Category: Uncategorized
Thursday assorted links
1. MIE: Crush a car with a tank.
2. Ben Southwood music of the decade list. And Scott Sumner 5 favorite books.
3. Modest moves toward markets in Venezuela.
4. Paris ballet dancers fighting for the right to retire on full pension at age 42.
6. “Of the 50m children currently learning the piano worldwide, as many as 40m may be Chinese.”
7. Jomon revival.
Social science explanations don’t usually require so much intentionality
“What will you do to stay weird?” Ah, how many people responded with claims like:
No offense, but I think if you’re doing a lot of these things consciously and for the expressed purpose of being weird or differentiating yourself from those around you, you’re just a poseur. Truly weird people don’t have to come up with lists like this about how to be weird; they just follow their preferences.
But it’s not about intentionality. Take one of today’s MR stories, namely that universities are tracking the locations of college students to make sure they come to class. That is bad for the weird! So if you are weird, and you like to cut out on class and read Gwern instead (recommended), maybe you shouldn’t go to a school like that.
Going to those schools might be bad for you. Going to those schools might make you less weird. But you don’t have to sit around thinking “I’m going to try to look really weird, as if I were getting a bizarre tattoo, by refusing to attend schools with surveillance.” No, you need only to say “I love Gwern more than class!” And then think through the means-end relationship of how to keep the weird stuff flowing to the weird you.
Thus refusing admission at such schools is part of how you stay weird. But it need not have any element of poseur, artificiality, or deliberate image construction. What you want is to read Gwern instead of attending class, which indeed is weird (and good). At the same time, without artificiality you still to think through ends-means relationships, so you don’t end up stuck in class all day. And thus it is worth thinking about how to keep your freedom to be weird, poseur-free at that.
Thinking that social science explanations require more intentionality than in fact they do is one of the classic mistakes of internet comments.
Christmas assorted links
1. Disney cuts the same sex kiss scene from Star Wars in Singapore. And a good Tim Kreider Star Wars essay (NYT). And this NYT header brought a guffaw but also feelings of sorrow and pity: “‘Star Wars’ Fans Are Angry and Polarized. Like All Americans.“
2. There are tens of thousands of volunteers doing the dangerous work of fighting the Australian fires.
3. Is Christmas just a tax on women?
4. “According to new data from the restaurant reviewing website Yelp, the share of Chinese restaurants in the top 20 metropolitan areas has been consistently falling. Five years ago, an average of 7.3 percent of all restaurants in these areas were Chinese, compared with 6.5 percent today.” (NYT link).
Presentation of the Infant Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem
The Indian Mughal emperor Akbar was interested in and tolerant of many religions and in 1579 invited Portuguese Jesuits from Goa to his court. They brought with them paintings illustrating the European style, which influenced Indian artists of the day including in this piece from Bijapur circa 1600. From the V&A.
The U.S. Public Debt Valuation Puzzle (uh oh)
The market value of outstanding federal government debt in the U.S. exceeds the expected present discounted value of current and future primary surpluses by a multiple of U.S. GDP. When the pricing kernel fits U.S. equity and Treasury prices and the government surpluses are consistent with U.S. post-war data, a government debt valuation puzzle emerges. Since tax revenues are pro-cyclical while government spending is counter-cyclical, the tax revenue claim has a higher short-run discount rate and a lower value than the spending claim. Since revenue and spending are co-integrated with GDP, the long-run risk discount rates of both claims are much higher than the long Treasury yield. These forces imply a negative present value of U.S. government surpluses. Convenience yields for Treasurys are much larger than previously thought and/or U.S. Treasury markets have failed to enforce the no-bubble condition.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Mindy Z. Siaolan.
Tuesday assorted links
1. The penis-shaped ice rink culture that is Russia.
2. The Economist on Peter Chang and the revolution in Chinese cuisine. Price variability is rising in the Chinese cuisine market.
3. Dylan Matthews favorite social science studies of the decade.
4. “Impact funds earn 4.7 percentage points (ppts) lower IRRs ex post than traditional VC funds.”
5. Arnold Kling’s books of the year. And Scott Sumner responds to me on national security and trade.
6. “Relative to low-income households, high-income households enjoy 40 percent higher utility per dollar expenditure in wealthy cities, relative to poor cities. Similar patterns are observed across stores in different neighborhoods. Most of this variation is explained by differences in the product assortment offered, rather than the relative prices charged, by chains that operate in different markets.” Link here.
“What will you do to stay weird?”
