Category: Uncategorized
How effective was the IAEA?
Here is the Open AI call for international regulation, most of all along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency. I am not in general opposed to this approach, but I think it requires very strong bilateral supplements, from the United States of course. Which in turn requires U.S. supremacy in the area, as was the case with nuclear weapons. From a 564 pp. official work on the topic:
For nearly forty years after its birth in 1957 the IAEA remained essentially irrelevant to the nuclear arms race. (p.22)
There is also this:
However, in the late 1950s and early 1960s it was not the failure of the IAEA’s functions as a ‘pool’ or ‘bank’ or supplier of nuclear material that inflicted the most serious blow on the organization, on its safeguards operation and eventually on Cole himself. For a variety of reasons, the Agency’s chief patron, the USA, chose to arrange nuclear supplies bilaterally rather than through the IAEA. One reason was that the IAEA had been unable to develop an effective safeguards system. Another was that in a bilateral arrangement it was the US Administration, under the watchful eyes of Congress, that chose the bilateral partner rather than leaving the choice to an international organization that would have to respond to the needs of any Member State whatever its political system, persuasion or alliance. But the most serious setback came in 1958 when, for overriding political reasons, the USA chose the bilateral route in accepting the safeguards of EURATOM as equivalent to — in other words as an acceptable substitute for — those of the IAEA.
It is frequently suggested that the IAEA has been partially captured by the nuclear sector itself. I do not consider that bad news, but it is a sobering thought for those expecting too much from this approach. Do note that it took years to set up the agency, and furthermore when North Korea wanted to acquire nuclear weapons the country simply left the agency and broke its earlier agreement. Perhaps the greatest gain from this approach is that the non-crazy nations have a systematic multilateral framework to work within, should they decide to defer to the external, bilateral pressure from the United States?
On the other side, my fear is that the international agreement will lead to excess regulation at the domestic level.
There is also this:
The fact that Iraq’s nuclear weapon programme had been under way for several years, perhaps a decade, without being detected by the IAEA, led to sharp criticism of the Agency and posed the most serious threat to the credibility of its safeguards since they had first been applied some 30 years earlier.
All of these issues could use much more intelligent discussion.
Undervalued talent in the NBA playoffs
With the underdog Miami Heat ahead of the Celtics 3-0, and the Denver Nuggets ahead of the Lakers 3-0, it is time to assess a lesson or two.
As for Miami, four of their key players — Gabe Vincent, Max Strus, Caleb Martin and Duncan Robinson — were undrafted altogether. This is not only a lesson in talent spotting, it is a lesson of talent development. Those four players have accounted for about forty percent (ESPN gate) of Miami’s points this season. No one on Miami made the All-Star team in 2023.
How about Denver? Jokic, if he proves durable, could end up as one of the top ten players of all time. He was a second-round draft pick (#41), snagged perceptively by Denver and then given a chance to develop, which took a few years. Only Jokic made the All-Star team this year. KCP, a key player for Denver, was let go by the Lakers two years ago and then the Wizards a year ago. Now he is an essential contributor, most of all against the Lakers. (Who even remembers who Denver gave up to get him?) The second best Denver player, Jamal Murray, was picked #7 in 2016. If Philadelphia had deployed their number one pick on him, instead of Ben Simmons, who basically refused to play, they probably would be winning a title right now.
So the potential gains to being good at talent selection are very real indeed. Not every major contributors starts off as a Lebron James or a Victor Wembanyama.
Monday assorted links
1. Why do many people find slow motion appealing?
2. Canine markets in everything, Austin edition. And the hotel version (NYT).
3. News stripped of all hype and emotion, by AI. And new tool for co-authoring long form articles with AI.
5. Everleigh? Nova? Good to see that “Tyler” is dropping in popularity. Rising and falling baby names.
6. Why you should visit Ravenna.
7. The Straussian that is Magnus Carlsen (WSJ). Thanos!
Future markets in everything?
Here is one series of takes on AI in cinema/TV, and where it is going:
4. Viewers getting digitally scanned themselves, and paying extra to have themselves inserted in these custom films. 7/
— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) May 13, 2023
Via Anecdotal.
Islam and human capital in historical Spain
We use a unique dataset on Muslim domination between 711-1492 and literacy in 1860 for about 7500 municipalities to study the long-run impact of Islam on human-capital in historical Spain. Reduced-form estimates show a large and robust negative relationship between length of Muslim rule and literacy. We argue that, contrary to local arrangements set up by Christians, Islamic institutions discouraged the rise of the merchant class, blocking local forms of self-government and thereby persistently hindering demand for education. Indeed, results show that a longer Muslim domination in Spain is negatively related to the share of merchants, whereas neither later episodes of trade nor differences in jurisdictions and different stages of the Reconquista affect our main results. Consistent with our interpretation, panel estimates show that cities under Muslim rule missed-out on the critical juncture to establish self-government institutions.
