Category: Education
Not hard to geoguess this location…
Of course it is not in the state of Virginia…
On German romanticism (from my email)
Tyler,
I’ve been thinking about what might be the most underrated aspect of your intellectual formation, and I believe it stems from Germany. You’ve mentioned studying Goethe closely, and “manysidedness” is a quality you prize highly in “GOAT” (which I’m currently reading during my lunch breaks).
Another aspect would be your sometimes extreme artistic taste, such as your penchant for brutalism or Boulez. This, too, is romantic and German.
Your recent emphasis on being a “regional thinker” strikes me as quite Herderian.
These elements from German romanticism are not, to be clear, predominant in your thought, but without them you would surely be a different thinker.
I myself am somewhat biased against German romanticism, as I see it as a strain of thought that culminated in the Pangerman folly. The second – perhaps even more important – reason is that it disturbed the development of Polish intellectual life. These intellectual currents also distorted French philosophy, which in turn transformed minds across the Atlantic (for the worse).
I’m curious about your current relationship with German romanticism and how you see it in retrospect. Perhaps you could expand on it in one of your ‘autobiographical’ series.
Best,
KrzysztofP.S. I highly recommend Albert Béguin’s book on German romanticism. It hasn’t been translated into English, but you can find a Spanish translation titled “El Alma romántica y el sueño”. The minor Romantic philosophers built peculiar and astonishing systems. Part of me admires their subtle efforts; part of me pities how fruitless they were.
On the mark, that is from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski. For the time being, I will note simply that the importance I attach to elevating aesthetics is one of the most important marks from this heritage.
Ideological Reversals Amongst Economists
Research in economics often carries direct political implications, with findings supporting either right-wing or left-wing perspectives. But what happens when a researcher known for publishing right-wing findings publishes a paper with left-wing findings (or vice versa)? We refer to these instances as ideological reversals. This study explores whether such researchers face penalties – such as losing their existing audience without attracting a new one – or if they are rewarded with a broader audience and increased citations. The answers to these questions are crucial for understanding whether academia promotes the advancement of knowledge or the reinforcement of echo chambers. In order to identify ideological reversals, we begin by categorizing papers included in meta-analyses of key literatures in economics as “right” or “left” based on their findings relative to other papers in their literature (e.g., the presence or absence of disemployment effects in the minimum wage literature). We then scrape the abstracts (and other metadata) of every economics paper ever published, and we deploy machine learning in order to categorize the ideological implications of these papers. We find that reversals are associated with gaining a broader audience and more citations. This result is robust to a variety of checks, including restricting analysis to the citation trajectory of papers already published before an author’s reversal. Most optimistically, authors who have left-to-right (right-to-left) reversals not only attract a new rightwing (left-wing) audience for their recent work, this new audience also engages with and cites the author’s previous left-wing (right-wing) papers, thereby helping to break down echo chambers.
That is from a new paper by Matt Knepper and Brian Wheaton, via Kris Gulati. If it is audience-expanding for researchers to write such papers, does that mean we should trust their results less?
New MRU video on the demand curve
How to find the most talented people on earth
That is the title of my latest Free Press essay. Here is one relevant excerpt:
The suburbs of Toronto are one of the world’s most neglected talent areas. Cities such as Mississauga or Brampton are now quite familiar to me, because so many Emergent Ventures winners grew up there.
Virtually all of these young applicants from Ontario are either immigrants or children of immigrants. My (unconfirmed) hypothesis is that the most ambitious immigrant families decide to live in Ontario rather than other parts of the country. After all, so much of the opportunity is there because Toronto is the largest and most important city in the country. But they cannot afford Toronto proper, and so they end up in the suburbs. These teenagers have a stable and productive environment, but because of their backgrounds, typically from poorer countries, they do not take success or prosperity for granted. That is an ideal combination of factors for success.
There is great food in that region as well.
My Conversation with the excellent John Arnold
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and John discuss his shift from trading to philanthropy and more, including the specific traits that separate great traders from good ones, the tradeoffs of following an “inch wide, mile deep” trading philosophy, why he attended Vanderbilt, the talent culture at Enron, the growth in solar, the problem with Mexico’s energy system, where Canada’s energy exports will go, the hurdles to next-gen nuclear, how to fix America’s tripartite energy grid, how we’ll power new data centers, what’s best about living in Houston, his approach to collecting art, why trading’s easier than philanthropy, how he’d fix tax the US tax code and primary system, and what Arnold Ventures is focusing on next.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Say there’s a major volcanic event, and there’s a lot of ash in the sky for two or three years. Solar needs a backup. In the meantime, before the volcanic event happens — and of course, that’s quite rare — how much do we need to be up and running with the backup energy infrastructure? What do we need for reserve capacity in case the solar goes down?
