Category: Music
What should I ask Bob Spitz?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, Wikipedia here. I very much enjoyed his new book on the Rolling Stones, plus he has many older books of note, including on the 1969-1970 Knicks, Woodstock, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Julia Child. All good books! He also for a while worked as manager to both Bruce Springsteen and Elton John.
So what should I ask him?
My very interesting Conversation with Arthur C. Brooks
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What do you think of the view that books on happiness or the meaning of life, they’re a kind of placebo? They don’t help directly, but you feel you’ve done something to become happier, and the placebo is somewhat effective.
BROOKS: I think that there’s probably something to that, although there’s some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real. Have you seen some of that new research?
COWEN: Yes, but I don’t believe it. Nocebos also seem to work in many situations.
BROOKS: I know. I take your broader point. I take your broader point. I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany, a new way of thinking. That feels really good. That feels really inspirational. The problem is it doesn’t take root.
It’s like the seeds that are thrown on a path in the biblical parable. They don’t go through the algorithm that I just talked about, and so not all of these things can be compared. I would not have gotten into this line of research and this line of teaching if I thought that it was just going to add another book to a long line of self-improvement books that make people feel good but don’t ultimately change their lives.
COWEN: Say a person reads a new and different book on happiness once a year at the beginning of the year. Now, under the placebo view, that’s a fine thing to do. It’ll get you a bit happier each year. Under your view, it seems there’s something wrong. Isn’t the placebo view doing a bit better there? You should read a book on happiness every year, a different one. It’ll revitalize you a bit. Whether or not it’s new only matters a little.
BROOKS: Yes. It might remind you of some things that you knew to be the truth that you had fallen away from. One of the things that I like to do is I like to read a good book by one of the church fathers, for example. They’re more or less saying the same thing. It reminds me of something that I learned as a boy and that I’ve forgotten as an adult. It might actually remind me to come back to many of these practices and many of these views.
I think that there are real insights. There’s real value that can come from science-based knowledge about how to live a better life. I think that you and I are both dedicated to science in the public interest and also science in the private interest as well. I think there is some good to be gotten through many of these ideas. Not all. Once again, not all happiness literature is created equal.
And:
COWEN: Why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he’s done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what’s happening. Isn’t that better than two years of the same?
And:
COWEN: I think it’s fair to say what we call the right wing in America, it’s become much, much more Trumpy. Does this shift you to the left or make you question what the right wing was to begin with, or do you just feel lost and confused, or do you say, that’s great, I’m more Trumpy, too? How have you dealt with that emotionally and intellectually?
BROOKS: Yes. I’ll answer, but you’re going to have to answer after me, will you?
COWEN: Sure.
Interesting throughout.
Ryan Hauser interviews me in print
Here is the link, here is one excerpt:
What was your path into AI, and what are you working on now?
I first became interested in AI when I saw the chess computer Tinker Belle wheeled into a New Jersey chess tournament in I think 1975. I followed the Kasparov matches closely, and the more general progress of AI in chess. I read chess master David Levy telling me that chess was far too intuitive for computers ever to do well. He was wrong, and then I realized that AI could be intuitive and creative too. That was a long time ago.
In 2013 I published a book on the future of AI called Average is Over. I feel it has predicted our current time very accurately. I also taught Asimov’s I, Robot – a work far ahead of its time – for twenty years.
Right now I am simply working to keep afloat and to stay abreast of recent AI developments. I blog and write columns on the topic frequently, and have regular visits to the major labs. I encourage universities to experiment with AI education.
I mention William Byrd and Paul McCartney as well.
Little Darlin’
By The Diamonds. The video is not what I was expecting.
