Category: Uncategorized
Friday assorted links
1. New Mercatus visiting fellows on pluralism.
2. New Jacob Goldstein podcast (he is former co-host of Planet Money podcast).
3. More on Michael Thaddeus, the Columbia professor, putting his tenure to good use (NYT).
4. Long Bryan Caplan response to me.
Shruti Rajagopalan podcast with Lant Pritchett
There is plenty on India, RCTs, economic development, and education. Here is one bit from Pritchett:
Everybody is getting a crappy education. One of the few times I’ve gotten a spontaneous standing ovation was, I was giving a talk about Indian education to a group, mainly of IAS officers—and who were elites of the education system, who have emerged as elites from the system. I was talking about the deficits in the Indian education system. I just said, “Look, I know everybody in this room is intrinsically smarter than I am by a lot, because imagine where you would be had anyone given a shit about what you actually learned.”…
It was that the curriculum is so out of touch and the teaching is so out of touch with good teaching that by not learning the fundamentals early, it’s not the case that the elite are getting a great education. Indonesia is another place I’ve worked and lived and have a lot of love for. When the OECD did adult literacy tests, fact of the matter is that adult literacy of tertiary graduates in Jakarta—this is just a sample of the most elite city, the most elite—were lower than high school dropouts in the OECD.
Again, I think there’s this illusion that there’s this very steep gradient in a low-performing system and that the elite are coming out with super good educations. I agree that the elite coming out of the Indian system are super impressive, amazing people because no way could I have survived the education system. I’m not claiming the Indian elite aren’t unbelievably world-competitive with any elite everywhere. There’s a reason why the Indian elite come out and are now CEOs of major American corporations, but it isn’t because the education system has been this wonderfully value-added process.
It’s been an unbelievably brutal selection process, which select on a bunch of overcoming features like grit and determination and drive that then might be good signals of who could be an effective CEO. If you can survive the Indian education system, of course you can run Google.
And:
RAJAGOPALAN: How has your Utah-Idaho background, lots of exposure to Mormonism—how has that affected or shaped your perspectives on economic development?
Interesting throughout.
Peginterferon Lambda is looking good
Eiger BioPharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq:EIGR), a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of innovative therapies to treat and cure Hepatitis Delta Virus (HDV) and other serious diseases, today announced that Peginterferon Lambda (Lambda) significantly reduced the risk of COVID-19-related hospitalizations or emergency room visits greater than six hours by 50% (primary endpoint) and death by 60% in the Phase 3 TOGETHER study, a multi-center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of non-hospitalized adult patients with COVID-19, who are at high risk of progressing to severe illness.
The Phase 3 TOGETHER study of Lambda is the second largest study to date of a COVID-19 therapeutic. Final analyses evaluated data from 1,936 patients, with 84% of patients having received at least a single dose of any COVID-19 vaccine.
Here is the full press release, with original support from Fast Grants.
Thursday assorted links
1. Revising down Chinese growth assumptions.
2. The meaning of the Pope’s intervention.
3. On the new biomedical DARPA. Only $1 billion, but it will exist.
4. Swimming pools to limit Thai monkey wars.
5. Ross Douthat on populism and Putin’s war (NYT).
6. New MIT mask policy: you can’t ask other individuals to wear masks.
Sentences to ponder
EZRA KLEIN: Something you’ve said in different venues is that Putin’s essays, speeches about Ukraine are less revealing about the nature of Ukraine than they are about the nature of Russia. You wrote, “what is most striking about Putin’s essay is the underlying uncertainty about Russian identity. When you claim that your neighbors are your brothers, you are having an identity crisis.” Can you talk a bit about what’s being revealed, or for that matter, confused here about Russian identity?
TIM SNYDER: I think Russian national identity is extremely confused and you can understand the need for Ukraine as a kind of shortcut, as a kind of way of resolving all these problems. Because you can say, well, I mean, this is a kind of dumb analogy, but you can say, well, the only problem with my life is I don’t have somebody else, you know? But anybody who says that is probably incorrect. And what Putin is saying — if we kind of reduce all the philosophical stuff down to a very simple proposition, he’s saying, Russia is not itself without Ukraine.
