Category: Uncategorized
*Promoting Progress*
The author is Michael Magoon, and the subtitle is A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance For All. A good introduction to the ideas surrounding progress, here is the author’s particular recipe for progress:
1. A highly efficient food production and distribution system…
2. Trade-based cities…
3. Decentralized political, economic, religious, and ideological power…
4. At least one high-value-added industry that exports…
5. Widespread use of fossil fuels…
You can buy it here.
Friday assorted links
1. Jason Crawford on the review-and-approval paradigm for regulation.
2. Who dumped the pasta in New Jersey? (NYT)
3. Last Week’s New Yorker Review.
4. Frank and Glied JEP piece on mental health economics.
5. Good review of the Edmonds Parfit biography.
6. New blog about AI alignment.
7. Wednesday, May 10 evening, Conversations with Tyler meet-up in San Francisco, I will be there too.
My Conversation with the excellent Kevin Kelly
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
…Kevin and Tyler start this conversation on advice: what kinds of advice Kevin was afraid to give, his worst advice, how to get better at following advice, and whether people who ask for advice really want it in the first place. Then they move on to the best places to see traditional cultures in Asia, the one thing in Kevin’s travel kit he can’t be without, his favorite part of India, why he’s so excited about brain-computer interfaces, how AI will change religion, what the Amish can teach us about tech adoption, the most underrated documentary, his initial entry point into tech, why he’s impressed by the way Jeff Bezos handles power, the last thing he’s changed his mind about, how growing up in Westfield, New Jersey affected him, his next project called the Hundred Year Desirable Future, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Do you ever feel that if you don’t photograph a place, you haven’t really been there? Does it hold a different status? Like you haven’t organized the information; it’s just out on Pluto somewhere?
KELLY: Yes, I did. When I was younger, I had a religious conversion and I decided to ride my bicycle across the US. And part of that problem — part of the thing was that I was on my way to die, and I decided to leave my camera behind for this magnificent journey of a bicycle crossing the US. It was the most difficult thing I ever did, because I was just imagining all the magnificent pictures that I could take, that I wasn’t going to take. I took a sketchbook instead, and that appeased some of my desire to capture things visually.
But you’re absolutely right. It was a little bit of an addiction, where the framing of a photograph was how I saw the world. Still images: I was basically, in my head, clicking — I was clicking the shutter at the right moments when something would happen. That, I think, was not necessarily healthy — to be so dependent on that framing to enjoy the world.
I’ve learned to wean myself off from that necessity. Now I can travel with just a phone for the selfies that you might want to take.
COWEN: Maybe the earlier habit was better.
Recommended. And here is Kevin’s new book Excellent Advice: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.
Small steps toward a much better world, job search edition
Jobseekers face multiple barriers with potentially different implications for the level of search and returns to increasing search. An experiment on a job search platform in Pakistan shows that lowering users’ psychological cost of initiating job applications increases applications by 600%. Returns to the marginal applications induced by treatment are approximately constant rather than decreasing, in contrast with intuitive job search models. This pattern is consistent with a model in which heterogeneous psychological costs of initiating applications, potentially due to heterogeneous present bias, lead some jobseekers to miss applying to even high-return vacancies. Additional experiments and measurement reject alternative behavioral and non-behavioral explanations. Our finding of constant returns to marginal search effort, combined with limited spillovers onto other jobseekers, raises the possibility of suboptimally low search effort due to psychological costs of initiating applications.
That is from a new paper by Erica Field, Robert Garlick, Nivedhitha Subramanian, Kate Vyborny. Via Maxwell G.
Thursday assorted links
1. How to improve the Biden version of Operation Warp Speed.
2. Successor to the Doing Business index — Business Ready.
3. Mexico science policy moving in the wrong direction?
4. Will LLMs help or hurt Arabic?
5. “Satanist explains his big plan for America.” And the correct link (from yesterday) on abolishing tenure.
6. News Minimalist. I have been waiting for this.
7. Dwarkesh on LBJ.
8. Parts of the Biden AI plan. And will open source win out?
Sebastian Edwards on Chilean social security reform
In his forthcoming book on the Chilean reforms, Edwards is clear that the social security reforms did not succeed. He gives the following reasons (a partial and incomplete summary):
1. “At 10 percent of wages, the rate of contribution was obviously too low. The average for the OECD countries was 19 percent.” Accumulated funds ended up being too low.
2. The system assumed a static labor market, where workers stayed in the formal sector for 30 to 50 years.
3. Workers were never quite sure if they really were going to get the funds, or if they just were paying another tax.
4. Workers’ representatives were not included on the relevant program boards, and so workers felt little stake in the system.
