Category: Uncategorized
Thursday assorted links
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description:
Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, provides a nuanced look into the influential economist and public intellectual.
Tyler and Jennifer start by discussing how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact in statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, they discuss Jennifer’s previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there’s so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. They also delve into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s the future of Milton Friedman, say, 30, 40 years from now? Where will the reputation be? University of Chicago is no longer Friedmanite, right? We know that. There are fewer outposts of Friedmanite-thinking than there had been. Will he be underrated or somehow reinvented or what?
BURNS: Let me look into my crystal ball. I don’t think the name will have faded. I think there are still names that people read. People still read Keynes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential. I think that Friedman has got into the water and into the air a bit. I do some work on tracing out his influence.
Within economics, no one’s going to say, “Oh, I’m a Friedmanite,” or fewer people are, but this is someone whose major work was done half a century or more ago, so I don’t think that’s surprising. It would be surprising if economics had been at a standstill as Friedman still called the tune. When you think about the way we accord importance to the modern Federal Reserve, of course, there were things that happened in the world, but Friedman’s ideas did so much to shape that understanding.
He’s still in policymakers’ minds. He’s still in the monetary policy establishment’s minds, even if they’re not fully following him. I think we’re in the middle of a big reckoning now. You saw all the debate about M2 and the pandemic and monetary spending. I don’t know where it’s all going to settle out. It’s a more complicated world than the one that Friedman looked at. I tend to think he is an essential thinker, that the basics of what he talked about are going to be known 50 years from now, for sure.
COWEN: Did Milton Friedman have friends?
Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year. It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.
Who is rising and falling in status in the NBA?
Falling:
Damian Lillard
Jordan Poole
Zion Williamson
Klay Thompson
Andrew Wiggins
Austin Reeves
Rising:
Embiid
Maxey
Porzingis
Haliburton
Curry (not Seth)
Dare I say Kyrie Irving?
Lebron, if that is even possible at this point, he is already GOAT
Greg Popovich
Wemby
Bam Adebayo
That is a lot of status reshuffling, but it seems to be happening pretty quickly and I suspect most of it will stick, with Kyrie Irving maybe still up for grabs. Others?
When I was over Auren Hoffman’s house, I bet (using play chips only) 70% that either Boston or Denver wins the title this year.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Teacher-driven changes in ideas during the Scientific Revolution at Oxford and Cambridge (Julius Koschnick of LSE is on the job market).
2. ChatGPT grey markets in everything.
3. Kiwi family goes to Walmart for the first time (video).
4. Zero-sum thinking and political divides.
5. The course of Brazil’s trade surplus.
6. Why are Canadian remote workers right across the border paid less?
7. Ross on religion (NYT).
Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students
Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes as the program matured and scaled up. We observe growing benefits (higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates) to students attending public schools with more preprogram private school options as the program matured. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Local and district-wide private school competition are both independently related to student outcomes.
Here is the (AEA gated) paper by David N. Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik
Tuesday assorted links
1. The economics team at Instacart.
2. Josh Hart invents a new basketball play?
4. Digitization has increased the demand for the printed books.
5. Pet psychics are entering the mainstream (WSJ). “People book sessions with animal communicators to unravel behavioral issues, to learn about preferences for end-of-life care, and when the time comes, to make sure their pets are enjoying the afterlife.”
Words to live by
I propose a model of a social media platform which manages a two-sided market composed of content producers and consumers. The key trade-off is that consumers dislike low-quality content, but including low-quality content provides attention to producers, which boosts the supply of high-quality content in equilibrium. If the attention labor supply curve is sufficiently concave, then the platform includes some low-quality content, though a social planner would include even more.
That is from the job market paper of Karthik Srinivasan of University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Via Gavin Leech.
Monday assorted links
3. Again, Sweden has done immigration the worst.
4. On the Biden-Xi AI agreement?
5. Why don’t more intellectuals convert to Protestantism?
6. Vultures are underrated (NYT). I liked this line: ““It makes sense that an animal that depends on scarce resources can really benefit from being intelligent,” said Thijs van Overveld, a vulture researcher at the Donana Biological Station in Seville, Spain.” One of the best pieces I’ve read in a while.
7. National Gallery of Art receives major Haitian donation.
8. A claim that Hsieh and Moretti does not replicate. I am happy to link to a response from the authors.
Which are the most underperforming parts of the world? (from my email)
You’ve written about undervalued economies in the past, but after visiting the Bay Area, I wonder what you think are the most underperforming places in the world? Define “place” as you wish, but I mean underperforming relative to easily achievable/median policy mixes. So less “what if Albanians acted like Singaporeans” and more “what if LA improved land use.”
