Category: Political Science

A view that hardly anyone embraces

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is not an airtight view, but it is also not the least plausible view.  Imagine a “basic needs” argument that suggests, a’ la David Braybrooke, that individuals truly have positive rights to a certain degree of sustenance, health care, shelter, and so on.  Yet above that basic needs level, individuals don’t have positive rights to much of anything at all.  They are left to fend for themselves, though of course they will benefit from social cooperation.  After all, positive rights have to stop somewhere if only because of the scarcity constraint.  Furthermore, perhaps what society owes a person is “enough to construct a meaningful life,” but not so much more.

You may or may not agree, but as a view it is not crazy.

To make this more specific, imagine a health care policy that stated individuals have a true right to access any health care technology invented up through say…2004 or so.  Individuals would be guaranteed “2004 value health care lives.”  (In 2004 that certainly seemed pretty good.)  But for subsequent health care developments, a free market will reign.  Is not guaranteeing basic needs an essential part of the egalitarian argument?  Surely not everything needs to be equalized?  Anyway, no one believes in guaranteeing individuals protection against all the rare diseases out there, as that would cost too much.  So a line will be drawn somewhere.

The very title of this post suggested these views are extremely unpopular.  One reason might be their theoretical inadequacy.  But surely another reason is that, at the margin, they suggest you just don’t have too much complaining you can do.  You don’t have too much to say about social arrangements.  You don’t have too many opportunities to express purely negative emotions about how things are.

And perhaps that is a big part of what people find intolerable.

What does that tell you about political views more generally?

*The Individualists*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The authors are Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, and the subtitle is Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism.  Due out April 4, pre-order now, here is my blurb:

“Zwolinski and Tomasi have written the definitive book about libertarian ideas reaching up to the present day. They show that libertarianism remains a vital and fascinating source of ideological energy and influence.”

Recommended.

What should I ask Simon Johnson?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Other than “why don’t you have a better Wikipedia page?”  Here is one excerpt:

Simon H. Johnson…is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management… From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.  He is the author of the 2010 book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown along with James Kwak, with whom he has also co-founded and regularly contributes to the economics blog The Baseline Scenario.

He has an extensive publication record, including in political economy, economic history, and economic growth, he studied earlier Russian reforms, and he has books on science policy (with Jonathan Gruber) and the national debt (with Kwak).  Most notably his forthcoming book is with Daron Acemoglu and is titled Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, due out in May.  He is a Brit of course.

So what should I ask him?

Update on the New York Times Word Frequency Chart

by  Tyler Cowen in

By David Rozado, who has hit a bunch of home runs lately.  Look at his charts, to my eyes they show woke terminology in the NYT as having peaked and as now declining.  Here goes, they are very different from the earlier charts (also at the link) ending in 2019:

Climate change issues, however, continue to receive more coverage.  Not all of the charts “go my way,” but this is hardly what you would expect if Wokeness were simply rising, rising, rising out of control.  Oh, and check out these trends in pronoun usage.  Also here is more from Rozado, mostly on how the positive sides of woke rhetoric are gaining at the expense of the negative sides.

My Conversation with Brad DeLong

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the summary:

Tyler and Brad discuss what can really be gleaned from the fragmentary economics statistics of the late 19th century, the remarkable changes that occurred from 1870–1920, the astonishing flourishing of German universities in the 19th century, why investment banking allowed America and Germany to pull ahead of Britain economically, what enabled the Royal Society to become a force for progress, what Keynes got wrong, what Hayek got right, whether the middle-income trap persists, his favorite movie and novel, blogging vs. Substack, the Slouching Towards Utopia director’s cut, and much more.

And here is one excerpt:

COWEN: What do you take to be the best understanding of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, if indeed you view it as a 17th-century revolution?

DELONG: I always think Joel Mokyr is absolutely magnificent on this. I think he understates the role that having printing by movable type played in creating the community of scientific practice and knowledge seeking.

There’s one thing that happens that is extremely unusual. Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough. Which means that, principally, politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way, and then finding a way to run a force-and-fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society so that they at least can have enough. When Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft, it was not metaphor. It was really fact.

What does this elite consist of? Well, it’s a bunch of thugs with spears, the people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they’re their bosses, and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. Which means, most of the time, when you have a powerfully-moving-forward set of people thinking about ideas, whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.

