Category: Uncategorized
Sunday assorted links
2. When do ideas get easier to find? Hard to excerpt, but important piece.
3. The economics of stadium names.
4. Pollution from car tire wear.
5. The Swedish history of not feeding other people’s children.
6. The 1993 ferry sinking off the coast of Jeremie, Haiti had a high death toll — some sources say over one thousand (does anyone know the proper final toll?). Yet the incident doesn’t seem to have its own Wikipedia page.
Saturday assorted links
Those new (?) service sector jobs
The level of pay is new at least:
Who knew that LA lifeguards—who work in the sun, ocean surf, and golden sands of California— could reap such unbelievable financial reward?
It’s time we put Baywatch on pay watch. In 2019, we found top-paid lifeguards made up to $392,000.
Unfortunately, today, the pay and benefits are even more lucrative.
Daniel Douglas was the most highly paid and earned $510,283, an increase from $442,712 in 2020. As the “lifeguard captain,” he out-earned 1,000 of his peers: salary ($150,054), perks ($28,661), benefits ($85,508), and a whopping $246,060 in overtime pay.
The second highest paid, lifeguard chief Fernando Boiteux, pulled down $463,517 – up from $393,137 last year.
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found 98 LA lifeguards earned at least $200,000 including benefits last year, and 20 made between $300,000 and $510,283. Thirty-seven lifeguards made between $50,000 and $247,000 in overtime alone.
And it’s not only about the cash compensation. After 30 years of service, LA lifeguards can retire as young as 55 on 79-percent of their pay.
Hard to believe? The source is given as a FOIA request to LA County. The details provided are so specific that if they are wrong, some kind of lawsuit would be forthcoming. So maybe this is for real! Here is the full article. Via Anecdotal.
How the heritability of politics works?
Estimates from the Minnesota Twin Study show that sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public – much more so than population-level results (57%) – but with much lower heritability (29%) for the public’s bottom half.
Here is the research article by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Martin Johnson. The reference is from Matt Yglesias, and one possibility is that you are born with inherited values, but you need to be educated to learn where those values ought to put you on the political spectrum.
Friday assorted links
1. Robert Armstrong at the FT directly addresses my eurozone inflation questions. The results, to me, still do not discriminate against Fischer Black’s “inflation will be whatever people expect” hypothesis.
2. David A. Price of the Richmond Fed interviews me.
3. Life hacks (NYT).
Data on IR scholars and their views on Russia/Ukraine
MR reader Edmund Levin sent me this very useful piece, based around a poll of IR scholars, with the poll opened on December 16 and if I understand correctly continuing through some point in January 2022.
Here is one question “In the next year, will Russia use military force against Ukrainian military forces or additional parts of the territory of Ukraine where it is not currently operating?” The responses:
Yes 203 56.08%
No 73 20.17%
Do not know 86 23.76%
You will note that the question could simply be referring to some additional police action, which is in fact what many people were predicting at the time. I find it striking that the researchers don’t ask about a full-scale invasion. What percentage would have predicted a full-scale attack?
Here is the same question posed to the regional specialists, namely: “In the next year, will Russia use military force against Ukrainian military forces or additional parts of the territory of Ukraine where it is not currently operating?” The responses are barely different, though slightly better:
Yes 36 (60.0%)
No 12 (20.0%)
Don’t know 12 (20.0%)
I take those results to be 60-40 that a modest majority of the specialists respondents expected further Russian military action in the next year, again noting that additional police action would suffice to generate a “yes” response.
Is that a good or bad performance relative to a full-scale invasion date of February 24, with the massing of Russian troops well underway?
If I turn to the December 3 Washington Post, I see a major article by journalists Shane Harris and Paul Sonne, titled “Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns.” The piece offers plenty of detail, including photos, maps, and good sourcing. Of course it turned out to be correct, and I am only one of many people who realized this at the time. Furthermore, if you saw such a piece, you might have inquired with your network at the time (as I did), including sources in multiple relevant countries, and learned in response that the predictions of this article were no joke, no media excess, and in fact likely to happen. Furthermore the rhetoric, demand, and logistics investments of Russia at the time strongly suggested “attack and blame Ukraine” as the equilibrium, rather than some kind of knife-edge bargaining strategy of “attack with p = 0.6” — that one can learn by reading Thomas Schelling.
