Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday assorted links
1. More. Please forgive the source and the pop-ups.
2. Those new service sector jobs: the rising number of dog lawyers in Canada.
3. The decentralized origin of standard weights.
4. The longer-term economic consequences of pandemics, over 220 years.
5. Why Africa’s island states are generally freer (The Economist).
6. Transient pacemaker that dissolves harmlessly in your body. And another step toward a pancoronavirus vaccine.
My Conversation with Richard Prum
Prum is an ornithologist at Yale, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Richard joined Tyler to discuss the infidelity of Australian birds, the debate on the origins of avian flight, how the lack of a penis explains why birds are so beautiful, why albatrosses can afford to take so many years to develop before mating, the game theory of ornithology, how flowers advertise themselves like a can of Coke, how modern technology is revolutionizing bird watching, why he’s pro-bird feeders yet anti- outdoor cats, how scarcity predicts territoriality in birds, his favorite bird artist, how Oilbirds got their name, how falcons and cormorants hunt and fish with humans, whether birds exhibit a G factor, why birds have regional accents, whether puffins will perish, why he’s not excited about the idea of trying to bring back passenger pigeons, the “dumb question” that marks a talented perspective ornithologist, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Putting path dependence aside, if you were trying to give us the most fundamental explanation of why sexual dimorphism is different in birds compared to mammals, what would that be?
PRUM: Well, that’s actually a really big question. [laughs]
COWEN: Of course, but the most fundamental factor — what is it?
PRUM: The most fundamental factor is that most birds don’t have a penis.
COWEN: Talk me through the equilibrium there.
PRUM: [laughs] There’s a lot. That’s where we start: Most birds don’t have a penis, which means that one of the things that happens in avian evolution that’s distinct from mammals is that the kids require a lot of care. They’re growing up in the nest, they’re hatching out of an egg, but they’re very, very vulnerable until they can fly.
Birds have a very rapid period of rapid development. That means that they grow up and leave the nest, and you need two parents to do that efficiently in most diets or most kinds of ecologies. That means the dad’s got to be at the nest.
We usually thought that you have social monogamy, at least two birds helping raise the young, because the young are so needy and they have to grow up quickly. But there’s another possibility, which is that they could evolve to be so needy and grow up quickly because they managed to get males at the nest.
One of the things that happened in the phylogeny of birds — you’ve got ostriches and their relatives, and you’ve got chickens and ducks, and then you’ve got the rest of birds, and that’s a bunch. That’s the vast majority of them, and in that lineage leading to the rest of birds, the penis evolved away, and the question is why. My own theory is that female birds preferred mates that did not have a penis.
One of the ancillary benefits of that, one of the correlated benefits of that is that they were no longer subject to sexual coercion or sexual violence. They could be coerced behaviorally, but they couldn’t be forcibly fertilized. That means that they have freedom of choice, and what do they do with their freedom of choice? They choose beauty. One of the reasons why birds are so beautiful is that males don’t have a penis. They have to be subject to choice in order to effect reproduction, and also they have to invest if females require it.
COWEN: Now, sometimes albatrosses don’t breed until they’re 20 years old or even, on average, maybe it’s what — 10 years old. What are they doing in the meantime that’s so important?
PRUM: Well, that is a deep question.
Recommended, this was one of my favorite CWT episodes.
A problem in nuclear waste semiotics
Via Richard Harper, this thread asks how you might warn very future people away from a nuclear waste site. Alexandra Erin wrote:
An easy way to understand the problem of nuclear waste storage semiotics is to imagine what kind of warning could have been on an Egyptian tomb that would have kept Howard Carter from robbing it.
Here is some background material on how people are thinking about the problem at Yucca Mountain. Here is a Wikipedia page on different signs and options. Alex suggests color-changing cats.
I would think the question of how to inform a super-advanced civilization is a manageable one, at least if they have any patience at all. Simply explain the whole truth in plain English, and give them enough English text, in durable micro form if needed, so they can unlock the secrets of English. Also put up some images of radioactive decay. Skull and crossbones may not mean so much to them.
What about our possible “Mad Max” descendants? Of course that scenario means our own civilization has in some manner perished, so it is not a totally optimistic prognosis for human prudence. So why think some silly red signs will make much of a difference? After all, just try today to talk people out of alcohol. Good luck.
So instead my mischievous thoughts turn to finance theory and portfolio diversification. If the nuclear waste site is truly remote and previously unobserved and undiscovered, why not put something really good in there as recompense?
A seed bank. Copies of The Great Books. The text of the United States Constitution. Proofs of Newton’s Laws. Einstein’s theory of relativity (maybe wait on that one?…) Design for a better medieval water wheel. Compositions of Beethoven and Mozart. Translation advice, some of it pictorial. And so on. Surely some of it will be useful, sooner or later.
Which is further reason why all of your ideas are less likely to work. You can’t credibly commit to not giving people insurance against their bad decisions — just ask the Fed!
Bulletin: a more than marginal boost for Marginal Revolution
We are proud to announce that Marginal Revolution now exists on a second site as well, affiliated with Facebook, at marginalrevolution.bulletin.com.
