Category: Uncategorized
North vs. South India?
The data set used by Paul and Sridhar starts with the year 1960, when per capita income in Tamil Nadu was 51 per cent higher than UP’s. In the early 1980s, this difference had narrowed to 39 per cent. However, over the following decades the gap began to rapidly grow, and in 2005 an average resident of Tamil Nadu earned 128 per cent more than an average resident of Uttar Pradesh. (Statistics available online suggest that by 2021 the gap has increased to almost 300 per cent.)
Taking the South as a whole and the North as a whole, the book found that while the two regions differed only by 39 per cent in terms of per capita income in 1960-61, forty years later the gap had widened to 101 per cent. Now, in 2021, the gap has widened much further. Currently, the average annual per capita income of the four northern states profiled by Paul and Sridhar is about US $4,000, and of the four southern states, in excess of US $10,000, or roughly 250 per cent higher.
The data analysed by Paul and Sridhar show that there are two areas in which the South has done much better than the North. First, with regard to human development indicators such as female literacy rate, infant mortality and life expectancy. Second, in areas critical to economic development such as technical education, electricity generation, and quality and extent of roads. The first set of factors prepares healthier and better educated citizens to participate in the modern economy, while the second set enables much higher rates of productivity and efficiency in manufacturing and services.
Paul and Sridhar also found that the South fares substantially better than the North on governance indicators.
Here is the full piece by Ramachandra Guha, interesting throughout, with a pointer to Alice Evans, via Paul Novosad.
Saturday assorted links
China fact of the day
Here is the link and source.
Friday assorted links
The Edward Nelson books on Milton Friedman
Two volumes, such a wonderful book, for sure one of the best of the year. Not quite a biography, more a study of Friedman’s career, but his career was his life so this is a wonderful biography too. Here is one excerpt:
Friedman was a student of business cycles who was prone to say that he did not believe there was a business cycle. He was a trenchant critic of reserve requirements as a monetary policy tools and a strong advocate of financial deregulation, yet he had many favorable things to say about moving to a regime of 100 percent reserve requirements. he stressed the looseness of the relationship between money and the economy, yet critics saw his policy prescriptions as predicated on a tight relationship. He criticized in detail the way the Federal Reserve allowed the money stock to adjust to the state of the economy, yet he was often characterized as treating empirical money-stock behavior as exogenous. He made fundamental contributions to the development of Phillips-curve theory, yet he was averse to conducting discussion of inflation prospects using Phillips-curve analysis. He spent much of his first two decades as a researcher working on labor unions and the use of market power in setting prices, yet for the subsequent five decades he found himself accused by critics of predicating his economic analysis on an atomistic labor market, a one-good model, or perfectly competitive firms.
Here is Scott Sumner on the book. Highly recommended, here is the Amazon link, and volume II.
John Stuart Mill on the English
From causes which might be traced in the history and development of English society and government, the general habit and practice of the English mind is compromise. No idea is carried out to more than a small portion of its legitimate consequences. Neither by the generality of our speculative thinkers, nor in the practice of the nation, are the principles which are professed ever thoroughly acted upon; something always stops the application half way. This national habit has consequences of very various character, of which the following is one. It is natural to minds governed by habit (which is the character of the English more than of any other civilized people) that their tastes and inclinations become accommodated to their habitual practice; and as in England no principle is ever fully carried out, discordance between principles and practice has come to be regarded, not only as the natural, but as the desirable state. This is no an epigram, or a paradox, but a sober description of the tone of sentiment commonly found in Englishman. They never feel themselves safe unless they are living under the shadow of some convention fiction — some agreement to say one thing and mean another.
That is from Mill’s Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848.
Thursday assorted links
1. Are boarding houses underrated?
2. Redux of older MR post “Modeling Vladimir Putin.”
3. Claims about California blackouts.
4. New free on-line book: Capitalism after Covid: Interviews with 21 Economists, edited by Luis Garicano.
6. Fusion plant backed by Jeff Bezos to be built in the UK, the bad news being “It won’t generate power…”
*Unsettled*, by Steven E. Koonin
A few of you have asked me to review this book, sometimes presented as a clinching case for climate contrarianism. I thought it was fine, but not a great revelation, and ultimately disappointing on one very major point of contention. On the latter angle, on p.2 Koonin writes:
The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.
That is presented as a big deal, and yes it would be. But “minimal”? The economist wishes to ask “how much.” The more concrete discussion comes on pp.178-179, which looks at twenty studies (all or most of them bad), and reports they estimate that by 2100 global gdp is three percent less due to climate change, or perhaps the damages are smaller yet. Those estimates are then graphed, and there is a bit of numerical analysis of what that means for growth rates working backwards. There is not much more than that on the question, and no attempt to provide an independent estimate of the economic costs of global warming, or to tell us which might be the best study or what it might be missing. Koonin seems more interested in discrediting the hypocritical or innumerate climate change researchers than finding out the best answer to the question of cost.
