Category: Uncategorized
*Atlantis*
Last night I watched this Ukrainian movie on AppleTV. It was released in 2019 and is set in 2025, in the aftermath of a major war with Russia, which ended the year before. Due to radiation and other post-conflict problems, the eastern half of Ukraine is essentially uninhabitable. Ukraine, however, won the war because Russia underestimated Ukrainian guerrilla warfare, instead preparing for a war that the Ukrainians would fight with tanks (they didn’t). The fundamental Ukrainian activity in this dystopian, apocalyptic postwar order is that of archaeology, uncovering wartime ruins and also corpses of Russian soldiers; I took that to be a stand-in for a broader understanding of Ukrainian history.
Originally this film had been marketed as “science fiction.”
Addendum: I thought the movie was excellent, though not for all tastes. There are of course periodic visual references to Tarkovsky. All the roles in the movie are played by military veterans and volunteers and paramedics, not professional actors. Here is its Wikipedia page. Here is the Variety review.
Corn fact of the day
…in the United States: they find that the 95th percentile of corn yield is 190 percent larger than the 5th percentile yield. For comparison, the 95–5 ratio for Uganda is 9,304 percent and for Tanzania 2,558 percent…
That is from Tavneet Suri and Christopher Udry. Via Gaurav Sood.
The game theory of attacking nuclear power plants
From my latest Bloomberg column (do I really need to indent my own text?):
“Putin would like to find a way of making nuclear threats without quite incurring the liability from … making nuclear threats.
Enter nuclear power plants. When Russian forces attack the plant, there is some chance that something goes wrong, such as a radiation spill. But more likely than not, the plant will hold up, and most dangerous processes can be shut down and the very worst outcomes avoided. You can think of Putin as choosing a “nuclear radiation deployment” with only some small probability.
Why might he do this? Well, he is showing that the use of broader nuclear deployments is not out of the question. He is also showing that he is willing to take a huge risk.
Most of all, he doesn’t much have to fear retaliation. The Western powers cannot know if these nuclear attacks are deliberate strategy or simply an accident of tactics in the field, and so — if only for that reason — they will not respond with a major escalation. If Russian forces moved on Estonia, they might be courting a very serious NATO response. But not in this situation.
You don’t have to believe that Putin sat in his lair rubbing his hands as he dreamed up this diabolical strategy. It’s also possible that the attack on the nuclear power plant started by mistake, or was ordered by lower-level commanders. Putin then simply allowed it to continue, perhaps out of a general love of chaos. At the very least, he did not consider it a priority to stop the attack.
Game theory doesn’t always have to be about explicit plans and intentions. It also can help explain why “invisible hand” mechanisms lead people to a particular point in the strategy tree, as if they had those strategies as conscious intentions.
Attacking the nuclear power plant also illuminates some other parts of game theory. Ukraine and its people are taking very heavy losses and are hoping for NATO to intervene on their behalf. If the conflict seems riskier to all of Europe, and not just Ukraine, the odds of such intervention improve.
In this sense, the attack on the nuclear power plant does not have to be entirely bad for Ukrainian prospects in the war. The Ukrainian leadership is rightly horrified by this attack, due to the risks for Ukrainian citizens. But the attack could also mobilize European public opinion on behalf of military intervention for Ukraine. If the war greatly increases chances for the spread of dangerous nuclear radiation, then the likelihood that Germany, France, Turkey and other nations will intervene also greatly increases.
Notice, however, that the Russian position here may be sounder than it at first appears. European citizens care more about radiation in Ukraine than do American citizens, for reasons of simple proximity. Putin may realize he can put Europeans at greater risk so long as he doesn’t provoke an intervention from the U.S. military, which would probably be decisive. It is a risky strategy that he might just get away with.
If you are the Ukrainian government, your incentive is to make the nuclear power plant attack sound as risky and precarious as possible. Indeed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has done exactly that.”
I am sorry to say that the column does not have an especially optimistic ending.
From Ryan Petersen at Flexport
“I just couldn’t sit around watching this humanitarian crisis in Ukraine without doing anything about it. So Flexport is organizing a massive airlift of relief goods to refugee camps in Eastern Europe starting next week.
You can read more about the full operation below. It’s inspiring stuff.
We’re looking to raise money to pay for more flights—Flexport is covering the first full cargo plane full of relief goods, but we’re asking others to donate including potential corporate sponsors to help us pay for more flights.
Donations are open at Flexport.org/donate and fully tax-deductible through our 501c3 partners.”
Friday assorted links
1. Graeme Wood Atlantic interview with MBS.
2. “Russian businesses in U.S. face threats, vandalism over invasion.”
3. Avi Schiffman’s “UkraineTakeShelter.com is an independent platform connecting Ukrainian refugees with potential hosts and housing.”
4. Geoffrey Hosking has written (by far) the best book on Russia I know.
5. Fantasy Author Raises $15.4 Million in 24 Hours to Self-Publish (NYT). And Kadryov markets in everything.
6. Fikret Amirov. Very good, moving.
7. “Focused Protection” was a dubious idea from the beginning. Best form of it was to be on the vaccines and antivirals bandwagon! With enthusiasm, not “enthusiasm about natural immunity” >> “enthusiasm about vaccines,” as I have seen from so many. It is vaccines that are focused protection.
8. Data on Russian crypto ownership, and government plans to regulate the sector. And “Train tickets for the short trip from St. Petersburg to Helsinki cost over 9000 euros yesterday.”
9. Should it matter which nationalities and ethnicities are seeking to cross your borders? Relevant to the Nigerians stuck in Ukraine who are not so welcome elsewhere.
*The Journey of Humanity*
The author is Oded Galor and the subtitle is The Origins of Wealth and Inequality.