That is from a new paper by Francesco Cinnirella, Alieza Naghavi, and Giovanni Prarolo, via a loyal MR reader.
Sunday assorted links
2. Scott Sumner and Bob Lucas. And climate change and the Lucas Critique.
3. Dhabas serving U.S. Punjabi truck drivers.
4. Ezra Klein on why coin minting and the like, in response to the debt ceiling, are terrible ideas (NYT). Ezra is right, and a lot of the other commentary on this issue is simply not very well thought out churlishness.
5. Paul Simon update (Times of London, yes you should subscribe very cheap for U.S. readers).
6. More on Turkey from The New Left Review. And Acemoglu on the election.
Is software eating Japan? (from my email)
I came across a great series of posts by Richard Katz about Japan and information technology. It shows that software has not eaten Japan (for now?).
Some interesting facts:– “by 2025, 60% of Japan’s large companies will be operating core systems that are more than 20 years old. Would anyone today use a 2005 PC?”
– ” It is worth noting that the OECD shows Japan suffering an actual drop in output per employee in ICT business services from 2005 through 2021, its ICT productivity having peaked out in 1999. By contrast, Korea’s productivity grew 41% in the same period”
– “Among high school boys, Japan ranks number one in using the Internet to search for information on a particular topic several times a day, and Japan’s girls come in second among OECD girls. Japanese boys also rank number one in single-player online games. On the other hand, these boys score at, or near, the bottom on other activities, such as multi-player online games or uploading their own content”.
– In an OECD study, Japan is third from the bottom when it comes to the share of students ” who foresee having a career, not just in ICT, but in any area of science or engineering” [that was quite shocking to me, to be honest. Positively shocking, on the other hand, was that Portugal leads the pack]
– “What’s even more remarkable is that Japan’s top performers on the math and science tests come in dead last in the share who foresee themselves working in science or engineering”.
– Maybe this provides a bit of an explanation: ” In 2021, the average annual income of a Japanese ICT staffer was just ¥4.38 million ($34,466), down 4% from 2019. That was 2% below the median salary in Japan, whereas in the US and China, ICT salaries are 8-10% above the median.”
sources: https://richardkatz.substack.com/p/2025-digital-cliff-part-i
https://richardkatz.substack.com/p/metis-2025-digital-cliff-part-ii
That is all from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski.
Saturday assorted links
1. Higher intergenerational mobility for African Christians than Muslims, demographically adjusted.
2. The oldest plans to scale of humanmade mega-structures.
3. An LLM trained on the Dark Web. (Remember when you all were complaining about how “Woke” some of the current products are?)
4. Henry Oliver on Edmonds on Parfit.
5. “Here we report the discovery of a temperate Earth-sized planet orbiting the cool M6 dwarf LP 791-18.”
6. Why do people listen to sad songs? (NYT) And Girardian orcas.
Ezra Klein and Jean Twenge on teen mental health
They did an NYT podcast, here is the transcript, here is the podcast itself. Excerpt:
EZRA KLEIN: Violent crime actually gets at why I wanted to ask this before we got into smartphones, because I’m much more familiar with the debate over crime than I am over the debate over suicide trend lines. And the thing that has always striking to me, and I think really underplayed in our national discourse over crime, is that we don’t really understand it, that if you go into the ’80s and the ’90s, you see crime goes way, way up in the 70s, way, way up in all kinds of different jurisdictions, more or less all at the same time.
And then it begins going way, way down in all kinds of different places all at the same time. So you have stories that people know, like there’s New York with Rudy Giuliani and broken windows policing and stop and frisk. But it also goes down in all these places that didn’t do what New York City did. It’s so widespread, both the rise and the fall, that you end up having researchers trying to think of even broader explanations, like whether or not lead and the amount of lead in young kids’ bloodstreams — and thus, the effect on their executive function when they got older, maybe that’s the causal mechanism.
And it made me wonder if there isn’t a chance that suicide and teen mental health is like that, that it has this kind of all the way up, all the way down in all places, and we don’t really understand why pattern to it.
Do read/listen to the whole thing, interesting throughout.
*The Fall of the Turkish Model*
The author is Cihan Tuğal, and the subtitle is How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism, though the book is more concretely a comparison across Egypt and Tunisia as well, with frequent remarks on Iran. Here is one excerpt:
This led to what Kevan Harris has called the ‘subcontractor state’: an economy which is neither centralized under a governmental authority not privatized and liberalized. The subcontractor state has decentralized its social and economic roles without liberalizing the economy or even straightforwardly privatizing the state-owned enterprises. As a result, the peculiar third sector of the Iranian economy has expanded in rather complicated and unpredictable ways. Rather than leading to liberalization privatization under revolutionary corporatism intensified and twisted the significance of organization such as the bonyads…Privatization under the populist-conservative Ahmedinejad exploited the ambiguities of the tripartite division of the economy…’Privatization’ entailed the sale of public assets not to private companies but to nongovernmental public enterprises (such as pension funds, the bonyads and military contractors).