5. The number of retirement years rose dramatically, due in part to rising life expectancy. Yet the system made no adjustment for this, requiring a certain amount of savings to be stretched out to finance a growing number of years.
6. Management fees were very high, and this became a major issue when equity returns fell.
Here is my earlier post on the book — The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, one of the must-reads of the year.
How to read using GPT-4
Matthew asks:
You mentioned today a history book that you enjoyed reading with GPT-4 as your companion. Do you have any tips for more contemporary nonfiction?
…I’m trying the GPT-4 & LangChain Tutorial you linked, but wanted to ask: are there any tools or tricks you recommend for using GPT-4 as a reading companion where its knowledge is less than perfect?
Just keep on reading, and keep on asking GPT questions about what you are reading. Do note that the paid version of GPT is much better!
Reading a book with GPT-4 works best when the book offers a large and somewhat unknown “cast of characters” to you. Often that is true for history books, but it doesn’t have to be a history book per se. You want a book that is fact-rich, and requires a lot of background context. Then the marginal contribution of GPT’s “running annotations” is relatively high. You probably won’t be able to keep track of all the names, nor will you have context on most of them. So when a name, or battle, or doctrine, or some event pops up, just keep on prompting GPT-4. The final effect is to create a version of “reading in clusters,” yet with only a single book + GPT.
So in equilibrium, due to GPT-4, the number of books you are reading should go down. But each reading experience should be better as well.
Here are Cynthia Haven and Mike Gioia with their views.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “Agreeableness positively predicted emotional well-being, while negatively predicting advancing knowledge. We ultimately argue that gender is a crucial, underestimated explanatory factor of the value orientations of American college students.” Link here.
2. How much do India’s new nuclear reactors cost?
3. The geography of retracted papers (China fact of the day). And should Japan defend Taiwan?
4. The new Philip A. Wallach book Why Congress?
How to talk on Zoom
In a study last year, people who were face-to-face responded to yes/no questions in 297 milliseconds, on average, while those on Zoom chats took 976 milliseconds. Conversational turns — handing the mic back and forth between speakers, as it were — exhibited similar delays. The researchers hypothesized that something about the scant 30- to 70-millisecond delay in Zoom audio disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags use to get in sync with one another, that magic that creates true dialogue.
And the data:
The result is the largest-ever database of one-on-one Zoom conversations. It’s called CANDOR, short for Conversation: A Naturalistic Dataset of Online Recordings. Reece and his colleagues examined more than 1,600 conversations — some 850 hours and 7 million words total. The researchers paired volunteers, people who had never met each other, and asked them to hop on Zoom for half an hour about any old thing — with Record turned on. Which means that unlike most conversational databases, CANDOR didn’t just encode their words, which were transcribed automatically, by digital algorithms. It also automatically captured things like the tone, volume, and intensity of conversational exchanges, recording everything from facial expressions to head nods to the number of “ums” and “yeahs.”
And some results:
But loudness, it turns out, isn’t as good a metric as intensity — maybe because intensity is more subtle, a combination of the frequencies and sibilance of speech and the emotion conveyed by everything from tone to body language. To help the computer to assess something so ineffable — like, what is this thing you humans call love? — the CANDOR team fed it the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song. That enabled the candorbots to draw on more than 7,000 recordings of 24 actors saying and singing things with different emotional shading, from happy or sad to fearful or disgusted. The machine found that women rated as better Zoom conversationalists tended to be more intense. The differences among men, strangely, were statistically insignificant. (The reverse was true for happiness. Male speakers who appeared to be happier were rated as better conversationalists, while the stats for women didn’t budge.)
Then there’s nodding. Better-rated conversationalists nodded “yes” 4% more often and shook their heads “no” 3% more often. They were not “merely cheerful listeners who nod supportively,” the researchers note, but were instead making “judicious use of nonverbal negations.” Translation: An honest and well-timed no will score you more points than an insincere yes. Good conversationalists are those who appear more engaged in what their partners are saying.
Here is the full Adam Rogers article, and most notably the participants did not dislike talking on Zoom per se. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Hypergamy Revisited: Marriage in England, 1837-2021
There is a new paper by Greg Clark and Neil Cummins:
It is widely believed that women value social status in marital partners more than men, leading to female marital hypergamy, and more female intergenerational social mobility. A recent paper on Norway, for example, reports significant female hypergamy, even today, as measured by parental status of men and women in partnerships. Using evidence from more than 33 million marriages and 67 million births in England and Wales 1837-2022 we show that there was never within this era any period of significant hypergamous marriage by women. The average status of women’s fathers was always close to that of their husbands’ fathers. Consistent with this there was no differential tendency in England of men and women to marry by social status. The evidence is of strong symmetry in marital behaviors between men and women throughout. There is also ancillary evidence that physical attraction cannot have been a very significant factor in marriages in any period 1837-2021, based on the correlation observed in underlying social abilities.
