Category: Uncategorized
The supply of motivation is elastic — Study Web
Study Web is the space students have constructed for themselves in response to the irl system that just isn’t working. Unable to find a place or person to turn to with their academic and career anxieties, they find internet strangers—strange kin—to speak to, or simply share the same space with, online. Lacking the intrinsic inspiration to study for hours each day, online advice and group accountability provide a solution. Feeling isolated, virtual study partners create a sense of fellowship. On Study Web, while stressed, students have accepted their lot—they’re not investigating the rightness or wrongness of the pressurized environment of the Gen Z student or asking whether college is worth it at all. 12-hour Study With Me videos are seen as something to aspire to rather than rebel from. Students accept the premise that school and studying are non-negotiables. Where they come from, where they live, their beliefs and value systems are not barriers to community-building; they suffer in common.
And Study Web is huge, and weird:
The Study Web is a constellation of digital spaces and online communities—across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, and Twitter—largely built by students for students. Videos under the #StudyTok hashtag have been viewed over half a billion times. One Discord server, Study Together, has over 120 thousand members. Study Web extends far past study groups composed of classmates, institution specific associations, or poorly designed retro forums discussing entrance requirements for professional programs. It includes but transcends Studyblrs on Tumblr that emerged in 2014 and eclipses various Reddit and Facebook study groups or inspirational images shared across Pinterest and Instagram. Populated mostly by Gen Z and the youngest of millennials, Study Web is the internet most of us don’t see, and it’s become a lifeline for students from junior high to college.
By Fadeke Adegbuyi, this is one of the best pieces I have read all year.
Further Monday assorted links
7. Yuan Longping, RIP (NYT).
8. Famous musicians pick their favorite Bob Dylan songs. Would mine be “Highway 61”? “Mr. Tambourine Man”? “Tangled Up in Blue”? “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”? Too many choices. Bob is today 80 years old. The most overrated is perhaps “Desolation Row”, with its pretentious lyrics?
9. Why the new Elon Musk rocket really will matter?
10. Why a new business surge in black communities during the pandemic? (NYT)
Monday assorted links
Facts about recessions and unemployment (and matching)
Not everyone is going to like this one:
During a recovery, unemployment seems little responsive to demand disturbances. Economic policy should focus on preventing recessions rather than trying to ameliorate their effects.
That is from the new slides/paper by Robert E. Hall and Marianna Kudlyak on the consistency of recovery from recessions, lots of evidence behind that claim, as employment recovery occurs at a remarkably consistent rate across recessions, regardless of policy response. Furthermore explanation of the micro-data mostly follows from the supply of employment, not the demand, and no that doesn’t require any kind of weird DSGE model, nor does it involve aggregate demand denialism about the initial cause of the problem. Links are here, including other papers by Kudlyak, many good papers in there, sadly these rooftops are nearly empty.
The British in 18th century India
The British were obliged to design a state structure in India virtually from scratch, because the one Warren Hastings lashed together between 1772 and 1784 was considered to have failed. He had tried to adapt traditional Indian practice while adding a British top layer to it, but this compromise never worked well. Absence of supervision, abundant temptation, scarcity of reliable information and poor communication between Calcutta and the mofussil (rural areas) created multiple problems. When placed in Indian shoes, Europeans often behaved worse than their native predecessors. Hastings’s system lacked discipline, so British politicians resolved in the early 1780s to supply standards and enforce them. Pitt’s India Act of 1784 and the Cornwallis Code of 1793 were the results.
Traditional ruling practices in India were replaced by specific rules, designed to reduce personal discretion. What the British most feared in their own rulers — arbitrary power — they were determined, at least initially, to deny to those placed in authority in India.
Just as the US Constitution was designed to thwart the central executive, so the objective of the Cornwallis system of 1793, its near contemporary, was to restrain the EIC’s [East India Company’s] servants in India. The collective self-regulation that it set up, by means of boards and committees, worked fairly well in enforcing honesty within government in India after 1784, but not in achieving efficiency. Day-to-day government was not facilitated, and judicial decisions slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile tax revenues, instead of sticking to British fingers, stayed somewhere out in the rural areas, hid behind an opaque wall of legal and customary technicalities.
That is from Roderick Matthews’s excellent Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India. Here is my previous post on the book.
Sunday assorted links
*New Order* (this movie review is full of spoilers)
I found this Mexican movie unpleasant to watch, quite a few reviews are negative, and very few of you ought to see it. Yet at least it is fundamentally interesting, and it does show off some skills of movie-making, such as good cinematography and creation of tension and communicating a sense of Mexico City.
Most gringos won’t understand it. Most of the time watching you think it is a racist movie about revolt from indigenous Mexicans who stick together from motives of racist solidarity. By the end of the movie, but only at the end, you realize the paler skinned elites of the Army engineered the whole thing. What seemed to be the racism of the movie is in fact implicit commentary on the racist paranoia of the Mexican elites. And then finally you realize that the outrages committed by the indigenous people in the movie are mirroring outrages committed under the Conquest (e.g., rape, kidnapping for ransom), and that in reality the Conquest is being re-committed each and every day by the elites, yet with these somewhat racist paranoid fantasies layered on top that the logic of the Conquest someday will be reversed by the indigenous. And yet always it will be the elites in charge, who at the same time make their paranoid racist dystopian nightmares the fundamental narrative of society, thereby screwing everybody over double. The faucets do not in fact produce green water, though kind of they do, as cadmium green is a national color of Mexico.
