Category: Uncategorized
Can liberals be pacifists?
This is mostly a podcast about Benjamin Britten, and in particular his War Requiem, with Rebecca Lowe (former singer and conductor, in addition to philosopher and also her current role at Mercatus).
Here is the YouTube, here is the transcript and further listening links. Excerpt:
LOWE: Yeah, so we should think about what it means for a conscientious objector to have written this work, which is supposed, in some sense, to maybe pay tribute to the soldiers. Maybe, in some sense, it’s supposed to play some role in the British response to the war. At a time when, of course, conscientious objectors had been seen as maybe betraying the nation. There are very interesting, tense questions about the choice of Britten to compose this work.
COWEN: And Benjamin Britten himself, he described the work as a reparation.
LOWE: Yes.
COWEN: Paid to the dead soldiers.
LOWE: That’s right.
COWEN: I think in some ways, he always had World War I more in mind than World War II. But other parties involved, of course, didn’t see it that way.
LOWE: That’s true.
COWEN: But Wilfred Owen was a World War I poet. And that was the formative experience for him, was World War I. And also, the Spanish Civil War influenced him greatly. So, he wanted to do this work, and I’m not sure he ever found a way to make it succeed with World War II. That, to me, is one of the drawbacks of the work.
Definitely recommended, it is fresh material throughout. Can you find a better podcast on Britten and his War Requiem, arguably his greatest work? And here is the Rebecca Lowe Substack and podcast more generally.
Tuesday assorted links
1. How did the United States bend the health care cost curve?
2. Why are you reading fewer books?
3. Dean Ball on the Papal encyclical. My interpretation is a little different, and I suppose more Straussian. The Pope is basically telling us that AI is here to stay. If the detailed analysis seems thin to you, there is no need to distract from that more important and more essential message. That the Pope presented this with Anthropic, and for that matter quoted Tolkien/Gandalf, and allowed the use of em dashes, does not harm my interpretation. And here is what Perplexity thought I would say.
5. A one-time treatment for bad cholesterol? (NYT) And a Twitter thread.
The corporate tax rate really matters
Three findings emerge. First, improvements in aggregate tax competitiveness are positively and significantly associated with real GDP per capita growth, robust to a wide range of controls. Second, this aggregate effect is driven entirely by the corporate tax pillar; no other component displays a significant growth effect. Third, the corporate tax effect materializes contemporaneously and accumulates over time, with a statistically significant three-year cumulative effect of approximately 0.16 percentage points per one-point improvement in the corporate tax score. These results suggest that the full architecture of the corporate tax system, not merely the headline statutory rate, is what matters for growth.
That is from a recent paper by Michael Christla and Monika Köppl–Turyna. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
What I’ve been reading
1. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent. A beautifully written, first-rate intellectual biography of Buber. It is hard to imagine finding a better book on him.
2. Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha, Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant. How did this strange story end up happening? This book offers the best set of explanations I have seen. But Hoxha himself remains a psychological cipher at the end of it all? It turns out he never thought Mao was much of an ideologue, being too influenced by Chinese culture and thought. Also I had not previously realize how much Albania’s growing youth population — with the most natalist demographics in Europe at the time — was considered a major threat to the regime.
3. Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902-1945. Such an excellent and high-level work. And the author is not afraid to accuse Popper of making everything about himself, and also writing on topics (Plato, Hegel, Marx) where he was less than well-informed. I had not known that Popper hated Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna book, feeling that the actual Viennese environment at the time was far more positive and forward-looking than most intellectual historians were inclined to grant. Nor had I known how cut off Popper was during his New Zealand years, as there were no plane connections, New Zealand news did not cover foreign affairs very much, and the mail was painfully slow. Popper also wanted to turn the Mont Pelerin Society into a coalition group, including socialists. That did not happen.
4. Frank Callanan, James Joyce: A Political Life. An excellent, lengthy study, I now see Joyce as intensely political whereas I did not before. “His fiercely Parnellian critique of Ireland and Irish nationalism is only politically intelligible as written from within Irish nationalism. It is an argument addressed to Irish nationalists. The paradox of Joyce’s nationalism is that it is in his critique of nationalism that his nationalism is most evident.” As Italo Svevo once stated: “Joyce is twice a rebel, against England and against Ireland.”
5. Suzy Hansen, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan. An insightful look into Erdoğan, Turkish Islamism, parts of Istanbul, and most of all how Turkey slid into autocracy. One of the best case studies I know of on how a fragile democracy can go away.
All of these books are very good. I’ve been seeing complaining in the press lately, and on social media, about the paucity of book reviews these days. Well, no one is stopping you from reviewing books! Just do it.
*Silent Friend*
An excellent and profound movie, large screen essential. I take this movie to be an engagement with the truths of German romanticism (set in Marburg, with Geothe and Rilke as relevant texts), and asking whether that romanticism decays over time, or simply morphs into new forms and thus renews itself, even in an age of high tech and near-universal measurement. The narrative swings back and forth between those two views like a pendulum, ultimately settling upon the notion of continuation. Was perhaps Stevie Wonder an influence too? The great Tony Leung stars, here is a trailer. Reviews are very positive but they do not seem to understand the film well?
New Aesthetics awards
Patrick Collison tweets:
Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants.
Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on the whole thing:
• Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many.
• It’s too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest.
• The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take.
• Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: “American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build).” This was evident in the submissions.
• AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider.
• Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That’s unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested.
• There’s a lot to know that is not written down, and I’m very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.
I will offer thoughts of my own soon. Here is our original call for proposals.
