I ask Patrick McKenzie?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Patrick is a phenomenon of the modern age.  He writes the excellent Bits About Money, which focuses on money, banking, payments, and more.

His blog is Kalzumeus.  He has lived most of his adult life in Japan, and has many excellent posts about Japan.  Here are his greatest hits on the blog.  He has run national shadow vaccine location information infrastructure.   On Twitter he is @patio11.

So what should I ask him?

From my email (on single-parent families)

by  Tyler Cowen in

I won’t do double indentation, but this is all from Rick from Baltimore:

“In your post today, you cite to an interview you gave in which you describe the negative effects of children growing up with one parent and state that “I don’t have a magic wand to wave to make all those men worthy of having a nice family, but we could do much more than what we’re doing now”.  So my question is what is it that we can or should be doing?  It seems like one of the more important questions of our day.

So what does a Tyler Cowen pro-parent plan look like?  I can think of a number of candidates for interventions, but most of them don’t strike me as things you would advocate for either because of their limited effectiveness or their unintended consequences.  Some possibilities that I can think of:

  1. Parenting interventions in poor communities (i.e. an army of social workers descending on poor communities to teach parenting and advocate for children).
  2. Shorter/fewer prison sentences in order to allow more poor men to be present for their children and improve the sex ratio in poorer communities (thereby encouraging more committed relationships).
  3. Similarly – more drug decriminalization?  Less?
  4. Tax reforms of the kind advocated for by people like Brad Wilcox to encourage rather than penalize marriage.  (Seems like a good idea to me, but I don’t know how many people there really are out there who choose not to wed for tax reasons).
  5. Better/more jobs for working class men and all-out brutes?  (Seems like an obvious idea, but how?  More unions? Fewer?  More tariffs and less free trade?  Get rid of the Jones Act?  More immigration? Less?  A larger standing army?  A return to more vocational education as advocated for by people like Mike Rowe?)
  6. The re-churching of America?  If so, what are your suggestions for how to accomplish this (evangelical minds would like to know)?
  7. Cultural shifts?  Melissa Kearney points out that up and down the educational ladder, Asian kids almost always have a dad.  Should we be more Asian?  More Mormon?
  8. Less cultural feminization?  Less blame cast on structural oppression and more of a return to a culture of personal responsibility as preached by Jordan Peterson et al.?
  9. More recognition of the downsides of the sexual revolution as described by Louise Perry?  Less premarital sex and pornography? The return of the shotgun marriage?
  10. More cultural depictions in Hollywood etc. of successful mixed-collar marriages in order to encourage more college-educated women to marry plumbers and electricians?

What else am I missing?  What do you think would work?”

TC again: I would add this.  We don’t know what would work.  But it can’t hurt to have the intelligentsia unified and vocal in a belief that a) this problem really matters, and b) like most problems it is not a hopeless one and improvement is possible.  I propose that as step number one — are you on board?

School choice for North Carolina

by  Tyler Cowen in

North Carolina’s budget for the new biennium would expand school choice across the state to an unprecedented level.

The budget, slated for votes Thursday morning, would enlarge the piggybank for the Opportunity Scholarship Program — the state’s voucher that enables families to choose a private school education for their children — to $520 million by the 2032-2033 fiscal year.

“Expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship Program would not only be a game changer for North Carolina families, giving parents a real choice on where they attend schools, the new legislation would help to redefine public education and underscore that not all state-funded education has to be publicly funded, administered and delivered,” said Dr. Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation.

The budget also expands eligibility for Opportunity Scholarships to all families in a tiered system based on income. Lower income households would be first priority, while wealthier families would have access if sufficient funds remain available.

Here is the full story.  It is noteworthy that this happened without a GOP trifecta in the state…

Median voter theorem, again

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sweden looks set to miss its legislated climate targets, the latest sign of how combating global warming is slipping down the policy agenda.

The nation — the first globally to set a milestone target for net zero emissions — won’t reach that goal for 2045 with current measures, according to the center-right government’s 2024 budget submitted on Wednesday. It cited the tough economic climate along with a plunging krona, expecting to also fall short on other targets for protecting the environment.

Here is more from Bloomberg.  And from the BBC:

Rishi Sunak is considering weakening some of the government’s key green commitments in a major policy shift.

It could include delaying a ban on the sales of new petrol and diesel cars and phasing out gas boilers, multiple sources have told the BBC.

I do hope the median voter ends up happy with these ones…

Who in America has mental health problems?

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is a new EJPH paper on these questions by Junxiu Liu, et.al.  Let’s start with some geography:

The prevalence of symptoms varied significantly across states, ranging from 27.9% (95% CI = 23.8%, 32.0%) in Florida to 46.4% (95% CI = 41.9%, 50.9%) in New Hampshire…

How much of that is a sunshine effect?  The full ranking of states supposedly is given in their Appendix A, but I can’t find that on-line.  If you can, please let us know.

Furthermore, when it comes to your parents — income good, education bad!  Graduate education yikes:

Youths with parents with higher education had more mental health symptoms; the prevalence of mental health symptom was 37.4% (95% CI = 36.3%, 38.5%) among youths whose parents had graduate degrees compared with 30.3% (95% CI = 23.8%, 36.8%) among those whose parents had less than a high school–level education. By contrast, youths from households with the highest income level (≥ $200 000) had a lower prevalence of mental health symptoms at 30.7% (95% CI = 29.1%, 32.3%) than did those from households with the lowest income level (< $25 000) at 37.3% (95% CI = 34.8%, 39.8%).

We’re into uh-oh territory here.  As for ethnic groups, mental health problems measure as worst for whites and also for an assorted group known as “other.”

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.