To be sure, this is all a useful corrective to those who think global warming will destroy the earth or create major existential risk. I am happy to praise the book for that and for all of its other corrections of hysteria.
But I just don’t find the Koonin discussion of economic costs to be useful. The best estimate I know estimates global welfare costs of six percent, with some poorer countries suffering losses of up to fifteen percent, and some of the colder regions gaining. There is high uncertainty about average effects, so you also can debate what kind of risk premium can be considered. (I have myself written about how climate change may induce stupid policy responses, thus perhaps boosting the costs further yet.) You may or may not agree with those numbers, but the above-linked paper provides plenty of structure for considering the problem further, such as modeling migration and adjustment effects across different parts of the world. The Koonin brief meta-survey does not, it simply tells you that the junky papers don’t have the numbers to justify the panic.
So in what sense is the Koonin book useful for furthering my understanding of my number one question of concern? Of course not every book has to be written for me, but at the end of the day it didn’t cause me to update my views much at all.
Wednesday assorted links
1. A public choice model of where support for the administrative state came from historically. And John Austin on centralization.
2. Ari Lamm podcast with Leah Boustan on the Bible and big data; Ari Lamm podcast with Hollis Robbins “Only the Weirdos can Save Us!”
3. “It is obscene: a true reflection in three parts.”
5. Will they insert advertisements into your dreams? (highly speculative, absurd you might say)
My Conversation with Elijah Millgram
Elijah is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Elijah joined Tyler to discuss Newcomb’s paradox, the reason he doesn’t have an opinion about everything, the philosophy of Dave Barry, style and simulation theory, why philosophers aren’t often consulted about current events, his best stories from TA-ing for Robert Nozick, the sociological correlates of knowing formal logic, the question of whether people are more interested in truth or being interesting, philosophical cycles, what makes Nietzsche important today, the role that meaning can play in a person’s personality and life, Mill on Bentham, the idea of true philosophy as dialogue, the extent to which modern philosophers are truly philosophical, why he views aesthetics as critical to philosophy, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Newcomb’s paradox: Are you a one-boxer or two-boxer, and why?
MILLGRAM: I’ve never been able to take a stand on that, mostly because there’s this moment in Robert Nozick’s discussion of the Newcomb paradox. Should we pause to tell the audience . . .
COWEN: No, no. This is not for them; this is for us. They can Google —
MILLGRAM: Oh, this is for us? OK. Nozick said, “Look, here’s what happens when you get a class,” or not even a class. People talk about Newcomb’s paradox. Some people end up having one view and some people end up having the other view. Each side has the argument for their own view, but they don’t have the explanation of what’s wrong with the other argument. Then Nozick says — and I think this is absolutely on target — “It doesn’t help to just repeat your own argument more slowly and more loudly.”
Since I don’t know what’s wrong with the — whichever other argument it is, I don’t have a view.
COWEN: If you don’t have a view, doesn’t that by default put you close to the one-box position? It means you don’t consider the dominance principle self-evident because you’re not sure that in fact you’re getting more by opting for the two boxes. Quantum mechanics is weird; aliens may be weirder yet. You don’t know what to do. Why not just take the slightly smaller prize and opt for one box? Not with extreme conviction, but you would be a default, mildly agnostic one-boxer.
MILLGRAM: Who knows what I would do if somebody turned up and gave me the . . .
But let me say something a little bit to the meta level, and then I’ll speak to the view that I would be a one-boxer. I live in a world where I feel disqualified from a privilege that almost everybody around me has. People are supposed to have opinions about all kinds of things. They have opinions about politics, and they have opinions about sports teams, and they have opinions about who knows what.
I’m in the very peculiar position of being in a job where I’m paid to have opinions. I feel that I can’t have opinions unless I’ve worked for them and I can back them up, and that means that unless I’ve done my homework, unless I have an argument for the opinion, I don’t have it — so I don’t.
Now, going back from the meta level, kind of one level down: let’s stop and think about what’s built into the . . .
When you explain dominance to a classroom, you say, “Look, here are the different options you have,” and I guess the options are used to the column, “and here are the different states of the world, and you can see that for each state of the world this option does better than that option. So you should take . . .”
There’s a lot built into that already. For example, that the world is carved up into these different — the state space is carved up, and your option space is carved up, and you don’t get to rethink, recharacterize — the characterization of the things that you do is already given to you, and it’s fixed. It’s an idealization.
Until the situation arrived and I had a chance to face it and think about it, I wouldn’t know whether to accept that idealization. I know that sounds really coy, but the principled view is that since I don’t have an argument, I don’t have an opinion.
