Category: Film
My Conversation with Glen Weyl
I found it interesting throughout, the first half was on Covid-19 testing, and the second half on everything else. Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the summary:
Tyler invited Glen to discuss the plan, including how it’d overcome obstacles to scaling up testing and tracing, what other countries got right and wrong in their responses, the unusual reason why he’s bothered by price gouging on PPE supplies, where his plan differs with Paul Romer’s, and more. They also discuss academia’s responsibility to inform public discourse, how he’d apply his ideas on mechanism design to reform tenure and admissions, his unique intellectual journey from socialism to libertarianism and beyond, the common element that attracts him to both the movie Memento and Don McLean’s “American Pie,” what talent he looks for in young economists, the struggle to straddle the divide between academia and politics, the benefits and drawbacks of rollerblading to class, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
WEYL: There’s one really critical element of this plan that I don’t think has been widely discussed, which is that there are 40 percent of people in the essential sector who are still out there doing their jobs. There may have been some improvements in sanitation. There probably have been, though there have been a lot of issues with getting the PPE required to do that.
But those people are basically transmitting the diseases they always have been. And so, by far, our first priority has to be not “reopening the economy,” but rather stabilizing that sector of the economy so that transmission is not taking place within that sector.
Once we’ve accomplished that goal, it will actually be relatively easy to reopen the rest of the economy, given that that’s 40 percent. It’s just a doubling to get to everybody being in a disease-stabilized situation. So I really think the focus has to be on stabilizing the essential sector by building up this regimen. I think we can do that by the end of June.
Once that’s accomplished, I think we can, over the course of July, reintroduce most of the rest of the economy and have the confidence that, because we haven’t seen reemergence of diseases within the essential sector, that reintroducing everybody else will proceed in a similar fashion.
And:
COWEN: Other than possibly the adoption of your plan, what do you think will be the most enduring economic or social change from this pandemic?
WEYL: My guess is that there will be a lot of large corporations that take on important social responsibilities because of the trust environment that you were talking about and that it becomes increasingly illegitimate for them to be run under a pure shareholder-maximization perspective once they’re taking on that role. I think we’re going to see fundamental shifts in some of the corporate governance parameters as a result of the social role that a bunch of companies end up taking on.
And:
COWEN: At heart, coming out of the Jewish socialist tradition, through a matter of biographical accident, you first became a libertarian. Needed time to find your way back to the tradition you belonged to. Along the way, did economics, so you believe in some notion of markets, albeit directly adjusted by regulation and mechanism design. And you’ve moved away from methodological individualism.
But you’re this weird person of a Jewish socialist, believes in markets, and had this path leading away from libertarianism. No other person in the world probably is that, but you are. Is that a unified theory of you?
WEYL: Well, the thing that throws a little bit of a wrench into that is that I was actually a Jewish socialist before I became a libertarian.
COWEN: Does that strengthen or weaken the theory?
For me the most instructive part was this:
COWEN: What do you view yourself as rebelling against? At the foundational level.
But you will have to read or listen to hear Glen’s very good answer.
Definitely recommended.
My Conversation with Ross Douthat
We do another CWT, here is the audio and transcript (link corrected), a very good installment in the series. Here is part of the summary:
Ross joined Tyler to discuss why he sees Kanye as a force for anti-decadence, the innovative antiquarianism of the late Sir Roger Scruton, the mediocrity of modern architecture, why it’s no coincidence that Michel Houellebecq comes from France, his predictions for the future trajectory of American decadence — and what could throw us off of it, the question of men’s role in modernity, why he feels Christianity must embrace a kind of futurist optimism, what he sees as the influence of the “Thielian ethos” on conservatism, the plausibility of ghosts and alien UFOs, and more.
A welcome relief from Covid-19 talk, though we did cover Lyme disease. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Does the Vatican have too few employees? There’s a Slate article — it claimed in 2012, the Roman Curia has fewer than 3,000 employees. Walmart headquarters at the time had 12,000. If the Church is a quite significant global operation, can it be argued, in fact, that it’s not bureaucratic enough? They don’t actually have state capacity in the sense that state capacity libertarianism might approve of.
