Category: Uncategorized
Why massive deregulation is very difficult
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, just to clarify context for the newbies I think more than half of all current regulations are a net negative. Anywhere, here are some of the problems:
Consider the relatively straightforward idea, popular in some Republican circles, of firing large numbers of federal bureaucrats. There would be immediate objections, not only from the employees themselves but also from US businesses.
Businesses need to make plans, and they frequently consult with regulatory agencies as to what might be permissible. The Food and Drug Administration needs to approve new drug offerings. The Federal Aviation Administration needs to approve new airline routes. The Federal Communications Commission needs to approve new versions of mobile phones. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice need to give green lights for significant mergers. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. needs to approve plans for winding down failed banks. And so on.
If those and other agencies were stripped of their staffs, a lot of US businesses would be paralyzed. You might argue that this fact is itself proof that there is too much regulation, but the fact remains. Shutting down a large chunk of the federal regulatory apparatus would make it harder, not easier, for the private sector. Furthermore, regulation would give way to litigation, and the judiciary is not obviously more efficient than the bureaucracy.
And this:
The basic paradox is this: Government regulations are embedded in a large, unwieldy and complex set of institutions. Dismantling it, or paring it back significantly, would require a lot of state capacity — that is, state competence. Yet deregulators are suspicious of greater state capacity, as it carries the potential for more state regulatory action. Think of it this way: If someone told a libertarian-leaning government efficiency expert that, in order to pare back the state, it first must be granted more power, he would probably run away screaming.
Recommended, the piece has numerous good points of interest.
U.S: central city population as a % of metropolitan area
Via James Hohman.
What should I ask Musa al-Gharbi?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications.
I am a big fan of his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke, which I have blurbed. Here is Musa’s home page, do read his bio. Here is Musa on Twitter.
So what should I ask?
Monday assorted links
1. This DVD/Blu-Ray of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt is one of the best performances I have seen, ever.
2. Houston is turning its back on bicycles.
3. Ethiopia vs. Somalia? (NYT) And Juleanna Glover on where Republican donations go (NYT).
6. The importance of mobility for hunter-gatherers. “They remain mobile so they can participate in large and complex societies.”
Why do the servers always want to take our cutlery and plates and glasses away?
I have noticed repeatedly, over the course of many restaurant visits, that my servers want to take away my plates, my glasses, my cutlery, and indeed almost anything else — before I really want to give it up.
The ratio of “they want to take it away too soon” to “they take it away too late” seems to me at least five to one.
Those who know me would not describe me as a lingerer over meals, or a very slow eater. So I do not view this phenomenon as merely my peculiarity, rather the servers often want to take my things away before I am done with them.
In many restaurants the servers seem to put more energy into keeping your table clean than in taking your order promptly in the first place.
How should we model this behavior?
One possibility is that the servers know they will be busier yet later on, so they want to get some of the work out of the way now. Surely that holds in many cases, but still I observe this “server grabbing behavior” in a wide variety of circumstances, including in near-empty restaurants.
Could it be that the restaurant managers give these instructions, hoping it will induce the diners to order further dishes and spend more money?
Another possibility is that the servers feel the need to signal that they are always busy, rather than standing around and looking idle. I can imagine that hypothesis having some truth, but it doesn’t explain the entirety of what I observe.
The most plausible general explanation is that the restaurant managers favor a more rapid turnover of tables than the customers do, and regular plate- and glass-clearing helps to achieve that end. It also creates another “point of contact,” giving the customer the opportunity to ask for the check. Still, you might think ex ante competition to attract diners would moderate this practice more than it does.
I have asked both current and former servers why there is so much emphasis on place-clearing, and usually I receive circular answers, such as “We want to make sure your plates and glasses are cleared away when you are done with them.”
So what is the best way of thinking about this practice?
Sunday assorted links
1. Crafting AI-complementary skills.
2. Rhino vs. elephant. And they work for less than minimum wage.
3. Some evidence that wage disclosure leads to wage suppression.
4. Lotte Lenya singing Weill’s Alabama Song.
5. High-tech ice packs for the summer heat (WSJ).
7. Chicago School of Economics canon. And for Austrian economics.
Emergent Ventures 36th cohort
Unmol Sharma, Ontario, for work on purple sulfur bacteria to make hydrogen.
