Category: Media

Interviewing Yiyang Zhuge (Zhong Shu)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Many people are writing to me, upset that I am interviewing Ziyang Zhuge, a well-known Chinese internet intellectual, who recently was accused of plagiarism.  I am keen to proceed with the interview, and am happy to explain why.  A few points:

1. The relevant facts here still are being disputed, and furthermore it all happened in Chinese.  If I cannot personally adjudicate the matter, I remain inclined to proceed.  I am also well aware that standards in China, including for plagiarism, are very different than in the United States.  If someone tells me “A person in China did [fill in the blank]” my initial reaction is still “Are they interesting to talk to?”

2. I have had on numerous CEOs and business leaders.  Your opinions of each will vary, but surely some of them are guilty of something.  I do not regret any of them as guests, except insofar as they were boring.  You also can debate whether a former CIA head, in this case John Brennan, ever did anything wrong.  He was fascinating.

3. I once had on Sam Bankman-Fried, now a convicted felon.  It was an excellent episode, and I will point out my lines of questioning were more perspicacious than many people since have realized.

4. I once had on a convicted murderer, Shaka Senghor.  It was an excellent episode, and if I recall only a single person wrote me to complain.  I would gladly have more criminals on, and they do not all have to be repentant in the manner that Shaka is.  Would not a pickpocket guest be intriguing?  For Althusser however it is too late.

5. Without knowing the full story, I suspect the case of Yiyang Zhuge (neither a felon nor a murderer) is most analogous to having on the CEO of DeepSeek, Liang Wenfang.  At this point it is pretty well known that DeepSeek (and other Chinese AI models) distilled a lot from Anthropic’s Claude.  That is a violation of terms of service, and in economic terms it is an event and a depredation of pretty serious magnitude.  I still would be delighted to have Liang Wenfang on the show, and I would do so without obsessing over the issue of distillation.  How about it Liang Wenfang?

Xi Jinping is welcome too.  Chairman Mao, is pork belly with red sauce over- or underrated?  The world awaits your response.

There are now eight episodes

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Everyday Abundance podcast explores the hidden histories behind everyday activities and the technologies we don’t even know are technologies.

Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann dive into the surprising stories behind everything from brushing your teeth to driving your car.

Listen, subscribe, and rate us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Here is the link, self-recommending of course…

What should I ask Roman Mars?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Most of all he is obsessed with design, here is Wikipedia:

Roman Mars is an American radio producer. He is the host and producer of 99% Invisible, a KALW radio show and podcast, and a founder of the podcast collective Radiotopia, which he describes as efforts “to broaden the radio landscape [and] make shows that aren’t bound by conventions” of public radio in the United States. In 2020, he co-authored the New York Times best seller The 99% Invisible City with Kurt Kohlstedt…Mars, with Elizabeth Joh, also hosts the podcast What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law.

His TED talk on city flags is a good introduction to his thought.

So what should I ask him?

Congratulations to Ross D. and others

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, is leaving to join the CBS News program “60 Minutes” as a correspondent, the show’s executive producer said in a memo to staff on Tuesday.

Mr. Douthat is among a group of journalists joining for the show’s 59th season, which will premiere on Sept. 13. The writer Sebastian Junger and Gianna Toboni, a former Vice News correspondent, will become contributors, along with Trevor Phillips, a British journalist who joined CBS last month. Norah O’Donnell, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” will be a correspondent as well.

They are the first significant hires at the long-running Sunday program since CBS’s new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, orchestrated a shake-up that led to the departure of three top correspondents this spring, including the veteran journalist Scott Pelley.

Here is the full NYT story.

The Odyssey

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Worth seeing, and I enjoyed it — but a few observations I haven’t seen elsewhere.

For all the praise of IMAX and 70mm’s supposed clarity, several scenes are out of focus on the actor. Pulling focus is harder with a large-format negative. The problem is compounded by Nolan’s fondness for darkness: too many scenes are dark enough to squander much of what the format offers. The sound was earth-shaking in the way we have come to expect from Nolan but there is no song.

The “woke casting” controversy is a non-issue — barely noticeable in practice. The film is obviously conservative in temperament. Helen gets some of the best lines, and Nolan’s slight disfigurement of her traditional arc is exactly right. The Circe scene is the best in the film.

Tyler is entirely wrong about Calypso. Odysseus’s seven years with her were among his most enjoyable. I have no doubt about this.

