Category: Music
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?
My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China’s lack of a liberal tradition and why it won’t democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott’s work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it’s like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini’s Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler’s hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?
WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.
COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?
WANG: Yes.
COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.
WANG: How about never? I’m not expecting that China will have American-style suburbs anytime soon, in part because of the social engineering projects that are pretty extensive in China. I think there is a sense in which Chinese cities are not especially dense. Indian cities are much, much more dense. I think that Chinese cities, the streets are not necessarily terribly full of people all the time. They just sprawl quite extensively.
They sprawl in ways that I think the edges of the city still look somewhat like the center of the city, which there’s too many high-rises. There’s probably fewer parks. There’s probably fewer restaurants. Almost nobody has a yard and a dog in their home. That’s in part because the Communist Party has organized most people to live in apartment compounds in which it is much easier to control them.
We saw this really extensively in the pandemic, in which people were unable to leave their Shanghai apartment compounds for anything other than getting their noses and mouths swabbed. I write a little bit about how, if you take the rail outside of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you hit farmland really, really quickly. That is in part because the Communist Party assesses governors as well as mayors on their degree of food self-sufficiency.
Cities like Shanghai and Beijing have to produce a lot of their own crops, both grains as well as vegetables, as well as fruits, as well as livestock, within a certain radius so that in case there’s ever a major devastating war, they don’t have to rely on strawberries from Mexico or strawberries from Cambodia, or Thailand. There’s a lot of farmland allocated outside of major cities. I think that will prevent suburban sprawl. You can’t control people if they all have a yard as well as a dog. I think the Communist Party will not allow it.
COWEN: Whether the variable of engineers matters, I went and I looked at the history of other East Asian economies, which have done very well in manufacturing, built out generally excellent infrastructure. None of these problems with the Second Avenue line in New York. Taiwan, like the presidents, at least if we believe GPT-5, three of them were lawyers and none of them were engineers. South Korea, you have actually some economists, a lot of bureaucrats.
WANG: Wow. Imagine that. Economists in charge, Tyler.
COWEN: I wouldn’t think it could work. A few lawyers, one engineer. Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, he’s a lawyer. He thinks in a very lawyerly manner. Singapore has arguably done the best of all those countries. Much richer than China, inspired China. Why should I think engineers rather than just East Asia, and a bunch of other accompanying facts about these places are what matter?
WANG: Japan, a lot of lawyers in the top leadership. What exactly was the leadership of Hong Kong? A bunch of British civil servants.
COWEN: Some of whom are probably lawyers or legal-type minds, right? Not in general engineers.
WANG: PPE grads. I think that we can understand the engineering variable mostly because of how much more China has done relative to Japan and South Korea and Taiwan.
COWEN: It’s much, much poorer. Per capita manufacturing output is gone much better in these other countries.
And:
WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain. Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?
COWEN: I don’t think the differences are that big. For instance, if we ask ourselves, what’s the relative ranking of Chengdu plus Chongqing compared to the rest of the world? We’re 98.5% in agreement compared to almost anyone else. When you get to the micro level, the so-called narcissism of petty differences, obviously, you’re born in China. I grew up in New Jersey. It’s going to shape our perspectives.
Anything in China, you have been there in a much more full-time way, and you speak and read Chinese, and none of that applies to me. I’m popping in and out as a tourist. Then, I think the differences make much more sense. It’s possible I would prefer to live in Shanghai for essentially the reasons you mentioned. If I’m somewhere for a week, I’m definitely going to pick Beijing. I’ll go around to the galleries. The things that are terrible about the city just don’t bother me that much, because I know I’ll be gone.
WANG: 98.5% agreement. I’ll take that, Tyler. It’s you and me against the rest of the world, but then we’ll save our best disagreements for each other.
COWEN: Let’s see if you can pass an intellectual Turing test. Why is it that I think Yunnan is the single best place in the world to visit? Just flat out the best if you had to pick one region. Not why you think it is, but why I think it is.
Strongly recommended, Dan and I had so much fun we kept going for about an hour and forty minutes. And of course you should buy and read Dan’s bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Popular music of 2025
Usually I wait until the year passes before dipping too deeply into these offerings, but this year I have been impressed by:
Bad Bunny, ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’.
Geese, Getting Killed.
Rosalia, Lux.
Oklou, Choke Enough.
Saya Gray, Saya.
Fontaines D.C., Romance, late 2024.
Jeff Tweedy, Twilight Override.