This is a point I’ve stolen from Ernest Gellner, and I think it is very true. Yet, somehow, the Royal Society decides, no. The Royal Society decides nothing except through experiment — what we are going to demand that nature tell us, or tell one of us, or at least someone writes us a letter saying they’ve done the experiment about what is true. That is a miraculous and completely unexpected transformation, and one to which I think we owe a huge amount.

Many interesting points are discussed.

“Sustainable funds” have peaked?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Cash flows into US sustainable funds plummeted last year as the broader market took a beating and anti-ESG crusaders targeted money managers including BlackRock Inc. for “woke capitalism.”

ESG exchange-traded funds in the US aren’t faring any better in 2023.

ETFs in the US with environmental, social and governance goals had net outflows of $772 million in January, compared with $953 million of inflows for the first month in 2022, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Some of the largest withdrawals last month came from funds managed by BlackRock, Invesco Ltd. and Vanguard Group.

BlackRock had zero net flows into its sustainable products in the US last year, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Here is more from Silla Brush at Bloomberg.  The evidence mounts…

UK fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

As of 2017 we [Brits] spent about 5.6 per cent of national income on benefits for those in old age against 7.1 per cent in the US, 7.7 per cent across the OECD as a whole, 10 per cent in Germany and more than 13 per cent in France.

And yet the country is still in economic troubles.  In any case, that is from the new and excellent Paul Johnson book Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost?  This book talks you through both the tax expenditure side of the British government budget.  It is not quite thrilling, but given the topic area it is remarkably interesting and well-executed.  And while the authors is not without his own ideas, the book is more to inform you than to propagandize you.

You can buy it here.  There should be many more books just like this one, but for different topics — take note!

Emergent Ventures winners, 24th cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

Shakked Noy, MIT economics, to do RCTs on GPTs as teaching and learning tools.

Gabriel Birnbaum, Bay Area, from Fortaleza, Brazil, to investigate lithography as a key technology used in the manufacturing of microchips.

Moritz Wallawitsch, Berkeley. RemNote is his company, educational technology, and to develop a complementary podcast and for general career development.

Katherine Silk, Boston/Cambridge, general career support and to support advice for early-stage startups.

Benjamin Schneider, Brooklyn.  To write a book on the new urbanism.

Joseph Walker, Sydney, Australia, to run and expand the Jolly Swagman podcast.

Avital Balwit, Bay area, travel grant and general career development.

Benjamin Chang, Cambridge, MA. General career support, “I will develop novel RNA riboswitches for gene therapy control in human cells using machine learning.”

Daniel Kang, Berkeley/Champagne-Urbana, biometrics and crypto.

Aamna Zulfifiqar, Karachi, Pakistan, to attend UK higher education to study economics.

Jeremy Stern, Glendale, CA, Tablet magazine.  To write a book.

James Meech, PhD student, Cambridge, UK, to work on a random number generator for better computer architectures.

Arthur Allshire, University of Toronto, background also in Ireland and Australia, robotics and support to attend conferences.

Jason Hausenloy, 17, Singapore, travel and general career development, issues surrounding artificial intelligence.

Sofia Sanchez, Metepec, Mexico, biology and agricultural productivity, to spend a summer at a Stanford lab.

Ukraine tranche:

Andrey Liscovich, eastern Ukraine, formerly of Harvard, to provide equipment for public transportation, communication and emergency power generation to civilian authorities of frontline-adjacent areas in Ukraine which have lost vital infrastructure.

Chris Nicholson, Bay area, working as a broker to maintain internet connectivity in Ukraine.

Andrii Nikolaiev, Arsenii Nikolaiev, Zarina Kodyrova, Kvanta, to advance Ukrainian mathematics, help and train math Olympiad winners.

As usual, India and Africa/Caribbean tranches will be reported separately.

DEI jobs under fire

by  Tyler Cowen in

As sweeping layoffs plague Big Tech, DEI jobs are taking the brunt of the blow.

According to a Bloomberg report, listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year — a larger downtick than in legal or general human resources departments per data from Textio, a company helping businesses create unbiased job ads.