Andrew Gau, Stanford, robotics for the science lab.
James Edward Dillard, Atlanta area, AI and local reporting.
Jim Larsen, Farmington, New Mexico, energy, geothermal energy, and Indonesia,
Mohit Deepak Agarwal, Stanford, LLMs and ancient texts, through Perseus.
Rohit Krishnan, San Francisco, to run mid-career sabbatical program for interesting doers and thinkers.
Yuan Sui, Toronto/Harvard, to work at Harvard on neurosystems and the brain.
Kevin Zhu, Palo Alto, AI and child protection.
Muhammad Hunain, NYC, 18, space shields to protect satellies.
Vaishnav Sunil, NYC, writing and podcasting, including on talent.
Andrew Wu and Holden Mui, MIT, to compose and play the piano music of Holden.
Alan Chen, Austin, high schooler, robotics, AI, and assembly.
Ishir Rao, Chatham, NJ, high school, bio and AI and neurodegeneraton.
Adam Cheairs, Boston, high school, general career support, issues of sustainable development.
Nicholas Reville and Alex Jutca, San Francisco, RCTs to study the ability of GLP-1 drugs to alleviate addictions.
Here are previous winners of Emergent Ventures. Here is Nabeel’s software for querying about EV winners.
Saturday assorted links
1. Intertemporal empathy decline.
2. When do LLMs harm educational outcomes?
3. “Data from the Current Employment Statistics survey suggests that average hourly pay in manufacturing relative to the rest of the private sector has been falling for decades, and in May 2018 finally sank below. Among production workers the premium vanished in September 2006.” From Soumaya Keynes at the FT.
4. Okie-dokie, nuclear fusor at Waterloo edition.
5. Claims about how Georgia raised fertility.
7. He modeled that.
How do musical artists end up getting cancelled?
There is a new paper on that topic by Daniel Winkler, Nils Wlömert, and Jura Liaukonyte. Here is the abstract:
This paper investigates how the consumption of an artist’s creative work is impacted when there’s a movement to “cancel” the artist on social media due to their misconduct. Unlike product brands, human brands are particularly vulnerable to reputation risks, yet how misconduct affects their consumption remains poorly understood. Using R. Kelly’s case, we examine the demand for his music following interrelated publicity and platform sanction shocks-specifically, the removal of his songs from major playlists on the largest global streaming platform. A cursory examination of music consumption after these scandals would lead to the erroneous conclusion that consumers are intentionally boycotting the disgraced artist. We propose an identification strategy to disentangle platform curation and intentional listening effects, leveraging variation in song removal status and geographic demand. Our findings show that the decrease in music consumption is primarily driven by supply-side factors due to playlist removals rather than changes in intentional listening. Media coverage and calls for boycott have promotional effects, suggesting that social media boycotts can inadvertently increase music demand. The analysis of other cancellation cases involving Morgan Wallen and Rammstein shows no long-term decline in music demand, reinforcing the potential promotional effects of scandals in the absence of supply-side sanctions.
What I’ve been reading
1. Anna Bogutskaya, Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us. A fun read about the importance of horror movies in contemporary culture, and a lament that we underrate them.
2. Daniel Tammet, Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum. This is probably the best book of profiles of high-achieving autistics, with the chapter on Dan Ackroyd especially interesting. Do note that the writing style is autistic, which you may consider either a plus or a minus. And “Are we there yet?”
3. Michael Haas, Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler. A detailed, well-organized and captivating look at this story. My conclusion, though, is that the Germanic compositional scene already was starting to reach dead ends in terms of quality and innovation?
4. Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict. A good look at the festering problems in place before 1948. Among other things, it shows how many of the current arguments and debates have very deep roots, and just how far back the lack of trust goes.
5. Luke Stegemann, Madrid: A New Biography. Madrid is now one of the world’s very very best cities. You can judge tomes like this by how many other books they induced you to read or buy, and in this case the number was eight. I bought a whole catalog of color plates by the 18th century still life painter Melendez, for instance. Recommended.