This book is one useful background source for the current electoral process in Turkey.
How to use GPT-4 plus web browsing
I like:
What are three prominent stories about the economy of Nairobi, appearing in Kenyan newspapers in May of 2023?
…and then keep on going…much better than trying to read Kenyan newspapers.
Friday assorted links
1. 1950-2020, what predicts U.S. urban density?
2. Will AI want to self-improve?
4. Ross against marijuana legalilization (NYT).
5. Rasheed Griffith on Caribbean dollarization.
6. “One of the most common mistakes in American politics today is to suppose that rival groups pose an “existential threat” when they, in fact, do not.” David Corey’s critique of the New Right.
Population and Welfare: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number
That is a new paper by Peter J. Klenow, Charles I. Jones, Mark Bils, and Mohamad Adhami, reject its implications at your peril:
Economic growth is typically measured in per capita terms. But social welfare should arguably include the number of people as well as their standard of living. We decompose social welfare growth — measured in consumptionequivalent units — into contributions from rising population and rising per capita consumption. Because of diminishing marginal utility of consumption, population growth is scaled up by a value-of-life factor that substantially exceeds one and empirically averages around 2.7 across countries and over time. Population increases are therefore consistently the dominant contributor, and consumption-equivalent welfare growth around the world averages more than 6% per year since 1960, as opposed to 2% per year for consumption growth. Countries such as Mexico and South Africa rise sharply in the growth rankings once population growth is incorporated, whereas China, Germany and Japan plummet. We show the robustness of these results to incorporating parental time use and fertility decisions using data from the U.S., the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea. The effects of falling parental utility from having fewer kids are roughly offset by increases in the “quality” of kids associated with rising time investment per child.
If you worry about fertility rates, do you not have to accept something like this framework? Mexico — underrated!
In general, I think people should visit the high population countries more. For the pointer I thank Oliver Wang.
Thursday assorted links
1. Transformers in time series: a survey.
2. AIs learning how to bargain.
3. The Long Now Foundation seeks new executive director.
4. Boettke and Coyne on developments in Austrian economics.
5. “When everyone can sound intelligent, elite conversations will become less intelligible.”
My Conversation with Simon Johnson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode description:
What’s more intense than leading the IMF during a financial crisis? For Simon Johnson, it was co-authoring a book with fellow economist (and past guest) Daron Acemoglu. Written in six months, their book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, argues that widespread prosperity is not the natural consequence of technological progress, but instead only happens when there is a conscious effort to bend the direction and gains from technological advances away from the elite.
Tyler and Simon discuss the ideas in the book and on Simon’s earlier work on finance and banking, including at what size a US bank is small enough to fail, the future of deposit insurance, when we’ll see a central bank digital currency, his top proposal for reforming the IMF, how quickly the Industrial Revolution led to widespread prosperity, whether AI will boost wages, how he changed his mind on the Middle Ages, the key difference in outlook between him and Daron, how he thinks institutions affect growth, how to fix northern England’s economic climate, whether the UK should join NAFTA, improving science policy, the Simon Johnson production function, whether MBAs are overrated, the importance of communication, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If institutions are the key to economic growth, as many people have argued — Daron and yourself to varying degrees — why, then, is prospective economic growth so hard to predict?
In 1960, few people thought South Korea would be the big winner. It looked like their institutions were not that good. It was a common view: oh, Philippines, Sri Lanka — then Ceylon — would do quite well. They had English language to some extent. They seemed to have okay education. And those two nations have more or less flopped. South Korea took off. It’s now, per capita income roughly equal to France or Japan. Doesn’t that mean it’s not about institutions? Because institutions are pretty sticky.
JOHNSON: Yes, I think of institutions as being part of the hysteresis effect, if you can get it in a positive way, that if you grow and you strengthen institutions, which South Korea has done, it makes it much harder to relapse. There are plenty of countries that had spurts of growth without strong institutions and found it hard to sustain that.
You make a very good point about the early 1960s, Tyler. There wasn’t that much discussion that I’ve seen about institutions per se, but education — yes, absolutely. Culture — people made the same comparisons. They said, “Confucian culture is no good or won’t lead to growth. That’s a problem, for example, for South Korea.” That turned out to be wrong.
I think institutions are sticky. I think history matters a lot for them. They’re not predestination, though. You could absolutely carve your own way, but the carve-your-own way is harder when you start with institutions that are more problematic, less democratic, more autocratic control, less protection of property rights.
All of these things can go massively wrong, but building better institutions and making them sustainable, like Eastern Europe — the parts of the former Soviet Empire that managed to escape the Soviet influence after 1989, 1991 — I think those countries have worked long and hard, with very mixed results in some places, to build better institutions. And the EU has helped them in that regard, unquestionably.
I enjoyed this session with Simon.