Thursday assorted links
Sentences about unemployment
As in the data, the price of risk in our model sharply increases in recessions. The benefit from hiring new workers therefore greatly declines, leading to a large decrease in job vacancies and an increase in unemployment of the same magnitude as in the data.
Yes, nominal wages are sticky but this is the other and all-important side of the hiring equation.
That is from a new and important NBER working paper by Patrick J. Kehoe, Pierlauro Lopez, Virgiliu Midrigan, and Elena Pastorino. There is much more to their general model than that single sentence would indicate.
(Small) markets in everything
Ralph Nader spent a career bashing corporate executives. Now he’s written a book praising some. It’s not going down too well.
Tentatively called “Twelve CEOs I Have Known and Admired,” the book is more than a little off-brand for the man who upended the world of auto safety with the blockbuster “Unsafe at Any Speed” and then attacked corporate behavior in a number of other industries.
Based on a string of rejection letters from publishers, Mr. Nader said he fears he’s been typecast, making any accolades he might have for corporate tycoons a hard sell. His literary agent, Ronald Goldfarb, advised him to change course and go negative, he says.
“He wanted chapters on bad CEOs,” Mr. Nader said of Mr. Goldfarb.
“I didn’t tell him what to write,” Mr. Goldfarb retorts. “I told him what I could sell.” The two parted ways after working on the manuscript for three months.
Mood affiliation strikes again. Nader fans don’t want to positively affiliate with CEOs, and “love letter” types do not always wish to affiliate with Nader. (By the way, here is my 2014 chat with Nader.) Here is the rest of the Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg WSJ article.
How is U.S. urban public safety changing?
This paper argues that changes in human activity during the COVID-19 pandemic led to an unusual divergence between crime rates and victimization risk in US cities. Most violent crimes declined during the pandemic. But analysis using foot traffic data shows that the risk of street crime victimization was elevated throughout 2020; people in public spaces were 15-30 percent more likely to be robbed or assaulted. This increase is unlikely to be explained by changes in crime reporting or selection into outdoor activities by potential victims. Traditional crime rates may present a misleading view of recent changes in public safety.
Here is the paper by Maxim Massenkopf and Aaron Chalfin, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Further Wednesday assorted links
1. The boycott of Russian science. In general I am more comfortable with boycotting the Russian nation directly, rather than aiming at individual “Russians” (how defined?) outside the borders, who may or may not have a legally meaningful link/liability to the Putin government. And simply calling them “oligarchs” does not change that calculus!
2. Ukrainian currency down only ten percent since November.
3. Art works being lent by Russia. So far not yet cancelled.
4. Very good FT piece on the political powerlessness of the Russian oligarchs.
5. Crypto start-ups with no real names attached (NYT), the facts of the article are more interesting than the moralizing.
Wednesday assorted links
Tuesday assorted links
1. “People emotionally tied to robots can undermine relationships with co-workers.”
2. Metaculus giving about 75% odds that Putin is still in power a year from now. And Fiona Hill on the mind of Putin.
3. Russians have dollar-denominated mortgages.
4. Those new service sector jobs who needs a bear conflict manager?
5. Do you really want that private ambulance in Sweden?
Anti-Russia sentiment is the new McCarthyism
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column:
The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is canceling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency. I expect more institutions to follow suit. Russia’s contemporary art scene, already financially struggling, fears ostracism from museums and collectors, mostly because of Putin’s recent actions.
Unwise, says I. And:
It is simply not possible to draw fair or accurate lines of demarcation. What about performers who may have favored Putin in the more benign times of 2003 and now are skeptical, but have family members still living in Russia? Do they have to speak out?
Another question: Who exactly counts as Russian? Ethnic Russians? Russian citizens? Former citizens? Ethnic Russians born in Ukraine? If you were an ethnic minority born under the Soviet Union, your former Soviet passport may have explicitly stated that you were not Russian.
And what about citizens of Belarus, which according to some reports is planning to send troops into Ukraine? Might they be subject to such strictures as well? How about citizens of China, which abstained from the United Nations vote condemning Russia’s invasion? Which wars are performers from Rwanda or Democratic Republic of the Congo required to repudiate?
When exactly is this ban supposed to end?
And to close:
If anything, the McCarthyism of the 1950s is a bit more explicable than the cancel culture of the present. At least it was trying to address what was then considered a great threat. That said, McCarthyism is not a practice America should want to revive. Witch hunts, by their very nature, do not bring out the best in people, Americans very much included.
I guess we will really see who is against cancel culture and who is not.
Announcing the Future Fund
We’re thrilled to announce the FTX Future Fund: a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. We plan to distribute at least $100M this year, and potentially a lot more, depending on how many outstanding opportunities we find. In principle, we’d be able to deploy up to $1B this year.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d love to fund, but it’s not exhaustive—we’re open to a broad range of ideas. We’re particularly keen to launch massively scalable projects: projects that could grow to productively spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Our areas of interest include the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic biorisk, improving institutions, economic growth, great power relations, effective altruism, and more.
If you’d like to launch one of our proposed projects, or have another idea for a project in our areas of interest—please apply!Please submit your applications by March 21 to be considered in our first open funding round.
And the team is:
Nick Beckstead (CEO), Leopold Aschenbrenner, Will MacAskill, and Ketan Ramakrishnan.
Here is much more information, including for applying, and the links on top of the page have further detail yet. Emergent Ventures winner Leopold Aschenbrenner has been a driving force behind this, congratulations to Leopold! Also notable is this:
- Our Regranting Program. We’re offering discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers. Our hope is that regrantors will fund great people and projects that weren’t on our radar! We’ve already invited the first cohort, and we’re also opening up a public process to be considered as a regrantor.
Recommended.