6. Michael H. Kater, After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany. Another excellent work. From this book I took away the (unintended?) conclusion that the German written and cinematic contributions have not aged well, due to excessive (but understandable) preoccupations with Naziism and the Second World War. The greatest German postwar cultural contributions in fact are Richter, Beuys, Kiefer, Baselitz, Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, and Can. The less literal artistic forms dealt with the war obsession in more effective and lasting ways, noting that some Kiefer works still have this problem.
Self-recommending is Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment, and Other Essays. The essays on Frost, Auden, and Bradbury are some of my favorites.
Jordan Ott’s Back to the Future: How to Reignite American Innovation is exactly that.
Speaking of Kraftwerk, I also enjoyed the new Simon Reynolds book Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today Reynolds is very good at covering parts of music history that other people ignore.
More to come!
Friday assorted links
1. Which books, papers, and blogs are in the Bayesian canon?
2. “All fields, EXCEPT FOR ECONOMICS, exhibit a low and decreasing concentration, which suggests a trend toward decentralized knowledge production.” Link here.
3. David Perell interviews Ben Thompson.
4. Boudreaux and McKenzie on price controls (WSJ). And most climate policies are ineffective in cutting emissions (WSJ).
5. NYT on the Harris tax plan.
6. Chickens per capita, in some Anglo countries.
7. John Woo remakes The Killer but set in Paris and with a female lead, reviews are good.
8. Model this pelican capabara interaction (are they trying to eat him? I don’t think so).
Yes, strong talent is getting younger and younger
Except for the tank tops, this could be a bunch of professionals on a boisterous equity trading floor. In fact, it’s a cohort of 15- to 18-year-old students at a two-day free seminar getting a taste of high finance. The session ended with a simulation in which they each ran fictitious $20 million portfolios for more than an hour.
If the training seems intense, it is. From Morgan Stanley to Citadel, the titans of finance are spanning the globe to find ever-younger talent to eventually fill their ranks with the best and brightest. That’s creating opportunities for firms like AmplifyME Ltd., which for years has run seminars for university students, and is now extending them to high schoolers in places like Hong Kong and Singapore.
Here is the full Bloomberg story by Lulu Yilun Chen. The article has further points of interest. The winner is eighteen, and he started in on related activities at the age of fourteen. Via John De Palma.
Mobility vs. density in American history
American history is much more about rapid and cheap transport than about extremes of population density. Even New York, our densest major city by far, became dense relatively late in American history. To this day, the United States is not extremely dense, not say by European or East Asian standards.
But in American history, themes of horses, faster ships, safer ships, turnpikes, canals, our incredible river network, railroads, cars, and planes have been absolutely central to our development. America has put in a very strong performance in all those areas. When it comes to density, we have a smaller number of victories. The moon landing was mobility, but not density.
Many of our Founding Fathers were in fact a bit suspicious of density. So why not play to your own cultural and also geographic strengths? After all, the United States is arguably the most successful country.
American SMSAs are so often more impressive than are American cities per se.
These days I see an urbanist movement that is more obsessed with density than with mobility. I favor relaxing or eliminating many restrictions on urban density, and American cities would be better as a result. Upward economic mobility would rise, and Oakland would blossom. But still I am more interested in mobility, which I see as having a greater upside.
One issue is simply that urban density seems to lower fertility. It is not obvious the same can be said for mobility.
And do you really want to spread and replicate the politics of our most dense areas?
Is not mobility rather than density better for raising a class of young men who will fight to defend their country?
Do not mobile, scattered immigrants assimilate better than densely packed ones?
The density crowd is very interested in high-speed rail, which I (strongly) favor for the Northeast corridor, but otherwise am not excited about, at least not for America. Otherwise, the density crowd works to raise the status of a lot of low-speed means of transport, for instance bicycles. Bicycles are also precarious, and their riders break the traffic laws at a very high frequency. I do not wish to ban bicycles, but I do wish we could program them not to run red lights. (I wonder how much the demand for them would then fall.)
I prefer to look to a better future where higher-speed transport is both affordable and green. Ultimately, low-speed transport is a poor country thing. It is also a poor country thing to have a lot of different speeds on your roads at the same time (I will never forget my first India visit in 2004). High variance of speed also can prove dangerous, as evidenced by the research of Charles Lave.
