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My Conversation with Chuck Klosterman
Excellent stuff, we had so much fun we kept on going for an extra half hour, as he decided to ask me a bunch of questions about economics and personal finance. Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the CWT summary:
Chuck joined Tyler to discuss the challenges of writing about recent history, the “slow cancellation of the future” that began in the aughts, how the internet widened cultural knowledge but removed its depth, why the context of Seinfeld was in some ways more important than its content, what Jurassic Park illustrates about public feelings around scientific progress in the ’90s, why the ’90s was the last era of physical mass subcultures, why it’s uncommon to be shocked by modern music, how his limited access to art when growing up made him a better critic, why Spin Magazine became irrelevant with the advent of online streaming, what made Grantland so special, what he learned from teaching in East Germany, the impact of politics on the legacies of Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, how sports often rewards obnoxious personalities, why Wilt Chamberlain is still underrated, how the self-awareness of the Portland Trail Blazers undermined them, how the design of the NFL makes sports rivalries nearly impossible, how pro-level compensation prevents sports gambling from corrupting players, why so many people are interested in e-sports, the unteachable element of writing, why he didn’t make a great editor on his school paper, what he’d say to a room filled with ex-lovers, the question he’d most like to ask his parents, his impressions of cryptocurrency, why he’s trying to focus on what he has in the current moment rather than think too much about future plans, the power of charisma, and more.
Whew! Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I see the world as follows. Every decade, to me, is super weird, but the 1980s and ’90s pretended they weren’t weird. The ’80s pretended to be good versus evil. The ’90s pretended that good won. But when crypto comes and persists, you have to drop all pretense that the age you’re living in isn’t totally weird.
You have internet crypto, and everyone admits, right now, everything’s weird. And that, to me, is the fundamental break with the 1990s because everyone pretended most things were normal and that Seinfeld was your dose of weird, right? Jason Alexander — that’s a very manageable weird.
KLOSTERMAN: Oh, absolutely.
COWEN: Some guy in an apartment in New York City cracking sarcastic jokes — like, whoop-de-do.
And:
KLOSTERMAN: …this guy, Mark Fisher, who’s dead now, had this idea about the slow cancellation of the future. I feel like that’s one of the most profound ideas that I’ve come across in the last 10 years of my life, and it seems so palpable that this is occurring.
An example I will often use is, if you take, say, 10 minutes from an obscure film in 1965 with no major actors, and then you take 10 minutes from an obscure film from 1980 where nobody became famous, and you show anyone these 10-minute clips, they will have no problem whatsoever figuring out which one came first. Even a little kid can look at a movie from 1965 and a movie from 1980 and instantly understand that one predates the other.
But if you do that with a film from 2005 and a film from 2020 — again, an obscure film where you don’t recognize the actors — you’re just looking at it aesthetically and trying to deduce which one came first and which one came second. It’s almost impossible.
This phenomenon just seems to almost be infiltrating every aspect of the culture…
And:
KLOSTERMAN: Before I did this podcast, I listened to your podcast with Žižek.
COWEN: Oh yeah, that was hilarious.
KLOSTERMAN: Are you friends with him? It sure seemed like it. And if you are, what is it like to be with him when he is not in a performative scenario?
Recommended. And again, here is Chuck’s new book The Nineties.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Jason Furman on gas tax incidence, policy economics, and other matters. And more. And more.
2. The redistribution result seems to be false.
3. The mainstreaming of “sexual wellness” products (NYT).
4. Rafael Guthmann on the Roman empire and Walter Scheidel and political fragmentation.
5. Magpies outwit research scientists by helping each other remove their tracking devices.
A big thank you to Jane Street
To the company that is, not the street:
We trade a wide range of financial products, including ETFs, Equities, Bonds, Options, Commodities, Digital Assets, Futures, and Currencies. We have global offices which allow us to make markets continually on more than 200 electronic exchanges and other trading venues in more than 40 countries around the world.
A number of people at Jane Street have donated a total of over $20 million to Emergent Ventures and Emergent Ventures India, as well as a significant sum to Fast Grants. This support has existed for a while now, but they’ve always been anonymous donations. I am happy and honored to now be able to recognize them publicly, even if they prefer not to be individually named!
Jane Street is renowned for its brainy, challenging environment, and also for its ability to spot and recruit talent, so that makes their support for Emergent Ventures and Fast Grants all the more meaningful to me. One further implication is that, if this is an appropriate option for you, please do consider working there. I’ve always had a blast during my visits, and I recall one time where I gave a talk, we all went out to dinner, and then quite late everyone went back to the Jane Street office to play chess, bughouse, and other games. They are better at these games than you might think, update your other expectations accordingly!