DOUTHAT: Right. State capacity libertarianism would disapprove of the Vatican model. And it reflects the reality that media coverage of the Catholic Church doesn’t always reflect, which is that in Catholic ecclesiology and the theory of the institution, bishops are really supposed to be pretty autonomous in governance. And the purpose of Rome is the promotion of missionary work and the protection of doctrine, and it’s not supposed to be micromanaging the governance of the world Church.
Now, I think what we’ve seen over the last 30 years — and it’s been thrown into sharp relief by the sex abuse crisis — is that the modern world may not allow that model to exist; that if you have this global institution that has a celebrity figure at the center of it, who is the focus of endless media attention, you can’t, in effect, get away with saying, “Well, the pope is the pope, but sex abuse is an American problem.”
And to that extent, there is a case that the Church needs more employees and a more efficient and centralized bureaucracy. But then that also coexists with the problem that the model of Catholicism is still a model that was modern in the 16th century. It’s still much more of a court model than a bureaucratic model, and pope after pope has theoretically tried to change this and has not succeeded.
Part of the reality is, as you well know, as a world traveler, the Italians are very good at running courts that exclude outsiders and prevent them from changing the way things are done. Time and again, some Anglo-Saxon or German blunderer gets put in charge of some Vatican dicastery and discovers that, in fact, the reforms he intends are just not quite possible. And you know, in certain ways, that’s a side of decadence that you can bemoan, but in certain ways, you have to respect, too.
Definitely recommended, a very fun CWT with lots of content. And again, here is Ross’s (recommended) book The Decadent Society: How We Became a Victim of Our Own Success.
Robert Browning and Ingmar Bergman in a Bloomberg column
With all those fools going to bars and concerts, or running marathons, it is evident we still need to solve the problem of entertainment, as I argue in my new Bloomberg column.
It is instructive to look back to the days of World War II. The U.S. government played a critical role in encouraging Hollywood to make cheery movies, and it helped by not trying to force every actor into the armed services. Major league baseball, the national pastime of the era, continued to hold a regular season and a World Series, again to distract people from wartime worries. Many top players, such as Ted Williams, were away fighting, but there were adequate replacements. The government knew that wartime drama could not be the only drama on tap.
With Covid-19, the goal is to keep people at home, at least if they are not essential workers. But if staying at home is too boring, cabin fever will take over and people will run out to social gatherings when they ought to be staying put. So solving the entertainment problem is one very real piece of the puzzle for minimizing the effects of the coronavirus and keeping Americans not just in good spirits but healthy.
The very worst scenario is that the coronavirus itself — how it is playing out, how officials and celebrities and neighbors are reacting — becomes our main entertainment. It could become an ongoing horror show that drives us crazy and makes people even more cynical about politics.
To avoid such a mix of frustration and terror, I have a modest proposal: We should restructure a few of our traditional entertainments to be safe from the coronavirus.
As suggested on Twitter, how about inducing a few of the cable providers to offer free streaming for a few months? The Met has announced a big increase in opera streaming. And:
Or how about proceeding with some version of the NBA Finals? Take a subset of the best qualifying teams, test every player for coronavirus, isolate them in a remote area with a college gymnasium, and have them proceed with a shortened version of the real thing in front of only a TV crew. With so many other public events closed down, television viewership would probably reach an all-time high, and the sense of drama would be incredible. It would be one NBA Finals we would never forget, and the quality of play would respond to the very high psychological stakes.
Ben Golliver serves up a concrete NBA proposal. You’ll have to click through to get to the Browning and Bergman parts, the latter being Easter egg. At least the Candidate’s Tournament still seems to be on in chess, you can all watch that for the next few weeks, starts Tuesday I believe, try www.chessbomb.com.
Lecturing alone won’t work: we really do need to make it more fun for people to stay at home!