Monday assorted links
1. Sampling DNA from animal skin parchments.
2. The making of Indian statistics.
3. What happens if your iPhone is stolen in London? (NYT)
4. Brazil school phone bans: “We then show that test scores, which were trending similarly in the two groups prior to the ban, improved by 0.06 s.d. in treatment schools relative to control.”
The carousel trade (arbitrage)
Imagine two companies which are secretly controlled by the same people. If company A imported some phones, then sold them to company B, it charged VAT on the deal. If company B then exported the phones, it reclaimed — from the government — the VAT it had paid to company A. the integrity of the VAT system depends on the two totals balancing out. The money that A pays in is equl to the money that B takes back. The scam lay in A disappearing and not handing over the money it owed, but B till claiming it. The hidden owners of the two firms therefore earned for themselves 17.5 per cent (the rate at which VAT was then charged) of the value of the shipment of the phones. The more phones you sold to yourself, the more money you made.
That is John Lanchester in the LRB, citing Oliver Bullough’s Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won.
Emergent Ventures winners, 54th cohort
Kenny Guo, Krish Chhajer, Luthira Abeykoon Mudiyansela, Toronto, quantum computing.
Jolie Gan, Calgary/SF, a publication on science and meta-science.
Hudson Mitchell-Pullman, 16, San Diego, how users interact with LLMs to learn.
Adnan Manna, 17, Amman, Jordan, finding exoplanets.
Heloise Hoffman, Stanford, biomedical research to cure her own rare disease.
M.F. Libano-Monteiro, Portugal/LSE, economics education through video.
Scott Ellis, Mississauga, Ontario, making movies with AI.
Adrian Martinez, 17, Mission Viejo, CA, math, education.
Aadil Ali, San Francisco, biographies of young achievers.
Chandler Reilly, Denver, Substack on Denver and its economics.
Jeremy Kingsley, London, AI, podcasting and Substack.
Michelle Lin, 15, Mclean, VA, curved-surface stitching on deformable materials, and algorithms.
Brunella Tipismana, general career support, writing, Peru/New Haven/NYC.
Theo Cross-Zamirski, Cambridge, UK, platform to power math education.
Beatrice Erkers, Stockholm, progress ideas in Sweden.
Sunday assorted links
1. Are “dad books” a dying breed? (WSJ) And are podcasts to blame?
2. Profile of Camille Paglia at age 79 (London Times, gated).
3. Olivier Blanchard: ” I certainly worry about the evolution of US public debt and the size of primary deficits. But, while there is a lot of discussion/worry about the increase in nominal interest rates, the 10-year inflation indexed rate, which is the relevant one for debt dynamics, has remained surprisingly stable.”
4. Revana Sharfuddin: “Uncertainty around immigration policy may have downstream effects on fertility decisions. We probably underestimate how much family formation responds to policy instability.”
6. Nagel on Scanlon.
7. “No child deaths have been definitively linked to Covid vaccines, according to a report from the FDA that was quietly made public.” Article here.
*Equality of Permission*
The subtitle is The Politics of Feasible Liberalism, and the author is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. The author wishes to argue for liberalism as opposed to statism, a very good book. And unlike many authors, Deirdre also tells you what she thinks of everyone else’s views. Due out in November.
Saturday assorted links
1. Fortune covers my AI talk for Sana in NYC. Plus my NBA predictions, made Thursday a.m.
2. SGA does seem to flop more.
4. Thomas Sargent lectures on YouTube.
5. Why Japanese companies do so many different things.
6. Fresh Knausgård.
What should I ask Chase Koch?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Chase and Charles Koch have a new book out, namely
India fertility facts of the day
Ten notable facts from India’s new SRS Statistical Report 2024 published two days ago:
1) India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped to 1.88 (rounded up to 1.9 in the figures) in 2024 from 1.92 in 2023.
2) This drop is roughly the historical speed of the last few decades. India’s TFR was 4.3 in 1985 and it has been falling around 0.06 per year since then.
3) For those who think “smartphones are the reason for the fall of TFR,” there is not much change in India’s TFR after their introduction. Of course, this might only apply to India.
4) India’s sex ratio at birth continues moving toward natural levels. It has grown from 907 girls per 1000 boys in 2018-2020 to 918 in 2022-2024. Without sex selection (e.g., selective abortions), it should be around 952.
5) Nonetheless, this bias still means that India’s replacement rate is around 2.15, not 2.1 as in other advanced economies.
6) Hence, India is already 0.27 children below the replacement rate and the gap continues growing.
7) However, this figure hides large regional differences. Kerala is at 1.3, well below the U.S. and approaching Italian and Spanish levels (Delhi is even lower, at 1.2, but it is a peculiar case), while Bihar remains at 2.9.
8) In terms of the rural/urban divide, rural India is at 2.1 and urban India at 1.5.
9) From everything I can see, India’s TFR will continue to fall, and it should reach 1.57 (the current level of the U.S.) around 2031 unless something significant changes.
10) Having said that, India’s data has a non-trivial margin of error, and a new Census might change our reading of the situation. In summary, India is following the same path as everyone else. No Indian fertility Sonderweg!
That is all from Jesús Fernández-Villaverde.
*In the Realm of the Last Man*
As Mark Lilla, a recovering Straussian, once remarked, they [the Straussians] were like craftsmen building a house brick by brick on a foundation that Leo Strauss had laid. But they would never become architects of that house, or decide that the house was too small for them to comfortably live in. Moreoever, Strauss disparaged social science and what he considered naive forms of positivism prevalent in American universities. This led some of his followers to disdain merely empirical accounts of current events. If you are more of a Hegelian, you need to pay attention to actual history if you are to give an account of how ideas play out in the real world.
That is from Frank Fukuyama’s forthcoming memoir, recommended of course.