Category: Uncategorized
The median voter theorem is underrated
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
More broadly, it is striking how many policies of the Biden administration reflect ideas or proposals from the Trump administration. Biden’s “Buy America” plan could be a Trump administration protectionist initiative. The Trump administration spent $2 trillion on coronavirus relief; the Biden administration proposed and spent $1.9 trillion. Trump wanted to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan; Biden actually did. Biden has left many of Trump’s anti-China policies, such as the tariffs, in place. Biden also has continued rapid deportation programs for immigrants.
All of these policies are broadly aimed at the center. It is no accident that Biden, even though his “honeymoon” period is ending, has remained broadly popular in the polls.
There are still areas in which Republicans and Democrats differ greatly, of course. On Covid-19, they have divergent attitudes and safety practices. Still, the Biden administration has not seriously considered either a nationwide vaccination mandate or governmental vaccine passports, as neither would be especially popular with voters.
Then there are cultural issues, where the median voter theorem most definitely does not hold. What seems to have happened is that Americans have picked one area in which they can let off steam and express their mutual mistrust — and in turn that has allowed a kind of consensus to form around many actual government policies. Perhaps what the median voter theorem misses is that individuals have a deeply irrational side and need to treat some political debates more like a mixed martial arts competition than as a forum for getting things done.
The median voter theorem tends to be unpopular in an increasingly left-leaning academic environment. It has a decidedly anti-utopian quality, as it insists that policy is not going to deviate too far from the views of the ordinary American. It implies that many projects of left-wing progressives are pipe dreams, at least until major shifts in public opinion set in. It dismisses the common progressive attitude that current voters would welcome major left-wing reforms and are only waiting for a heroic politician to stare down the special interest groups that oppose them.
To be clear, there is no presumption that the median voter actually wants the right thing. As an economist, I am particularly frustrated by how frequently American voters fail to appreciate the benefits of international trade and migration, or how they tend to believe that government programs financed by borrowing represent a free lunch. They also put disproportionate weight on low gasoline prices, to cite yet another example from a long list of mistaken views.
Still, as a practical matter, the median voter probably represents a kind of protection against the worst excesses and arrogances of the human spirit. Failed politicians do tend to get voted out of office. Crazy views, regardless of how popular they may be, tend to get sanded down by the political process.
The upshot, for the U.S. at least, is that the reality of American life is very different from the one that pundits regularly describe.
True.
Monday assorted links
1. “As Elizabeth Currid-Halkett reported in her 2017 book, The Sum of Small Things, affluent parents have increased their share of educational spending by nearly 300 percent since 1996.” Link here.
2. The most significant buildings constructed since World War II? (NYT)
5. English-language version of “Bergman Island” coming out in October.
A new chess variant
With Steven Brams, an American game theorist, Ismail devised a radical but easily implemented solution to the perceived white bias in chess. Their system, dubbed “balanced alternation”, allows black to make two moves after white’s opening move, with white then taking the next two moves before reverting to standard play.
By giving black a double riposte to white’s opening, Ismail argues that the imbalance would be sharply reduced and “render chess fairer than any other reform of which we are aware”.
…Other players questioned whether chess really needs to be fairer, given the number of draws at elite level. When AlphaZero played itself in last year’s experiment, 98 per cent of the games ended in draws. “More draws? What a bore!” said a leading chess writer.
Ismail acknowledged that the chess world “can be very conservative”. He added: “I do expect a backlash at a proposal like this, but I hope open-minded players will want to give it a try.”
Here is more from The Times of London (gated). You will note that my pet proposal for reforming chess also introduces a kind of color equity, though it is not motivated by that goal. To limit the import of opening preparation and to minimize the number of draws, we should randomize the initial opening moves, but within reason, with an average value clustered around 0.00, and with a focus on non-drawish lines. So some games would start with 1.b4 d5, which is “playable” for White, though few players would move as such in a major tournament. Most of the randomizations shoul be fairly sharp variations, and so the randomization would allow the Petroff and Berlin to surface only one out of every 768 games.
Within one hundred years the future is going to get very weird
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The notion that the future will be weirder than we think, and come sooner, is a possibility raised by Holden Karnofsky, the co-chief executive officer of Open Philanthropy. It’s an intriguing and provocative idea.
I consider genetic engineering, longevity research, finding signs of life on other planets, neural engineering, and AI as possible developments, plus a bit more.
…these changes are far more radical than those that occurred between 1921 and today. Compared to 1921, we are much wealthier and more secure — but a lot of basic structures of the world remain broadly the same. I don’t think that much of what we can do now would strike our 1921 predecessors as magical, though the speed and power of our computers might surprise them. Nor would visitors from 1921 think of us as somehow not human.
Of course none of these developments are inevitable. Another very weird future is entirely possible: that we humans use our creative energies for destruction, causing civilization to take some major and enduring steps backwards.
Either way, the future is not just more and nicer suburbs, better pay and new forms of social media. All those are likely to happen, but they won’t be the biggest changes. When it comes to the future of the human race, we — and our children, for those of us who have any — may turn out to be especially important generations. I very much hope we are up to this moment.
