Category: Uncategorized

That was then, this is now, again Russia/Ukraine edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Circa 1919, with Ukraine under siege from the Bolshevik armies:

Things, however, did not soon improve.  Again to take the case of Odessa, by the end of April electricity was running out.  “Thus in one month they have brought chaos to everything,” Bunin snarled, “no factories, no railroads, no trams, no water, no bread, no clothes — no nothing!”  In fact the Bolsheviks had inherited the chaos and the crisis; they also inherited — and exacerbated — the free-wheeling brutality displayed on all sides and of which…they were the beneficiaries.  To this kind of panache they applied a new moral calculus.

That is from Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914-1921, which as noted yesterday is quite a good book, especially for viewing the Bolshevik Revolution through the eyes of what became the broader Soviet empire.

U.S.A. fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

But the 10 fastest growing counties last year accounted for nearly 80 percent of the national total, a testament not so much to the rapid pace of change in these places, but to the lack of significant growth in the rest of the nation.

Here is more from the New York Times, with useful maps as well.  And this:

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1506995138173837318

The virtues of seaweed collecting

by  Tyler Cowen in

Nineteenth-century seaweed albums have a baked-in melancholy. Despite the best intentions, they do not flatter seaweed. The samples are brittle where the plant was pliant, opaque when once translucent, flaccid where previously ballooned. The displacement from sea to paper steals a measure of the plants’ integrity, and time leaches away the rest. In every respect, the wonders of seaweed have fled the book. And yet, these albums still speak — not of seaweed exactly, but of the collector’s care and devotion. There is a particular kind of eros that thrums between a receptive human and the natural world; the contours and depth of this eros is the true subject of a seaweed album.

Here is much more, interesting throughout, via Jodi Ettenberg.

*Amongst Women*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of a 1990 Irish novel by John McGahern, well-known in Ireland but as of late not so frequently read outside of Ireland.  In addition to its excellent general quality, I found this book notable for two reasons.  First, it focuses on the feminization of Ireland, being set in the mid-century decades after independence.  An IRA veteran slowly realizes that the Ireland he fought for — a place for manly men — was a figment of his civil war imagination, and not an actual option for an independent, modernizing Ireland.  The latter will be run according to the standards and desires of women, and actually be far more pleasant, whether or not Moran likes it.  Second, the book is an excellent illustration of the importance of context for reading fiction.  The story reads quite differently, depending how quickly you realize the protagonist is an IRA veteran with his wartime service as a fundamental experience.  Few readers will know this from the very beginning, but I suspect many Irish readers — especially older ones — will figure this out well before they are told.  In general, the very best fiction is context-rich, and this is one reason why many people may not appreciate all of the literary classics.

I thought these people wanted lower trade deficits?

by  Tyler Cowen

…[Tom] Cotton argued that America “ought to ban US investment in strategic Chinese industries and encourage reshoring of US factories and jobs — and punish offshoring to China. Further, we need to scrutinise and regulate Chinese investment in America much more closely.” In a 2021 report he highlighted a wide range of “financial weapons”.

Republican senator Marco Rubio is another outspoken critic of globalisation. In December, he sent an open letter to his colleagues, declaring it a “strategic disaster” that “American financial investment is pouring into [China] at its highest rate ever” and seeking support for his “American Financial Markets Integrity and Security Act,” which would block investment in Chinese companies flagged by the Departments of Defense and Commerce.

Here is more from the FT, by Oren Cass.  Keep in mind that capital flows are the mirror image of the trade deficit!  Be careful not to slip into the language of causality here, because it is all mutually determined.  But a world of higher net American capital flows into China is also a world with a lower American trade deficit with China.  Which is it going to be?  There are legitimate national security reasons for restricting some U.S. investments into China.  But an analysis such as this should start by recognizing the relevant trade-offs.  How about calling it “the new Republican coalition for a higher trade deficit with China?”

My Conversation with the excellent Lydia Davis

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Lydia joined Tyler to discuss how the form of short stories shapes their content, how to persuade an ant to leave your house, the difference between poetry and very short stories, Proust’s underrated sense of humor, why she likes Proust despite being averse to long books, the appeal of Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, why Proust is funnier in French or German than in English, the hidden wit of Franz Kafka, the economics of poorly translated film subtitles, her love of Velázquez and early Flemish landscape paintings, how Bach and Schubert captured her early imagination, why she doesn’t like the Harry Potter novels — but appreciates their effects on young readers, whether she’ll ever publish her diaries, how her work has evolved over time, how to spot talent in a young writer, her method (or lack thereof) for teaching writing, what she learned about words that begin with “wr,” how her translations of Proust and Flaubert differ from others, what she’s most interested in translating now, what we can expect from her next, and more.

Lydia is hard to excerpt, as the flow is very important, but here is one bit:

COWEN: What do you think is your most unusual productivity habit?

DAVIS: Unusual.

COWEN: And successful, that is.