Raye, assorted songs.
There will be more, that is my first cut at a list of interest.
My excellent Conversation with Cass Sunstein
Cass was in top form, and so we went on for almost two hours. In his Substack he described it as “The most fun interview I have ever done.” Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-undermining or simply vulnerable to illiberal forces, the tensions in how a liberal immigration regime would work, whether new generations of liberal thinkers are emerging, if Derek Parfit counts as a liberal, Mill’s liberal wokeism, the allure of Mises’ “cranky enthusiasm for freedom,” whether the central claim of The Road to Serfdom holds up, how to blend indigenous rights with liberal thought, whether AIs should have First Amendment protections, the argument for establishing a right not to be manipulated, better remedies for low-grade libel, whether we should have trials run by AI, how Bob Dylan embodies liberal freedom, Cass’ next book about animal rights, and more.
I will reproduce the section Cass pulled for his own Substack:
COWEN: Now, we started with the topic of liberalism. How is it you think about or characterize the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: Bob Dylan is a liberal. His liberalism is captured in the line, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” I hope he’s immortal, but if anything is on his epigraph, that would be a good candidate.
The notion of self-invention, of freedom, is central to basically everything. His refusal to keep singing the same song — you can hear him talking about it in some of the interviews. He said, “I could do that. I could just do that forever. I knew how they’d react.” He said, “What’s that about?” He said, “I needed to do something else.” But of course, the line, “I needed to do something else” — that’s my line. How he would put it would be much more vivid and surprising than that.
His “Like a Rolling Stone” is an anthem of freedom. I heard it, actually, in concert a few years ago. It was a great performance. It wasn’t young, but it was a great performance. The audience went wild when he did “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was the final song. It was the encore. It wasn’t just because it was the greatest rock song ever written. It was because of how he did it. I thought, “What’s going on in this song? Why is everyone exhilarated?” The song, which he described when he wrote it as vomit, hatred directed at somewhere that was real — it wasn’t that, or it was a little bit that, but it was a song of liberty.
“How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” Everyone felt like they were flying. He makes that — “Like a Rolling Stone” — be a song of freedom. If you look at his angry songs — “Positively 4th Street” — there’s a freedom in being, of course, uninhibited, able to say things, but also a freedom of disconnection.
When he’s asked why did he change his name, I have an account of why he actually did. I think he gave it exactly once, but in his more characteristic way, he said, “This is America. You can change your name.” Then he said, “I was born. I didn’t think I was born with the right name. I could make it up. I could say that sounds more like I was.”
Making rootlessness not be a curse, but instead something that is . . . the word joy is too clichéd for Dylan. If you look at his love songs, like “If You See Her, Say Hello,” which isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s good. There’s a connection with the one he loved, who got away, but you can feel the sense of freedom.
COWEN: “Visions of Johanna”?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, completely. He’s torn. That has the great opening line. “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks When you’re trying to be so quiet?” Did Yeats write better lines than that? Probably, but he was Yeats.
COWEN: Blood on the Tracks — a liberal album?
SUNSTEIN: Oh, yes.
COWEN: How would you express that?
SUNSTEIN: Well, I’m thinking “Buckets of Rain” is the closing song. Right before that, there’s a song, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” That’s it, which is, I think, one of his greatest songs. That’s a liberal song of freedom and separation, that she’s going, but he’s going to see her everywhere, and there’s smiling at impermanence. That is a big liberal theme — smiling at impermanence — because impermanence makes things not routine and also makes for freedom.
COWEN: “Idiot Wind” is the angry song of the batch, right?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, it’s pretty mad. He said about that song, “I don’t know why people like it. There’s so much sadness and distress in it.”
COWEN: Do you see your own liberalism or just yourself in the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: I think so.
COWEN: Reinventing yourself, not quite wanting to be pinned down, doing a lot of stuff.
SUNSTEIN: He likes, I think, abandoning and going on to something that’s very different. I wish I’d gone electric or had some equivalent of that. But doing something quite different — I do share a little bit with him. I like it when I think something I thought was wrong. I now am very enthusiastic about the Austrian economists and Hayek. I’ve always admired them, of course, but I didn’t feel that they were on my team. Now I feel I’ve gone to their team. I don’t feel ashamed that I was wrong before. I feel excited that I’m less wrong now.
Definitely recommended, I could have pulled out many other parts as well. Again, I am happy to recommend Cass’s new book Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.
