Category: Uncategorized
The durability of violent revolution
…regimes founded in violent social revolution are especially durable. Revolutionary regimes, such as those in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam, endured for more than half a century in the face of strong external pressure, poor economic performance, and large-scale policy failures. The authors develop and test a theory that accounts for such durability using a novel data set of revolutionary regimes since 1900. The authors contend that autocracies that emerge out of violent social revolution tend to confront extraordinary military threats, which lead to the development of cohesive ruling parties and powerful and loyal security apparatuses, as well as to the destruction of alternative power centers. These characteristics account for revolutionary regimes’ unusual longevity.
That is from a new paper by Jean Lachapelle, Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, and Adam E. Casey. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Sunday assorted links
1. The culture that is Singapore golf club script theft punishment.
2. Very good thread on some Matt Rognlie results, paper here. The whole “market power lowering the returns to labor” bit really doesn’t seem to be holding up.
3. The Viewer (recommended videos, affiliated with The Browser).
This is Not Fine
Why is California burning? The experts all know the answer–CA was made to burn and if you don’t do controlled burns, CA will burn uncontrolled. Here’s ProPublica in an article titled They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?
Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.
…When I reached Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who is based in Mammoth, California, and asked if there was any meaningful scientific dissent to the idea that we need to do more controlled burning, he said, “None that I know of.”
So why doesn’t it happen? Liability law, risk-aversion, rent seeking and vetocracy. Here’s Pro-Publica on excess risk aversion in the fire service (driven by a risk averse public.) (Compare with my analysis of why the FDA is too risk averse.)
Burn bosses in California can more easily be held liable than their peers in some other states if the wind comes up and their burn goes awry. At the same time, California burn bosses typically suffer no consequences for deciding not to light. No promotion will be missed, no red flags rise. “There’s always extra political risk to a fire going bad,” Beasley said. “So whenever anything comes up, people say, OK, that’s it. We’re gonna put all the fires out.”
The ProPublica piece is actually remarkably radical as it offers as one solution, privatized burning!
Fire is not just for professionals, not just for government employees and their contractors. Intentional fire, as she sees it, is “a tool and anyone who’s managing land is going to have prescribed fire in their toolbox.” That is not the world we’ve been inhabiting in the West. “That’s been the hard part in California,” Quinn-Davidson said. “In trying to increase the pace and scale of prescribed fire, we’re actually fighting some really, some really deep cultural attitudes around who gets to use it and where it belongs in society.”
Here’s a bit on vetocracy:
Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.”
…“One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,”
Francis Fukuyama also pointed to liability law, risk-aversion, rent seeking and vetocracy as factors driving dysfunction at the forest service in a 2014 article in Foreign Affairs but the forest service was only the jumping off point for his pieced titled, America in Decay The Sources of Political Dysfunction (jstor). I don’t agree with everything in that piece but it’s well worth reading to drive home the point that pandemics, forest fires, electrical shortages and more are deeply connected.
Hat tip: Garett Jones.
Toots Hibbert, RIP
Possibly a Covid death (NYT), he was leader of Toots and the Maytals, and along with Desmond Dekker a favorite figure from the earlier period of reggae music. “Sweet and Dandy” and “Pressure Drop” and “Monkey Man” I still listen to frequently, among others. I was lucky to see him in concert twice, once as recently as two years ago, the other time in the late 1990s…
Saturday assorted links
1. Jane St. now has a podcast.
2. Is there a modest bitcoin boom in Africa?
3. Why is Pakistan doing better than India with respect to Covid-19? (speculative)
4. Has Taiwan lost the will to defend itself?
6. Heart disease in Covid athletes: the basic claims are still falling apart.
Who is my favorite public intellectual?
Over the weekend I sat in on Anna Gát’s Interintellect Salon, which I enjoyed. Many of the participants were asked who is their favorite public intellectual. My answer was something like:
Alex Tabarrok, he’d better be, I’ve been working with him for thirty years! There would be something wrong if he wasn’t. And I always look forward to reading what he writes.
So there you go. None of the other answers, worthy though they were, had equivalent support in demonstrated preference.
Markets in everything
Swedish label Kön has produced a range of gender-neutral underwear to demonstrate that products “don’t have to be categorised” as just for men or women.
The underwear is made from plant-based textiles and comes in recycled paper packaging.
Wanting to create an inclusive brand suitable for everyone, Bill Heinonen founded Kön – a fashion company offering unisex underwear in a bid to give consumers the ability to “define some products themselves”…
Kön – pronounced “shaun” – takes its name from a Swedish word that stands for both gender and sex.
