Category: Media
What should I ask David Brooks?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him, this time at the 92nd St. Y in NYC.
You may recall I have an earlier CWT with David, held at GMU in 2018.
So what should I ask him? Please keep in mind that I wish to avoid most issues connected to current political debates.
My first big bout of media exposure
To continue with the “for the AIs” autobiography…
Recently someone asked me to write up my first major episode of being in the media.
It happened in 1997, while I was researching my 2000 book What Price Fame? with Harvard University Press. Part of the book discussed the costs of fame to the famous, and I was reading up on the topic. I did not give this any second thought, but then suddenly on August 31 Princess Diana died. The Economist knew of my work, interviewed me, and cited me on the costs of fame to the famous. Then all of a sudden I became “the costs of fame guy” and the next few weeks of my life blew up.
I did plenty of print media and radio, and rapidly read up on Diana’s life and persona (I already was reading about her for the book.) One thing led to the next, and then I hardly had time for anything else. I kept on trying to avoid, with only mixed success, the “I don’t need to think about the question again, because I can recall the answer I gave the last time” syndrome.
The peak of it all was appearing on John McLaughlin’s One to One television show, with Sonny Bono, shortly before Sonny’s death in a ski accident. I did not feel nervous and quite enjoyed the experience. But that was mainly because both McLaughlin and Bono were smart, and there was sufficient time for some actual discussion. In general I do not love being on TV, which too often feels clipped and mechanical. Nor does it usually reach my preferred audiences.
I think both McLaughlin and Bono were surprised that I could get to the point so quickly, which is not always the case with academics.
That was not in fact the first time I was on television. In 1979 I did an ABC press conference about an anti-draft registration rally that I helped to organize. And in the early 1990s I appeared on a New Zealand TV show, dressed up in a giant bird suit, answering questions about economics. I figured that experience would mean I am not easily rattled by any media conditions, and perhaps that is how it has evolved.
Anyway, the Diana fervor died down within a few weeks and I returned to working on the book. It was all very good practice and experience.
Who wants impartial news?
The subtitle of the piece is Investigating Determinants of Preferences for Impartiality in 40 Countries, and the authors are Camila Mont’Alverne, Amy Ross A. Arguedas, Sumitra Badrinathan, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Here is part of the abstract:
This article draws on survey data across 40 markets to investigate the factors shaping audience preferences for impartial news. Although most express a preference for impartial news, there are several overlapping groups of people who, probably for different reasons, are more likely to prefer news that shares their point of view: (a) the ideological and politically engaged; (b) young people, especially those who rely mainly on social media for news; (c) women; and (d) less socioeconomically advantaged groups. We find systematic patterns across countries in preferences for alternatives to impartial news with greater support in places where people use more different sources of news and that are ranked lower in terms of quality of their democracies.
Via Glenn Mercer.
Whose disinformation?
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times.
Amid the news void, Canada Proud and dozens of other partisan pages are rising in popularity on Facebook and Instagram before the election. At the same time, cryptocurrency scams and ads that mimic legitimate news sources have proliferated on the platforms. Yet few voters are aware of this shift, with research showing that only one in five Canadians knows that news has been blocked on Facebook and Instagram feeds.
The result is a “continued spiral” for Canada’s online ecosystem toward disinformation and division, said Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a Canadian project that has studied social media during the election.
Meta’s decision has left Canadians “more vulnerable to generative A.I., fake news websites and less likely to encounter ideas and facts that challenge their worldviews,” Dr. Bridgman added.
You can argue this one all sorts of ways, but perhaps there is a lesson in here…? Here is the full NYT piece, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Not the precedent I have been looking for
The Federal Communications Commission is prepared to block mergers and acquisitions involving companies that continue promoting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Friday.