But if you’re not capable of being yourself without attacking and absorbing, violently, someone else, some other country, the real question might be about you, the real question might be about how you see the world, how you’re living in the world. So I think there’s a serious problem with Russian national identity.
Here is the full NYT dialogue.
Why isn’t crypto an effective hedge?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The last few months of chaos show what Bitcoin and other crypto assets are good for: They are advanced tools of globalization, luxury goods for complex, well-functioning markets — not protections against the depredations of hostile governments.
One common story, especially popular in libertarian circles, has been that when inflation runs rampant and governments confiscate private wealth, crypto will be a vital refuge. It increasingly appears that this story is wrong.
The world has been in turmoil, with a major war, wealth confiscations, and much higher inflation rates. Yet mostly crypto prices have fallen. More theoretically:
Think of some of the possible legitimate use cases for crypto. Perhaps entrepreneurs will build a significant online metaverse, spanning national boundaries and allowing for fruitful interactions, including commercial ones. For many transactions, especially micropayments, crypto transfers might make more sense than trying to process all the trades through current dollar networks. There is at least the promise that crypto will be faster, more reliable and more secure.
In this scenario, crypto is worth the most when global trading networks, and internet connections, are stable. Right now they are moving in the opposite direction, and as a result the price of crypto is falling. The reality is that the crypto world has been a globalized product from the very beginning.
Recommended.
Wednesday assorted links
Did Turkish Islamization make people more religious?
No:
This paper first evaluates the impact of a two-decade-long Islamization policy carried out by a pro-Islamist party, which came to power in 2002 in Turkey, on the attitudes of Turkish people toward religious values, religious practices, and clergy. In this regard, how the importance of religion, frequency of going to mosques, and trust in the clergy have changed among Turkish Muslims between 2002 and 2018 were examined by using World Values Survey data and employing logistic regression analysis. Estimation results indicated a reduction in belief in God, attendance to mosques, and trust in clergy, which imply the failure of the Islamization policy. Second, we explored what caused the failure by using the same data set and methodology. Our estimations suggested that the symbiotic relationship between the pro-Islamist government and religious clergy and institutions may explain the failure. As the government is identified with religion in the eye of the public, dissatisfaction with the government turned to dissatisfaction with religious values.
Here is the paper by Murat Çokgezen, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Fin Moorhouse suggests some EA writing projects.
3. The economics of Bloomberg Media.
5. James Hamilton on oil prices and inflation.
6. An excellent piece on how to practice, ice skating is the accidental topic. Also known as “the Nils van der Poel production function.” Recommended, a strong piece of real interest.
Ukraine Take Shelter
On March 3 — three days and only five hours of sleep later — they launched Ukraine Take Shelter, a site in 12 languages where Ukrainian refugees fleeing war can immediately find hosts with spare rooms, unused resort condos, mother-in-law apartments and school dormitories…
“What we’ve done is put out a super fast, stripped-down version of Airbnb,” he said.
That is a project by Avi Schiffman and Marco Burstein of Harvard, still both teenagers. We are very happy to have Avi as a former EV winner for his Covid work and now to be supporting this project. Here is the full story. As of yesterday, there were over 100 million reads of the database.
How to find good TV shows
Chris asks:
You’ve written a lot about your reading habits in the past, but I’m curious to know more about how you find and watch TV shows. You’ve mentioned before that you watch very little TV (in explaining your productivity), and yet you speak highly of the shows you do watch. Do you have any strategies to find good TV, how to watch television “well”, how to avoid getting sucked in to mediocre TV, etc.? And, I’d be curious to know what specific shows you think are worth the time sink to watch.
All of this comes from my somewhat-conflicting desires 1.) To not waste time and 2.) To enjoy the best art there is, in all of its forms.
Here are my rather brutal answers, noting they probably are not helpful for most people:
1. Most TV shows are not good. The key problems are that too much quality scripting is required, and that the incentives are to try to get the show extended for another season. Plus too much of the audience “just wants something to watch.”
2. Most TV shows that your smart friends tell you to watch also are not good. See #1.
3. You should almost always watch a movie rather than a TV show. If you have to, watch the movie in hour or half-hour segments. Movies are better and smarter, at least if you can figure out which are the quality films. But that is not so hard, as standard critical opinion does OK there.