ARNOLD: Good question. It would be difficult. It’s doable today. I think as solar continues to grow in market share, both in the US and globally, it will have to be met with some type of battery, a significant battery resource. That’s part of the economics of solar now, that it’s not just sticking it right outside of Phoenix, but it is solar plus transmission or solar plus battery. The question of what happens in that type of event — it would be difficult. The existing energy infrastructure is still largely around.
COWEN: But it will dwindle over time, right?
ARNOLD: It will dwindle over time.
COWEN: Is there some market issue? Say the volcanic event is only once every 150 years, but sooner or later, one happens. In the meantime, you need economic incentives for the gas or the nuclear to be ready. Does our government just keep on paying for those for 149 years in a row until the catastrophe comes?
ARNOLD: It’s a great question, and I think this is why nuclear, and particularly next-gen nuclear, is considered the holy grail, right? You’re not constrained by location. You’re not constrained by, is the wind blowing, is the sun shining? And it’s a clean resource. The problem today is just economics. In order to develop the current generation of nuclear, it’s extraordinarily expensive. Next generation — either small modular fission or fusion — both have a number of technological as well as unclear economics in how they compete.
I do think this question of how do you do this transition in a manner that maintains affordability but continues to get cleaner and lower emissions over time is a complex one, and I think it’s one that the environmentalists probably oversold five years ago in saying that this was going to be an easy transition. It’s certainly not. Just the scale and scope of the energy system is enormous, as you’re pointing to in your question. The need for backup, the need for a diversity of fuels, and how they complement each other is real, and you can’t replace that just with the intermittent resources we have today, plus battery.
And:
COWEN: What’s your most optimistic scenario for the US energy future from an environmental point of view, something that could plausibly happen?
ARNOLD: I think next-gen nuclear, if we can overcome the technical hurdles, if we can overcome the economic hurdles.
COWEN: But isn’t NIMBYism the biggest hurdle? The others I could imagine overcoming pretty readily, but I live in Fairfax County, which builds a fair amount. People there just don’t want nuclear. It’s irrational, but I’m not sure they’ll change their minds. It could be called fusion; it’s still nuclear to them.
ARNOLD: Yes, I’ve been surprised. That was my prior five years ago. I’ve been surprised at the number of jurisdictions that are inviting these next-gen nuclear companies to come. Texas, for instance, just passed a bill creating new incentives for nuclear companies to come and build their first plants and pilot projects in Texas. You see jurisdictions that are choosing to take the economic growth associated with it and that have more of a building culture and say, “Come here.”
I think, as things get proven out, then the question is, will the Fairfax counties of the world see what’s going on and become more agreeable to having that? I think it’s very similar to self-driving cars.
There’re some jurisdictions that say, “Come here. We want you to come, test,” and this is what’s happening in Texas. These companies say, “We want you to come pilot your projects here.” And some jurisdictions are saying, “No, prove it out, and then we’ll talk.”
COWEN: My nightmare is that even Texas becomes NIMBY. You see this in Austin already. Houston, Dallas will become more like the rest of America over time, maybe even San Antonio someday, El Paso with more time.
Interesting throughout, recommended. We also talk about art and art collecting…
What Explains Growing Gender and Racial Education Gaps?
In the 1960 cohort, American men and women graduated from college at similar rates, and this was true for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. But in more recent cohorts, women graduate at much higher rates than men. Gaps between race/ethnic groups have also widened. To understand these patterns, we develop a model of individual and family decision-making where education, labor supply, marriage and fertility are all endogenous. Assuming stable preferences, our model explains changes in education for the ‘60-‘80 cohorts based on three exogenous factors: family background, labor market and marriage market constraints. We find changes in parental background account for 1/4 of the growth in women’s college graduation from the ’60 to ’80 cohort. The marriage market accounts for 1/5 and the labor market explains the rest. Thus, parent education plays an important role in generating social mobility, enabling us to predict future evolution of college graduation rates due to this factor. We predict White women’s graduation rate will plateau, while that of Hispanic and Black women will grow rapidly. But the aggregate graduation rate will grow very slowly due to the increasing Hispanic share of the population.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Emergent Ventures winners, 43rd cohort
Jason Cameron, North York, Ontario, high school and incoming RBC, AI privacy.
Opemipo Odunta, Winnipeg, hydroponics.
Benjamin Arya, Harvard, California, Australia, longevity.
Aida Baradari, Harvard, audio privacy.
John Denny, Galway, to visit SF and NYC.
Zelda Poem, SF/France, artistic and cultural patronage programs for San Francisco.
Lauren Pearson, Toronto, genomic origins of focal epilepsy.
Charles Yang, WDC, digitize the Hyman Rickover archives.
Bethlehem Hadgu, NYC/Eritrea, “to make classical music beautiful again,” violist, her institution is Exalt, DC chamber music concert June 4.
Noah Rowlands, Cheltenham, general career support in AI and travel support.
Lily Ottinger, Taipei, to study the game theory of South Pacific international relations.