“I’m cautiously concerned — not that these roles will go to zero but that there will be a spike in ‘Swiss army knife’ type roles,” Textio Chief Executive Officer Kieran Snyder told Bloomberg.

Other sectors besides have dramatically carved into their DEI departments after deploying mass layoffs in anticipation of a pending global recession.

Via RD.  To be clear, I don’t think any one of the measure indicating “peak woke” are all that strong.  You can always argue some other factor is driving the change downward, or the slowing of the trend.  But taken together, they do not look very much like a world where woke will just keep on taking more and more ground.  So when it comes to my earlier call about “woke having peaked,” I think that one is looking pretty good.

Chinese charter city in the Marshall Islands?

by  Tyler Cowen in

On a tropical Pacific atoll irradiated by U.S. nuclear testing and twice since evacuated because of the fallout, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou planned to create a unique paradise for Chinese investors.

They wanted to turn Rongelap — an atoll in the Marshall Islands totaling eight square miles of land and 79 people — into a tax-free ministate with its own legal system that, they claimed, would be able to issue passports enabling visa-free travel to the United States.

It would have a port, luxurious beachfront homes, a casino, its own cryptocurrency, and a full suite of services for offshore companies registered in Rongelap. With 420 miles of sea between it and the capital, Majuro, it would be relatively free of oversight.

All the couple had to do to make this a reality was bribe a swath of politicians in the Marshall Islands, once occupied by the United States and now a crucial U.S. ally in the Pacific, to pass laws to enable the creation of a “special administrative region” — the same classification given to the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao.

The venture is not on track to succeed, and the two are now awaiting sentencing.  The entire story reflects one of my broader worries about charter cities.  The most powerful nations in the world, in this case the United States, do not necessarily favor small enclaves that possibly can be turned to favor their rivals.  In other words, the relevant hegemon here did not at all support the charter city plan.

RightWingGPT

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the ever-interesting David Rozado:

Here, I describe a fine-tuning of an OpenAI GPT language model with the specific objective of making the model manifest right-leaning political biases, the opposite of the biases manifested by ChatGPT. Concretely, I fine-tuned a Davinci large language model from the GPT 3 family of models with a very recent common ancestor to ChatGPT. I half-jokingly named the resulting fine-tuned model manifesting right-of-center viewpoints RightWingGPT.

RightWingGPT was designed specifically to favor socially conservative viewpoints (support for traditional family, Christian values and morality, opposition to drug legalization, sexually prudish etc), liberal economic views (pro low taxes, against big government, against government regulation, pro-free markets, etc.), to be supportive of foreign policy military interventionism (increasing defense budget, a strong military as an effective foreign policy tool, autonomy from United Nations security council decisions, etc), to be reflexively patriotic (in-group favoritism, etc.) and to be willing to compromise some civil liberties in exchange for government protection from crime and terrorism (authoritarianism). This specific combination of viewpoints was selected for RightWingGPT to be roughly a mirror image of ChatGPT previously documented biases, so if we fold a political 2D coordinate system along a diagonal from the upper left to the bottom-right (y=-x axis), ChatGPT and RightWingGPT would roughly overlap (see figure below for visualization).

Told you people that this was coming.  More to come as well.  Get this:

Critically, the computational cost of trialing, training and testing the system was less than 300 USD dollars.

Okie-dokie!

On a land tax, from the comments

by  Tyler Cowen in

A land tax in its purest form will never survive contact with political reality. To implement it you have to tell people that own their own homes that they are in fact renting them from the government, and at rates which depend on how much other people covet their land. This may be economically incorrect but it is how opposition will play out.

Furthermore, determining land values as distinct from property values in highly built-up areas with strong planning constraints (e.g. the UK) is an exercise in guesswork. You cannot realistically disentangle the value of the land from the actual and likely permissions on that land. The valuation process will be intensely political, prone to corruption, and any modelling easily manipulated by how exemplars are chosen. In the UK at least it would be a bloodbath.

That is from Sonofid.  And from dan1111:

So much hand wringing over NYC and San Francisco, and treating this as the standard “urban” case.

Meanwhile, 90% of US cities feature depressed urban cores with very cheap, under-used land. Maybe figuring out how to make more US cities desirable is the low hanging fruit? And there is plenty of comparative study that can be done, since some cities have been better at rebounding than others.