The deeper flaws are structural. Nolan loves to play with time, and the resulting flashbacks and memories ironically shortchange the odyssey itself — making the journey feel shorter and less arduous than it should. This is very much in the mode of Interstellar: a sequence of set-piece locations strung together. One planet/one monster/one scene–on to the next. But Odysseus as a character on an odyssey never quite coheres.

We are told repeatedly that Odysseus is smart but we shouldn’t need to be reminded. Odysseus is both beloved and resented by gods, a man whose men will follow him to the ends of the earth and then betray him but Mat Damon just doesn’t bring it. Things happen to him; he responds stoically. What we needed was the equivalent of Kirk defeating the Kobayashi Maru — a moment that makes the audience understand, viscerally, that this man bends the rules and contends with the gods by the sheer force of his wit and will. Of courses the Trojan horse is this but Nolan treats this as something of which Odysseus is ashamed and the other clever bits are downplayed. Damon never gets his Kobayashi Meru. The odyssey is a slog, rather than an adventure. Could have used a bit more Sinbad, a bit less Dark Knight. The dialogue, as Tyler noted, is lame. 

Not Nolan’s best film but still better than most films and for scale, ambition, and grand themes well worth the 3-hour investment.

What should I ask Michael Moritz?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, based around his new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile.  Mike of course was a pioneering venture capitalist through Sequoia, and before that had a distinguished career as a journalist, which included books on Chrysler, Apple (the first such book I believe?), and soccer coach Alex Ferguson of Manchester United.  Here is his Wikipedia page.

So what should I ask him?

My Conversation with Dave Baszucki

by  Tyler Cowen in

Dave is CEO and co-founder of Roblox, and here is the audio, video, and transcript.  From the episode summary:

With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.

Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he’s skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son’s experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he’ll learn next, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: What percentage of your games now do you feel are beautiful?

BASZUCKI: All of them.

COWEN: Some look just quite ordinary. They might be fun, but I wouldn’t say they’re beautiful, right?

BASZUCKI: Well, I was trying to go a couple levels out of the box on you there. The reason I feel they’re beautiful is when you said that, I immediately went to look and feel, but then I tried to imagine the 12-year-old or the 18-year-old or the 30-year-old struggling to build something wonderful and the human connection to those games. By that definition, I think they’re all beautiful. They are all the efforts of creation of real people trying to pour their hearts out to make something that other people love to play.

On an artistic basis, I think you could ask me what percent of paintings in the MoMA do I think are beautiful. I’d probably say 20 percent. If I had to look at 1,000 Roblox games, I wouldn’t name which is more beautiful to me because I think that’s less important than really the heartfelt work of all the creators.

COWEN: I’ve been struck when I look at gaming at how much people don’t seem to care much about the visual beauty of their games. I would have expected something different, say, 15 years ago, and they just want a game that engages them somehow. Normal standards of visual beauty seem to have fallen away. Is that incorrect? Would you correct that impression in some manner?

BASZUCKI: I think you’re absolutely correct. What I feel you may actually be describing, if we looked into other disciplines, the evolution of story from the campfire to written to audio to a movie, and the increasing fidelity; all of those stories, in a way, are beautiful, but at the time, for the vast majority of the creators, it may be that writing is just easier than producing a 4K Hollywood movie. I feel that’s a little bit like the metaphor you’re talking about right now in gaming.

For the vast majority of people, their story or their idea for their game is actually pretty beautiful. Whether it’s a fashion game like Dress to Impress or it’s a grow garden game, the games are arguably beautiful, even if they don’t look photorealistic. What I think we’ll see is, over time, as AI helps accelerate the ability to make games look really polished in any style the creator wants—could be photorealistic, could be anime, could be a Warner Brothers 2D cartoon look—you and I might say that looks more beautiful, but the core gameplay is still somewhat the original gameplay. I think we are going to see games arguably look more beautiful, even though I think they’re all beautiful.

The dialogue is a bit slow to get underway, but there are many interesting parts.

A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data

by  Alex Tabarrok in

My latest paper, A Test of the Coase Conjecture Using Prices of Electronic Books, with the excellent Tim Groseclose, has just been published. The Coase Conjecture is another one of Coase’s little ideas — the original paper is six pages — that has spawned hundreds of follow-up papers and thousands of citations.

The idea is simple. A monopolist of a durable good has a time-inconsistency problem. Set the monopoly price in period 1 and he will be tempted in period 2 to cut the price and mop up the customers whose valuations sit between the period-1 price and MC. But the same logic applies in period 2, and again in period 3, and so on — eventually the price unravels to MC. Consumers see this coming, the monopolist knows the consumers see it coming, and so the monopolist cuts price to MC in period 1. And since a “period” is just the interval between price changes, the whole unraveling happens — in Coase’s phrase — “in the twinkling of an eye.”