*The Seventh Seal*, directed by Ingmar Bergman
We watched this movie the night before, and it struck me as very different this time around, perhaps because it is set during the time of the Crusades with the plague as a major theme. I no longer think the death character is real, and I now view the film as about how much we flirt with the idea of death, and apparitions of death, in order to make life tolerable and to feel in control. Don’t take the opening scene “as is,” but rather contrast it with all the other ways humans use the death theme for their own theatrical purposes (theatrical, both literally and figuratively) over the next 30-40 minutes of the movie, and then later throughout. Perhaps the key line is “All the damn ranting about death. Is that sustenance for modern people?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4yXBIigZbg
Recommended, especially the new Blu-Ray edition of Bergman’s complete works.
Behind the Data
Here’s a nice video from Dean Karlan’s Innovations for Poverty Action group and EconFilms emphasizing the work that goes on behind the scenes collecting data in often difficult parts of the world in order to produce better, more effective programs targeting poverty.
Damir Marusic and Aaron Sibarium interview me for *The American Interest*
It was far-ranging, here is the opening bit:
Damir Marusic for TAI: Tyler, thanks so much for joining us today. One of the themes we’re trying to grapple with here at the magazine is the perception that liberal democratic capitalism is in some kind of crisis. Is there a crisis?
TC: Crisis, what does that word mean? There’s been a crisis my whole lifetime.
And:
TC: I think addiction is an underrated issue. It’s stressed in Homer’s Odyssey and in Plato, it’s one of the classic problems of public order—yet we’ve been treating it like some little tiny annoyance, when in fact it’s a central problem for the liberal order.
And:
AS: What about co-determination?
TC: There are too many people with the right to say no in America as it is. We need to get things done speedier, with fewer obstacles that create veto points. So no, I don’t favor that.
And:
AS: John Maynard Keynes.
TC: I suppose underrated. He was a polymath. Polymaths tend to be underrated, and Keynes was a phenomenal writer. I’m not a Keynesian on macroeconomics, but when you read him, it’s so fresh and startling and just fantastic. So I’d say underrated.
And:
AS: Slavoj Zizek, the quirky communist philosopher you debated recently.
TC: Way underrated. I had breakfast with Zizek before my dialogue with him, and he’s one of the 10 people I’ve met who knows the most and can command it. Now that said, he speaks in code and he’s kind of “crazy,” and his style irritates many people because he never answers any question directly. You get his Hegelian whatever. He has his partisans who are awful, but ordinary intellectuals don’t notice him and he’s pretty phenomenal actually. So I’d say very underrated.
Here is the full interview, a podcast version is coming too.
Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism
There is now transcript and audio from the Holberg debate in Bergen, Norway, courtesy of the CWTeam, here is their summary of the event:
This bonus episode features audio from the Holberg Debate in Bergen, Norway between Tyler and Slavoj Žižek held on December 7, 2019. They discuss the reasons Slavoj (still) considers himself a Communist, why he considers The Handmaid’s Tale “nostalgia for the present,” what he likes about Greta Thunberg, what Marx got right about the commodification of beliefs, his concerns about ecology and surveillance in communist states like China today, the reasons academia should maintain its ‘useless character,’ his beginnings as a Heideggerian, why he is distrustful of liberal optimism, the “Fukuyama dilemma” we face, the importance of “empty manners,” and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: You know the old joke, what’s the difference between a Communist and a Nazi? Tenure.
[laughter]
ŽIŽEK: You mean university tenure?
COWEN: Yes. It’s a joke, but the point is you don’t need Communism. You are much smarter than Communism.
I would describe the proceedings as “rollicking,” including the segment about “smoking the prick.”
My look back at the last decade
Via Bloomberg, here is one bit:
Consider the 10 best-selling books of the decade. All have female protagonists, and the top seven are authored by women. (“Fifty Shades of Grey” and its sequels take the top three spots, with three others having the word “Girl” in the title.)
The feminization of our culture is for me trend number one. Next in line is screens:
They simply convey more interesting narratives than most of the other spaces in our lives.
There is much more at the link.
*The Rise of Skywalker* (no real spoilers)
MacGuffins! That said, contrary to many reviews, the plot made perfect sense to me, many scenes were excellent, and the whole thing had a sweep and grandeur that episodes seven and eight completely lacked. It had many of the strengths and flaws (and plot devices) of Return of the Jedi, but after forty-two years of waiting for the series to conclude mostly I went away happy. Believe it or not.