We are excited to be part of this new project, called Bulletin. Please note that marginalrevolution.bulletin.com will be fully free and open, just as the current site is.
If you prefer to stay here, you can do so — no need to make any changes. RSS, Twitter feed, email service, everything remains intact. Or if you prefer it over there, that is great too. Facebook obviously has a reputation for producing great software, and we look forward to seeing what they can do with this project. Many other content creators have been recruited for this venture, they will have their own Bulletin sites, and we will tell you more about them soon.
We are keen to see our ideas and writings brought to new audiences, and our new partnership with Facebook will enable this. So far they have been great to work with, and we will be able to continue with our fully independent status.
We are also delighted to see that some of you will have the opportunity to comment on two different sites, not just one.
Onwards and upwards! We are in this for the long haul.
And as always, we thank you all for reading.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Quarles skeptical about a CBDC.
2. Ransomware hackers building their own VC system.
3. Why is American infrastructure so expensive?
4. Mas-Colell update (in Spanish), here in English. Judgment rendered, and he (joint with Mas, if I understand correctly) has to put up a bond of over two million euros and later stand trial, possibly to be found liable for that sum.
5. Amazing how cheap this Courbet is (other Old Masters too).
6. I feel I’ve been in advance of this trend. Non-believer intellectuals on the Right who pay heed to religion as a cultural foundation.
7. Nintil on California wildfires, very good post.
The Pandemic JOLTS
The 2009 recession was big but it followed a very familiar pattern–job separations were a little bit larger than job hires and this lasted for a little less than year which drove up unemployment rates. Unemployment rates then declined slowly as hires became a little bit larger than separations. Now look at the pandemic recession! Separations triple from normal–absolutely unprecedented. Hires then rebound at a slower rate than separations but at a much faster rate than in any previous recession (I haven’t bothered correcting for population since the differences are so large.)
I don’t know entirely what to make of this but we are still debating the Great Depression and the Great Recession so the Pandemic Recession will provide data and questions for a generation of economists. Why, for example, are supply shocks seemingly so much easier for an economy to handle than demand shocks? And why are some demand shocks worse than others? The dot com bust was at least as big a decline in wealth than the housing bust in 2009 but the latter resulted in a much bigger recession. How much was due to policy? How much was due to the fact that the financial system wasn’t so involved in the dot com bust or the pandemic recession? Finance often seems like it doesn’t do so much but why then do things go so badly when the financial system is impeded?
*The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade*
That is a new and very useful book by Benjamin T. Smith, oddly it came out first in the UK. Here is one excerpt:
Over the past fifty years, to earn the median wage, a Mexican has had to sell an average of 700 grams of marijuana, 18 grams of heroin, or 66 grams of cocaine on the U.S. streets. It amounts to weed weighing two cans of soup, coke weighing a tennis ball, or smack weighing just three U.S. quarters. And this is only the average. During the economic collapse of the mid-1980s, it took only 280 grams of marijuana and 4.8 grams of heroin to make the annual wage. You could earn as much growing a single marijuana plant or a window box of poppies as driving a cab for a year.
And this:
Up to the 1970s, violence was rarely employed to sort out disputes between drug traffickers. The trade was relatively peaceful. Cooperation was the rule. Deep ties of blood, marriage, friendship, and neighborhood, which linked many of the traffickers, prevented the frequent use of force. In general, so did the local protection rackets. Both state governors and state cops were keen to avoid conflicts that risked exposing their own ties to the traffickers.
This changed because sometimes the later state authorities sought to institute their own protection rackets, using force toward that end. Many of the gangs sought to extend their turf beyond drugs to other commercial areas, also leading to conflict. Finally, the U.S.-led war on drugs induced a form of Mexican aggressive counternarcotics policing that bred conflict as well.
Overall this is a good book about a hard to research topic.
There is now actually a book like this
And a very good book at that:
My main argument is that Jacob’s approach to urbanism and economics was developed parallel to, and perhaps benefited from, a much broader field of knowledge than is generally understood. Therefore, the chapter considers a wide context, including the revolutionary critique of planning espoused by Alison and Peter Smithson throughout the 1950s, on the one hand, and the Austrian-school theory of spontaneous order, on the others. Decades before Jacobs’s remarkably hypotheses, liberal theorists had advanced a demoralizing critique of central design as a challenge to the legacy of collectivist planning while advocating market-based solutions and demonstrating the crucial role that informal commerce played in spontaneous order.
!
That is from the new and noteworthy Anthony Fontenot, Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism & the Market.
!
The origins of Wokeism
My latest Bloomberg column considers one factor (of many), here is an excerpt:
The male-female imbalance in academic life should be treated as a kind of emergency. But the institutions that address it are slow and bureaucratic.
Now enter the philosophy of wokeism. One way to think of the woke is as a bunch of people who scream about various injustices. But sometimes they don’t have a good plan to address a particular imbalance — and along the way they can inflict a good deal of unjustified damage, for instance by canceling people who make the wrong remarks about gender imbalance or other issues.