I ask because the Bay Area, despite its achievements, seems like a candidate (Paul Graham seems to think so), as does Southern California which cedes the world’s most livable climate to cars. Various parts of Mexico come to mind. Eritrea sits on a key trade route with little to show for it. My Bosnia is a disappointment relative to neighbors. West Virginia?
Always eager to hear your thoughts.
That is from Haris Hadzimuratovic. I have a few nominations:
1. Albania I think will end up much richer, more or less on a par with parts of the former Yugoslavia. The country has enjoyed a growth spurt lately. So Albania is a good pick, but it is converging and soon won’t be a pick anymore.
2. Egypt and Lebanon should be much richer. You cannot cite their neighbors in support of that claim, but they are both extremely cultured places. Lebanese migrants in particular have done very well elsewhere.
3. Armenia should be much richer. Armen Alchian would agree.
4. Belarus should be richer than Russia, not poorer than Russia.
5. Nicaragua should be modestly richer than it is.
6. Venezuela was once the richest country in Latin America, now it is among the poorest. Cuba too.
(You will notice that communism is implicated in 3-6, and arguably #1 too.
7. Yemen should be richer, though I would not expect it to be rich.
What else?
Freer Indian reservations prosper more
Several disciplines in social sciences have shown that institutions that promote cooperation facilitate mutually beneficial exchanges and generate prosperity. Drawing on these insights, this paper develops a Reservation Economic Freedom Index that classifies institutions on a sample of Indian reservations concerning whether these intuitions will enhance the prosperity of Indians residing on these reservations. The development of this index is guided by the research of political scientists, economists, other social science disciplines, and research in law. When correlating this index with Indian incomes, the evidence shows a statistically significant positive correlation between reservations with prosperity-enhancing institutions and their economic prosperity.
That is from a recent article by my colleague Thomas Stratmann, recently published in Public Choice. Here is the SSRN version. Here is the index itself. Here is a related Op-Ed.
Sunday assorted links
1. Will Sweden move away from school vouchers?
2. Lagos harbor and various water and real estate projects.
3. How Manuel Blum became such a successful academic advisor.
4. Chinese confrontations with Filipino ships.
5. U.S. approves chikungunya vaccine. As I’ve been telling you, it is all going to work.
6. Claims about fake license plates.
Should I keep an eye on Spain? (from my email)
Keep an eye on Spain. What is happening politically is very serious and the tension is increasing.
Fernando Savater: Spain is formally a democracy, sure, but it is ceasing at a forced march from being a rule of law state.
https://theobjective.com/elsubjetivo/opinion/2023-11-05/resignados-sumisos-luchar-sanchez/
Felix de Azúa: The reactionary left will face the coup right with a predictable result: economic ruin and institutional chaos.
https://theobjective.com/elsubjetivo/opinion/2023-11-11/irse-preparando-sanchez/
…Felipe González is very worried, as well.
That is all from Mario Abbagliati.
Classical liberals are increasingly religious
Not too long ago, I was telling Ezra Klein that I had noticed a relatively new development in classical liberalism. If a meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean, compared to days of yore. But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well. That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last.
The person being religious is now a predictor of that same person having non-crazy political views. Classical liberalism thus, whether you like it or not, has become an essentially religious movement.
Many strands of libertarianism are being left behind, and again this is a positive rather than a normative claim. It is simply how things are.
Aayan Hirsi Ali announces she is now a Christian.
The neo trad movement gets ayaan 🙁 But seriously this seems to be a real trend – lots of otherwise smart, successful, secular people I know have been going religious, but it’s not in the same way people used to go religious. It’s much more *cultural* now, and less about belief
Seconded. You may recall my earlier prophecy that the important thinkers of the future are going to be religious thinkers. I believe that will prove true outside of classical liberalism as well.
Saturday assorted links
1. What drives Russian men to volunteer to fight in Ukraine?
2. More on the economics of OnlyFans.
3. Abstract art comes from figurative art. The Mondrian sequence is my favorite, and it has intrigued me for a long time.
4. The EU seems to be slowing down with its anti-AI regulations. More information here. Good for them.
5. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is 43.
6. Can a GPT-4 Vision model do your Christmas shopping for you?
The Latin American option
Estimates for the number of Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese in Brazil range from 10 to 12 million, with a reasonable degree of uncertainty. Most of them came over before those were distinct countries, for one thing. Other Latin American countries also have migrants from that region, Panama in particular, and as you may know Bukele of El Salvador is of Palestinian origin.
I don’t know of any formal statistics, but by repute those individuals have done quite well in Latin America. And it is hard to argue they have increased rates of violence or political disorder.
I would gladly see Brazil and other Latin polities open their immigration to current Palestinians in the Middle East.
The major Latin economies have very low fertility rates, about 1.55 for Brazil. They will need more people, and more young people, in any case. Now seems like a good time to act.