Category: Uncategorized

Enlightenment ideas and the belief in progress leading up to the Industrial Revolution

by  Tyler Cowen in

Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, scientific volumes became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, industrial works—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the 17th century. It was therefore the more pragmatic, industrial works which reflected the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s takeoff.

That is from a paper by Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy, and Jared Rubin.  Now forthcoming at the QJE.

Emergent Ventures winners, 49th cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

David Yang, 14, Vancouver, robotics.

Alex Araki, London, to improve clinical trials.

Ivan Skripnik, Moldova/LA, physics and the nature of space.

Mihai Codreanu, Stanford economics Ph.D, industrial parks and the origins of innovation.

Salvador Duarte, Lisbon/Nebraska, 17, podcast in economics and philosophy.

Aras Zirgulis, Vilnius, short economics videos.

Ava McGurk, 17, Belfast, therapy and other services company and general career support.

Anusha Agarwal, Thomas Jefferson High School, NoVa, space/Orbitum.

Cohen Pert, 16, Sewanee, Georgia, running several businesses.

Jin Wang, University of Arizona, Economics Ph.D, AI and the history of Chinese economic growth.

Janelle Yapp, high school senior, KL Malaysia, general career support.

Justin Kuiper, Bay Area, Progress Studies ideas for video.

Mariia ]Masha] Baidachna, Glasgow/Ukraine, quantum computing.

Beatriz Gietner, Dublin, Substack on econometrics.

Roman Lopatynskyi, Kyiv, romantic piano music.

What is opera?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brunnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being.  In reali life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

In recompense for this lack of psychological complexity, however, music can do what words cannot, present the immediate and simultaneous relation of these states to each other.  The crowning glory of opera is the big ensemble.

That is from an excellent W.H. Auden essay “Notes on Music and Opera.”

Eric Hanushek on the import of schooling quality declines

by  Tyler Cowen in

 My recent research at Stanford University translates the achievement declines into implications for future economic impacts. Past evidence shows clearly that people who know more earn more. When accounting for the impact of higher achievement historically on salaries, the lifetime earnings of today’s average student will be an estimated 8 percent lower than that of students in 2013. Because long-term economic growth depends on the quality of a nation’s labor force, the achievement declines translate into an average of 6 percent lower gross domestic product for the remainder of the century. The dollar value of this lower growth is over 15 times the total economic costs of the 2008 recession.

Here is the full Op-Ed, noting that Eric compares this decline to the effects of an eight percent income tax surcharge.  I have not read through this work, though I suspect these estimates will prove controversial when it comes to causality.  In any case, file this under “big if true,” if only in expected value terms.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Those semi-new service sector jobs how to get people to leave a cult.

2. What was Alice Munro actually writing about?  So often people are writing about themselves.

3. The New Yorker on Paul Collier and Britain.

4. Claims about LLMs and stock returns.

5. Live version of “I Hear a Symphony,” you can skip the thirty second intro.

6. The Harvard endowment’s single biggest public investment is now Bitcoin.

Some second-order effects of unaffordable housing

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is one of the best, most interesting, and most important papers I have seen of late:

Housing affordability has declined sharply in recent decades, leading many younger generations to give up on homeownership. Using a calibrated life-cycle model matched to U.S. data, we project that the cohort born in the 1990s will reach retirement with a homeownership rate roughly 9.6 percentage points lower than that of their parents’ generation. The model also shows that as households’ perceived probability of attaining homeownership falls, they systematically shift their behavior: they consume more relative to their wealth, reduce work effort, and take on riskier investments. We show empirically that renters with relatively low wealth exhibit the same patterns. These responses compound over the life cycle, producing substantially greater wealth dispersion between those who retain hope of homeownership and those who give up. We propose a targeted subsidy that lifts the largest number of young renters above the “giving-up threshold.” This policy yields welfare gains that are 3.2 times those of a uniform transfer and 10.3 times those of a transfer targeted to the bottom 10% of the wealth distribution, while also increasing homeownership rate, raising work effort, and reducing reliance on the social safety net.

That is from Seung Hyeong Lee of Northwestern and Younggeun Yoo of University of Chicago.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

My very fun Conversation with Blake Scholl

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  This was at a live event (the excellent Roots of Progress conference), so it is only about forty minutes, shorter than usual.  Here is the episode summary:

Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he’s building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he’s equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it’s airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept.

Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what’s wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what’s wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: There’s plenty about Boom online and in your interviews, so I’d like to take some different tacks here. This general notion of having things move more quickly, I’m a big fan of that. Do you have a plan for how we could make moving through an airport happen more quickly? You’re in charge. You’re the dictator. You don’t have to worry about bureaucratic obstacles. You just do it.