DAVIS: It’s hard to say because I imagine that a lot of writers share some of the things I do. So, unusual. I know that I have a more chaotic approach than some writers would want to have, and that’s always been true. It’s, in a way, very wasteful, like the books I don’t finish reading. There are also a number of very interesting projects — or very interesting to me — that I’ve done a lot of work on and then gone on to another project.

I have at least three or four or five big projects. These are not small stories. These are biographical projects or grammar projects or history projects — crossing genres — that I’ve done a lot of work on and then gotten distracted from. But then, when you say productive or successful, it does work very well with shorter things that you can actually finish.

The way I work on stories is to get busy immediately and write down what occurs to me, and write it until I’ve exhausted that vein for the moment. Then I usually have enough to come back to later. I’ll have 10, 15, 20, 30 unfinished stories, and every now and then, I’ll pick one up again. Sometimes I don’t even remember what it is. I’ll see a title and think, “I don’t know what that story was.” I’ll pick it up again and try to discern what it was that moved me, and what it was that made me want to write it, and get back into that and see if I could finish it. That’s a chaotic method that works pretty well.

Recommended.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. WHO delays in getting Sputnik vaccine approved for travel purposes.

2. Why income share agreements did not work out.

3. The Arab Israeli parties do not seem to be siding with Ukraine.

4. Why we have 0.05.

5. “…the paper demonstrates that indigenous communities in Mexico are better able to escape predatory criminal rule when they are legally allowed to carve a space of autonomy from the state through the institution of “usos y costumbres.”” Link here.

My 2021 “stories to watch” column

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is one excerpt:

A possible Chinese move against Taiwan has received a lot of attention, but a Russian union with Belarus could be a greater danger. Belarus might even agree to such a proposition, so it would be hard for NATO or the U.S. to decry it as a coercive invasion. Yet such a Russian expansion could upend political stability in Europe.

If Russia and Belarus became a single political unit, there would be only a thin band of land, called the Suwalki Gap, connecting the Baltics to the rest of the European Union. Unfortunately, that same piece of territory would stand in the way of the new, larger Russia connecting with the now-cut off Russian region of Kaliningrad. Over the long term, could the Baltics maintain their independence? If not, the European Union would show it is entirely a toothless entity, unable to guarantee the sovereignty of its members.

Even if there were no formal political union between Russia and Belarus, the territorial continuity and integrity of the EU could soon be up for grabs. The EU has more at stake in an independent Belarus than it likes to admit.

Here is the full column, do still keep your eyes on this one.  And read this too.  If Poland feels a large enough threat, might they do something to try to draw in NATO preemptively?  And here is commentary from Russian state TV.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. New CBA for the child allowance, showing basically a 10x benefit to cost ratio.

2. New survey of the non-health effects of air pollution.

3. The importance of teaching frontier knowledge.

4. Marcus Rediker’s tips for historical writing, excellent and also of more general interest.

5. The current state of nuclear brinksmanship (NYT).

6. “Companies are marketing polygenic risk scores as part of IVF…”  And more here.

7. UCLA will pay that adjunct after all.

That was then, this is now, Russian political economy edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon:

Though all four continental great powers were in theory absolute monarchies, no one doubted that the power of The Russian emperor was more complete than that of his French Austrian or even Prussian peers.  He could make laws and tax his peoples without their consent, and no laws protected even his most aristocratic subjects against his arbitrary whims.  By contrast, especially in France and Austria, aristocratic assemblies and judicial institutions inherited from medieval feudalism inhibited a monarch’s power, as indeed did the ethos of the social elites, including sometimes of the monarchs themselves and their relatives.  Other factors also enhanced the power of the Russian autocrat.  For examples, in Protestant Europe the previously enormous landholdings of the Catholic church had been confiscated during the Reformation and had mostly fallen into the hands of the aristocracy.  In eighteenth-century Catholic Europe most of these lands were still held by the Church.  In Russia, however, the monarchy had confiscated the vast wealth of the Orthodox Church by the 1760s and largely held on to it for itself.  That was one key reason why by the 1790s more than 40 per cent of the entire serf population “belonged” not to private landlords but to the crown.

And:

The Russian army traditionally fought with a higher ratio of artillery to infantry than was the case elsewhere in Europe.

And:

The Russians instead soon overran the principalities of Moldova and Wallachia, and made their acquisition the key war aim.

I found this book very useful for understanding the mindset of Putin and some of the other Russian elites.  For instance, none of the characters in this earlier history seemed to regard the national borders of the status quo as anything close to sacrosanct.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Summers on the Fed and whether we can expect inflation to diminish much.  Some points I have not seen him make in earlier presentations.

2. A hypothesis as to why Russia is focusing on Mariupol.

3. Can you beat the football bookmakers?

4. “…we estimate that juvenile detention leads to a 31% decline in the likelihood of graduating high school and a 25% increase in the likelihood of being arrested as an adult.”

5. New results on whether NBA referees are racially biased.

6. UCLA zero wage job listing update.  I blame the whole fracas on HR departments, not that UCLA as a school did anything wrong.