That was a question I asked someone while discussing the topic of careers, in this case academic careers but it applies more broadly. Virtually by definition, the major pressures are toward conformity, yet a budding innovator may wish to stay weird for purposes of superior creativity and perhaps enjoyment as well. What strategies can be used, or passively allowed to operate (in case one is weird already) to stay weird?
I thought of a few options:
1. Adhere to a weird ideology.
Libertarianism used to serve this function fairly well. If you were a libertarian, the mainstream forces might decide you are hopeless and stop pressuring you to conform. Furthermore, your libertarian peer group would encourage you to stay weird, so that you would stick with them and also weirdness was all they knew.
But these days libertarianism isn’t so weird anymore, even if most people strongly disagree with it. (“You want to legalize all drugs? Ho hum. Just yesterday I read a guy on the internet who wants…”) And there is a libertarian establishment that will encourage you to conform more than it encourages you to stay weird.
You might thus opt for a weirder view yet, perhaps to be found in the Bay Area. In any case, this strategy deserves to make the list, even if it does not always work or is less effective than it used to be. This gets at one of the problems with the internet, namely that by normalizing or at least regularizing the weird, it can be harder to actually stay weird.
Nonetheless support for Trump may offer some new hope here, even though he won 48 percent of the vote.
2. Be gay or lesbian or bisexual.
No longer so effective in keeping you out of the mainstream, mostly for good reasons, but there is a cultural loss attached to this progress.
3. Be a jerk.
People might then just ignore you altogether, or conspire against you. Either way, the pressures toward conformity will weaken. Still, you have to be a jerk and that is a high cost for you and for others. I don’t recommend this method, but it does seem to have worked for a number of leading scientists, just ask Eric Weinstein for his list.
4. Move to the middle of nowhere. Or move to another country.
The internet might be limiting the effectiveness of this strategy too, although it lowers its costs for the same reasons.
5. Cultivate a highly unusual physical appearance.
6. Marry someone from another country.
A weird country, preferably.
7. Develop a small group of intensely weird but smart friends, and treat them as your relevant audience.
A very good path, though due to the problems with the other options, your weird friends might themselves turn too normal. This may require a kind of collective bootstrapping method.
8. Read extensively in weird areas, outside the present and outside of your home nation, and refuse to read much news.
9. Adopt impenetrable terminology.
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoord-enenthurnuk to that one!
10. Blog rather than tweet. Stay off Twitter altogether.
Duh.
11. Avoid conference attendance. Especially for conferences that are more than five years old.
12. Avoid becoming famous for reasons other than your weirdness.
13. Develop and maintain a highly unusual family structure.
What else might you try?
Monday assorted links
1. California law vs. the arts.
3. Politically correct takes on The Rise of Skywalker (full of spoilers).
5. Grand Rapids, Rochester, Buffalo, Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City are the American cities with the shortest average commutes. On the other side of the distribution: “In the New York metropolitan area, 3.8 percent of traveling commuters reach their jobs by transit in less than 30 minutes. The San Francisco is second, at 2.7 percent, more than one quarter lower than New York.”
6. “Rio averages 24 shootouts per day. Large hours-long gun battles often don’t even make the headlines.” The link focuses on data on the bullets.
Conversations with Tyler, year-end retrospective
The show’s producer, the excellent Jeff Holmes, interviews me about what I thought of the year’s episodes (including most underrated), here is the audio and transcript, a very fun episode for me to do. We cover:
…who was most challenging guest to prep for, the most popular — and the most underrated — conversation, a test of Tyler’s knowledge called “Name That Production Function,” listener questions from Twitter, how Tyler has boosted his productivity in the past year, and whether his book and movie picks from 2009 still hold up.
And if you have enjoyed this year in Conversations, please consider donating here before the end of the year.
China isn’t close to being the #1 economy
From my latest Bloomberg column:
The key point is the difference between income and wealth. GDP and related numbers measure income flows: namely, the quantity of goods and services produced in a given nation in a given year. Wealth is a measure of the total stock of resources in a nation and is much higher. Furthermore, the gap between wealth and income is usually higher for nations that have been wealthy and stable for a very long time, such as the U.S.
When it comes to national wealth, the U.S. has a big lead over China, possibly as much as three times greater. That is a very rough estimate by Michael Beckley of Tufts University, drawing on data from the World Bank and the United Nations.
For a relevant pointer to Beckley, I thank Evan Abramsky of AEI.
Sunday assorted links
2. Beatles data from Spotify (“Here Comes the Sun” is the most popular song, and Abbey Road the most popular album, both by considerable margins). And how Strawberry Fields was made.