The theorists, most notably Gul, Sonnenschein and Wilson and Fudenberg, Levine and Tirole, formalized Coase’s insight and showed that under quite general conditions the logic goes through. Which is rather surprising, since, as Tim and I point out, Coase’s conjecture implies that many patents and copyrights are essentially worthless — a prediction wildly at variance with the facts. Other theorists, including Stokey, Ausubel and Deneckere, and Board and Pycia, have offered variants under which the Coase outcome does and does not obtain.

For all this theory, there have been almost no direct tests of the Coase Conjecture apart from a handful of lab experiments. Ours is one of the first papers to take the conjecture to the real world. We look at e-books, an unusually clean setting: digital goods are durable, marginal costs are low, resale is limited, and prices can be changed quickly. Using the prices of e-books that are in the public domain as a proxy for marginal cost, we ask: (a) do prices rapidly fall to MC, and (b) does the market clear in the first period? The answer to both is no. E-book prices begin well above MC, sales continue over many periods, and prices don’t even decline monotonically.

We reject the Coase Conjecture decisively.

The paper has an interesting history. The theorists (or the referees we guessed were theorists) praised the paper for taking the theory seriously but inevitably had a fillip to offer, distinguishing the world of pure theory from empirical tests. The empiricists, on the other hand, said our tests were too simple since no one takes the theory that seriously. It’s good to see the paper find a home!

We reject the Coase Conjecture decisively, but it remains to say why. We can rule out some explanations — it’s not rising MC, and it’s not the finiteness of buyers (which can support a perfectly price-discriminating Pac-Man equilibrium).

Two theories remain: 1) sellers can commit not to lower prices, and 2) the outside-options model of Board and Pycia. I prefer the former, my co-author prefers the latter. To me, commitment just isn’t that hard. The standard story is that profits are like cookies on the table and the monopolist can’t resist — but at least the people tempted by cookies get to eat the cookies! The Coase profits are illusory: the monopolist races to MC in period 1 precisely because they know they won’t resist later and as a result they don’t even get a taste of profit! Too clever by half. I say, show some backbone. Firms are *all about* commitment — to workers, consumers, contractors. Why not to a price? My co-author points out, however, that this is more Tabarrok-vibe than carefully laid out theory.

Tim likes the Board and Pycia model which begins with the plausible idea that consumers have outside options — if they don’t buy the book today, they will buy another book, rent the movie, or borrow from the library — and crucially, once they take the outside option, the consumer never returns to the market. You might think outside options would make it *harder* for the firm to set a high price, but Board and Pycia show in a very clever but extended argument that when you carefully work out the full equilibrium the opposite holds: outside options give firms a time-consistent incentive to set and keep a high price. Tim explains the argument further here (see also our paper for an intuitive breakdown).

In any case, the Coase Conjecture — at least as modelled by the theorists — fails in an environment most conducive to it.

A beautiful theory falls to ugly data.

Justin Wolfers update

by  Tyler Cowen in

Wolfers’s moment of clarity ultimately sent him down a road less traveled by academic economists: creating his own media company.

On Wednesday, Wolfers, 53, announced that he had founded Platypus Economics, an independent media start-up that aims to reach a mainstream audience. The name is a nod to his Australian roots, cheekily referring to the odd-looking mammal native to his birthplace. He’s funding the business himself, using the income from his textbook sales.

…To get his content channels off the ground and build an audience, Wolfers is teaming up with Initial Digital, the digital media division of the Initial Group, an entertainment company that’s backed by the private equity firm TPG.

Here is the full NYT story.

The Southern Poverty Law Center Indictment

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The excellent Patrick McKenzie has a very long Bits About Money post on the the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) indictment. It is filled with details about bank operating procedures. I’m going to summarize. The post is divided into what I think of as two parts. First, did the SPLC commit bank fraud? Second, what is the backstory behind the indictment?

The first part is simple, McKenzie argues that yes the SPLC committed bank fraud, more specifically false statements to a federally insured bank under 18 U.S.C. §1014–the main reason why this is not a hard call is that almost any false statement made to influence a bank, no matter how small, is illegal and can get you 30 years. Moreover, the banks are essentially an investigatory arm of the state and they collect data for decades, any piece of which can generate an indictment. The main way in which the SPLC committed bank fraud is that they set up fake businesses to pay secret informants. Neither of these things, as far as I know, are per se illegal but lying to your bank about the ownership, control and purposes of accounts opened in fictitious business names is illegal.