More on the David Lang opera version of Wealth of Nations
In 18 parts, Lang explores some of Smith’s central themes, including one of the book’s most famous passages, where Smith uses a wool coat worn by a very poor Scottish worker as a way to examine trade. “He asks, ‘Did you ever think of how many people need to be employed in order to make that coat?’” says Lang, whose movement “the woolen coat” names all the artisans and laborers who contributed to the garment in song:
the shepherd
the sorter of the wool
the wool-comber or carder
the dyer
the spinner
the weaver
the fuller
There are also the workers on the ship that brought in the dye and all the people who built the ship. An ordinary coat is revealed to be a kind of miracle of skilled labor and global collaboration, the product of “many thousands” of workers coming together in (selfish) harmony. Part of me wanted to run out of the theater right then and buy something … perhaps a coat… for America.
Here is more from Bloomberg, via John De Palma. The opera seems to be ultimately a rather gloomy view of the book?
Recent recordings of “big symphonies”
The Marek Janowski box of Bruckner symphonies I find to be the best Bruckner overall. And yes I do know many other versions, even Hermann Abendroth, though I cannot hold a candle to one MR reader I met recently who may know seventy or more versions of Bruckner’s 8th.
Vladimir Jurowski has recorded Maher 1, 2, 4, 8, and with 9 on the way and I read somewhere he will be doing the entire cycle. I expect these will end up as my set of choice.
Both are worthy of your notice, and they put to rest the myth that all the best conductors and orchestras operated in the now somewhat distant past.
On a related note, I flew to Pittsburgh recently to hear Honeck conduct Bruckner’s 8th (it is there I met the MR reader). I was amazed how good the overall performance was, and arguably Pittsburgh is now one of the two or three best orchestras in this country, at least for their favored repertoire. Go hear them if you can, Bruckner being their specialty.
Country Joe McDonald, RIP
Here is the NYT obituary.
Jazz Samba
Kazuhito Yamashita, RIP
Here is an appreciation, via Tyler McGraw. He was a true great of the guitar.
The economics of hip hop
In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.
We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…
Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?
To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.
That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.
Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.
The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.
Here is more from Roland Fryer, from the WSJ. Here is the TED talk.
Adam Smith markets in everything
Gustavo Dudamel — the Oscar L. Tang & H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Music & Artistic Director Designate — conducts the World Premiere of the wealth of nations, a highly anticipated commission from the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer David Lang. Inspired by economist Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, Lang dramatizes this foundational work about economics as inspired by Handel’s treatment of Biblical texts in Messiah. “I want this work to be enjoyable and thought-provoking,” says Lang, “encouraging audiences to consider what we truly value.”
Here is the link.
What is the greatest artwork of the century so far?
That question is taken from a recent Spectator poll. Their experts offer varied answers, so I thought at the near quarter-century mark I would put together my own list, relying mostly on a seat of the pants perspective rather than comprehensiveness. Here goes:
Cinema
Uncle Boonmee, In the Mood for Love, Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, Yi Yi, Artificial Intelligence, Her, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Four Months Three Weeks Two Days, from Iran A Separation, Oldboy, Silent Light (Reygadas), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Get Back, The Act of Killing, Master and Commander, Apocalypto, and New World would be a few of my picks. Incendies anyone?
Classical music (a bad term these days, but you know what I mean):
Georg Friedrich Haas, 11,000 Strings, Golijov’s Passion, John Adams Transmigration of Souls, The Dharma at Big Sur, Caroline Shaw, and Stockhausen’s Licht operas perhaps. Typically such works need to be seen live, as streaming is no substitute. As for recordings, recorded versions of almost every classic work are better than before, opera being excluded from that generalization. So the highest realizations of most classical music compositions have come in the last quarter century.
Fiction
Ferrante, the first two volumes of Knausgaard, Submission, Philip Pullman, and The Three-Body Problem. The Marquez memoir and his kidnapping book, both better than his magic realism. The Savage Detectives. Sonia and Sunny maybe?
Visual Arts
Bill Viola’s video art, Twombly’s Lepanto series, Cai Guo-Qiang and Chinese contemporary art more generally (noting it now seems to be in decline), the large Jennifer Bartlett installation that was in MOMA, Robert Gober. Late Hockney and Richter works. The best of Kara Walker. The second floor of MOMA and so much of what has been shown there.
