Category: Uncategorized
*Beautiful World, Where Are You?* — the new Sally Rooney novel
It is really good, and more subtle than one might have expected. Imagine Ireland’s #1 left-wing writer imbibing the brew of Ross Douthat over the last few years and putting it all into fictional form, and convincingly at that. I don’t just mean the Mass scene and the pornography discussion, it is the consistent theme running throughout the book.
The tale ends up as a true case for cultural optimism, albeit with some reasonable qualifications.
Here is a good New Yorker review by Lauren Michele Jackson. The title of the book is excellent as well.
Saturday assorted links
2. New Brazilian econ Ph.D student at UC Davis is in fact very famous.
3. Robby Soave on vaccine mandates (NYT).
4. The demand for academic economists is rebounding.
5. Australian vaccination progress could be doing better — incentives matter!
6. Adoption and IQ. It is still my view, by the way, that very large cultural changes can alter IQs quite a lot, as evidenced by the Flynn Effect. That is one reason why economic development often is so difficult.
7. Final summary and published version of Robin Hanson, et.al., grabby aliens paper.
Friday assorted links
1. More on risk-based business cycles.
2. “Residents in apartment blocks locked-down by NSW Health are having their alcohol deliveries policed as part of a policy to limit the number of drinks being consumed each day.” It seems that quite a few of these people want more than six beers a day.
3. Claims of a fusion breakthrough at MIT. And building Arcadia, a new science funding institution.
4. What do Germans fear the most?
5. How effective is the China crypto trading ban?
The “multiplier,” circa 2021
A recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey found that 88 percent of commercial construction contractors reported moderate-to-high levels of difficulty finding skilled workers, and more than a third had to turn down work because of labor deficiencies. The industry could face a shortage of at least two million workers through 2025, according to an estimate from Construction Industry Resources, a data firm in Kentucky.
The pandemic has compounded labor shortages, as sectors like construction see a boom in home projects with more people teleworking and moving to the suburbs. Contractors have also faced a scarcity of supplies as prices soared for products like lumber and steel.
Here is the full NYT article. And this I found interesting for other reasons:
Infrastructure workers tend to be older than average, raising concerns about workers retiring and leaving behind difficult-to-fill positions. The median age of construction and building inspectors, for instance, is 53, compared with 42.5 for all workers nationwide. Only 10 percent of infrastructure workers are under 25, while 13 percent of all U.S. workers are in that age group, according to a Brookings Institution analysis.
So men are going to college less and also working on infrastructure less? Hmm…
Returning to the main point, one reason I often am skeptical of multiplier talk is that the same economists and analysts recommend the same policies when the multiplier is…um…not so high.
Emergent Ventures winners, sixteenth cohort
Phoebe Yao, founder and CEO of Pareto, “a human API delivering the business functions startups desperately need.” Here is the Pareto website. She was born in China, formerly of Stanford, and a former classical violist. (By my mistake I left her off of a previous cohort list, apologies!)
BeyondAging, a new group to support longevity research.
Sam Enright, for writing, blogging, and general career development, resume here. From Ireland, currently studying in Scotland.
Zena Hitz, St. John’s College, to build The Catherine Project, to revitalize the study of the classics.
Gavin Leech, lives in Bristol, he is from Scotland, getting a Ph.D in AI. General career support, he is interested in: “Personal experimentation to ameliorate any chronic illness; reinforcement learning as microscope on Goodhart’s law; weaponised philosophy for donors; noncollege routes to impact.”
Valmik Rao, 17 years old, Ontario, he is building a program to better manage defecation in Nigeria.
Rabbi Zohar Atkins, New York City, to pursue a career as a public intellectual. Here is one substack, here is another.
Basil Halperin, graduate student in economics at MIT, for his writing and for general career development.
Gytis Daujotas, lives in Dublin, studying computer science at DCU, for a project to make the Great Books on the web easy to read, and for general career development. Here is his web site.
Geoff Anders, Leverage Research, to support his work to find relevant bottlenecks in science and help overcome them. A Progress Studies fellow.
Samantha Jordan, NYU Stern School of Business, with Nathaniel Bechhofer, for a new company, “Our platform will accelerate the speed and quality of science by enabling scientists to easily manage their data and research pipelines, using best practices from software engineering.” Also a Progress Studies grant.
Nina Khera, “I’m a teenage human longevity researcher who’s interested in preventing aging-related diseases, especially those related to brain aging. In the past, I’ve worked with companies like Alio on computation and web-dev-based projects. I’ve also worked with labs like the Gladyshev lab and the Adams lab on data analysis and machine learning-based projects.” Her current project is Biotein, about developing markers for aging, based in Ontario.