When Bank-1 investigated, an SPLC employee asked the bank to close several of the accounts and transfer the remaining balances to an SPLC account. Later, SPLC’s president/CEO and board chair confirmed in writing that the accounts were opened for SPLC operations and operated under SPLC authority. As Patrick writes, the letter is “a succinct confession to bank fraud.” Thus, the case that the SPLC paid informants through bank accounts opened under fictitious business names appears strong.

But the government had long been aware of SPLC’s informant work, indeed the existence of the informant program has been public knowledge for decades. It’s hard to see how to run a secret network to pay informants without hiding some information–could the SPLC simply have told the bank what they were doing? It seems to me that the punishment for false statements to a bank ought to depend on the motive and intention of the false statements but the law isn’t written that way. Another administration, however, would certainly look away. Which brings us to the second part of the story.

The SPLC itself was embedded in banking and private-sector decision making. Suppose Acme Inc., a large business, wanted to offer its employees matching grants for charitable donations. Acme, however, doesn’t want newspaper headlines like “Acme donated to the KKK!” So Acme contracts with a firm that vets charitable donations, and that firm uses a blacklist created by the SPLC. This was routine. Amazon used the SPLC list for AmazonSmile; workplace-giving vendors used or advertised SPLC screening; all of this gave the SPLC and the broader Change the Terms coalition power to pressure social media, tech, and financial infrastructure firms over speech, blacklisting, and payments because they were already in the door and embedded in their systems.

When the SPLC was mostly identifying nearly universally despised organizations like the KKK, all of this was more or less accepted by everyone in the know, except perhaps for a few hard core civil-libertarians. But in the woke era the SPLC overplayed their hand. The SPLC and related organizations began to take on conservative, Trump affiliated organizations with widespread support. Through a massive PR and outreach campaign they pressured social media organizations, tech firms, and finance firms to follow along–and this was not just a media campaign, the Change the Terms coalition had hundreds of meetings with top level staff. The partisan nature made it legally questionable but when your allies are in power. these things can be overlooked. In perhaps the most remarkable part of the document, Patrick quotes a donor fundraising letter from Free Press and Free Press Action (not the SPLC but part of the larger coalition):

Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump[.]

…Facebook initially suspended Trump “indefinitely” and later changed his suspension to a two-year ban. We’re now pushing the company to permanently ban Trump and to close a loophole that’s allowing a Trump PAC to fundraise and organize on his behalf.

…FUND THE FIGHT. Your generosity makes our work possible. Please give what you can today to make sure we have the resources we need to keep fighting for equitable media policies that improve people’s lives.

As Patrick notes, the fund raising letter closed with the following deadpan disclaimer:

Free Press and Free Press Action are nonpartisan organizations….Free Press and Free Press Action do not support or oppose any candidate for public office.

Trump won. Many people will say the indictment is the result. That may well be true but that doesn’t make the indictment legally weak.

Read the whole thing for a lesson in how SPLC’s list and coalition work became embedded in private-sector decisioning systems and more generally for a behind the scenes look at how institutional power actually works.

Dwarkesh!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

It’s been great to see Dwarkesh Patel rise to the top ranks of podcasters. The profile in the NYTimes is excellent. Dwarkesh’s success is his own but I couldn’t help but smile at the early, wacky GMU influences—all of which I can attest are true:

Mr. Patel recorded the first episode of “The Lunar Society,” his original name for the podcast, from his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin in 2020, during the early months of the Covid pandemic, when he was 19. He was taking online classes, bored, and thirsty for intellectual engagement. So he did what any normal college sophomore might do and cold-emailed Bryan Caplan, a member of George Mason University’s famously libertarian economics department. In the email, he described how three Caplan books had shifted his perspective on immigration, education and how many children to have. Mr. Caplan responded encouragingly, and after a further friendly exchange, Mr. Patel asked if he could interview him for a podcast. Mr. Caplan was impressed with the result. “He wasn’t just repeating 10 questions from everyone else. He had his own close-reading questions.”

Mr. Caplan and his sons happened to spend a couple of months that summer in Austin, staying at the home of Steve Kuhn, the billionaire ex-hedge fund manager. Mr. Patel had lunch with Mr. Caplan nearly every day, and joined him at Mr. Kuhn’s house for pickleball (Mr. Kuhn founded Major League Pickleball), intellectual salons and role-playing games, including the Mr. Caplan-written “Badger and Skinny Pete,” based on two “Breaking Bad” characters.