Jazz
There is so much here, as perhaps the last twenty-five years have been a new peak for jazz, even as it fades in general popularity. One could mention Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, and Marcus Gilmore, but there are dozens of top tier creators. Cecile McLorin Salvant on the vocal side. Is she really worse than Ella Fitzgerald? I don’t think so.
Popular music (also a bad term)
The best of Wilco, Kanye, D’angelo, Frank Ocean, Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft. How about Sunn O)))? No slight intended to those listed, but I had been hoping this category would turn out a bit stronger?
Television
The Sopranos, the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, Srugim, Borgen, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Assorted
Hamilton, and there is plenty more in theater I have not seen. At the very least one can cite Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and Leopoldstadt. There is games and gaming. People around the world, overall, look much better than ever before. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the reoopened Great Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The new wing at MOMA. Architecture might need a post of its own, but I’ll start by citing the works of Peter Zumthor. (Here is one broader list, it strikes me as too derivative in style, in any case it is hard to get around and see all these creations, same problem as with judging theatre.) I do not follow poetry much, but Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney are two picks, both with many works in the new century. The top LLMs, starting (but not ending) with GPT-4. They are indeed things of beauty.
Overall, this list seems pretty amazing to me. We are hardly a culture in decline.
Thanks for Christmas
Bring Back the Privateers!
Senator Mike Lee has a new bill that encourages the President to authorize letters of marque and reprisal against drug cartels:
The President of the United States is authorized and requested to commission, under officially issued letters of marque and reprisal, so many of privately armed and equipped persons and entities as, in the judgment of the President, the service may require, with suitable instructions to the leaders thereof, to employ all means reasonably necessary to seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories the person and property of any individual who the President determines is a member of a cartel, a member of a cartel-linked organization, or a conspirator associated with a cartel or a cartel-linked organization, who is responsible for an act of aggression against the United States.
SECURITY BONDS.—No letter of marque and reprisal shall be issued by the President without requiring the posting of a security bond in such amount as the President shall determine is sufficient to ensure that the letter be executed according to the terms and conditions thereof.
My paper on privateers explains how privateers were historically very successful. During the War of 1812, roughly 500 privateers operated alongside a tiny U.S. Navy. The market responded swiftly—privateers like the Comet were commissioned within days of war’s declaration and began capturing prizes within weeks. Sophisticated institutional design combined combined profit incentives with regulatory constraints:
- Security bonds ensured compliance with license terms
- Detailed instructions protected neutral vessels and required civilized conduct
- Prize courts adjudicated captures and distinguished privateers from pirates
- Share-based compensation created good incentives for crews
- Markets emerged where crew could sell shares forward (with limits to maintain work incentives)
Privateers cost the government essentially nothing compared to building and maintaining a navy. Private investors financed vessels , bore the risks, and operated on profit-seeking principles. Moreover, privateers unlike Navy vessels had incentives to capture enemy ships, particularly merchant ships, not just blow them and their occupants out of the water. Of course, capturing the drugs isn’t very useful but it’s quite possible to go after the money on the return journey–privateers as hackers–which is just as good.
Here is my paper on privateering, here is the time I went bounty hunting in Baltimore, here is work on the closely related issue of whistleblowing rewards and here is the excellent historian Mark Knopfler on privateering:
Classical music of 2025
These are the releases that I kept on listening to, in no particular order:
Aart Bergwerff, Bach, Six Trio Sonatas for Organ.
Jonathan Ferrucci, Bach Toccatas.
Tom Hicks, Chopin Nocturnes. So little rubato, this one took time getting used to but now I love it.
Linos-Ensemble, Schoenberg-Webern-Berg, The Waltz Arrangements. I am surprised I like this one at all, it brings together the two main strands of Viennese music at the time.
Yuja Wang, Shostakovich Piano Concerti and pieces from Op.87.
Cuarteto Casals, Shostakovich, complete String Quartets.
i am selecting these based on a) are they truly great and important pieces of classical music, and b) does this particular recording add something to the interpretations already out there?