YMMV, but at least a day later I am still thinking about it.
Did humans evolve to be suited for large-scale cooperation as well?
Here is the new Boyd and Richardson paper:
We present evidence that people in small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts, constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, alliance, and trade. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of many individuals, so each person made only a small contribution. This evidence suggests that large-scale cooperation occurred in the Pleistocene societies that encompass most of human evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that large-scale cooperation in Holocene food producing societies results from an evolved psychology shaped only in small group interactions. Instead, large scale human cooperation needs to be explained as an adaptation, likely rooted in the distinctive features of human biology, grammatical language, increased cognitive ability, and cumulative cultural adaptation.
If true, this would revise a fair amount of social science, including Hayek on atavistic desires and also various “off the cuff” invocations of evolutionary biology and assumptions about the conditions of early human evolution.
Via Kevin Vallier, who has recently published Trust in a Polarized Age, a book of interest to anyone considering this topic.
What is holding back employment?
The White House and congressional Democrats have argued for weeks that the lack of child care services poses a major obstacle to the economic recovery, pressing for a massive and immediate investment to get parents back to work.
But a new economic analysis led by a prominent White House ally concludes that school and daycare closures are not driving low employment levels — blunting a key Biden administration argument in favor of its American Families Plan and undercutting the view of some Democrats that investing in child care is crucial for the country to climb out of the coronavirus recession.
“School closures and lack of child care are not holding back the recovery,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration and co-authored the analysis. “And conversely, we shouldn’t expect a short-term economic bump from reopening schools and making child care more available.”
The study — which found that the employment rate for parents of young children actually declined at a lower rate than for those without kids — adds fuel to an intense national debate about what is behind a suspected worker shortage and what policy changes are needed to accelerate Americans’ return to work as the pandemic subsides.
Here is the full Politico article by Megan Cassella and Eleanor Mueller.
Saturday assorted links
1. Have American movies lost their sense of place?
3. Ten positions chess computers have had trouble with.
4. Fear the fungi. Their computational powers may be stronger than you think.
5. “Icelandic designer Valdís Steinarsdóttir has created a range of translucent, gelatinous garments that are cast into moulds rather than cut from a pattern in a bid to eliminate waste.” Link here.
What I’ve been reading
1. Allen Lowe, “Turn Me Loose White Man”, two volumes and 30 accompanying compact discs. “Personally I accept the assumption that a great deal, if not all, of American music is rooted in forms that derive in some way from Minstrelsy.” Would you like to see that documented over the course of 30 CDs and almost 800 pp.? Would you like to know how early blues, country, gospel, jazz, bluegrass (and more) all fit together? Then this is the package for you. It is in fact of one of the greatest achievements of all time in cataloguing and presenting American culture. Here is a WSJ review.
2. Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. This book is the best introduction to this key Girardian concept.
3. Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography. I only read slivers and won’t finish it, because I just don’t need 800 pp. on Philip Roth. But…it’s really good. I like Picasso too, and Caravaggio (a murderer). I’ve heard, by the way, that this book will be picked up by Simon and Schuster and put back into print.
4. Martha C. Nussbaum, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation. There are so many recent books on these topics, you might feel a bit weary of them all, but this is one of the best. It is rationally and reasonably argued, from first principles, and focuses on the better arguments for its conclusions. It nicely situates the legal within the philosophical, it is wise on power vs. sex, rooted in the idea of objectification, and it has at least one page on alcohol.
5. Kenneth Whyte, The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise. How the consumer and auto safety movement helped to bring down GM.
6. Fabrice Midal, Trungpa and Vision, a biography of Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist leader. I enjoyed this passage: “He never hesitated to tell the truth, even if this meant provoking the audience. At a talk in San Francisco in the fall of 1970, he began by saying: “It’s a pity you came here. You’re so aggressive.””
And this passage: “Chögyam Trungpa might have appeared, at first, sight, to be very modern and up-to-date in his approach to the teachings. He had abandoned the external signs of the Tibetan monastic tradition. He drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes, and wore Western clothes. He had a frank often provocative way with words and ignored the normal conventions of a guru.” In fact he died from complications resulting from heavy alcohol abuse.
Friday assorted links
1. Do employers discriminate against obese women?
2. Is bitcoin a good inflation hedge?
3. Five counties seek to leave Oregon for Idaho.
4. Will the Mormon moderation persist? Good piece.
5. New issue of Works in Progress, recommended.
6. How well is the lead hypothesis really doing? And the research is here.
7. “In Canada, it’s possible to find a man lounging on a chesterfield in his rented bachelor wearing only his gotchies while fortifying his Molson muscle with a jambuster washed down with slugs from a stubby.” (Obituary, NYT)
Population predicts regulation — but why?