Best movies 2019
I am happy to recommend these selections, the links going to my earlier remarks about them:
Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse (animated)
Campernaum (Ethiopian refugee in Beirut)
Us
Ash is Purest White (Chinese, obscure)
High Life (best science fiction movie of the year?)
Long Day’s Journey into Night (big screen only, Chinese obscure)
Woman at War (Icelandic, wacky)
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (duh)
Booksmart (full of energy on the screen)
Echo in the Canyon (L.A. music scene in the 1960s and beyond)
The Farewell (American-Chinese, about a dying relative)
Honeyland (Macedonian, about bee keepers)
Inside Bill’s Brain (Bill Gates, short documentary)
Parasite (Korean, the Straussian reading is anti-egalitarian)
JoJo Rabbit (modern-day anti-Nazi comedy, mostly they pull it off)
Marriage Story
The Rise of Skywalker
A Hidden Life
From those my top picks would be Marriage Story — the American redo of Scenes from a Marriage, and then Honeyland. Overall it was a much better year for movies than last year.
As for marginal choices, Ad Astra and Knives Out were two movies I liked, and came close to making this list, but didn’t.
As for historic cinema, I am very glad I purchased the complete Blu-Ray set of Ingmar Bergman movies, spectacular transfers and the American viewer can watch the true, complete version of Persona for the first time.
As for the rest of the year, I have high hopes for The Souvenir, Little Women and also the new Adam Sandler movie, but I have not yet seen them. The documentary For Sama has potential too.
What am I forgetting?
My debate with Žižek
It was quite something, the proceedings did not disappoint, here is the YouTube:
I can’t fully access video from this airport location, but I believe the actual debate starts at around 1:06. After the debate proper, a particular highlight is the four video questions that were taped and sent in from humanities academics.
The Holberg people put on a great event.
*Jojo Rabbit*
I almost didn’t see this one, first because I didn’t like the preview (at all), second because in this post-Hogan’s Heroes era I am not sure another Nazi comedy (is that what it is?) is exactly what we need. And yet…this is an excellent film and it expresses the power of cinema in a way one is no longer used to seeing from a Hollywood movie. For the first half hour I wasn’t sure I liked it, though it improves steadily. Mel Brooks, Charlie Chaplin, and Ernst Lubitsch references abound, and the soundtrack starts with the Beatles singing in German (“Komm’ Gib Mir Deine Hand”). Excellent cast and visuals too, so who cares if it ends up being known as “the Nazi rabbit movie”?
How did this one ever get made? Always go see movies by directors you like, in this case Taika Waititi, who also did the super-subtle Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
My Conversation with Ted Gioia
Here is the audio and transcript, the chat centered around music, including Ted’s new and fascinating book Music: A Subversive History. We talk about music and tech, the Beatles, which songs and performers we are embarrassed to like, whether jazz still can be cool, Ted’s family background, why restaurants are noisier, why the blues are disappearing, Elton John, which countries are underrated for their musics, whether anyone loves the opera, whether musical innovation is still possible, and much much more. Here are some excerpts:
GIOIA: …Spotify still isn’t profitable. I believe Spotify will become profitable, but they’re going to do it by putting the squeeze on people. Musicians will suffer even more, probably, in the future than they have in the past. What’s good for Spotify is not good for the whole music ecosystem.
Let me make one more point here. I think it’s very important. If you go back a few years ago, there was a value chain in music — started with the musician, worked for the record label. The records went to the record distributor. They went to the retailer, who sold the record to the consumer. At that point, everybody in that chain had a vested interest in a healthy music ecosystem in which people enjoyed songs. The more people enjoyed songs, the better business was for everybody.
That chain has been broken now. Apple would give away songs for free to sell devices. They don’t care about the viability of the music subeconomy. For them, it could be a loss leader. Google doesn’t care about music. They would give music away for free to sell ads. In fact, they do that on YouTube.
