Category: Uncategorized
Saturday assorted links
1. Tiny robots made from human cells heal damaged tissue.
2. Is the gender confidence gap contagious to evaluators?
3. What Tom Whitwell learned this year, always good stuff.
4. Should you offer to tip your GPT?
5. Claims from Jonah Goldberg.
6. Women fare better than men on the economics job market when they specialized in “high-male” fields.
p.s. they are doxxing anons using voice samples matched against text. Just fyi.
YIMBY for commercial real estate
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here are some bottom line results:
What would “Yes in My Backyard” even mean in the context of commercial real estate?
A new economic research paper offers a hint of an answer: Most likely, there would be taller buildings, more mixed-use neighborhoods and considerably more wealth.
One way to approach this question is to look at less regulated cities. According to one widely used index, the least regulated metro area in the US is Midland, Texas. Midland isn’t particularly large or well-known, with a population of about 132,000, yet one of its nicknames is the “Tall City” because of its downtown skyline. When there is freedom to build, going vertical often is most cost-effective…
The research paper estimates the total social gains if every US city deregulated to the level of Midland, including the evening out of regulations within each city. The gains are strikingly large (though with some caveats): National output would rise by between 3% and 6%, and the gains in well-being would be in the range of 3% to 9% of lifetime consumption. Think of it as Americans getting a lifetime raise of at least 3%.
And:
Another caveat is that the data behind these estimates is based on 2018 numbers, when a little more than 5% of the work force worked from home. Under one more recent estimate, 12.7% of all full-time employees work fully from home. (Hybrid work is more common yet, but that typically still requires office space.)
So the researchers ran their model again, this time assuming that 40% of workers were at home full-time. They still found a 1.5% output gain. Of course, given that the US is not currently close to 40% work from home, the actual gains from commercial real estate deregulation, circa 2023, lie somewhere between 1.5% and the larger numbers — the 3% to 6% output boost — I cited earlier. The researchers suggest that the gains from deregulation are almost linear in the share of workers who need offices, so the larger measured gains should be closer to the truth.
Here is the underlying research by Fil Babalievsky, Kyle F. Herkenhoff, Lee E. Ohanian, and Edward C. Prescott.
Friday assorted links
1. Rasheed Griffith on reparations for the Caribbean.
2. Millions of new materials discovered by deep learning.
3. You can now pre-order Henry Oliver’s excellent
4. Chinese semi-clone of a GPT model. It’s not bad.
5. Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas.
6. You can pre-order Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics.
7. “Paraguay official resigns after signing agreement with fictional country.“
South American economic growth
All countries in South America have become richer over the past 40 years — except the socialist paradise of Venezuela.
(Note: Guyana discovered oil and is now very wealthy.)
IMF estimates. pic.twitter.com/Kbinzg9VWI
— Whyvert (@whyvert) November 29, 2023
While there are varying sources, I did check a few of the numbers and they were confirmed. At first they seemed a little high to me.
Addendum: Note there is some kind of data problem with the 1980 numbers, but the latter-day numbers seem fine.
Thursday assorted links
1. Alexandria, Virginia ends single family only residential zoning.
2. Predictions about Seoul yikes.
4. Background on the pending Guyana conflict.
5. Camera obscura, AI, and art.
6. Is AI easy to control? Speculative, but a good example of how the discourse runs, this time from the optimist side. And claims about Chinese open source AI, speculative too but important if true. And more.
My excellent Conversation with John Gray
I had been wanting to do this one for a while, and now it exists. Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Tyler and John sat down to discuss his latest book, including who he thinks will carry on his work, what young people should learn if liberalism is dead, whether modern physics allows for true atheism, what in Eastern Orthodoxy attracts him, the benefits of pessimism, what philanthropic cause he’d invest a billion dollars in, under what circumstances he’d sacrifice his life, what he makes of UFOs, the current renaissance in film and books, whether Monty Python is still funny, how Herman Melville influenced him, who first spotted his talent, his most unusual work habit, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Do you think that being pessimistic gives you pleasure? Or what’s the return in it from a purely pragmatic point of view?
GRAY: You are well prepared for events. You don’t expect —
COWEN: It’s a preemption, right? You become addicted to preempting bad news with pessimism.
GRAY: No, no. When something comes along which contradicts my expectations, I’m pleasantly surprised. I get pleasant surprises. Whereas, if you are an adamant optimist, you must be in torment every time you turn the news on because the same old follies, the same old crimes, the same old atrocities, the same old hatreds just repeat themselves over and over again. I’m not surprised by that at all. That’s like the weather. It’s like living in a science fiction environment in which it rains nearly all of the time, but from time to time it stops and there’s beautiful sunlight.