4. “The Golden Age of TV” doesn’t change any of this, though Hollywood movies have become worse, due to tent pole franchises and pressures for serialization, which give them some of the problems of television shows. At the margin, almost everyone should be watching more foreign films. Do you really know them all? How well do you know the best of African cinema? Iranian cinema? And so on.
5. I will try a TV show if two people I know, in the very top tier of smarts, recommend it. Even then I usually don’t like it. I thus infer there is at least a single dimension where I differ strongly from just about all my friends.
6. Could I name twenty TV shows that I think are worth watching, relative to the best movies you haven’t seen and the best books you haven’t read? Not sure. Attention is that which is scarce. But it shouldn’t be. Just pay better attention and read that book or watch that movie. There is also plenty on YouTube that beats TV shows, and if you are old you may not consume much YouTube content at all.
7. For sure, there are fifteen TV shows worth watching, but you really need to have very very strong filters. Whatever your filters may be, make them stronger. Don’t trust those friends of yours!
8. By this point, you are probably not very interested in knowing which are those fifteen shows.
What I’ve been reading
1. Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. An excellent look at all the icky ideas that have been circulating around Russia for the last few decades. This book also brings the relevant characters to life, for better or worse. Recommended.
2. Christopher Prendergast, Living and Dying with Marcel Proust. Unlike most of the secondary literature, this book actually makes In Search of Lost Time sound like it is worth reading.
3. Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. A useful book, and many people should read it, that said I have some caveats. Was “equality” ever the standard? Why isn’t there more public choice/political economy analysis in here?
4. Joseph Sassoon, The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty. A fun read, I had not known the family was Iraqi-Jewish, or so heavily involved in the opium trade in 19th century China. The author, by the way, is a distant relation to the main family tree, but it turns out he can read all the relevant languages for deciphering the family archives (and hardly anyone else can).
5. Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout. Bowen has to be one of the most underrated writers of the twentieth century. No human ever has told me to read one of her books! Yet this one is a subtle knockout.
Why Artificial Intelligence Increases the Importance of Humans in War
Recent scholarship on artificial intelligence (AI) and international security focuses on the political and ethical consequences of replacing human warriors with machines. Yet AI is not a simple substitute for human decision-making. The advances in commercial machine learning that are reducing the costs of statistical prediction are simultaneously increasing the value of data (which enable prediction) and judgment (which determines why prediction matters). But these key complements—quality data and clear judgment—may not be present, or present to the same degree, in the uncertain and conflictual business of war. This has two important strategic implications. First, military organizations that adopt AI will tend to become more complex to accommodate the challenges of data and judgment across a variety of decision-making tasks. Second, data and judgment will tend to become attractive targets in strategic competition. As a result, conflicts involving AI complements are likely to unfold very differently than visions of AI substitution would suggest. Rather than rapid robotic wars and decisive shifts in military power, AI-enabled conflict will likely involve significant uncertainty, organizational friction, and chronic controversy. Greater military reliance on AI will therefore make the human element in war even more important, not less.
That is from a new paper by Avi Goldfarb and Jon R. Lindsay, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Sunday assorted links
Claims about the evolution of memes
GoodToSell serves up a cyclical/asymptotic model of meme evolution and competition:
This is also an industry dominated by network effects. The forces that lead to such explosive growth, such as the scalability of info-tech, also lead to its downfall, as one or two companies dominate each niche. This means that the profitabilty component of evolution lessens its selective power, as platforms collect monopoly rents once all our attention has been accounted for.
Finally, algo-generated memes competed a little too well there for a minute. The shrillness reached its peak sometime in the past 3 years, and yet here we are, not in a civil war. The ideas were selected, in the inital expansion and takeover of memes, for pure potency and engagement, but not for accuracy or longevity. As people catch on, we will build up a societal defense immune system against purely mimetic viruses. Even now, I see many people simply detaching, having been burned thinking we were entering a societal event horizon—it turns out material reality was still dictated by material necessity, and the old powers that be are still in control, if temporarily perturbed. 4chan may still spin off a potent meme every once in a while, causing people to think that vaccines are population control, but after getting burned enough, and evading fact-checkers and censorship, people will eventually fall into habituation, and learned epistemic helplessness, back into the arms of traditional media, willing and occaisonally able to interpret things accurately…
Here is the entire post.