Category: Uncategorized
The George Romney campaign
…most important of all was the gulf between the man and the national media, who could not understand each other — Romney’s billboards in New Hampshire read THE WAY TO STOP CRIME IS TO STOP MORAL DECAY; he could not understand why newsmen found the slogan funny; and they could not understand what he meant by moral decay.
That is from the still-engaging Theodore H. White The Making of the President 1968. And here is Rod Dreher on crime and morality.
Was the Grand Canal a substitute for Chinese ocean exploration?
Why their sudden inward turn, and why the Chinese state’s abandonment of the oceans? Some historians, like Bruce Swanson, cite a power struggle within the bureaucracy between eunuchs and conservative neo-Confucians, dubbed “continentalists,” with the eunuchs ultimately losing out. Another important factor was probably China’s reopening of its enlarged and completely renovated Grand Canal, an extraordinary feat of engineering that connected northern China to the increasingly populous breadbasket of the south. At eleven hundred miles long, the canal was controlled by numerous locks, much like New York’s Erie Canal, which measures only one-third its length and was not built until four hundred years later. In 1415 the state banned the shipment of grain to the north by sea to compel use of the canal, for which thousands of barges were built. Such a decision would have dramatically reduced the need for shipping, and hence shipbuilding and the maintenance of fleets, leading to the halting of oceangoing ship construction altogether by Yongle’s successor in 1436.
That is from the new and interesting Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, by Howard W. French. I believe the definitive economic history of the Grand Canal remains to be written, it will be a major achievement when it happens.
Thursday assorted links
1. Why do the Chinese hug less?
2. Linguistic practices of Chinese state media, recommended.
3. “No less than 72% of the most ‘authoritarian’ group voted to leave, while just 21% of the most ‘libertarian’ group did so.” A post-mortem on Brexit (pdf). And in Germany there is a pub The UnBrexit.
4. This piece is a good meditation on what efficiency really means (with apologies to Benjamin L.), here is one bit: “[Chris] Paul can’t consistently create easy shots against an elite defense, but he’s also too disciplined to take bad shots, which limits his upside against higher levels of competition. Paul has averaged more than 25 points a game in a playoff series only once, and it was in his most recent seven-game battle against the Jazz. Westbrook has done it nine times, and Curry has done it eight. Paul’s tricks don’t work as well against his All-NBA peers.”
5. Eduardo Porter on tax reform (NYT).
Rio de Janeiro fact of the day
In the period from January to June criminal homicides have risen 10 per cent in the state of Rio, compared with last year, while homicides in confrontations with police have risen 45 per cent, according to the state security secretariat. Violent deaths resulting from attempted robbery have risen 21 per cent.
The violence is taking its toll on Rio`s cash-strapped police, who complain they lack funds even for petrol for their vehicles. News organisation Globo reported that every 54 hours, a policeman is killed in the city.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Pea Soup discussions of important philosophy papers; economics should do more of this and not just on blogs.
2. In praise of Ingmar Bergman.
3. Venezuela’s unprecedented collapse.
My favorite things Austrian, part I writers
Yes, I am in Vienna, but I will take this country in discrete chunks because the contributions are so significant. Today is literature, here are a few remarks:
1. Thomas Bernhard. One of the very best post-war writers, obsessive and funny and extremely neurotic. The Loser [Der Untegeher] is the one that works best in English, though his unique style is not at its most fevered pitch. Wittgensteins Neffe [Wittgenstein’s Nephew] is my favorite, one of the smartest and funniest novels I know, close to perfect. Das Kalkwerk is entrancing, though I suspect unreadable in English. He remains grossly underrated in the English-speaking world, mostly for linguistic reasons but also he is a rebellion against the idea of a culture of entertainment. In my personal canon he is one of the more significant writers.
2. Hermann Broch. Death of Virgil is a 20th century classic, again much under-read amongst the American educated classes. Die Schlafwandler [The Sleepwalkers] is impressive, and perhaps seen as his major work, but it is more uneven in quality and eventually it falls apart.
3. Robert Musil. There are wonderful and historically significant major passages in The Man Without Qualities, but the drama loses its interest, the loose ends are not tied up, and ultimately I will call him overrated, especially compared to Bernhard or Broch.
