Category: Uncategorized
My Conversation with Alain Bertaud
Excellent throughout, Alain put on an amazing performance for the live audience at the top floor of the Observatory at the old World Trade Center site. Here is the audio and transcript, most of all we talked about cities. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Will America create any new cities in the next century? Or are we just done?
BERTAUD: Cities need a good location. This is a debate I had with Paul Romer when he was interested in charter cities. He had decided that he could create 50 charter cities around the world. And my reaction — maybe I’m wrong — but my reaction is that there are not 50 very good locations for cities around the world. There are not many left. Maybe with Belt and Road, maybe the opening of Central Asia. Maybe the opening of the ocean route on the northern, following the pole, will create the potential for new cities.
But cities like Singapore, Malacca, Mumbai are there for a good reason. And I don’t think there’s that many very good locations.
COWEN: Or Greenland, right?
[laughter]
BERTAUD: Yes. Yes, yes.
COWEN: What is your favorite movie about a city? You mentioned a work of fiction. Movie — I’ll nominate Escape from New York.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: Casablanca.
Here is more:
COWEN: Your own background, coming from Marseille rather than from Paris —
BERTAUD: I would not brag about it normally.
[laughter]
COWEN: But no, maybe you should brag about it. How has that changed how you understand cities?
BERTAUD: I’m very tolerant of messy cities.
COWEN: Messy cities.
BERTAUD: Yes.
COWEN: Why might that be, coming from Marseille?
BERTAUD: When we were schoolchildren in Marseille, we were used to a city which has a . . . There’s only one big avenue. The rest are streets which were created locally. You know, the vernacular architecture.
In our geography book, we had this map of Manhattan. Our first reaction was, the people in Manhattan must have a hard time finding their way because all the streets are exactly the same.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: In Marseille we oriented ourselves by the angle that a street made with another. Some were very narrow, some very, very wide. One not so wide. But some were curved, some were . . . And that’s the way we oriented ourselves. We thought Manhattan must be a terrible place. We must be lost all the time.
Finally:
COWEN: And what’s your best Le Corbusier story?
BERTAUD: I met Le Corbusier at a conference in Paris twice. Two conferences. At the time, he was at the top of his fame, and he started the conference by saying, “People ask me all the time, what do you think? How do you feel being the most well-known architect in the world?” He was not a very modest man.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: And he said, “You know what it feels? It feels that my ass has been kicked all my life.” That’s the way he started this. He was a very bitter man in spite of his success, and I think that his bitterness is shown in his planning and some of his architecture.
COWEN: Port-au-Prince, Haiti — overrated or underrated?
Strongly recommended, and note that Bertaud is eighty years old and just coming off a major course of chemotherapy, a remarkable performance.
Again, I am very happy to recommend Alain’s superb book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.
Tuesday assorted links
The new Catholic illiberals
A few of you have asked me what I think of this movement, surveyed here (possibly gated for you), or try this coverage. If you would like the whole thing in one tweet, maybe try this one from Sohrab Ahmari:
What I’d say to liberal friends who are men and women of goodwill: “Persuade your comrades to ease up and back off while there’s yet time. You don’t want to pit your ideology against forces much older and more potent than liberalism, which is thin civilizational gruel, indeed.”
Other than disagreeing with this group, here is my general impression. They have not managed to produce a deep, compelling illiberal book comparable say to the works by James Fitzjames Stephens, Carl Schmitt, Burke (not actually an illiberal in my view, but the comparison remains relevant), Jean Bodin, or others from that tradition. I’m not sure they could beat the arguments of Thomas Mann’s liberal caricature Settembrini in The Magic Mountain.
They have not attached themselves to any great social movement or revolution, either as leaders or followers, unless you count the Church itself, but that is hardly new news.
They do not have a signature policy proposal (at the end of the article behind the first link, the big policy proposal unveiled at the end is “restrictions on share buybacks” — Cliff Asness, telephone! Are they kidding?)
Do they have a T.S. Eliot or an Emil Nolde or for that matter a J.S. Bach, who probably was not a Millian liberal?
So I believe they are part of the same “thin civilizational gruel” as the rest of us. They are too embedded in liberalism and its presuppositions to get very far with their own programme. That said, I am fine with them coexisting within the froth of a liberal order, insisting correctly that the heritage of “the Church” is essential to western civilization, in the meantime allowing their intuitions to be muddled by a confusion of rates of changes and levels when it comes to liberalism in the West today.
A few comments to close, returning to the tweet presented above:
1. Is all gruel thin?
2. Would thick gruel be better or worse?
3. Is Karachi haleem a form of thick gruel?
4. Isn’t the key word here “civilizational”? It is liberalism that produced, nourished, and sustained the world’s first truly admirable societies. There is nothing in the arguments of these new illiberals which seriously contradicts that.
5. Many people have longed for gruel, which I take to be underrated.
Do they object to dividends as well?
Monday assorted links
1. On Foucault on neoliberalism.
2. That was then, this is now (very short video, and check out Booker’s facial expression throughout).
3. Kevin Rudd on Australia as the Complacent Country.
Dining out in Karachi
The general standard is very high, though trying to chase after “the best place” does not seem worth the effort — it is more about choosing the best dish to order. As in India, the hotel restaurants are excellent, and you can sample everything you might want without leaving a single restaurant, if you find the dust and heat too daunting (I do not, but you might, please do believe me on that one). The crowning glories in Karachi are the biryanis and the lassi. A randomly chosen lassi here seems to match the very best Indian lassis in quality. The karahi dishes come alive like nowhere else. Qorma sauces too. Vegetables are hard to come by, especially greens — the restaurant version of Karachi cuisine is quite meat-heavy, and the overall selection of dishes is not so different from what you find in the Pakistani restaurants in Springfield, Virginia. That said, the greens and herbs that accompany the meat dishes are fresh and vibrant.