Lipton Matthews, from Jamaica, here is his YouTube channel, for general career development.
A photo from my email
That is from Brad H., from a Starbucks in Nashville.
Thursday assorted links
2. The economics of “Buy Now, Pay Later.”
4. Diem update.
5. Chinese language girlie man Orwellian update.
6. Where is Novavax? Read through the responses.
My Conversation with David Cutler
I did Cutler and Ed Glaeser sequentially, based on their new co-authored book, here is the joint episode but I will create another link concerning Glazer. Here is one excerpt from the general summary:
They joined Tyler for a special joint episode to discuss why healthcare outcomes are so correlated with education, whether the health value of Google is positive or negative, why hospital price transparency is so difficult to achieve, how insurance coding systems reimburse sickness over health improvement, why the U.S. quit smoking before Europe, the best place in America to get sick, the risks that come from over-treatment, the possible upsides of more businesses moving out of cities, whether productivity gains from remote work will remain high, why the older parts of cities always seem to be more beautiful, whether urban schools will ever improve, why we shouldn’t view Rio de Janeiro’s favelas as a failure, how 19th century fights to deal with contagious diseases became a turning point for governance, Miami’s prospects as the next tech hub, what David and Ed disagree on, and more.
And from David:
COWEN: But even if we adjust for that, education seems to matter a lot. It’s also puzzling to me — in your own work, it matters more at younger ages. You would think the returns are cumulative: it would really pay off when you’re 67 because you’ve invested in a stock portfolio for decades, but it matters most when you’re young. What’s your best micro account of that?
CUTLER: One of the things that’s super interesting is that, for example, people who live in cities — where there are more better-educated people — smoke less, even conditional on your own education. The same thing is true about age and so on.
I think it’s partly that cities and areas are run by upper-middle-class folks often. For example, the environment is set up in a way that’s more conducive to health when you have more upper-middle-income people. It’s much more difficult to smoke. There are healthier behaviors in general. There are parks and things like that. I think part of it is just that society is shaped by higher-income, higher-SES people, and that can be good for everyone who lives around those areas.
COWEN: To the extent education makes you healthier by lowering your stress and raising your relative status — which is a possible hypothesis — what are the policy implications of that? What should we do?
CUTLER: Part of what we’re learning over time is that social insurance programs are actually having a bigger and more sustained effect on health than we had thought they did. For example, we’ve always thought of Medicare and Medicaid as being the primary social insurance programs that affect health, but then there’s research that the WIC program — Women, Infants, and Children — affects health, that food stamp programs affect health, that TANF benefits affect health, that housing policies can affect health.
COWEN: And you think that’s through lowering stress as one mechanism?
Recommended!
Wednesday assorted links
1. More on Loot. And a good discussion of property rights in characters.
2. Why are inmates so much more vaccinated than jailers?
3. Pending regulatory movements on crypto. One kind of crazy claim at the end there. And commentary from Brian Armstrong.
4. Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate.
5. One way to counter excess GPS vulnerability?
6. Only $1.5 trillion for Manchin?
7. Matt Walsh in trouble for opposing the “feminization” of football.
What I’ve been reading
1. Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, The Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus. Self-recommending (they were leaders on the team), most of all it is striking how much time they spend covering and complaining about problems in the science funding network. Let’s improve that. In any case I enjoyed the book.
2. Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-55. A quite interesting book which considers how German women were disappointed in German men, how eastern German women dealt with Soviet soldier rape, how the Soviets resumed classical orchestral concerts within weeks (for their own pleasure), currency conversion, and more: “But Beate Uhse fell foul of the law for the first time, not because of violation of the moral code of corrupting the young, but for breach of price regluations.”
3. Jeevan Vasagar, Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia. Selective rather than comprehensive, but entertaining and balanced and insightful. Those interested in Singapore should read this book, and even Singapore experts will learn some new nuggets. The author was the FT correspondent in Singapore from 2015 to 2017.
4. Mathilde Fasting and Øystein Sørensen, The Norwegian Exception: Norway’s Liberal Democracy Since 1814. “This book started as an idea to explain Norwegian society to a broader public.” I am not sure they quite succeed, but still it is the best single Norway book I know. I hadn’t known for instance that Norway has two different official written languages. In general there should be more books trying to explain highly successful countries! This is a move in the right direction, and I am happy to see that the authors do not try to deny or run away from Norway’s first-rate performance.
5. James Hawes, The Shortest History of England. One can pick nits with books such as these, but I found this one useful. It stresses the role of the French in English history, and also the ongoing clash between the South and the North over who will rule whom.