If you think that basically there is beautiful sunlight all the time, but you’re just living in a small patch of it, most of your life will be spent in frustration. If you think the other way around, as I do, your life will be peppered, speckled with moments in which what you expect doesn’t happen, but something better happens.
COWEN: Why can’t one just build things and be resiliently optimistic in a pragmatic, cautionary sense, and take comfort in the fact that you would rather have the problems of the world today than, say, the problems of the world in the year 1000? It’s not absolute optimism where you attach to the mood qua mood, but you simply want to do things and draw a positive energy from that, and it’s self-reinforcing. Why isn’t that a better view than what you’re calling pessimism?
And:
COWEN: Under what circumstances would you be willing to sacrifice your life? Or for what?
GRAY: Not for humanity, that’s for sure.
Recommended, interesting throughout. John is one of the smartest and best read thinkers and writers. He even has an answer ready for why he isn’t short the market. And don’t forget John’s new book — I read all of them — New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.
*Everyday Freedom*, by Philip K. Howard
This is very much a book that needed to be written. Here is one short excerpt:
Powerlessness has become a defining feature of modern society. Americans at all levels of responsibility feel powerless to do what they think is needed. The culture wars, sociologist James Davison Hunter explains, stem from institutional impotence: A “growing majority of Americans believe that their government cannot be trusted, that its leaders . . . are incompetent and self-interested, and that as citizens, they personally have little power to influence the . . .institutions or circumstances that shape their lives.”
Feeling fragile, and buffeted by forces beyond our control, many Americans retreat to online groups defined by identity and by distrust of the other side as “a threat to [our] existence.” It’s hard to identify what’s wrong amid the clamor and conflict in modern society. But a clue can be found in remembering what makes us proud. America is where people roll up our sleeves and get it done.
The ability to do things in our own ways activates the values for which America is well-known: self-reliance, pragmatism, and loyalty to the greater good—what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest, rightly understood.” For most of American history, the power and imperative to own your actions and solutions—the concept of individual responsibility—was implicit in the idea of freedom.
Americans didn’t abandon our belief in individual responsibility. It was taken away from us by post 1960s legal framework that, with the best of intentions, made people squirm through the eye of a legal needle before taking responsibility. Individual responsibility to a broader group, for example, was dislodged by a new concept of individual rights focused on what’s best for one person or constituency. The can-do culture became the can’t do culture.
At every level of responsibility, Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible. The teacher in the classroom, the principal in a school, the nurse in the hospital, the official in Washington, the parent on the field trip, the head of the local charity or church . . . all have their hands tied by real or feared legal constraints.
And yes he does propose concrete solutions, most of all at the level of the law. The whole thing is only 84 pp., and this is one of the books that comes closest to diagnosing what is wrong with our country. The subtitle is Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Anti-Piketty on r > g, once you put entrepreneurs into the model.
2. From Loyal, potential gains in canine life extension. And more from the NYT.
3. The economics of globalized fashion. And Emily Oster moonlights as fashion model.
4. Please donate to Conversations with Tyler.
5. Joe Walker podcasts with Shruti Rajagopalan on India and also talent. With transcript, there is also quite a bit of discussion of me in there.
6. Scott Alexander on Effective Altruism.
7. Niskanen symposium on Milton Friedman and the negative income tax.
Why Argentina’s dollarization is likely to come in sudden, messy ways
Yes, I do still favor it, but here is part of the problem, as I explain in my latest Bloomberg column:
The simplest way for Argentina to dollarize would be to inflate the peso even more. For purposes of argument, imagine a peso inflation rate of one billion percent a year. Pesos would be worthless, and transactions would be consummated with US dollars (or in some cases in crypto, which also is popular in Argentina). The problem is that current peso holders would be left with nothing. That would be unfair, and it also might torpedo support for other parts of Milei’s agenda.
To put it in more general terms: The question is not how to adopt a new currency, it is how to adopt a new currency and retain a reasonable value for the old one. Argentina, according to some estimates, would need about $30 billion to back the retired pesos.
And now here is the key practical issue:
Another question is how to choose a rate of conversion for pesos to dollars. The government might look to current black market rates as a rough guide — but the correct rate, post-policy shift, would not be the same as the market rate right now. If the government were to peg the peso too high, in the short run prices in Argentina would have to adjust downward, if only because the demand for pesos would be rising (let’s generously assume the peg is credible). That would lead to deflationary pressures, which would likely harm the economy.