What should I ask Arthur C. Brooks?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia:
Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow.[2] Previously, Brooks served as the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey (2023), From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022), Love Your Enemies (2019), The Conservative Heart (2015), and The Road to Freedom (2012). Since 2020, he has written the Atlantic’s How to Build a Life column on happiness.
Do not forget Arthur started as a professional French hornist, and also was well known in the cultural economics field during his Syracuse University days. And more. So what should I ask him?
Will the most important pop stars of the future be religious pop stars?
The personally irreligious (last I checked) economist Tyler Cowen has long been fond of proposing that the most important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers—counter to everything we heard growing up in the age of the New Atheists, and yet, the evidence seems to keep amassing. After the recent release of LUX, the Spanish polymath Rosalía’s fourth studio album, I want to propose a corollary: the most important pop stars of the future may indeed be religious pop stars.
Critics and listeners already seem to agree that LUX represents a titanic accomplishment by the classically-trained, genre-bending singer. Urbane reviewers and YouTube-savvy opera conductors alike have spent the last two weeks obsessively unpacking Rosalía’s 4-movement, 18-track opus, whose symphonic trilingual cathedral piece and Mexican-inflected post-breakup diss track have already charted worldwide. Closer to home, it’s a striking accomplishment to get me to pay serious attention to Top 40 (it helps, of course, to make a hyperpolyglot album with Iberian duende at its core)…
At the beginning of the decade, metamodern types (myself included, in my interview for a PhD position at the Spirituality and Psychology Lab) were given to asking the question: “What can we do to reenchant the world?”
The great stagnation is over. In the age of spiritual machines, enchantment may soon become too cheap to meter. What’s left to ask is: “How are we to make sense of it?” We’ll need artists who can hold the tension—between the earthly and the divine, the ironic and the sincere, the rational and the numinous. Rosalía, to her credit and our great benefit, is already living the question with her full body.
What is opera?
The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brunnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In reali life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.
In recompense for this lack of psychological complexity, however, music can do what words cannot, present the immediate and simultaneous relation of these states to each other. The crowning glory of opera is the big ensemble.
That is from an excellent W.H. Auden essay “Notes on Music and Opera.”
Lô Borges, RIP
Here is the obituary, via John.
What to Watch
A House of Dynamite (Netflix) is an expertly crafted political thriller about living 18 minutes from nuclear annihilation. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it shares thematic DNA with two of her previous films, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. (Bigelow also directed the cult classic Point Break and the underrated Strange Days). The film tightens the tension in the first 18 minutes, releases it just enough to breathe, then resets and winds you up again—and then again. There is no climax. That frustrates some viewers, but the ending makes the point: the film is fiction but we are the ones living in a house of dynamite. Nuclear war is underrated as a problem–see previous MR posts. The film is technically and politically well researched, which is one reason the Pentagon is trying to pushback on some figures. If HOD is to be charged with a lack of realism, it’s in the competency of the within 18-minute response (although there are some excellent phone scenes.)
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere isn’t a conventional rock biopic. It focuses on the making of Nebraska, Springsteen’s bleakest and most intimate album—a solo acoustic recorded at his home in New Jersey on a cassette. Nebraska’s songs portray not the merely unlucky, but the damned: people who drag others down with them.
I saw her standing on her front lawn
Just a-twirling her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir
And ten innocent people died…I can’t say that I’m sorry
For the things that we done
At least for a little while, sir
Me and her, we had us some fun
Springsteen was depressed at the time. The film has three love stories, the first and least important is between Springsteen and his then girlfriend. The second is Springsteen’s relationship with his troubled father. The third is with his manager, Jon Landau. We should all be so lucky to have someone who loves us as much as Landau loved Springsteen.
Jeremy Allen White, as Springsteen, gives a strong performance; in some shots he looks uncannily like him. He sings most of the songs himself and excels on the Nebraska material, though he can’t match Springsteen’s power and electricity on the brief E Street Band sequences. Jeremy Strong is excellent as Landau.
I liked Deliver Me from Nowhere, but it doesn’t demand a big screen, you can watch at home.
It’s not a movie, but for my money Wings for Wheels: The Making of “Born to Run”, included with the 30th-anniversary edition of BTR, remains the definitive portrait of Springsteen at work. It shows Springsteen driving the E Street Band through take after take, unrelenting and exhausting, in pursuit of the sound in his head—a great study in creative obsession. Pairs well with the very different process documented in Peter Jackson’s Get Back.