3. Does the United States or China have more bargaining power? “Beijing also failed in the demand it most wanted – for the US to relax the restrictions and bans imposed on Chinese technology, such as is blacklisting of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.” While I don’t agree with their economic analysis of the trade deficit, the above-linked piece is a very useful corrective to most of what you read from the Anglo press on the trade deal. I just don’t get Scott Sumner’s unwillingness — expressed here — to frame the trade deal in national security terms. That changes everything, and it is obviously true.
4. David Gerrold tech predictions from 1999.
5. The culture that is a German Santa shortage: “In the past, she says, the Santas under her watch didn’t ask for much. “But now, supply and demand regulate the market, and that’s a very dangerous development,” she says. “One agency has chosen to keep prices at 45 euros per Santa visit, but I’ve had to go up to 66. Others are asking for up to 120 euros.””
What I’ve been reading
1. Ben Cohen, The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks. An intelligent popular social science book covering everything from Stephen Curry to Shakespeare to The Princess Bride, David Booth, Eugene Fama, and more. I am not sure the book is actually about “the hot hand” as a unified phenomenon, as opposed to mere talent persistence, but still I will take intelligence over the alternative.
2. Richard J. Lazarus, The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court. A genuinely interesting and well-presented history of how climate change became a partisan issue in the United States, somewhat broader than its title may indicate.
3. Ryan H. Murphy, Markets Against Modernity: Ecological Irrationality, Public and Private. The book has blurbs from Bryan Caplan and Scott Sumner, and I think of it as an ecological, historically reconstructed account of the demand for irrationality as it relates to the environment, interest in “do-it-yourself,” and the love for small scale enterprise. Interesting, but overpriced.
4. Juan Du, The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City. An actual history, as opposed to the usual blah-blah-blah you find in so many China books. The author has a background in architecture and urban planning, and stresses the import of the Pearl River Delta before Deng’s reforms (Shenzhen wasn’t just a run-down fishing village), decentralization in Chinese reforms, and fits and starts in the city’s post-reform history. Anyone who reads books on China should consider this one.
Gordon Teskey, Spenserian Moments, The Master is finally receiving his poetic due.
Toby Ord’s forthcoming The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity is a comprehensive look at existential risk, written by an Oxford philosopher and student of Derek Parfit.
*The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe*
What an excellent book. Imagine somebody — in this case Thane Gustafson — taking all those snippets of gas history you used to read about and turning them into a coherent, well-written narrative. The Dutch disease, Norwegian gas, the origins of Gazprom and Western Siberian reserves, the French decision to go nuclear, and much more. It’s all here. Every topic should have a book like this about it. Excerpt:
Kortunov’s importance as the founder of the Soviet gas industry and the originator of the gas bridge with Europe cannot be overstated. Without his vision and drive, organizational talent, and political skill, the development of West Siberian oil and gas might have been delayed by as much as a generation. Gas exports to Europe would have remained modest, for lack of sufficient ready reserves and a pipeline system through which to ship them. Above all, the rapid displacement of coal and oil by gas in the Soviet primary fuel balance — one of the last successes of the Soviet planned economy — would have taken much longer. By the beginning of the 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell apart and the Soviet oil industry with it, it was the gas industry, by then Russia’s most important source of primary fuel, that kept the Soviet cities heated and lighted, while oil was exported for desperately needed dollars. That was Kortunov’s legacy to the country he so ardently believed in.
Due out in January, you can pre-order your copy here.
Saturday assorted links
1. Australia’s biggest forest fire has now destroyed an area seven times the size of Singapore.
2. Do chimps create rock music by throwing stones? They prefer to throw rocks at trees with a lower, longer-lasting sound.
3. Arnold Kling on the Weinstein and Cowen podcast.
4. Fast. Who will build this index? And how long will it take them?
5. Fighting with China in the Faroes (NYT). By the way, total unemployment there is 183.
Transparent erasers markets in everything there is no great stagnation
To many, Japan seems like a technological wonderland that’s at least a couple of decades ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to innovation. That even applies to something as seemingly mundane as office supplies, as is evident by this new see-through eraser that enhances precision by providing an unobstructed view of what’s actually being erased.
…And with a price tag of around $1.40 for a large version of the Clear Radar, and around 90 cents for a smaller one, Seed isn’t charging an inflated premium for this innovation, so why wouldn’t you upgrade?
Here is the full story, via Samuel Brenner.