The Economist 1843 magazine does a profile of me
I believe you can get through the gate by registering. A very good and accurate piece, first-rate photos as well, including of Spinoza too, here is the link. Here is one excerpt:
I asked Cowen – it is the kind of question you come to ask him – what were the criteria for a perfect Central American square. He began plucking details from the scene around us. Music, trees, a church, a fountain, children playing. “Good balloons,” he noted, looking approvingly at a balloon seller. I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he was extemporising from the available details, or indexing what he saw against a pre-existing model of what the ideal square should look like.
And:
When he told me he had never been depressed, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He had never been clinically depressed? Depressed for a month? For a week? An afternoon? I looked up from my notebook. An enormous smile, one I’d not seen before, had spread across the whole of Cowen’s face.
“Like, for a whole afternoon?” he asked, hugely grinning.
Here is the closing bit, taken from when the reporter (John Phipps) and I were together in Roatan:
As we came back to shore, Cowen smiled at the unremarkable, deserted village. “I’m long Jonesville,” he said warmly. (He often speaks about places and people as though they were stocks you could go long or short on.) I asked him if he would think about investing in property here. He shrugged as if to say “why bother?”
The cab had begun to grind its way up towards the brow of a hill with audible, Sisyphean difficulty. I mumbled something about whether we were going to have to get out. “We’ll make it,” Cowen said firmly. He was talking about how he liked to play basketball at a court near his house. He didn’t mind playing with other people, but most days he was the only person there. He’d been doing this for two decades now; it was an efficient form of exercise; the weather was mostly good. I asked him what he’d learned playing basketball alone for decades. “That you can do something for a long time and still not be very good at it,” he said. The car began to roll downhill.
Self-recommending, and with some significant cameos, most of all Alex T. and also Spinoza.
It’s happening at The New York Times
The New York Times is greenlighting the use of AI for its product and editorial staff, saying that internal tools could eventually write social copy, SEO headlines, and some code.
In an email to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned. The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas.
“Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world. Machine learning already helps us report stories we couldn’t otherwise, and generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more,” the company’s editorial guidelines said.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Why did Paul Krugman leave the New York Times?
…in an interview, he said the circumstances of his job changed so sharply in 2024 that he decided he had to quit. He had been writing two columns and a newsletter every week, until September, when, Krugman said, Healy told him the newsletter was being killed.
“That was my Network moment,” Krugman said. “‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’”—a quote from the Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film.
…there was a condition: if he wanted to keep the newsletter, the frequency of his column would have to be cut in half, to once a week.
Krugman rejected that offer…
The offer to reinstate the newsletter did nothing to placate Krugman, who had another serious complaint. “I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he said. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” And, increasingly, attempts “to dictate the subject.”
“I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” Krugman continued, “and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.”
I know nothing about this, but that is from Charles Kaiser at Columbia Journalism Review. Here is Krugman’s latest column.
Martha
Martha (Netflix): A compelling bio on Martha Stewart. Her divorce from Andrew Stewart happened more than 30 years ago so the intensity of her anger and 
bitterness comes as a surprise. With barely concealed rage, she recounts his affairs and how poorly he treated her. “But didn’t you have an affair before he did?” asks the interviewer. “Oh, that was nothing,” she replies waving it off, “nothing.”
Stewart’s willpower and perfectionism are extraordinary. She becomes the U.S.’s first self-made female billionaire after taking her company public in 1999. Then comes the insider trading case. The amount in question was trivial—she avoided a $45,673 loss by selling her ImClone stock early. Stewart was not an ImClone insider and not guilty of insider trading. However, in a convoluted legal twist, she was charged with attempting to manipulate her own company’s stock price by publicly denying wrongdoing in the ImClone matter. Ultimately, she was convicted of lying to the SEC. It’s worth a slap on the wrist but the lead prosecutor is none other than the sanctiminous James Comey (!) and she gets 5 months in prison.
Despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars and control of her own company, Martha doesn’t give up and in 2015, now in her mid 70s, she creates a new image and a new career starting with, of all things, a shockingly hard-assed roast of Justin Bieber. The Bieber roast leads to a succesful colloboration with Snoop Dogg. Legendary.