Recommended. And here is Elijah’s home page and research.
What we learned doing Fast Grants
Here is my new piece with Patrick Collison and Patrick Hsu. The title says it all, here is one excerpt:
…we recently ran a survey of Fast Grants recipients, asking how much their Fast Grant accelerated their work. 32% said that Fast Grants accelerated their work by “a few months”, which is roughly what we were hoping for at the outset given that the disease was killing thousands of Americans every single day.
In addition to that, however, 64% of respondents told us that the work in question wouldn’t have happened without receiving a Fast Grant.
For example, SalivaDirect, the highly successful spit test from Yale University, was not able to get timely funding from its own School of Public Health, even though Yale has an endowment of over $30 billion. Fast Grants also made numerous grants to UC Berkeley researchers, and the UC Berkeley press office itself reported in May 2020: “One notably absent funder, however, is the federal government. While federal agencies have announced that researchers can apply to repurpose existing funds toward Covid-19 research and have promised new emergency funds to projects focused on the pandemic, disbursement has been painfully slow. …Despite many UC Berkeley proposals submitted to the National Institutes of Health since the pandemic began, none have been granted.” [Emphasis ours.]
And:
57% of respondents told us that they spend more than one quarter of their time on grant applications. This seems crazy. We spend enormous effort training scientists who are then forced to spend a significant fraction of their time seeking alms instead of focusing on the research they’ve been hired to pursue.
The adverse consequences of our funding apparatus appear to be more insidious than the mere imposition of bureaucratic overhead, however.
In our survey of the scientists who received Fast Grants, 78% said that they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent in an unconstrained fashion. We find this number to be far too high: the current grant funding apparatus does not allow some of the best scientists in the world to pursue the research agendas that they themselves think are best.
And:
Some of the other Fast Grants investments were speculative, and may (or may not) pay dividends in the future, or for the next pandemic. Examples include:
- Work on a possible pan-coronavirus vaccine at Caltech.
- Work on a possible pan-enterovirus (another class of RNA virus) drug at Stanford University that has now raised subsequent funding.
- Multiple grants going to different labs working on CRISPR-based COVID-19 at-home testing. One example is smartphone-based COVID-19 detection, being worked on at UC Berkeley and Gladstone Institutes.
Self-recommending…
A recent common cold may confer partial Covid-19 protection
Initial replication of SARS-CoV-2 in the upper respiratory tract is required to establish infection, and the replication level correlates with the likelihood of viral transmission. Here, we examined the role of host innate immune defenses in restricting early SARS-CoV-2 infection using transcriptomics and biomarker-based tracking in serial patient nasopharyngeal samples and experiments with airway epithelial organoids. SARS-CoV-2 initially replicated exponentially, with a doubling time of ∼6 h, and induced interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs) in the upper respiratory tract, which rose with viral replication and peaked just as viral load began to decline. Rhinovirus infection before SARS-CoV-2 exposure accelerated ISG responses and prevented SARSCoV-2 replication. Conversely, blocking ISG induction during SARS-CoV-2 infection enhanced viral replication from a low infectious dose. These results show that the activity of ISG-mediated defenses at the time of SARS-CoV-2 exposure impacts infection progression and that the heterologous antiviral response induced by a different virus can protect against SARS-CoV-2.
That is a just published paper, supported by Fast Grants, by Nagarjuna R. Cheemarla, Timothy A. Watkins, Valia T. Mihaylova, Bao Wang, Dejian Zhao, Guilin Wang, Marie L. Landry, and Ellen F. Foxman.
Tuesday assorted links
1. What would one-dimensional chess look like?
2. Very high implicit marginal tax rates for poor people (link fixed).
3. Very good Jason Furman thread on inflation uncertainty.
4. The power of median inflation.
5. Buy shares in your favorite musicians?
6. Andreu Mas-Colell is in trouble for secessionary activities. And more from Pol Antras. Hans Peter Grüner says: “It is hard to imagine that someone capable of writing such a wonderful textbook could have done anything that makes him deserve that kind of treatment.”
Roger Scruton Hungarian coffee shop markets in everything
When the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton died last year Boris Johnson called him “the greatest modern conservative thinker”.
It seems that he had an even greater admirer in Viktor Orban, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary, whose allies have poured £1.5 million into a chain of coffee shops in Scruton’s memory. The first opened in November in Budapest and is filled with Scruton memorabilia donated by his widow, Sophie.
More cafés will follow, says John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher who now chairs a Hungarian think tank. The £1.5 million investment comes from the state-sponsored Batthyany foundation, which also paid for the historian Norman Stone to write a history of Hungary that praised Orban’s leadership.
Here is the full link from the London Times (gated). For the pointer I thank Jason D.