Here is the link, oddly they are charging six pounds for access. Now there is an ungated version.
Tuesday assorted links
What I’ve been reading and not having time to read
Marcel Proust, The Seventy-Five Folios & Other Unpublished Manuscripts. Early drafts of In Search of Lost Time, fragments, but still of interest to Proust lovers.
Claire Hughes Johnson, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building is that rare thing — a good and also useful management book. She was COO at Stripe, this is a Stripe Press title, and I was happy to see it make the WSJ bestseller list.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? The authors are skeptical on the actual settlement of space, and so am I, so I am glad this book exists. I hope somebody proves them wrong, but that is not my bet.
Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income, is a good history of ideas on the basic concept.
Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, Superman Brainiac, Superman wins, but is that plausible? Yes. The writers note there is too much that Brainiac cannot control, most of all on Earth.
Peter Attia, with Bill Gifford, has now published Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity.
I have only browsed Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism, but it seems to be a very good and serious treatment of its chosen topics.
Lionel Page, Optimally Irrational: The Good Reasons We Behave the Way We Do, argues that many behavioral “imperfections” in economics are in fact rational in a broader perspective.
Simone and Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, the authors lay out what their version of a pro-natalist world and philosophy would have to look like.
There is Shanker A. Singham and Alden F. Abbott, Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy: Trade Liberalisation, Competitive Markets and Property Rights Protection.
I will not have time to read Chris Wickham’s massive tome The Donkey & the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180, but surely it is worthy of note and it appears to be a major achievement.
And Is Social Justice Just?, edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne.
Monday assorted links
Diamond arbitrage!
That diamond ring your newly engaged friend is showing off? It may not be a traditional diamond.
More than a third of all engagement rings with center stones purchased last year were created in a lab, according to an online survey of nearly 12,000 U.S. couples by wedding-planning website The Knot. That’s double the number from 2020.
A natural diamond takes billions of years to form deep within the earth. The diamond industry, it seems, evolves almost as slowly. But a major shift seems to be under way.
As the technology to make lab-grown diamonds has improved, production has increased and retail prices are falling. Their growing popularity, especially among younger consumers, has caught the attention of jewelers and watchmakers — and is challenging traditional diamonds that are mined from the earth.
It’s not just engagement rings. Diamonds grown in a lab accounted for 13.6% of the $88.6 billion in diamond jewelry sold globally in 2022, up from less than 1% in 2015 where they had hovered since the early 2000s, according to Paul Zimnisky, a diamond industry analyst.
Here is more from the WSJ, and the article is interesting throughout. Here is my 2004 post on diamonds. Didn’t Alex once have a long post on this as well? (I can’t find it in the MR search function.)
*The Chile Project*
An excellent book, the author is Sebastian Edwards, and the subtitle is The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism. This is the only book on this topic where I feel I am finally getting to the bottom of what happened. Here are a few points:
1. The Chicago School ties to Chile go as far back as 1955, when Theodore Schultz, Earl Hamilton, Arnold Harberger, and Simon Rottenberg visited to strike up an agreement with Catholic University in Santiago.
2. The same year Chilean students started arriving at U. Chicago for graduate study.
3. Edwards himself, at the age of 19, worked on price controls under the Allende regime.
4. Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the (left-wing) Austrian economist, was critical of the Allende regime for deviating from true socialism.
5. The Allende regime was a disaster, with for instance real wages falling by almost 40 percent (this one I knew).
6. Pinochet’s much-heralded private pension reform really did not work (I may do a whole post on this).
7. Milton Friedman’s famed visit really was quite modest, contrary to what you sometimes hear. Nonetheless he was so persuasive he really did convince Pinochet to proceed with the shock therapy version of reform. He had mixed feelings about this for the rest of his life, and did not like to talk about it: “But deep inside, Friedman was bothered by the Chilean episode.”
8. You may know that pegging the exchange rate was one of the major Chilean mistakes during the reform era. Friedman, although usually a strict advocate of floating exchange rates, did not take the opportunity to criticize that decision, and in fact made some remarks that suggested a possible willingness to tolerate a moving peg regime for the Chilean exchange rate.
9. Friedman underestimated how long Chilean unemployment would last, following shock therapy.
10. Arnold Harberger “…prided himself in not being doctrinaire and not being a Milton Friedman clone.”
11. Much more recently, Chile turned to the Left, in part because Chilean market-oriented economists retreated from public debates.
Strongly recommended, one of the must-reads of the year. You can buy it here.