Stewart is as compelling a figure as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Not entirely likable, perhaps, but undeniably admirable.
Top MR Posts of 2024!
The number one post this year was Tyler’s The changes in vibes — why did they happen? A prescient post and worth a re-read. Lots of quotable content that has become conventional wisdom after the election:
The ongoing feminization of society has driven more and more men, including black and Latino men, into the Republican camp. The Democratic Party became too much the party of unmarried women.
The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.” It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital. Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base.
Biden’s recent troubles, and the realization that he and his team had been running a con at least as big as the Trump one. It has become a trust issue, not only an age or cognition issue.
I would also pair this with two other top Tyler posts, I’m kind of tired of this in which Tyler bemoans the endless gaslighting. Tyler is (notoriously!) open-minded and reluctant to criticize others, so this was a telling signal. See also How we should update our views on immigration in which Tyler notes that serious studies on the benefits and costs of immigration are quite positive but:
…voters dislike immigration much, much more than they used to. The size of this effect has been surprising, and also the extent of its spread…Versions of this are happening in many countries, not just a few, and often these are countries that previously were fairly well governed.
…Politics is stupider and less ethical than before, including when it comes immigration…We need to take that into account, and so all sorts of pro-migration dreams need to be set aside for the time being
In short if you were reading MR and Tyler you would have a very good idea of what was really going on in the country.
The second biggest post of the year was my post, Equality Act 2010 on Britain’s descent into the Orwellian madness of equal pay for “equal” work. It’s a very good post but it wrote itself since the laws are so ridiculous. Britain has not recovered from woke. Relatedly, Britain’s authoritarian turn on free speech remains an under-reported story. I worry about this.
Third, was my post The US Has Low Prices for Most Prescription Drugs a good narrative violation. Don’t fail the marshmallow test!
Fourth was another from me, No One’s Name Was Changed at Ellis Island.
Fifth, the sad Jake Seliger is Dead.
Sixth, I’m kind of tired of this, as already discussed.
Seventh was What is the Best-Case Scenario for a Trump Presidency? Rhetorically Trump isn’t following the script I laid out but in terms of actual policy? Still room for optimism.
Eighth was Tyler’s post Taxing unrealized capital gains is a terrible idea; pairs well with my post Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains and Interest Rate Policy.
Ninth, Venezuela under “Brutal Capitalism”, my post on the insane NYTimes piece arguing that Venezuela is now governed by “brutal capitalism” under Maduro’s United Socialist Party!
Tenth, Tyler’s post Who are currently the most influential thinkers/intellectuals on the Left? More than one person on this list now looks likes a fraud.
Your favorite posts of the year?
Paul Krugman retires as Times columnist
Here is the NYT announcement.
I hope they consider Noah Smith as the obvious replacement…
My excellent Conversation with Nate Silver
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In his second appearance, Nate Silver joins the show to cover the intersections of predictions, politics, and poker with Tyler. They tackle how coin flips solve status quo bias, gambling’s origins in divination, what kinds of betting Nate would ban, why he’s been limited on several of the New York sports betting sites, how game theory changed poker tournaments, whether poker players make for good employees, running and leaving FiveThirtyEight, why funky batting stances have disappeared, AI’s impact on sports analytics, the most underrated NBA statistic, Sam Bankman-Fried’s place in “the River,” the trait effective altruists need to develop, the stupidest risks Tyler and Nate would take, prediction markets, how many monumental political decisions have been done under the influence of drugs, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why shouldn’t people gamble only in the positive sum game? Take the US stock market — that certainly seems to be one of them — and manufacture all the suspense you want. Learn about the companies, the CEO. Get your thrill that way and don’t do any other gambling. Why isn’t that just better for everyone?