So in my view the regional IR specialists were well behind the understanding of two Washington Post reporters, or for that matter well-connected newspaper readers. A lot of the experts don’t seem to have tracked the issue very closely. Here is my previous (lengthy) post on the topic.
Addendum: Levin also points out to me that Sam Charap of Rand got it right as early as fall of 2021.
Thursday assorted links
My Conversation with Jamal Greene
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Jamal and Tyler discuss what he’d change about America’s legal education system, the utility of having non-judges or even non-lawyers on the Supreme Court, how America’s racial history influences our conception of rights, the potential unintended consequences of implementing his vision of rights for America, how the law should view economic liberty, the ideal moral framework for adjudicating conflicts, whether social media companies should consider interdependencies when moderating content on their platforms, how growing up in different parts of New York City shaped his views on pluralism, the qualities that make some law students stand out, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: There is a crude view in popular American society — even possibly correct — that, simply, American society is too legalistic. There’s that book, Three Felonies a Day. If you have expired prescription medicine in your cabinet, you’re committing a felony. People who are very smart will just tell me, “Never talk to a cop. Never talk to an FBI agent.” I’m an upper-class White guy who’s literally never smoked marijuana once, and they’re telling me, “Don’t ever speak with the law.”
Isn’t something wrong there? Is the common intuition that we’re too legalistic correct?
GREENE: I think that we are too apt to submit political disputes to legal resolution. I think that for sure. What your friends are telling you about police officers is slightly different, insofar as one can have a deeply non-legalistic culture in which the correct advice is to not talk to police officers if those people are corrupt, if those people are abusive.
When I hear that advice — and I might be differently situated than you — that’s what people are saying is, someone might be out to trick you. And that might be a mistrust of state power, as you mentioned before. Maybe it’s a rational mistrust of state power, but I don’t know that that’s about legalism, which again, is a separate potential problem.
We tend to formulate our problems in legal terms, as if the right way to solve them is to decide how they are to be resolved by a court, or how they are to be resolved by some adjudicative official, as opposed to thinking about our problems in terms of just inherent in, again, pluralism, which has to be solved through politics, has to be solved through conversation.
COWEN: But we still have whatever is upstream of the American law, the steep historical and cultural background, so anything we do is going to be flavored by that. We’re not ever going to get to a system where the policemen are like the policemen in Germany, for instance, or that the courts are like the courts in Germany.
Given that cultural upstream, again, isn’t the intuition basically correct? Just be suspicious of the law. We should have fewer laws, rely less on the legal process, in essence, deregulate as many different things as we can. Why isn’t that the correct conclusion, rather than building in more rights?
Interesting throughout.
The new *Top Gun* movie (no real spoilers)
I can’t say I loved it, though I found it sociologically interesting. They are still drawing on George Lucas for influence and inspiration? The movie is not so much anti-Woke as pre-Woke, with cliched ethnic characters and adoring women waiting for the heroic men to come back from mission. Little offends me, but what was interesting here was how uninteresting and un-self-aware the treatment was. There are bar scenes and mentor scenes where the same comment would apply. The visuals and aero scenes were very good, but I thought not spectacular. The ending should have been the opposite of what it was. Perhaps most notably, Tom Cruise wears a Taiwanese flag on his jacket. But it seems only for the Taiwanese release.
Wednesday assorted links
Has the world passed “peak agricultural land”?
Expanding agriculture has been the biggest driver of the destruction of the world’s wilderness.
This expansion of agricultural land has now come to an end. After millennia, we have passed the peak, and in recent years global agricultural land use has declined…
Here I have brought together the three leading analyses on the change in global land use – these are shown in the visualization.1 Each uses a different methodology, as explained in the chart. The UN FAO produces the bedrock data for each of these analyses from 1961 onwards; however, the researchers apply their own methodologies on top, and extend this series further back in time.