What has been driving America’s opioid problem?
Matt Yglesias had an excellent (gated) Substack on this question lately, now Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner and Karen A. Kopecky have a new and quite valuable paper. I found this to be the most interesting segment:
Through the eyes of the model, there were two key forces. The first force is the decline in prices for bot prescription and black market opioids. This had a big effect. The second force is the increase in the dosages per prescription meted out by doctors. This also had a significant impact. The fact that doctors kept pain sufferers on prescription opioids for a longer period of time had little effect. Last, an analysis is conducted on medical interventions that reduce either the probability of becoming addicted or the odds of an addict dying from an overdose. Reducing the odds of addiction can result in even more deaths due to the rise in users.
The opioid problem is a very difficult one to solve! I should stress that the paper has other results of interest.
What should I ask Daniel Gross?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, noting that he is my co-author on Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creators, and Winners Around the World.
Daniel is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist and here is his Wikipedia page. Here is Daniel on Twitter. Here is Daniel’s ideas page. Here is Daniel on his work, including Pioneer.
Since we are co-authors, this won’t just be the standard interview format, how do you think we should do it? And what should we ask each other?
What is so great about *Pet Sounds*?
That question is the subject of this short Holden Karnofsky essay. Many people told Holden it is the best album ever, some citing its use of the recording studio, and he tried to work his way through that claim, basically remaining skeptical. Here are various responses to him. Here is a piece explaining the wonders of Pet Sounds, it is OK enough but not so insightful. I would stress the following points:
1. It is an album of sadness, loss, and infinite longing. Melancholy. Do I know of a sadder album? Listen to the lyrics. And yet it is all set amongst the sunshine and girls and southern California. As for the harmonies, they are continually building up expectation and never satisfying it. It is necessary for the album to end on the down note of “Caroline, No,” a song which itself just fades away and ends, merging into the “pet sounds” that give the album its name. I think of the combination of the sadness and the rising and swelling but never satisfied expectations as the key feature of Pet Sounds.
2. It is worth a listen-through following only the bass lines. You also will hear the huge influence on Paul McCartney.
2b. It is worth a listen-through following only the harmonies. The bells. The percussion. The woodwinds.
3. I don’t even think it is the best Beach Boys album. Or sort of it is. Overall I find the Smile period to be more profound, noting that this material ended up spread out over a number of separate albums. That said, every single composition on Pet Sounds is excellent.
4. “You Still Believe in Me” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” I both prefer to “God Only Knows,” which perhaps I have heard too many times.
5. Overall I find the secret to the Beach Boys (and some Beatles) listening to be their sound world. Interpret the Beach Boys through John Cage! Listen to a simple song such as “Vegetables,” but on a very good sound system or with head phones. Surrounded by silence. Or pick some of the other works from the Smile period, or even Wild Honey or the top cuts on Sunflower, such as tracks 7-10. Try to discern the sound of the air behind the music, the silences, and the tautness of the sounds that are sent your way. Internalize that understanding (if you are trying this for the Beatles, pick the noises at the end of “You Never Give Me Your Money.”) Carry that understanding of the sound world with you every time you hear a Beach Boys song. At first you will hear that sound world in the “pet sounds” at the end of the album, most of all the train, and then will you will hear it throughout the entire album.
Musical life will never be the same again.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Democrats talking about their political problems, circa 1989. (That was then, this is now!)
3. Kinds of people, in universities. Or is there only one?
4. Will inter-state war take place in cities? And some reasons why India supports Russia. And one Ukraine book list.
5. Correlations. Cowen’s Second Law. And regulatory diffusion.
Monday assorted links
1. “Amid escalating concern over global access to Covid-19 vaccines, BioNTech (BNTX) disclosed details about its plans to boost production in Africa. But the effort was met with a mixed reaction because the approach snubs a parallel effort by the World Health Organization.” No need to even click on the link, really (plus it is gated).
2. New study of the English Enclosures.
3. Maybe he should be on Metaculus? And good Ulrich Speck thread on Putin and Ukraine. Speck’s view is very close to my own.
5. Does the marshmallow test replicate?
6. Very good Noah Smith interview with Emi Nakamura on macro.
Woke, feminized CIA sentences to ponder
From River Page:
The CIA, likewise, has been most successful in its own kind of culture war, whether it be through the CCF, anti-Soviet propaganda, or the lead-up to the Iraq War. Regardless of their failures, both the CIA and the professional class use their adeptness at culture war as a means of self-justification. The CIA utilizes the new dialect of power because it grants the agency legitimacy within the ruling elite; the Left and its professional-class vanguards cry foul because they do not want to admit their own involvement in the credentialing and reproduction of this elite.