Recommended.
Sunday assorted links
Monterrey notes
Most of all, I was surprised at how beautiful the city setting is — gleaming skyscrapers surrounded by green mountains.
The red Faro del Comercio is the city’s landmark, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the city’s Chamber of Commerce.
You can visit an excellent old iron works factory.
For “randomly scattered bizarre but interesting sculptures” I give Monterrey an A+. It is also the best location in Mexico for modernist architecture, as the landmark items in Mexico City are too scattered. Excellent for brutalist buildings as well. If you are interested in architecture, Monterrey is a must.
The city’s PPP_adjusted gdp per capita is over 35k, which alone makes it one of the most interesting parts of Mexico. It also seemed well within acceptable safety margins, just don’t drive the road up to Nuevo Laredo.
My two best meals were at Koli Cucina de Origin (fixed price menu only) and Cara de Vaca (get the green chile tacos). Overall the city is not top notch for “comida popular,” so go to the mainstream good restaurants.
It is one of the least walkable cities. Everything is spread out, and the most interesting parts are not typically compact neighborhoods. There are often highways to cross.
A mere hour away is Saltillo, home of serrapes and capital city of the state of Coahuila. The outskirts serve up a lot of American fast food, the city center is sleepy and feels like the 1950s. More generally, there is lots of “horse country” surrounding Monterrey and Saltillo. It is not uncommon to see cowboy hat and boots.
Not many people visit Monterrey for tourism, but I was very happy to have spent six days there and was never bored. It should be considered an essential part of one’s “Mexico education.”
The incentives for Mexican hotel Covid testing
Yes you need a negative result on the test to return to the United States, but you never know the sensitivity of the test you are taking. It should be from an “approved provider,” but what does that mean? No authority from the United States can readily verify how good the test is.
Let us say you are a hotel owner, which kind of testing service do you wish to commission to send around to your rooms to test your American guests? A highly sensitive test that will yield periodic false positives, or a not very sensitive test that won’t generate false positives and might even result in some false negatives? And say some of your guests truly will be Covid-positive — do you wish to keep them in their rooms for another week or two, with all the attendant risks, or do you wish to send them along their way?
You don’t even have to imagine that the hotel owners are entirely cynical. They themselves can’t judge the accuracy of the tests, so a service that yielded a fair number of Covid positives could be seen as “they make too many mistakes and won’t let our guests leave, we don’t want them.” If the Delta variant is outracing publicity about the Delta variant, as was the case for a while in Tulum, such a hotelier reaction might be all the more likely.
I did in fact test negative. And the testers were very nice to me.
What I’ve been reading
1. Richard Lapper, Beef, Bible, and Bullets: Brazil in the Age of Bolsonaro. A very good country-specific book, it takes you from “Brazil is the country of the future and always will be” to “Brazil was the country of the future and maybe never will be again.” Did you know that the Pentecostals and Evangelicals have five times the number of radio stations as does the Roman Catholic Church?
2. Graham Johnson, Poulenc: The Life in the Songs. An A+ book if…you give a damn. Here is one song by Poulenc. Compare it to this also beautiful recording. And this one. The book also serves as an excellent biography of the composer, the songs making up for the fact that his life did not see amazing amounts of action and dramatic tension.
2. Alex Ferguson with Michael Moritz, Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United. Short, but nonetheless one of the very best books on leadership and also talent search. You also don’t have to know anything about soccer, or care about soccer. Recommended, and this one supports my view that the best management books are about sports and music, not “business management” in the mainstream sense of that term.
Adrian Woolridge’s The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World is absolutely correct. It is remarkable how many deeply wrong books the world has been generating about this topic.
Andrew W. Lo and Stephen R. Foerster’s In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest is a good look at the development of portfolio theory, starting with Markowitz.
There is William L. Silber, The Power of Nothing to Lose: The Hail Mary Effect in Politics, War, and Business.
I found rewarding Lily Collison and Kara Buckley, Pure Grit: Stories of Remarkable People Living with Physical Disability.
I have not had a chance to read Masaaki Shirawaka, Tumultuous Times: Central Banking in an Era of Crisis; he was Governor of the Bank of Japan from 2008 to 2013.
Saturday assorted links
4. Speculative short piece on brain synchronization.
5. West African talking drums really can imitate human speech.
6. Carl Shapiro quits the FTC case against Facebook: “…he has criticized new FTC Chair Lina Khan’s aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement, and she in turn has faulted the agency’s traditional reliance on economists’ analyses in its fights against alleged monopolists.”
*The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery*
That is the new forthcoming Ross Douthat book, focusing on his struggles with Lyme disease. It is very much a memoir, starting with talk of Connecticut, deer, and his family’s dream house, all leading to an unfortunate bite from a tick. Visits to many doctors ensue, motivated by chronic pain and weakness.
Overall this is a book about the medical establishment, the psychological path of coming to terms with one’s own illness (a kind of Krankheitsbildungsroman), how bureaucracy shapes science, and a plea that a lot of people really are chronically sick rather than psychosomatic or malingerers. It is Ross’s best-written book, and it has echoes of Susan Sontag and also Robert Burton.