As you can see, they disagree on how much land is used for agriculture, and the time at which land use peaked. But they do all agree that we have passed the peak.
Here is more from Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data. Of course food production continues to rise.
Tuesday assorted links
Why is eurozone inflation so high?
Eurozone inflation soared to a new record high of 8.1 per cent in the year to May, piling pressure on the European Central Bank to speed up the pace of its exit from ultra-loose monetary policy.
The jump in eurozone price growth, from 7.4 per cent the previous month, was much higher than forecast by economists, who had expected 7.7 per cent, according to a Reuters poll. The core number, which excludes more volatile energy and food prices and is closely watched by ECB policymakers, also rose above expectations to 3.8 per cent, up from 3.5 per cent in April.
Here is more from the FT. A few questions:
1. Why is eurozone services inflation so high, given that the eurozone didn’t do a massive Biden-style stimulus?
2. Were the global monetarists right all along about the key role of the U.S. dollar?
3. Is this all just second-order effects from energy price spikes? But then how do services fit into the picture?
4. Why exactly is inflation 20.1 percent in Estonia?
So exactly which views do we at least to think about revising? Here are some remarks by Jason Furman.
How did the IR community get Russia/Ukraine so wrong?
In proper Tetlockian fashion, I thought I would look back and consider how well IR experts did in the time leading up to the current war in Ukraine. In particular, how many of them saw in advance that a war was coming? And I don’t mean a day or two before the war started, though there were still many commentators in denial at such a late point.
Where to start? One might look at the mid-2021 words of the very smart Daniel Drezner:
Wertheim thinks that Ukraine could trigger a great-power war. Meh. In 2021 we have already had one round of Putin brandishing the sword on Ukraine, Biden standing firm, and the situation de-escalating. NATO’s deterrent power seems important to the region. To be honest I would be more worried about flash points in the Pacific Rim.
Drezner lived in the Donbas region for some while in the 1990s, so he is hardly a stranger to the relevant issues.
More recently Chris Blattman, who is also very able and very smart, wrote in February that Putin probably was not going to attack. Chris has just published a very well-received major book titled Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Path to Peace. Chris does not pretend he is a Ukraine/Russia expert (“I know very little about Ukraine or Russia”), but he does command the literature on war and violent conflict with very real authority.
John Mearsheimer is one who foresaw the very real possibility of a war against Ukraine. I think he is quite wrong about NATO as the provocation, but if you are grading him on predictions alone obviously he wins some serious kudos.
See also this Scott Alexander post, though mainly I am looking for somewhat earlier predictions. By December 2021 a lot of us knew because it was pretty obvious (as for Scott’s puzzlement over me, due to the information flows I am sometimes in, I am not always in a position to make all my predictions fully public).
Garry Kasparov is another one who was right about the motives and the willingness of Putin to engage in further violent conquest, and I will return to him later. Garry knows a lot of IR, but of course he is not an IR scholar in the academic sense of that term.
Who were the other voices speaking up with urgency? IR voices? Comments are open and I hope you can guide me to the very best commentators who got this one right.
When I google “who predicted Russia war against Ukraine” I get Mearsheimer, a retired Russian general, and a blind psychic, but no bevy of IR scholars.
You might argue that IR scholarship is not about prediction, just as some macroeconomic theories themselves imply that recessions cannot be generally predicted. Still, if IR scholars understand this region reasonably well, many more of them should have been raising red flags, no pun intended. There is no analog of the efficient markets hypothesis here, so IR work should not be so far from some degree of predictive accuracy. Not so many scholars (of various kinds) predicted the collapse of the USSR, and I think it is absolutely correct to conclude they did not understand the late 1980s USSR very well. The same can be said of the earlier Iranian revolution, which also was not widely predicted.