One secondary consequence of the meat emphasis is that Karachi Western fast food is much more like the Western version than you might find in India. Hamburgers carry over very well to the Pakistani context, as does slopping together meat and bread in various ways, a’ la Subway. There is Movenpick chocolate ice cream in various shopping malls and hotels. Reasonable Chinese food can be found, can you say “One Belt, One Road”?
Golub Jamun, typically an atrocity in the United States, is marvelous in Pakistan.
How strong is the evidence that the EITC boosts labor supply?
This paper reconsiders the impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on labor supply at the extensive margin. I investigate every EITC reform at the state and federal level since the inception of the policy in 1975. Based on event studies comparing single women with and without children, or comparing single mothers with different numbers of children, I show that the only EITC reform associated with clear employment increases is the expansion enacted in 1993. The employment increases in the mid-late nineties are very large, but they are influenced by the confounding effects of welfare reform and a booming macroeconomy. Based on different approaches that exploit variation in these confounders across household type, space and time, I show that the employment effects align closely with exposure to welfare reform and the business cycle. Single mothers who were unaffected by welfare reform (but eligible for the EITC) did not respond. Overall and contrary to consensus, the case for sizable extensive margin effects of the EITC is fragile. I highlight the presence of informational frictions, widely documented in the literature, as a natural explanation for the absence of extensive margin responses.
Via A. Dube. The effectiveness of EITC used to be a consensus view, so if this result holds up, it would require some substantial revisions in how we think about both welfare and job incentives.
Sunday assorted links
Why do rates of entrepreneurship vary?
Why do societies vary in their rates of entrepreneurship and organizational founding? Drawing on the largest available longitudinal sample comprising 192 countries over 2001-2018, I examine the evidence in relation to several explanations, including variation in the density of established organizations, national investment in research and development (R&D), technology transfer to new companies, the quality of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, venture capital (VC) availability, and governmental support and policies for entrepreneurship. Contrary to prevailing theories, there is limited empirical support for these explanations. Rather, the evidence shows that the strongest predictors of cross-national variation in entrepreneurial activity were normative, with social norms being the most strongly associated with entrepreneurialism and rates of organizational founding. This study further examines the relationship between norms and societal culture and finds that more gender-egalitarian societies and societies that value and reward performance and endorse status privileges had on average higher rates of organizational founding, net of differences in national income and economic growth. The paper discusses the implications of these findings in relation to research on the social determinants of entrepreneurship and organizational founding.
That is from a new paper by Valentina Assenova. Let me just repeat one sentence in there, as it is one of the most important sentences in all of economics:
Rather, the evidence shows that the strongest predictors of cross-national variation in entrepreneurial activity were normative, with social norms being the most strongly associated with entrepreneurialism and rates of organizational founding.
Recommended. Here is Assenova’s other new paper, showing entrepreneurship is correlated with higher innovation.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Saturday assorted links
1. Suresh Naidu and Alice Evans podcast on democracy being better for economic growth than autocracy.
2. Toko Telo, with d’Gary, a song from Madagascar.
3. “There are 440 million fewer blackbirds than there once were.” (NYT)
4. Germany’s vanishing monasteries.
Friday assorted links
1. “Bos G Farm’s entire herd of 60 yaks went missing on the eve of the owners’ retirement.”
2. The political pollution cycle in China.
3. What is optimal policy toward wild horses?
4. David Perell notes on the new Peter Thiel interview.
5. High-tech clusters boost the productivity of top inventors.
7. Russ Roberts video makes the case for growth optimism since 1973.
How Harvard makes admissions decisions
Here are some new and very thorough results from Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and the excellent Tyler Ransom:
The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.
Am I allowed to observe that this seems wrong to me? And that our “liberal elite” (not my preferred term, but what you see in the discourse and I don’t know which other referent to use) has failed us?
And from Garett Jones:
Controlling for academic traits and much else, being Asian American predicts a substantially lower probability of Harvard admission… And being female predicts a substantially higher probability of admission.
Here is the full paper. For the pointer I thank various MR readers.
Thursday assorted links
Wednesday assorted links
Lebanese/Gaza marriage markets in everything
Political parties sponsor weddings for young members to reinforce their loyalty, and gratitude. Religious and ethnic minorities — which means everyone in splintered Lebanon — consider marriage and procreation essential to their long-term survival. And armed groups encourage their fighters to marry so that their children can become the fighters of the future.
A few weeks before the Maronite nuptials, Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group and political party, oversaw a similar enormous wedding for 31 couples. That was tiny compared with a mass wedding in Lebanon earlier this year that brought together 196 couples and was sponsored by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.
But the nearby Gaza Strip — where an Egyptian-Israeli blockade keeps people poor and locked in — beats them all, often because of competition between foreign sponsors eager to win friends by expediting marriages.
In 2015, the United Arab Emirates sponsored a mass wedding there for 200 couples. Two months later, Turkey seriously upped the ante, bankrolling a ceremony for 2,000 couples that was attended by officials from Hamas, the militant group that rules the territory…
Fadi Gerges, an official with the league, said it was natural for minorities to encourage their youths to procreate in a country where demographics affect power.
Here is the rest of the Ben Hubbard NYT story, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.