Right-wing critics acknowledge the power of wokeness but, like leftists, mistakenly believe that it is a bona fide political project capable of changing institutions rather than merely reifying them. The conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari’s dystopian fantasy about a future Kamala Harris presidency, in which America is in danger because, among other things, “the vast majority of our spooks spend their days analyzing their identities along intersectional lines of race, gender and sexuality,” presupposes a level of competence in the pre-woke CIA that is far beyond what it deserves given the historical record—the pre-woke spooks hardly kept America safe from danger. There is, however, an illuminating portion of Ahmari’s hypothetical that reveals an essential truth about “wokeness.” In the future imagined by Ahmari, the American military is ill-prepared to execute its mission, having been busy naming and renaming bases. When discussing Guantanamo Bay—now appropriately called Naval Base Mumia Abu Jamal—a staffer passively notes that the mission of the base hasn’t changed. This suggests that even the most aggressive right-wing critics of “wokeness” question its ability to change anything beneath the surface of American politics; it can change appearances, not purposes.
And this:
As the public face and self-understanding of the CIA has changed, sympathetic popular culture depictions of the organization have relied on similar themes of feminism, wokeness, and self-actualization to portray the agency’s work as morally complicated but necessary.
Here is the full piece, and for the pointer I thank a loyal MR reader.
Sunday assorted links
Talent Hoarding in Organizations
Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers. However, because managers are evaluated on team performance, they have an incentive to hoard talented workers, thus jeopardizing the efficient allocation of talent within firms. This study provides the first empirical evidence of talent hoarding using a unique combination of personnel records and application data from a large manufacturing firm. When managers rotate to a new position and temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers’ applications for promotions increase by 123%. Marginal applicants,who would not have applied in the absence of manager rotations, are three times as likely as average applicants to land a promotion, and perform well in higher-level positions. By reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers, talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent. Because female workers react more to talent hoarding than males, talent hoarding perpetuates gender inequality in representation and pay at the firm.
That is a new paper by Ingrid Haegele, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The new culture that is Virginia public high school
“I see these people just not wearing a mask, or wearing one pulled down, like, under their chin,” said Swan, “and my brain just immediately goes, ‘That person does not share the same ideals as me. We won’t get along.’ ” She added: “They may not be a bad person. They may just be thinking the same things as their parents.”
…School now feels, Swan said, “like a war zone”: a raging partisan battle that no one can opt out of, because every single student arrives with evidence of their politics — those without masks typically lean right, she said — written across their faces. Swan said she has stopped speaking with students who go maskless because they are dismissive of the decision to mask and unwilling to hear a different opinion.
Here is the full story, which is interesting throughout. Perhaps the French solution would be to ban masks! In the meantime, how about a policy of mandated no-masks for the teachers and administrators, unless they have health exemptions, and mask choice for each student? Or how else might we limit social strife over masking decisions? How can we move closer to the no-school masking equilibria of much of Europe>
As a side note, I believe masks have some effectiveness, but not total effectiveness, and so it is striking to me how much those in real danger think the masked environment is somehow acceptable. Some amount of risk is totally, absolutely fine, as they are not home schooling (which still would involve risk, I might add). But risk beyond that level is somehow a complete no-no — is it that they all have so accurately done the cost-benefit calculations using expected utility theory? Keep in mind that along a great number of the equilibrium paths, masks delay but do not prevent infection.
Saturday assorted links
1. Very nice Spectator coverage of Conversations with Tyler; I believe the author is an undergraduate. My favorite sentence was “He embodies the American work ethic.”
2. The guy who creates the Planet Money economics videos on TikTok (NYT).
3. Ivermectin efficacy continues to completely fail in the more serious studies. Here are further words of wisdom. This one’s a wrap, and has been for some time now.
4. Very close relatives to Covid-19 found in bats in Laos. Lowers the probability of the “gain of function” hypotheses.
5. Good Nathaniel Popper thread on NFTs.
6. The Pfizer pill is now more available (Bloomberg).
The Covid pandemic, circa February 2022
It is widely believed that speaking helps to spread Covid, including in public places. Yet if you try to book a ticket on the Acela (a term also used sarcastically to describe a particular brand of Eastern elites), you can get tickets only in the Quiet Car. The rest of the train is already sold out, because people prefer to be able to talk.
You may not think that is how things should be, but that is how they are. And no, the Acela does not run from Alabama to West Virginia.