Mr. Kuhn offered to invest in the podcast in return for equity. “Even at that age,” Mr. Kuhn says, “he in some ways commanded the room in ways not many people do.”

…Early on, when all Mr. Patel had to show for himself was a couple of blog posts and one podcast episode featuring Mr. Caplan, Anil Varanasi, co-founder of Meter, a network-infrastructure company in San Francisco, reached out and asked how much Mr. Patel would need to keep doing what he was doing for six months. (Mr. Varanasi, a former student of Mr. Caplan’s, has made similar overtures to other promising young people.) Not much, said Mr. Patel, who was then living with his parents in Austin. Mr. Varanasi sent him $10,000. Mr. Caplan opened the door to other interviews, including Tyler Cowen and other George Mason economists. Mr. Cowen, through his Emergent Ventures program, himself later gave Mr. Patel a grant.

The rest as they say is history.

My Conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin

by  Tyler Cowen in

This was great fun for me, here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Andrew debate whether those 1929 stock prices were justified, what Fed and policy choices might have prevented the Depression, whether Glass-Steagall was built on a flawed premises, what surprised Andrew most about the 1920s beyond the crash itself, how business leaders then would compare to today’s CEOs, whether US banks should consolidate, how Andrew would reform US banking regulation, what to make of narrow banking proposals and stablecoins, whether retail investors should get access to private equity and venture capital, why sports gambling and new financial regulations won’t make us much safer, how Andrew broke into the New York Times at age 18, how he manages his information diet, what he learned co-creating Billions, what he plans on learning about next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: I have a few general questions about the 1920s. Obviously, you did an enormous amount of work for this book. Putting aside the great crash and the focus of your book, what is it you learned about the 1920s more generally that most surprised you? Because you learn all this collateral information when you write a book like this, right?

SORKIN: So many things. The book turned into a bit of a love letter to New York in terms of the architecture of New York. I don’t think I appreciated just how many buildings went up in New York and how they were constructed and what happened. That fascinated me. I think the story of John Raskob, actually, who was, to me, the Elon Musk of his time, somebody who ran General Motors, became a super influential investor. He was a philosopher king that everybody listened to at every given moment.

He ultimately constructs the Empire State Building, which was probably the equivalent of SpaceX at that time. He had written a paper about creating a five-day workweek back in 1929, November, as all of this is happening. Not because he wanted people to work less and be nice to them, but because he thought there was an economic argument that if people didn’t have to work on Saturdays, more people would buy cars and gardening equipment, and do all sorts of things on the weekends, and buy different outfits and clothing. There were so many little things.

Then, I would argue, actually, his role in taking his fortune — he got involved in politics. He was a Republican turned Democrat. He spent an extraordinary amount of money to secretly try to undermine the reputation of Hoover. I would say to you, today, I actually think that part of the reason that Hoover’s reputation is so dim, even today, is a result of this very influential, wealthy individual in America who spent two years paying off journalists and running this secret campaign to do such a thing. You go back and really read the press and try to understand why some of these views were espoused.

By the way, this was before the crash. He started this campaign effectively in May of 1929, just three months after Hoover took office.

COWEN: It’s striking to me how forgotten Raskob is today. There’s a lesson in there about people who think they’re doing something today that will be remembered in a hundred years’ time. It probably won’t be, even if you’re a big, big deal.

SORKIN: It’s remarkable. He was a very big deal. He famously used to tell everybody, “Everybody ought to be rich.” He was trying to develop, back then, what would have been something akin to one of the first mutual funds, levered mutual funds, in fact, because he also wanted to democratize finance.

COWEN: Let’s say you’re back in New York. It’s the 1920s; you’re you. Other than walking around and looking at buildings, what else would you do back then? I would go to jazz concerts. What would you do?

SORKIN: Oh my goodness. You know what I would do? But I’m a journalista, so you’ll appreciate this.

COWEN: Yes.

SORKIN: I would have been obsessed with magazines. This was really the first real era of magazines and newspapers and the transmission of media, the sort of mass media in this way. I would have been fascinated by radio. I think those things, for me, would have been super exciting.

The truth is, I imagine I would have gotten caught up in the pastime of stock trading. It is true that all these brokerage houses are just emerging everywhere, and people are going to play them as if it’s a pastime. I always wonder whether prohibition played a role in why so many people were speculating because instead of drinking, what did they do? They traded.

Some of the time he spent interviewing me…