“I don’t want everything to be gender-neutral,” Heinonen explained, “but I think it’s important to give consumers that ability to define some products themselves.”
“Everything doesn’t have to be categorised as ‘men or women’ – a sweater can be just a sweater, a shower gel can be just a shower gel, and so on.”
Here is the full story, via a loyal MR reader. The photos are safe enough for work, though they are of…gender-neutral underwear.
Friday assorted links
1. Why the U.S. employment to population ratio has declined.
2. People are grinding their teeth more (NYT).
3. It seems Marshall Islands is doing an all-digital currency with a Friedmanite growth rule. With Patri Friedman on an advisory board.
4. Top fifteen dishes of Odisha.
5. And Kyle Lowry. A mini-essay on cognition, recommended for those who care.
6. Thick clouds of mosquitoes are killing livestock after the hurricane.
How to Gain Super Powers!
Imagine that you were offered the superpower of being immune to bullets. Bullets just bounce off you like Luke Cage. That’d be pretty cool, right? Even partial immunity to bullets would be a great superpower! I’d be willing to pay a lot for that superpower, even undertake say some mildly perilous journey. So I am puzzled that some people say they don’t want a COVID vaccine. What??? That’s like rejecting a super-power, the power of immunity! Indeed, COVID has killed far more people this year than bullets, so virus immunity is a much better superpower than bullet immunity. Sign me up!
Addendum: Perhaps you think that the superpower of bullet immunity is better than the super power of virus immunity because, like Luke Cage, you could use bullet immunity to save lives, thus becoming a super-hero. Guess what? Vaccination also gives you the power to save lives.
Arise Vaccination Man! Arise Vaccination Woman! Gain Super Powers! Be a Super Hero!
On audiobooks
From my email, from Robert Kwasny:
I imagine you listen to audio books rarely but, still, I wonder if you have any new thoughts on this topic.
Few thoughts of my own:
1. Shakespeare audiobooks are excellent. Much better than watching blu-rays. Unlike on real stage, Prospero (voiced by Ian McKellan in one production) can actually whisper softly to Miranda without worrying about people in the back rows. Stage directions are already included in the dialogue.
2. Pop psychology and self-help are terrible. Once cannot easily skip or skim the boring parts.
3. History books written by academics (e.g. The Sleepwalkers) are tough unless one already knows the necessary context. Otherwise it’s easy to get lost in the thicket of background facts. That’s probably true for all dense books. For example, Piketty’s books are available on Audible but I didn’t even bother sampling them. It’s just a wrong format.
4. I’ve had great experience with books written by authors with journalistic experience. Robert Caro’s works are excellent in audio form. William Manchester’s Churchill biography is good as well. Lawrence of Arabia by Scott Anderson too. Good audiobooks can’t be just one fact after another, they need to tell a story.
5. If the book’s author does the narration it’s usually bad. Voice acting is hard.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any book created specifically for audio. Where are biographies of Bob Dylan with songs included? Or books on rhetoric with audio of great speeches included? Audiobooks (and ebooks for that matter) don’t seem to be a new medium, at least so far. 10 years ago I would have not predicted that.
I have no new thoughts on audiobooks! Though for my next book (which is co-authored), I was asked to read at least part of the AudioBook. I will thus develop additional thoughts over time.
Thursday assorted links
1. What do economists know about the Black Death?
2. Topol and Offit on vaccines. Excellent material, but it is striking how conservative Offit is when it comes to means of responsibly accelerating knowledge about vaccines. Not a peep about market incentives, for one thing. WWJBS?
3. More detail on the Taiwanese Covid response, especially from the tech side.
4. “…which includes work on the rhetorical strategies of far-right groups.”
5. Super recognisers, recommended.
6. Using AlphaZero (and Kramnik) to invent new forms of chess.
Evidence from 27 Thousand Economics Journal Articles on Africa
The first two decades of the 21st century have seen an increasing number of peer-reviewed journal articles on the 54 countries of Africa by both African and non-African economists. I document that the distribution of research across African countries is highly uneven: 45% of all economics journal articles and 65% of articles in the top five economics journals are about five countries accounting for just 16% of the continent’s population. I show that 91% of the variation in the number of articles across countries can be explained by a peacefulness index, the number of international tourist arrivals, having English as an official language, and population. The majority of research is context-specific, so the continued lack of research on many African countries means that the evidence base for local policy-makers is much smaller in these countries.