If I understand Ross correctly, he is pro-antibiotic use under these circumstances, at least for his individual case. I do not myself have any opinion about the various medical views expressed in this work. Even prior to reading this book, my intuition was to believe that chronic Lyme disease is very much real, but that is not based upon aggregating a great deal of information. In any case, Covid and the response of the public health establishment have made the relevance of this book much clearer. The discussion here doesn’t give you much reason to trust them more.
I believe we are entering a new era where public intellectuals have an increasing degree of “medical sway.”
This is also a tale, under the surface, of how “the privileged” interact with the medical establishment in a fundamentally different way (I don’t mean that as snark or whining).
Here is an update on one potential Lyme disease vaccine. Was the previous vaccine really so bad?
How should you react if electromagnetic stimulation appears to improve your symptoms?
NB: I don’t like walking in the woods.
*Home in the World: A Memoir*
That is the new Amartya Sen autobiography, and it is well…a biography. You learn that he loves Sichuan duck and “hilsha fish” (if done properly with the mustard), his thoughts of enduring military service, Sen’s study of Sanskrit, his self-description as a hypochondriac, his bout with mouth cancer at a young age, and that Calcutta (!) is a great walking city, at least when Sen lived there in the 1950s, among other matters. The readers definitely gets his or her “biography money’s worth.”
But should you care?
The name “Tagore” appears so many times in the text that it takes up 3/4 of a page in the index. This is very much a Bengali memoir.
I learned that Sen’s family lived for a few years with him in Burma, he is sympathetic to Buddhism, he was ten at the time of the Great Famine and it had a major impact on his thinking, and that Sen was greatly influenced by Maurice Dobb and thought Marx was unjustly excluded from the economics curriculum. Piero Sraffa was his Director of Studies at Cambridge, and introduced Sen to the wonders of ristretto. Sen also stresses the import of Sraffa for converting the early Wittgenstein into the later Wittgenstein. He has great praise for P.T. Bauer, both as a thinker and as an instructor. He describes Buchanan as a “…very agreeable but rather conservative economist” who got him thinking about whether the notion of collective preference made sense at all.
This doesn’t have enough coherence to be a great book, but there is enough in here of interest to satisfy anyone curious about Sen.
You can pre-order here, I got my copy from the UK.
Friday assorted links
2. Vitalik on overuse of the Gini coefficient.
4. James Buchanan and club theory.
5. The details of how the delta variant works, better than I was expecting.
6. The laser-created, mid-air plasma columns hypothesis (WSJ).
7. Sriram Krishnan profile and Clubhouse (NYT).
Richard Hanania on safety craziness
There are other complications too; some people are just low IQ, and maybe their dumb beliefs aren’t their fault. But if you believe in personal responsibility at all as a guide to policy, for reasons of utilitarianism or justice, you have to assess blame at some point. Incentivizing people to get free vaccinations is not the same as incentivizing those with IQs of 100 to be astrophysicists, or poor people to buy Teslas; this is clearly in the realm of possible, and mostly involves overcoming motivated reasoning and laziness. COVID-19 rates of infection vary across time, likely because people change their behavior depending on how much spread there is in their community, and there is nothing to indicate that the unvaccinated are incapable of considering costs and benefits at all when it comes to the decision over whether to get vaccinated. This means that private sector mandates are therefore an unalloyed good, as I’ve pointed out before, and Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for standing in their way, as they have in certain states.
…Unfortunately, we live under a government, and particularly a public health community, that can’t do cost-benefit analysis, and doesn’t have the stomach for personal responsibility either. So we’re going to have an entire generation robbed of a normal childhood, and perhaps other restrictions too that will remain permanent. The question is how we will deal with COVID-19 now that we know it will never go away
Here is his Substack link, recommended.
Thursday assorted links
1. Against CBDC.
2. Confirmation of radar data on Tic Tac. And the Navy filmer, now a commander, claims he received “jamming cues” on his data stream. Lots of additional detail in the chat.
3. Cowen’s Second Law: “Beer mats make bad frisbees.” And what’s in the new infrastructure bill (NYT).
4. “The study maintains that the term “rough fish” is pejorative and degrading to native fish.”
5. “Joe Biden is overseeing one of the largest cuts in legal immigration in history.“
6. Buy property in El Salvador? (NYT)
Lapses in insurance payments
Most individual life insurance policies lapse, with lapsers cross-subsidizing non-lapsers. We show that policies and lapse patterns predicted by standard rational expectations models are the opposite of those observed empirically. We propose two behavioral models consistent with the evidence: (i) consumers forget to pay premiums and (ii) consumers understate future liquidity needs. We conduct two surveys with a large insurer. New buyers believe that their own lapse probabilities are small compared to the insurer’s actual experience. For recent lapsers, forgetfulness accounts for 37.8 percent of lapses while unexpected liquidity accounts for 15.4 percent.
Here is the full AER article by Daniel Gottlieb and Kent Smetters.