These and other criticisms of the woke may well be correct. Still, at the end of the day it has to be recognized that an unresponsive society will generate a lot of unproductive (and unresponsive) screamers. So simply dissecting the weaknesses of woke tactics and arguments misses the point. When practical solutions do not seem to exist, many people will resort to screaming.
This leads to the conclusion that wokeness won’t be defeated as an ideology until there is a more convincing and practical vision of how to undo institutional sclerosis. When that vision comes, it may not be so closely allied with wokeness, which is not excessively concerned with effective administration and incentive compatibility.
And this:
Sometimes it even seems that woke forces are effective. Recently some major museums have announced that they are sending back their highly valuable West African bronze sculptures to their countries of origin. Many of those sculptures were stolen by British colonial occupiers, and their restoration would reunite those countries with a significant part of their cultural heritage. This justified change would probably not have occurred without pressure from wokeism.
One underlying theme of the column is that the defects of the Woke — such as excess rigidity — are closely allied to the defects of the society they are protesting against.
Monday assorted links
2. More on the new CRISPR/mRNA results.
3. It ain’t monopsony: incidence of minimum wage hikes in Los Angeles.
4. Fredric Rzewski, RIP (NYT).
Sunday assorted links
2. Jennifer Doleac on lead and crime.
3. Can we reduce sonic booms? (New Yorker)
4. Will Singapore learn to live with Covid?
5. Pending regulation of DeFi? (FT) And the outrage of Britney. And is forced contraception legal? (NYT)
6. Non-alcoholic vacations are now “a thing”? (NYT) I guess that is good, sort of…but bad that it is good?
The Effect of Adult Entertainment Establishments on Sex Crime
This paper studies how the presence of adult entertainment establishments affects the incidence of sex crimes, including sexual abuse and rape. We build a high frequency daily and weekly panel that combines the exact location of not-self-reported sex crimes with the day of opening and exact location of adult entertainment establishments in New York City. We find that these businesses decrease sex crime by 13% per police precinct one week after the opening, and have no effect on other types of crimes. The results imply that the reduction is mostly driven by potential sex offenders frequenting these establishments rather than committing crimes. We also rule out the possibility that other mechanisms are driving our results, such as an increase in the number of police officers, a reduction in the number of street prostitutes and a possible reduction in the number of potential victims in areas where these businesses opened. The effects are robust to using alternative measures of sex crimes.
That is from a new paper by Ciacci and Sviatschi, via Jennifer Doleac. We find this clash of values repeatedly in public policy. Do you wish to side with the interests of the actual victims — the people who might end up abused and raped? — or do you wish to side with landlords and homeowners who might find their property values reduced by sex establishments? “Export the bad stuff!”, this is a NIMBy dilemma yet again.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ivo Maes, Robert Triffin: A Life. There should be more biographies of economists, and while this one does not succeed in making Triffin exciting, it is thorough and informative and shows there was more to the man than his famous dilemma. I hadn’t even known Triffin was from Belgium.
2. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. A wonderfully subtle Irish novel about the Anglo-Irish elite in south Ireland right after WWI, how they self-deceive about the impending doom of their rule and way of life, and the diverse forms those self-deceptions take. An underrated modernist classic.
3. Cynthia Saltzman, Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast. Among other things, this book shows how clearly Napoleon understood the role of art in both reflecting and cementing power. Nor had I known that Canova, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Napoleon all had a single intersecting story, revolving around the theft and return of art.
4. Mircea Raianu, Tata: The Global Corporation that Built Indian Capitalism. No, this book does not “read like a novel,” and it could use more economics rather than plain history, but it is an entire book of full of content, meeting mainstream standards, on the still understudied topic of Indian business, one very major Indian business in particular.
There is Emily J. Levine, Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University, on yet another understudied topic.
Paul Strathern’s The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization is probably the best current, general interest book on its (very important) topic.
Saturday assorted links
2. How to improve construction productivity, and why that is hard.
3. Best of Econtwitter Substack.
4. Mix and match for vaccines seems to be working out. And new and promising CRISPR results? Possibly important.
5. Architect Wang Shu on China’s new modernism.
6. Using novels to predict the next war? (speculative, Tetlock it ain’t)
7. Does the internet use up less energy than we think? (NYT) Research article here.
What should I ask Ruth Scurr?
Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL (born 1971, London) is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.
Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 2006; Metropolitan Books, 2006) won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize (2006), was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize (2006), long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2007) and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009. It has been translated into five languages.
Her second book, John Aubrey: My own Life (Chatto & Windus, 2015; New York Review of Books, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It was chosen as a 2015 Book of the Year in fifteen newspapers and magazines, including: the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Sunday Express, the Guardian, the Spectator and the New Statesman. It was chosen as a 2016 Book of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Review and the Washington Post.
Scurr began reviewing regularly for The Times and The Times Literary Supplement in 1997. Since then she has also written for The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, New Statesman, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Observer, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal.
That is from her Wikipedia page. She is an expert in the philosophy of biography and her new biography of Napoleon, which views his life through the medium of his involvement with gardens, has been receiving rave reviews. And here is her home page, and her article on her Cambridge house.
So what should I ask her?