4. Peter Handke. In German only, I say, and in any case not my taste. He is serious about politics in exactly the wrong way, and I hope future generations reject him.
5. Elfriede Jelinek. Many were surprised when she won the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature, and you are most likely to know her for writing the book behind the movie The Piano Teacher. Like Wagner, you could say her work is “better than it sounds,” but still it doesn’t sound that good. I find it irritating and offensive, plus she is a communist. Nonetheless, irritating fiction is better than boring fiction, see “Günter Wilhelm Grass.”
6. Karl Kraus. I used to think his work would eventually “come together” for me, but the more of it I read, and the more I read about him, I conclude he is a figure of historic interest only, and a good aphorist, but not an enduring literary artist. He was a keen satirist of the mores and totalitarian tendencies of his time, and that is to be appreciated. But if you try reading the rambling 500-page The Last Days of Mankind, in either English or German, you will conclude it was a work of its time only.
7. Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo Hofmannstahl. Both remain underrated, and don’t forget Hofmannstahl’s libretti for Richard Strauss, including Der Rosenkavalier.
8. Christoph Ransmayr. He is popular in contemporary Austrian literature. I was not convinced, but will try again, if you love The Last World let me know.
9. Heimito von Doderer — I have not yet read him but am hopeful.
9b. Ingeborg Bachmann. I just bought some this morning.
10. Johann Nestroy. From the Enlightenment, mostly a playwright, worth spending some time with to get a perspective on Austrian literature before the 20th century.
11. Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein are both often best read as literature.
12. Stefan Zweig. The World of Yesterday is a favorite, sad and bittersweet, and it treats the European civilization that was passing away at the time of the Second World War, still relevant. Zweig committed suicide in Brazil, here is an excellent biography. The rest of his fiction still is read around much of the world (not so much America, famously in Russia), but I find it pretty ordinary and of its time.
I’m not counting Canetti, Kafka, and the like, who are not properly Austrian, though they lived in the Empire. Rilke does not count either, though he is one of the greatest of poets. Joseph Roth was born in Galicia, yet I think of him as an Austrian rather than Polish writer, again still somewhat neglected in the English-speaking world. Try Radetzky March. Franz Werfel I find ordinary, though I have not yet read Forty Days of Musa Dagh, for some his masterpiece, I did buy a copy of that one recently.
The bottom line: There are amazing wonders here, and yes “weird stuff.” Most of the educated people I know are not clued into them.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Why did the Polish power grab backfire?
2. Why did Spotify dampen the loudness of its music?
3. University of Vermont medical school really is moving to zero lectures. They claim a ten percent retention rate for the material in the lectures, and that is for a quite elite group of students. What is the rate elsewhere?
4. Arnold Kling on the “safe asset shortage.”
5. Could 3000 Jedi beat 60,000 medieval foot soldiers? A simulation.
Monday assorted links
1. City dwellers are clueless about the suburbs (NYT). But they are happy if their kids can continue to slack off.
2. Organic building blocks on Saturn’s moon Titan?
3. The elderly have higher income than we thought: “…the discrepancy is mainly attributable to underreporting of retirement income from defined benefit pensions and retirement account withdrawals.”
4. One of the worst movie reviews I have ever read (of Dunkirk) and a prime example of mood affiliation.
5. “But the darkened hall is dotted with infra-red cameras to monitor theater-going couples.”
Sunday assorted links
1. Thailand tries to gentrify Western panhandling.
2. To what does asli refer? And pro-biotic beer from Singapore.
3. “Her look is clear: Stamps Man is their most unexpected commission ever.” The article is safe for work, but it is about a prurient topic.
4. Is Trump ruining book sales?
5. Full speech of V. Orbán. More ethno-nationalism in that part of the world isn’t exactly good news.
Saturday assorted links
Sentences about cellophane
Cellophane gets an entire chapter in Hisano’s book. As she explains in the paper, cellophane packaging let food vendors manipulate the appearance of foods by controlling the amount of moisture and oxygen that touched a product, thus preventing discoloration. “Cellophane played a big part in how the color of food started to be controlled and standardized,” she says.