I do not want to see the United States moving in poor country directions.
If you are obsessed with mobility, you will attach great importance to Uber, Waymo, self-driving vehicles more generally, and better aviation. To me these are major advances, and they all can get much, much better yet.
I do not know if current plans for Neom, in Saudi Arabia, can prove workable or affordable. Nonetheless, the idea of rapid transport along “The Line” at least represents an attractive mode of thought. A better direction for future exploration than bicycles.
These points were obvious to many people in the 1960s. The Jetsons had their (safe) flying cars. The ultimate innovation in Star Trek was the transporter.
Jane Jacobs was obsessed with the West Village, an amazing part of America. Yet, as far as I can tell (I haven’t read all her work), she didn’t write much about how to get more people visiting, and learning from, the West Village. Hers was the perspective of the insider who already lives there. That is one valid perspective, but not the only one.
Robert Moses was obsessed with building the Cross-Bronx Expressway. That was a mixed blessing (see Robert Caro), but it did reflect his interest in mobility rather than density per se.
Today the world is full of anti-tourist movements, opposed to at least some kinds of mobility. I prefer to push back on most of those, using Pigouvian fees to protect Venice and other locales when needed.
Ireland strikes me as the one country today that truly should be obsessed with density, not mobility. Before 1840, the country had many more people than it does today. And it could once again, easily. In the meantime, there are far too few structures and the cost of living is very high. Dublin and Belfast also need more cultural infrastructure (requiring higher populations) to be bigger draws for talented foreign workers.
The correct answers here really are going to depend on the countries and regions under consideration.
Switzerland, a highly successful country, also pays great heed to mobility. The Swiss tunnels through the Alps are some of Europe’s greatest achievements, though today we take them for granted. And the Swiss are trying to do road upgrades without slowing traffic. You don’t have to put more people in Bern if it is easier to get to Bern, and away from Bern.
Mobility often gives you more algorithmic freedom than does density.
So, at least amongst the urbanists, perhaps density is these days a wee bit overrated? After all, the net flow of American citizens still is to the suburbs.
The new Elizondo book
The title is Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs. This is a difficult book to review. For instance, it has passages like the following:
In one particular instance, a senior CIA official and his wife had a terrifying UAP experience in the backyard of their own home. When they awoke lying on the ground in the yard, the CIA officer had a small hole punched in the back of his neck and his wife had a small metallic object recovered from her nose when she sneezed [TC: what percentage of younger American women have this?]. Making things even more interesting, CIA doctors were notified of the circumstances and examined the patients.
I would bet very heavily against what seems to be Elizondo’s interpretation of those events. So if you read this book, do not trust any section that puts forward propositions about aliens. And that is much of the book.
That said, no matter what your view on aliens, the bureaucratic history surrounding debates on aliens is a fascinating one, and one very much underexplored by serious scholars. For instance, the more skeptical you are about aliens, the more you have to think our military and intelligence bureaucracies are just entirely, out of control insane. Here you will get a first person account of how incidents such as Tic Toc and GIMBAL evolved. I am not talking about interpretations concerning the aliens, I mean just the history of how these events were processed, recorded, and discussed. Along that exceedingly scarce dimension, this is indeed a valuable memoir.
Can you trust Elizondo on such “ordinary” matters when you cannot trust him on the accounts of the aliens? I am not sure, but my intuition says yes? So in probabilistic terms, this is a historical document of import. If used with care.
I cannot recommend a book which to me has so many apparent blatant falsehoods, but I would not try to talk you out of reading it either. There is something here, and time will tell what exactly that is.
Thursday assorted links
1. India Canada Naveen fact of the day.
2. New announcements on tax hikes supported by Harris. Most of these plans are not serious, and now is a good time to see who is a Democrat first, and an economist second. And vice versa. Here is some relevant commentary.
4. MIT without affirmative action (NYT). White admissions dropped (a small amount), by the way.
5. David Wallace-Wells on gambling and risk-taking (NYT).
6. MIE: “The scientists bought the citations for US$300 from a firm that seems to sell bogus citations in bulk. This confirms the existence of a black market for faked references that research-integrity sleuths have long speculated about, says the team.”