The fundamental change here is, you now have a distribution system for music in which some of the players do not have a vested interest in the broader musical experience and ecosystem. This is tremendously dangerous, and that’s the real reason why I fear the growth of streaming, is because the people involved in streaming don’t like music.
And:
COWEN: Do you think music today is helping the sexual revolution or hurting it? Speaking of Prince…
GIOIA: It’s very interesting. There’s market research and focus groups about how people use music in their day-to-day life. Take, for example, this: you’re going to bring a date back to your apartment for a romantic dinner. So what do you worry about?
Well, the first thing I have to worry about is, my place is a mess. I’ve got to clean it up. That’s number one. The second thing you worry about is, what food am I going to fix? But number three on people’s list — when you interview them — is the music because they understand the music is going to seal the deal. If there’s going to be something really romantic, that music is essential.
People will agonize for hours over which music to play. I think that we miss this. People view music as distance from people’s everyday life. But in fact, people put music to work every day, and one of the premier ways they do it is in romance.
COWEN: Let’s say you were not married, and you’re 27 years old, and you’re having a date over. What music do you put on in 2019 under those conditions?
GIOIA: It’s got to always be Sinatra.
COWEN: Because that is sexier? It’s generally appealing? It’s not going to offend anyone? Why?
GIOIA: I must say up front, I am no expert on seduction, so you’re now getting me out of my main level of expertise. But I would think that if you were a seducer, you would want something that was romantic on the surface but very sexualized right below that, and no one was better at these multilayered interpretations of lyrics than Frank Sinatra.
I always call them the Derrida of pop singing because there was always the surface level and various levels that you could deconstruct. And if you are planning for that romantic date, hey, go for Frank.
There is much more at the link, interesting throughout, and again here is Ted’s new book.
“And what a decade it was”
From Alex X.:
With the decade coming to a close, I would be curious on everyone’s favorite of the decade [gives list of categories]:
Without too much pondering, here is what comes to mind right away:
Film: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or A Touch of Sin. Might Winter Sleep by next? It was probably the best decade ever for foreign movies, the worst decade ever for Hollywood movies (NYT).
Blockbuster/action film: Transformers 4? Big screen only, live or die by CGI!
Album: Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Single: I don’t see an obvious, non-derivative pick here that really stands out. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” probably is the mainstream choice, but do I ever go over to the stereo to put it on? Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” is another option, but is it such a big step beyond Prince? Lorde or Beyonce? LCD Soundsystem seems more about the entire album, same for Frank Ocean. Something from Kanye’s Yeezus? To pull a dark horse option out of the hat, how about Gillian Welch, “The Way It Goes“? Or Death Grips “Giving Bad People Good Ideas“? I’ve spent enough time on Twitter that I have to opt for that one.
TV Show: Srugim, Borgen, The Americans.
Single Season: Selections from same, you know which seasons.
Book Fiction: The Ferrante quadrology and Houllebecq’s Submission.
Book Non Fiction: Knausgaard, volumes I and II.
Athlete of the Decade: Stephen Curry or Lebron James.
What are your picks?
*Terminator: Dark Fate*
Much of the movie is set in Mexico, to excellent effect, and arguably the main lines of the plot mirror some themes from Nahua culture and history:
“…the Aztec saw themselves as “the People of the Sun,” whose divine duty was to wage cosmic war in order to provide the sun with his tlaxcaltiliztli (“nourishment”). Without it, the sun would disappear from the heavens.” Link here.
Quetzalcoatl descending into the land of the dead, and the breaking of the bones.
“…a sibling rivalry grew between Quetzalcoatl and his brother the mighty sun, who Quetzalcoatl knocked from the sky with a stone club.”
“…When the Aztecs sacrificed people to Huitzilopochtli (the god with warlike aspects) the victim would be placed on a sacrificial stone. The priest would then cut through the abdomen with an obsidian or flint blade.” Link here.
Overall the movie reminded me of Rogue One. Rogue One did not have the freshness or originality of the core Star Wars movies, but it was a member of the actual franchise in a way that some of the later sequels were not, and thus a refreshing reminder of what the whole thing was all about in the first place.