…Cellophane, the world’s first transparent packaging film, was invented in 1908 by the Swiss engineer Jacques Brandenberger. He dubbed it “cellophane” as a combination of the words “cellulose” (of which it was made) and “diaphane” (an archaic form of the word “diaphanous,” which is a fancy word for “transparent”). He assigned his patents to La Cellophane Societe Anonyme, a French company formed for the sole purpose of marketing the invention. In 1923, the company licensed to DuPont the exclusive rights to make and sell cellophane in the United States.
…Initial versions of cellophane were waterproof, but not moisture-proof. So, while it was effective for wrapping products like candy and cigarettes, it wasn’t effective for packaging fresh food. In 1927, DuPont developed moisture-proof cellophane, food manufacturers started using it to package items like cakes and cheeses, and cellophane sales tripled between 1928 and 1930.
Here is the full story, interesting throughout, via the estimable Chug.
Thursday assorted links
1. Roombas are mapping your home, and they will sell that information to the highest bidder.
2. Registration link for Sept. 6 Conversation with Larry Summers.
3. China markets in everything Bob Dylan potato chips.
4. Is Baltimore the coolest city on the east coast?
5. Why aren’t businesses more interested in IQ tests?
6. More on India, China, and Bhutan (NYT).
Will robots really boost productivity all that much?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
…consider the general logic of labor substitution. Machines and software are often very good at “making stuff” and, increasingly, at delivering well-defined services, such as when Alexa arranges a package for you. But machines are not effective at persuading, at developing advertising campaigns, at branding products or corporations, or at greeting you at the door in a charming manner, as is done so often in restaurants, even if you order on an iPad. Those activities will remain the province of human beings for a long time to come.
How much is this shift of labor into marketing a step forward? To be sure, a lot of commercial persuasion is useful. Marketing informs consumers about new products and their properties, or convinces them that one product is better for them than another. It was marketing that got me to stop watching baseball and switch to the more exciting NBA. Sometimes the very existence of an ad — even apart from any direct informational value — makes a product more enjoyable. If a particular basketball sneaker is associated with LeBron James, through an endorsement and TV commercials, some people will enjoy wearing that sneaker more.
That all said, a lot of marketing is a zero- or negative-sum game. Each business tries to pull customers away from the other brands, and while the final matching of customers to products is usually closely attuned to what people want, more is spent on these business battles than is ideal for social efficiency. My bank might make me feel better about being a customer there, but its services just aren’t much superior to those of the nearest competitor, if at all. Maybe Coke really is better than Pepsi, or vice versa, but it’s not that much better — and billions are spent trying to persuade consumers to make one switch or the other.
I don’t take the Galbraithian view, but still consumers only enjoy extra marketing so much. I conclude with this:
Don’t be surprised if you see a lot of robots in daily life, and in news stories, but not huge productivity gains in the published statistics. That’s exactly the American economy right now.
Do read the whole thing.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Tweet storm on what actually happened with the health care vote.
2. Vanity Fair on the changes at the NYT.
3. Joshua Wright tweetstorm on hipster antitrust and why it will and indeed should fail.
4. Inability to pass a drug test (NYT).
5. Cleveland Browns wide receiver to pursue Ph.d in economics.
Why has regional income convergence in the U.S. declined?
1. “For over a century, incomes across states converged at a rate of 1.8% per year…The convergence rate from 1990 to 2010 was less than half the historic norm, and in the period leading up to the Great Recession there was virtually no convergence at all.”
2. After subtracting housing costs, janitors in NYC now earn less than they do in the Deep South. This was not the case for most of American history.
3. For NYC janitors, housing costs measure at 52% of their income.
4. Income differences across states are increasingly capitalized into housing prices.
5. “…income convergence declined the most in areas with [land] supply constraints.”
6. “Had [cross-state] convergence continued apace through 2010…the increase in hourly wage inequality from 1980 to 2010 would have been 8% smaller.”
That is from a new NBER working paper, “Why has Regional Income Convergence in the US Declined?”, by Peter Ganong and Daniel W. Shoag. Here are earlier ungated versions.
Note that this paper contains “…the first national panel measure of land use regulations in the US.”