Alternatively, if the government pegged the peso too low to the dollar, there would be even more inflation in the short run, as people would be all the more inclined to unload their pesos.
The government is more likely to overshoot, pegging the peso too low in order to avoid a deflationary recession and because it would require raising fewer dollars. In this case, the peso would lose even more value right now, and the rate of inflation would accelerate. In fact, this is the most likely scenario for the early months of the Milei administration.
It would be a version of the first plan mentioned above — namely, dollarization through the outright destruction of the peso, whether intentional or not. Either the value of the peso would collapse, or the higher inflation rate would induce Milei to advance dollarization as quickly as possible, even if it is done at quite unfair rates.
Worth a ponder, roller coaster ahead. One way to put it is that an unexpected dollarization and an expected dollarization have somewhat different properties, with the latter in some ways being more difficult. Here is the Spanish language version of the column.
Reassessing China’s Rural Reforms: The View from Outer Space
We study one of the central reforms in China’s economic miracle, the Household Responsibility System (HRS), which decollectivized agriculture starting in 1978. The HRS is commonly seen as having significantly boosted agricultural productivity—but this conclusion rests on unreliable official data. We use historical satellite imagery to generate new measurements of grain yield, independent of official Chinese statistics. Using two separate empirical designs that exploit the staggered rollout of the HRS across provinces and counties, we find no causal evidence that areas that adopted the HRS sooner experienced faster grain yield growth. These results challenge our conventional understanding of decollectivization, land reform, and the origins of the Chinese miracle.
That is a new paper by Joel Ferguson and Oliver Kim, with Kim being on the job market from Berkeley this year. Here is Kim’s thread on Twitter. Intriguing results, which have won praise from Pseudoerasmus…
Tuesday assorted links
2. Vitalik on techno-optimism, recommended.
3. Time inconsistent Korean canine threats.
4. Profile of Jensen Huang of Nvidia (New Yorker).
5. Samo Burla reports from Bismarck Brief.
7. How the NYT picks its “Best Books” list (NYT). This account is from the Times itself, and it illustrates so many nightmarish features of our contemporary world. And I’m not even talking about “Woke” issues here, just the procedure of how they do it.
Same-sex marriage and priestly employment
We study the effect of legalization of same-sex marriage on coming out in the United States. We overcome data limitations by inferring coming out decisions through a revealed preference mechanism. We exploit data on enrollment in seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood, hypothesizing that Catholic priests’ vow of celibacy may lead gay men to self-select as a way to avoid a heterosexual lifestyle. Using a differences-in-differences design that exploits variation in the timing of legalization across states, we find that city-level enrollment in priestly studies fell by about 15% exclusively in states adopting the reform. The celibacy norm appears to be driving our results, since we find no effect on enrollment in deacon or lay ministry studies that do not require celibacy. We also find that coming out decisions, as inferred through enrollment in priestly studies, are primarily affected by the presence of gay communities and by prevailing social attitudes toward gays. We explain our findings with a stylized model of lifestyle choice.
That is from a new working paper by Avner Seror and Tohit Ticku.
Monday assorted links
1. Big changes in energy and climate policy over the last five years, a list.
2. My 2014 post on immigration, and cosmopolitanism at the margin. And my 2005 post “Tyler Cowen pretends he is a Democrat.”
3. Dustin Sebell reviews the BAP dissertation (persist and you can get to the actual review).
4. WaPo runs a front page story about the first freed American hostage, so I am linking to it.
My favorite non-classical music of the year 2023
I liked these best:
Lankum, False Lankum. Claims to be Irish folk music, but has ambient textures and is designed to alienate its core audience.
Yaeji, With a Hammer. A mix of English and Korean, house and hip hop. She lives in Brooklyn.
Boygenius, The Rest. Four songs, twelve minutes.
Christine and the Queens, Paranoia, Angels, True Love. Three CDs, weird, still growing on me. By some French person.
Paul Simon, Seven Psalms. Now he is partly deaf, and he was already singing about dying.
Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile.
Cecile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine. Her track record (and consistency) at this point is simply staggering, and you can put her on a par with the very greatest of female jazz vocalists.
Irreversible Entanglements, Protect Your Light. From a free jazz collective, still vital.
Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles.
Ches Smith and We All Break, Path of Seven Colors. From the year before, but I discovered it this year, a blend of Haitian vodou and jazz.
I will be doing a separate post on classical music. What do you all recommend in these categories?
Addendum: And, via Brett Reynolds, here is a Spotify playlist for those.