We found that across states, a doubling of population size is associated with a 22 to 33 percent increase in regulation.
The relationship between regulation and population is surprisingly robust- it also holds for Australian states and Canadian provinces, and based on the limited data we have seems to hold across countries too (for instance, the “free market” United States has 10 times as many regulations as Canada- just as it has 10 times the population).
What is less clear is why this relationship is so strong. Mulligan and Shleifer attribute it to a fixed cost of regulating; larger polities can spread this cost over more people, making the average cost of regulating cheaper, so they do it more. We note two other explanations: larger polities might have more externalities worth regulating, or if regulation produces concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, a larger population could make it harder for those harmed by regulation to organize collectively to oppose it.
That blog post is based on work from James Bailey, James Broughel and Patrick McLaughlin, the latter two my Mercatus colleagues, written by James Bailey.
Windows not Windex
Science News: Though no one solution works for all places, public spaces need to focus on proper ventilation, air filtration, germicidal ultraviolet lights and air quality monitoring rather than rigorously disinfecting surfaces, say many scientists who cite evidence that the virus lingers in the air.
“This is what’s really frustrating,” says Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We’ve wasted billions and billions of dollars on disinfecting, which doesn’t serve any purpose whatsoever, yet things like having a $50 filter in every classroom, we haven’t done.”
Similarly, in an excellent piece Derek Thompson writes:
Too many U.S. institutions throughout the pandemic have shown little interest in the act of learning while doing. They etched the conventional wisdoms of March 2020 into stone and clutched their stone-tablet commandments in the face of any evidence that would disprove them. Liberal readers might readily point to Republican governors who rejected masks and indoor restrictions even as their states faced outbreaks. But the criticism also applies to deep-blue areas. Los Angeles, for instance, closed its playgrounds and prohibited friends from going on beach walks, long after researchers knew that the coronavirus didn’t really spread outdoors. In the pandemic and beyond, this might be the fundamental crisis of American institutions: They specialize in the performance of bureaucratic competence rather than the act of actually being competent.
The CDC’s announcement should be curtains for theatrical deep cleanings. But until companies, transit authorities, retailers, and magazines embrace the value of scientific discovery and the joy of learning new things, the show, and the soap, will go on.
Fortunately, there has been some recent learning. The Indian government now advises:
Aerosols could be carried in the air for up to 10 metres and improving the ventilation of indoor spaces would reduce transmission…“Ventilation can decrease the risk of transmission from one infected person to the other. Just as smells can be diluted from the air through opening windows and doors and using exhaust systems, ventilating spaces with improved directional air flow decreases the accumulated viral land in the air, reducing the risk of transmission. Ventilation is a community defense that protects all of us at home or at work,” it stated.
One thing which puzzled me even before the pandemic was the lack of interest in UVC even though there is credible evidence that it reduces hard to kill superbugs.
The large study, published in The Lancet, finds machines that emit the UV light can cut transmission of four major super bugs by a cumulative 30 percent. The finding is specific to patients who stay overnight in a room where someone with a known positive culture or infection of a drug-resistant organism had previously been treated.
“Some of these germs can live in the environment so long that even after a patient with the organism has left the room and it has been cleaned, the next patient in the room could potentially be exposed,” said Dr. Deverick J. Anderson, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Duke and lead investigator of the study. “Infections from one of these bugs are tough to treat and can be truly debilitating for a patient.”
The attentive reader will note that this also implies airborne transmission.
Even the FDA is moderately supportive of UVC:
UVC radiation is a known disinfectant for air, water, and nonporous surfaces. UVC radiation has effectively been used for decades to reduce the spread of bacteria, such as tuberculosis. For this reason, UVC lamps are often called “germicidal” lamps.
UVC radiation has been shown to destroy the outer protein coating of the SARS-Coronavirus, which is a different virus from the current SARS-CoV-2 virus. The destruction ultimately leads to inactivation of the virus. (see Far-UVC light (222 nm) efficiently and safely inactivates airborne human coronavirusesExternal Link Disclaimer). UVC radiation may also be effective in inactivating the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is the virus that causes the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Emergent Ventures winners, 14th cohort
Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, Jakarta, to hire a new director.
Zach Mazlish, recent Brown graduate in philosophy, for travel and career development.
Upsolve.org, headed by Rohan Pavuluri, to support their work on legal reform and deregulation of legal services for the poor.
Madison Breshears, GMU law student, to study the proper regulation of cryptocurrencies.
Quest for Justice, to help Californians better navigate small claims court without a lawyer.
Cameron Wiese, Progress Studies fellow, to create a new World’s Fair.
Jimmy Alfonso Licon, philosopher, visiting position at George Mason University, general career development.
Tony Morley, Progress Studies fellow, from Ngunnawal, Australia, to write the first optimistic children’s book on progress.
Michelle Wang, Sophomore at the University of Toronto, Canada, to study the causes and cures of depression, and general career development, and to help her intern at MIT.
Here are previous cohorts of winners.