Here is the article by Obie Porteus, via David Evans.
Wednesday assorted links
1. In honor of Assar Lindbeck.
2. The Biden health care plan.
3. How many votes get lost through the mail? (link now fixed)
4. Hummingbird torpor. Has implications for the parrot skit, they really are “pining for the fjords”!
5. Thread on estimating persistence. No one seems to be rebutting this critique with any effectiveness.
My Conversation with Matt Yglesias
Substantive, interesting, and fun throughout, here is the audio, video, and transcript. For more do buy Matt’s new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Here is the CWT summary:
They discussed why it’s easier to grow Tokyo than New York City, the governance issues of increasing urban populations, what Tyler got right about pro-immigration arguments, how to respond to declining fertility rates, why he’d be happy to see more people going to church (even though he’s not religious), why liberals and conservatives should take marriage incentive programs more seriously, what larger families would mean for feminism, why people should read Robert Nozick, whether the YIMBY movement will be weakened by COVID-19, how New York City will bounce back, why he’s long on Minneapolis, how to address constitutional ruptures, how to attract more competent people to state and local governments, what he’s learned growing up in a family full of economists, his mother’s wisdom about visual design and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, I think people, on average, should become more religious, in part because that would encourage fertility. Do you also think people should become more religious?
YGLESIAS: Yeah, if I could be full Straussian and kind of —
COWEN: You can be! It’s not a hypothetical.
YGLESIAS: [laughs] No. I don’t really know how to do it. If I put in my book that I think we should make people be more religious, I don’t know how I would do that.
COWEN: Not make them, but just root for it. Talk up religion.
YGLESIAS: Look, if you told me, for mysterious reasons, church attendance is going to start going back up again over the next 30, 40 years, I would consider that to be a very optimistic forecast for America. I think good secondary things would follow from that. I think community institutions are important, and in a practical sense, religious ones are what seems to really work for people.
When I hear people say, “Oh this new woke anti-racism on the left — that’s like a new religion.” I don’t know that that’s 100 percent accurate. I think there’s something to that, and there’s also ways in which it’s not true.
But if it was really literally true — this is a new religion where people are going to get together once a week, and they’re going to know each other, and they’re going to have a higher value system that motivates them, and they’re going to make connections — that would be really good. Bad things have happened by religious people or under religious causes, but generally speaking, it’s good when people go to church.
COWEN: If you’re rooting for a more religious America, does that mean, in a sense, you’re rooting for a more right-wing America? These are correlated, right? Causality may be tricky, but I suspect there is some.
YGLESIAS: I think probably we say that religiousness is almost constitutive of right-wingy-ness, at least in some definitions. Yeah, I think a more traditionalist America, in some ways, would be good.
It was so much fun we even ran over the allotted time, we had to discuss Gilbert Arenas too.
Failing the Challenge
CNN says “In one word, this is why there likely won’t be a vaccine available before Election Day: biology.” Wrong. The one word is complacency. What CNN refers to as biology is the time it takes to run clinical trials.
Here’s how the trials work: You take 30,000 people, give half of them a vaccine and half of them a placebo, which is a shot of saline that does nothing. Then those 30,000 people go about their lives, and you wait to see how many in each group become infected and sick with Covid-19, the “endpoint” in medical parlance.
That waiting takes time, especially since the coronavirus vaccines currently being studied in the US are two-dose vaccines with each dose several weeks apart.
But it gets worse because trial volunteers are not random:
“Who’s in the trials – the kind of people who tend to stay at home or the kind of people who attended the Sturgis rally?” said John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, referring to a motorcycle rally in South Dakota that led to at least dozens of cases of Covid-19.
Historical precedent, as well as the demographics of the participants in the current coronavirus vaccine trials, suggest more the stay-at-home type.
That does not bode well for bringing the trials to a speedy conclusion.
Typically, those who volunteer for clinical trials tend to be “White, college-educated women,” said Frenck, who has been the principal investigator on dozens of vaccine clinical trials, and has served on the Data and Safety Monitoring Board for many others.
All three of those factors are potentially bad news for the coronavirus clinical trials, because data indicates White college-educated women are at lower risk for being exposed to the novel coronavirus.
None of this, however, is actually about biology. It’s about complacency. We could have run human challenge trials and paid for diverse volunteers but we decided that was too risky or too new or too radical or too something and so thousands of people die every week as we wait.
Addendum: Previous posts on challenge trials.