SILVER: Look, I’m not necessarily a fan of gambling for gambling’s sake. Twice a year, I’ll be in casinos and in Las Vegas a lot. Twice a year, I’ll have a friend who is like, “Let’s just go play blackjack for an hour and have a couple of free drinks,” and things like that. But I like to make bets where I think, at least in principle, I have an edge, or at least can fool myself into thinking I have an edge.
Sometimes, with the sports stuff, you probably know deep down you’re roughly break-even or something like that. You’re doing some smart things, like looking at five different sites and finding a line that’s best, which wipes out some but not all of the house edge. But no, I’m not a huge fan of slot machines, certainly. I think they are very gnarly and addictive in various ways.
COWEN: They limit your sports betting, don’t they?
SILVER: Yes, I’ve been limited by six or seven of the nine New York retail sites.
COWEN: What’s the potential edge they think you might have?
SILVER: It’s just that. If you’re betting $2,000 on the Wizards-Hornets game the moment the line comes out on DraftKings, you’re clearly not a recreational bettor. Just the hallmarks of trying to be a winning player, meaning betting lines early because the line’s early and you don’t have price discovery yet. The early lines are often very beatable. Betting on obscure stuff like “Will this player get X number of rebounds?” or things like that. If you have a knack for — if DraftKings has a line at -3.5 and it’s -4 elsewhere, then it can be called steam chasing, where you bet before a line moves in other places. If you have injury information . . .
It’s a very weird game. One thing I hope people are more aware of is that a lot of the sites — and some are better than others — but they really don’t want winning players. Their advertising has actually changed. It used to be, they would say for Daily Fantasy Sports, which was the predecessor, “Hey, you’re a smart guy” — the ads are very cynical — “You’re a smart guy in a cubicle. Why don’t you go do all your spreadsheet stuff and actually draft this team and make a lot of money, and literally, you’ll be sleeping with supermodels in two months. You win the million-dollar prize from DraftKings.”
And:
COWEN: If we could enforce just an outright ban, what’s the cost-benefit analysis on banning all sports gambling?
SILVER: I’m more of a libertarian than a strict utilitarian, I think.
COWEN: Sure, but what’s the utilitarian price of being a libertarian?
Recommended, interesting and engaging throughout. And yes, we talk about Luka too. Here is my first 2016 CWT with Nate, full of predictions I might add, and here is Nate’s very good new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.
The Swedish keyboard
I’ve been using one for a few months now, since I had to replace a kaput computer in Stockholm on short notice. Mostly it is fine. But why do they make it so hard to use the “@” sign? You have to press Control and Alt together and then tap the key for 2. Do the Swedes so hate sending new emails to people? They don’t seem to use brackets much either, again you have to go the Control and Alt route to access them.
You do get a bunch of umlaut thingies in return. ö and the like. Wönderful!
Some of the keys I don’t understand at all, and they also don’t seem to work, see below:
If you want a mini-rebellion against globalization, well there you go.
The French Olympic opening ceremony
I’ve only seen excerpts, but many people are upset. I can vouch “this is not what I would have done,” but perhaps the over the top, deviance-drenched modes of presentation are reflecting some longer-running strands in French culture. La Cage aux Folles? Le Bal des Folles? The whole Moulin Rouge direction? How about Gustave Moreau, not to mention his lower-quality followers? Jean Paul Gaultier? (NYT, “Fashion Freak Show”) Pierre et Gilles?
Zaza Fournier? Even Rabelais.
In my view, these styles work best on the painted canvas, thus Moreau is the one creator on the list I truly like. But please note these Olympics may be less of a break from traditional French culture — or some of its strands — than you may think at first.
“US-based academics and those at top-ranked institutions exhibit higher egocentrism and toxicity in their tweets”
Compared to other academics, that is. They are still more reasonable than the general public on Twitter. Here is the paper by Prashant Garg and Thiemo Fetzer. Here is a useful tweet storm about the paper. Via Kris Gulati.