Jonathan Nankivell, London, to improve clinical trials in the UK.
Lucas Cremers and the David Network, NYC, to support the study, discussion, and use of AI in the conservative student community.
Robert Scowen, London, AI and general career support.
Dylan Paoletti, Bel Air, Maryland, high school, cancer cell suicide.
Lydia Laurenson, San Francisco, writing, Substack.
Lucas Kuziv, London, educate Ukrainian youth in AI and programming.
Noah on health care costs
…in 2024, Americans didn’t spend a greater percent of their income on health care than they did in 2009. And in fact, the increase since 1990 has been pretty modest — if you look only at the service portion of health care (the blue line), it’s gone up by about 1.5% of GDP over 34 years.
OK, so, this is total spending, not the price of health care. Is America spending less because we’re getting less care? No. In cost-adjusted terms, Americans have been getting more and more health care services over the years…
So overall, health care is probably now more affordable for the average American than it was in 2000 — in fact, it’s now about as affordable as it was in the early 1980s. That doesn’t mean that every type of care is more affordable, of course. But the narrative that U.S. health costs just go up and up relentlessly hasn’t reflected reality for a while now.
Here is the full post, which covers education as well.
On the decline of reading (from my email)
Regarding your recent post on reading and media, I would be curious for your thoughts about my observations teaching junior high and high school for the last few decades.
I (and some of my other colleagues) have noticed the following:
1. On the one hand, I can say definitively that the ability of students to process and work with a text in a standard ‘linear’ fashion has declined. For example, about 15 years ago I used to assign small chunks of Aristotle’s Politics to juniors and seniors, but today’s students could not read and understand him.
2. On the other hand . . . the ability of students to find patterns or links between texts has increased substantially. Just this past semester I taught a theology class to 9th-10th graders and wanted to introduce them to typological and patterned thinking. I was shocked how fast they picked this up, and many very quickly found plenty of connections in the text that I did not see. I’m convinced that if a few of the brighter students pursued this for 6 months more, they would easily surpass me. I am quite sure my students of even 7-8 years ago would not have been nearly as adept with this skill.
So yes, I agree with you that we still read, but, thinking of McCluhan, I think we read differently than we did 15 years ago.
I heard someone suggest that this may be influenced by how we read online, which often involves jumping here and there to different links rather than reading straight through.
From anonymous.
Why LLMs make certain mistakes
Via Nabeel Qureshi, from Claude 4 Sonnet, from this tweet.
How to fight Harvard
You could support institutions of higher education that deviate from the standard orthodoxy, such as the University of Austin, the departments of economics and law at George Mason University, or Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala (disclaimer: I have affiliations with all three).
Or how about right-leaning podcasts and YouTube channels? They too compete with Harvard, and very often they have more influence on how people actually think. Comedy is another institution that often is right-leaning. I’ve also spent significant time with the leading AI models, and find they are considerably more centrist and objective than our institutions of higher education.
It is far from obvious that the ideas of Harvard will play such a dominant role in shaping the future of America. And given that is the case, why choose a destructive “solution” that will impose so much collateral damage on America’s future?
In other words, this is not necessarily a losing battle, and thus you do not need to try to burn Harvard to the ground. Nor must you despair that true reform is impossible. True reform can occur elsewhere, most likely on the internet. There is indeed something to be said for getting back at Harvard. But it can’t be about them losing—you too have to win. Like it or not, it’s time to start building.
The Ohio Adam Smith mandate
For inspiration they might look to Ohio, where next month, the recently signed Senate Bill 1 (The Advance Ohio Higher Education Act) will take effect, mandating, among other things, that every state institution of higher education require its bachelor’s students to pass a course in “the subject area of American civic literacy.” At a minimum, no student will graduate without demonstrating proficiency in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and (for the sake of understanding the free market) selections from the writings of Adam Smith.
Personnel is policy I say! That is from Solveig Lucia Gold at The Free Press.
USA employment facts of the day
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the college majors with the lowest unemployment rates for the calendar year 2023 were nutrition sciences, construction services, and animal/plant sciences. Each of these majors had unemployment rates of 1% or lower among college graduates ages 22 to 27. Art history had an unemployment rate of 3% and philosophy of 3.2%…
Meanwhile, college majors in computer science, chemistry, and physics had much higher unemployment rates of 6% or higher post-graduation. Computer science and computer engineering students had unemployment rates of 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively…
Here is the full story. Why is this? Are the art history majors so employable? Or are their options so limited they don’t engage in much search and just take a job right away?
Via Rich Dewey.
Modern Principles of Economics!
A nice endorsement from a fellow who knows something about writing great books of economics. Ready to adopt a new principles of economics textbook? Modern Principles has got you covered with everything from tariffs to price controls to pandemics! MP also comes with Achieve, a powerful course management system, and over 100 high-quality, professionally produced videos.