SCHOLL: I think about this in the shower like every day. There is a much better airport design that, as best I can tell, has never been built. Here’s the idea: You should put the terminals underground. Airside is above ground. Terminals are below ground. Imagine a design with two runways. There’s an arrival runway, departure runway. Traffic flows from arrival runway to departure runway. You don’t need tugs. You can delete a whole bunch of airport infrastructure.

Imagine you pull into a gate. The jetway is actually an escalator that comes up from underneath the ground. Then you pull forward, so you can delete a whole bunch of claptrap that is just unnecessary. The terminal underground should have skylights so it can still be incredibly beautiful. If you model fundamentally the thing on a crossbar switch, there are a whole bunch of insights for how to make it radically more efficient. Sorry. This is a blog post I want to write one day. Actually, it’s an airport I want to build.

And;

COWEN: I’m at the United desk. I have some kind of question. There’s only two or three people in front of me, but it takes forever. I notice they’re just talking back and forth to the assistant. They’re discussing the weather or the future prospects for progress, total factor productivity. I don’t know. I’m frustrated. How can we make that process faster? What’s going wrong there?

SCHOLL: The thing I most don’t understand is why it requires so many keystrokes to check into a hotel room. What are they writing?

What are they writing?

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Reddit thread on Beatriz Villaroel.

2. “Reading about the St. Louis Hegelians, a group of American orthodox Hegelians who thought they could dialectically prove St. Louis, Missouri was good”

3. Suisun City and California Forever (NYT).

4. The male boom in Orthodox Christianity in the U.S. (NYT).

5. More on Harvard graduate cutbacks.

6. Paul Ekman, RIP.  And more here.

7. GPT-5.1 has been released, pretty quietly.

8. Summers will not finish the semester teaching at Harvard.

American democracy is very much alive, though not in all regards well

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Democrats who won in the November elections are all going to assume office without incident or controversy.

The Supreme Court is likely to rule against at least major parts of the Trump tariff plan, his signature initiative.  Trump already has complained vocally on social media about this.  He also preemptively announced that some of the food tariffs would be reversed, in the interests of “affordability.”

National Guard troops have been removed from Chicago and Portland, in part due to court challenges.  The troops in WDC have turned out to be a nothingburger from a civil liberties point of view.

Here is an account of November 18 and all that happened that day:

* House votes 427-1 to release the Epstein files, a veto-proof+ majority

* A federal judge blocked GOP redistricting map in Texas, meaning net net with CA measure passed, Democrats could pick up seats for 2026, KARMA!

* A federal appeals court, including two Trump appointed judges, rejected Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN over the term “Big Lie,” finding the case meritless

* Corporate Public Broadcasting agree to fulfill its $36 million annual contract with NPR, after a judge told Trump appointees at CPB that their defense was not credible

* A NY judge dismissed Trump’s calling of New York’s law barring immigration arrests in state and local courthouses.

The Senate also sided with the House on the Epstein files.  Nate Silver and many others write about how Trump is now quite possibly a lame duck President.

I do not doubt that there are many bad policies, and also much more corruption, and a more transparent form of corruption, which is corrosive in its own right.  But it was never the case that American democracy was going to disappear.  That view was one of the biggest boo-boos held by (some) American elites in recent times, and I hope we will start seeing people repudiating it.

I think the causes of this error have been:

1. Extreme dislike of the Trump administration, leading to emotional reactions when a bit more analysis would have done better.

2. Pessimism bias in the general sense.

3. Recency bias — for the earlier part of the term, Congress was relatively quiescent.

4. Cognitive and emotional inability to admit the simple truth of “democracy itself can lead to pretty bad outcomes,” thus the need to paint the status quo as something other than democracy.

5. The (largely incorrect) theory of good things happening in politics is “good people will them,” so from that starting point if you see bad people willing bad things you freak out.  The understanding was never “spontaneous order” enough to begin with.

Any other?

Matt Yglesias on aphantasia

by  Tyler Cowen in

What I tend to approach from the outside are unpleasant experiences. Life is a mix of ups and downs, but I’m not really haunted by sad experiences or disturbing things that I’ve seen. I can tell you about the time I found a dead body in the alley and called the authorities to report it, and my recollection is it was pretty gross, but I certainly don’t have any pictures of that in my iPhone.

Sometimes I see something that causes me to update my views of the world. But when I saw the body, I was already aware, factually, that drug overdose deaths were becoming common in D.C., so I felt that I hadn’t really learned anything new. At the time I was victimized by crime, the amount of violent crime in this city had been on a steady downward trend for a very long time, so it didn’t cause me to change my views at all. Several years later, that downward trend started to reverse and, after a few years of gradual growth, there were some sharp jumps, and then I got worried and started calling for policy changes.

And I think this is a strength of the aphantasic worldview. Something bad happened to me that was statistically anomalous, so I didn’t change my views. When the broader situation changed, I did change my views, even though actually nothing bad happened to me personally. And that’s because the right way to assess crime trends is to try to get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.

Here is the full essay.  Here is Hollis Robbins on related issues.