There is also Robert Wuthnow’s Why Religion is Good for American Democracy (true), and Michael Taylor’s The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which dashed my hopes when I learnt that Alexander McDonnell, the Belfast-born 19th century chess player who famously sparred with Louis de la Bourdonnais, also was a strongly pro-slavery and pro-imperialism economist in his time.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Redux of my 2006 post on global warming.
2. Interview with Steven Pinker about his new rationality book (NYT).
3. What is wrong with book reviews?
4. Overstated, unreasonable, and too polemic, but if you wish to read a critique of the Bangladesh mask RCT…
6. Impetus Grants, a kind of Fast Grants model for longevity research.
Why the defenses of Australia do not persuade me
Alex laid out some complaints about Covid policy down under, I have been receiving emails and tweets arguing the following:
1. Australia is choosing a perfectly acceptable point on the liberty vs. safety frontier.
2. The Australian decision to do extreme lockdowns is democratic, and most Australians support it.
And sometimes I see a third point, which as far as I can tell is true:
3. Australia doesn’t have much in the way of ICU excess capacity, so a Covid surge would hit the country especially hard.
I think those responses, however, are missing the point of the critique. I would stress that if Covid risk has you with your back against the wall and the government is forcing extremely restrictive measures on your citizenry, you should be implementing the following in an urgent manner:
a. Twice a week rapid antigen tests for everyone. (Plenty of time to prep for this one.)
b. Much stronger incentives to vaccinate people more rapidly, including with the large stock (six million or so?) of AstraZeneca vaccines. Demand side incentives, supply side incentives, whatever can be done. Let’s throw the kitchen sink at this one. But as it stands, I just don’t see the urgency.
c. Mobile monoclonal antibody units, as they are used in Florida (modest progress here).
d. Maybe other emergency measures too? I’ve been hearing for decades that Australia has such a great health care system so surely they can make lots of progress on these and other fronts?
As far as I can tell from this great distance, Australia is doing none of these. And, while there is some disquiet about lockdowns, few of its citizens are demanding that they do any of those positive measures. Not many of its well-known politicians are proposing those ideas either. (Please feel free to correct me if that is wrong!…but I just don’t see word of it on-line.)
If Australia implemented all of those policies, or even just one of them, they could attain a much better “liberty vs. lives” frontier, no matter where you think the government should end up on that frontier. They could save lives, and enjoy more liberty.
And that is the great shame and indeed I would say crime. There seems to be an incredible complacency that people in some parts of the country will put up with the current measures and not demand the government look for more practical measures to boost both liberty and security.
So when you write me and suggest “this is democratic and the people approve,” yes that is exactly the problem.
Are machine guns on the side of the civilized?
From Priya Satia’s recent and interesting Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire:
Evolutionary history likewise advised tolerance in the face of the mass death enabled by the new machine guns, which ended the long technological parity between Europeans and others, making it possible for Europeans to conquer Africa at least. Robert Routledge’s popular 1876 history of science lifted Adam Smith’s language defending firearms a century earlier to assure those concerned about machine guns’ destructive nature that they favored “the extension and permanence of civilization.” Their complexity and expense — itself testimony to European genius — ensured that they could be wielded only by “wealthy and intelligent nations.” But for a notable substitution of “race” for “nation,” he echoed Smith’s language almost verbatim (without citation) in arguing that firearms gave a necessary advantage to “opulent and civilized communities” over “poor and barbarous races,” which were today “everywhere at the mercy of the wealthy and cultivated nations.”
Obviously the same always will be true for nuclear weapons as well, right?
The book, by the way, is especially interesting about how thinking about progress is related to views of imperialism, though note the first 100 pp. are significantly less focused than the rest of the text.
Monday assorted links
2. Murky, but important, here is an excellent thread from Avichal Garg on Loot. And from Tandavas.eth. Pay attention people. I know it makes your brain hurt, but…”suck it up kid!”
3. Tom Holland podcast with @pmarca on the history of Silicon Valley.
4. Claims about obesity (speculative).
5. Autor’s mistakes in labor economics.
6. Is there adverse selection for taking equity shares in human capital?
7. New Yorker profile of Kathryn Paige Harden too much mood affiliation in our world.
Sunday assorted links
1. David Autor on the labor shortage (NYT).
2. Lawrence H. White corrects the record on Hayek.
3. China fact of the day: “…of all countries looked at by the IMF, in 2000 China had the most decentralized government as measured by the percentage of spending that is local.” NB: Better link is this one.
5. The culture that is Serbia? And Straussian Beatles Man We Was Lonely.
6. CDC once again not heeding the science, not even the medical science (much less expected value maximization). And yet further obvious, rookie screw-ups. And where are those Delta-specific boosters?
7. Ross Douthat on the American Empire (NYT).