As for further instances of getting it wrong, how about Obama’s famous gaffe in the 2012 debate with Mitt Romney, mocking Romney for his fear of Russia and cold war mentality? While Obama was a President and not an IR scholar, this was toward the end of his first-term and his was a “presidency of expertise” like few others have been. Obama was not irresponsibly “winging it” with his sarcastic take on Russian danger, rather it was a common point of view, especially among Democrats and Democratic political science experts at that time.
Or consider this more recently:
During Burns’ Senate confirmation hearing in February, he said that, as CIA director, he would have “four crucial and inter-related priorities.” They were: “China, technology, people and partnerships.” Russia was not on that priorities list.
Again, he is not an IR scholar but still:
To be fair, few people in Washington were bothered by that at the time. The city was far more obsessed, on a bipartisan basis, with China and its ambitions.
Overall, on a scale of one to ten, how would we grade the performance of IR scholars on the Russia-Ukraine war? 2? 2.5?
What are some possible reasons for those individuals so consistently missing the boat on this issue? I see a few options:
1. The IR community is mostly Democrats, and they were unprepared for the narrative that Putin might invade under Biden but not Trump. They too much had mental models where the evil of Putin works through Trump.
2. Perhaps the IR community doesn’t put enough emphasis on historical continuity and persistence. Russia has been messing around in Ukraine since at least Catherine the Great during the 18th century. Since that time, how many of those years has Ukraine been a semi-free, autonomous nation? Hardly any.
3. The IR community is risk-averse, and preserving of its academic reputations, and thus its members are less willing to make bold predictions than say pundits are. You might even think that is good, all things considered, but it will help explain the missed predictions here.
4. Perhaps partly for ideological reasons, it is hard for much of the IR community to internalize how much Putin (correctly?) thinks of the Western Europeans as cowards who will not defend themselves. The Western European nations are supposed to represent reasonable ways of running a polity, committed to social democracy above all else, and that is what so many academics believe as well. It might be hard for them to see that Western Europe has been full of folly, including with respect to nuclear energy and also collective defense.
5. Amongst academic and many of the scholars outside of academia but on the fringes, thoughts about evil are channeled into domestic directions, such as Trump, guns, “the right wing,” and so on. Maybe there isn’t enough mental energy to stay sufficiently alert about possible evils elsewhere. Along related lines, we don’t always have the background in the humanities, and history, to recognize that a certain kind of destructive evil still is possible in today’s world.
What else?
Listing those five points returns my attention to Kasparov, who has been banging the drum about Putin for quite a few years now and telling us Putin is going to do something like this. Garry is often considered an “extremist” by academics, or “not one of the club,” but it seems to me he has been entirely right and most of them entirely wrong. I know Garry, and can report that he really is able to pierce the veil on 1-5 very clearly. Perhaps that helped him see what was coming. For instance, Garry is strongly anti-Trump, but he doesn’t let that distract him from other issues of relevance. He also knows Russian history and the humanities very well, and his understanding of evil is well-calibrated to yield good predictions in situations like this.
I’ve also found that many individuals from the Baltic states, with real skin in the game, have had an appropriate level of suspicion about Russia for a long time. Anecdotally might this broadly Baltic view be more correct than the weaker suspicions held by the IR scholars?
Addendum: I’ve heard a few people claim that Putin is just an irrational madman and that he lies outside the sphere of prediction altogether. Well, the action in Ukraine had very definite and very direct precursors, including other invasions of Ukraine! It hardly seems like a pure black swan. Furthermore, a lot of the Russian public supports or at least tolerates the invasion. “Putin’s propaganda,” some cry, but all that same machinery of censorship and propaganda was not enough to get the Russian public to trust the Sputnik vaccine, which very likely would have saved many of their lives. So these events are not just about Putin by any means.
Also, if you are curious as to where I think things stand now, here is a good and interesting thread on the current state of the war and where it might be headed.
Monday assorted links
1. Introduction to Tanner Greer.
2. Are wild animals evolving faster than we had thought?
3. A new Fast Grants-inspired program for climate-related grants.
4. New geothermal energy project.
5. Africa’s Covid vaccine factory might close due to lack of demand (FT).