Category: Uncategorized
Sunday assorted links
1. Netflix as an engine of cultural globalization (NYT). A good piece.
2. Gene Simmons on Kiss and capitalism (WSJ).
3. How much does Magnus Carlsen make?
What I’ve been reading
Arvind Panagariya, Free Trade and Prosperity: How Openness Helps the Developing Countries Grow Richer and Combat Poverty. Self-recommending. The book has plenty of evidence, not just the usual hand-waving.
Knut Hamsun, On Overgrown Paths. Hamsun’s memoir, last creation, and maybe most interesting work? But few like to talk about it, for it is 1945 and the Norwegian government has just come to place him under house arrest and in turn bring him to an institution, for having wholeheartedly supported the Nazis. The story of course is told from his rather matter of fact point of view…
Jenny Davidson, Reading Jane Austen. I hardly know any books about Jane Austen, and indeed I don’t much enjoy reading her novels. Still, this is the best book on Austen I have seen, take that for what it is worth. It is very much to the point and furthermore the author writes: “I also hold a degree of suspicion toward those who love Austen, though, myself included.”
James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian is a good treatment of someone who was not the greatest Victorian.
Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, I had high hopes but it bored me.
Mercatus has republished The Market Process: Advanced Studies in Political Economy, a series of Austrian-like essays from the 1980s, edited by Peter J. Boettke and David L. Prychitko.
Joel S. Baden, The Book of Exodus: A Biography is forthcoming, a good general introduction.
David C. Rose, Why Culture Matters Most, is from the perspective of a Douglass North-type economist.
Saturday assorted links
1. New Megan McArdle kitchen cookery blog.
2. History of Singapore in ten dishes. Laksa included.
3. How Kodak accidentally discovered the A-bomb tests.
4. Greta Thunberg. And her FT profile.
5. Teaching in English in emerging economies — good or bad? (The Economist)
6. How Africa is creating welfare states (The Economist).
*Law and Macroeconomics: Legal Remedies for Recessions*
That is the new and interesting book by Yair Listokin. He argues that during a downturn regulators perhaps should be slower to approve utility rate increases, the IRS should run tax policy in a more stimulative manner, construction expenditures should be less regulated, and some environmental review should be eased. Perhaps during the Greek financial crisis, all prices and debt contracts should have been lowered, by law, an immediate ten percent, to ease the deflation.
Should so many different parts of government, including at the state and local level, have macroeconomic goals added to their missions? I am not sure, but I am glad to see an entire book devoted to the idea.
Friday assorted links
1. Organizational methods of Stephen Wolfram (frankly, I find a bunch of piles on the floor to be easier to implement).
2. Scott Sumner on blackmail: “I suspect that the almost universal public opposition to legalizing blackmail reflects society’s view (subconscious to be sure) that enforcing these norms (especially for non-criminal activities) requires a “light touch”, and that turning shaming into an highly profitable industry will do more harm than good. It will turn society into a mean, backstabbing culture. The people hurt most will be sensitive good people who made a mistake, not callous gang members who don’t care if others think they are evil.”
The Georgist equilibrium comes to Greece?
The 63-year-old has been been trying to buy an apartment ever since she was evicted from the home she rented for 32 years – when it was bought by Chinese investors two years ago.
“I want some security in case the same thing happens again,” says Ms Hynes, originally from Ireland. She earns a modest salary as an English teacher, while her Greek husband’s monthly pension was cut from €1,500 (£1,315; $1,690) to €500 during the country’s economic crisis, which began in 2010.
“When we were evicted there were still apartments selling nearby for €100,000. Now I can’t find anything under €250,000. These are Chinese and Russian prices. Not Greek.”
Greece’s financial crisis a decade ago shrank the country’s economy by more than 25% in the following years, but there are finally signs of improvement.
The property market, once completely dead, is on the rise – house prices in Athens rose 3.7% last year…
The boom appears to be driven by a controversial “golden visa” scheme, in which non-EU citizens receive residency and free movement in the EU’s Schengen zone, in exchange for investing in property.
The worry is that foreign investors are benefiting while ordinary Greeks miss out.
Many EU countries including the UK, Portugal and Spain, have golden visa schemes, but Greece has the lowest threshold. Investors receive five-year residency after purchasing €250,000 of property, making the country a new hotspot for foreign buyers.
Here is the full Jessica Bateman BBC story, via Ray Lopez. Does a culture of renters bring a bohemian, non-complacent dynamic urban core? Or a bunch of whiners who oppose economic progress? Or both?
Liu Cixin on American vs. Chinese science fiction
Presently — faced with the immaturity of Chinese sci-fi — everyone in our sci-fi community is envious of the adult sci-fi readership in the US, and see it as a sign of maturity in sci-fi literature. But one must know that senility comes after maturity, and death comes after senility. The prosperity of US sci-fi is largely a result of the prosperity of its movie and TV industries, and these sci-fi movies and TV shows are but a stylistic extension of the “golden age” (sci-fi). Contemporary sci-fi literature itself in US is already deep in twilight — full of works applying complex techniques to express dense metaphors, completely devoid of the youthful energy of the “golden age” (sci-fi); and many magnum opuses in recent years already have an air of death about them. Americans under 25 these days basically don’t read sci-fi; I don’t see what’s to be envied about that.
And this:
But to look at it in another way, sci-fi literature is by its very nature immature — because it shows humanity in its childhood, filled with curiosity and fear for the vast and profound universe, as well as the urge to explore it. In the face of such a universe, human science and philosophy are very immature, and sci-fi is the only literary form available to express our scientific and philosophical immaturities; so it’s no surprise that sci-fi is filled with immaturity. When human science is developed to the furthest extent and everything in the universe is discovered down to its minutia, that will be the day sci-fi dies.
Here is the entire Reddit thread, via Benjamin Lyons.
Thursday assorted links
How to travel to India
From a reader:
I have really enjoyed your travel posts on various countries, and am currently planning a trip to India for the month of November. However, I have struggled to find much writing of yours on the country. Perhaps a post on tips/places/cities/culture is in order? It would be much appreciated.
I have only a few India tips, but I can recommend them very, very strongly. Here goes:
1. You can’t just walk around all day and deal with the pollution, the bad sidewalks, and dodging the traffic. This ain’t Paris. Plan accordingly.
2. When Alex set off to live in India, I said to him: “Alex, after a few weeks there, I want you to email me “the number.” The number is how many consecutive hours you can circulate in an Indian city without having to stop and resort to a comfortable version of the indoors.” You too will figure out pretty quickly what your number is, and it won’t take you a few weeks.
3. India is one of the very best and most memorable trips you can take. You should go repeatedly.
4. Every single part of India is interesting and worth visiting, as far as I can tell after five trips. That said, I find Bangalore quite over-visited relative to its level of interest.
5. My favorite places in India are Mumbai, Chennai, Rajasthan, and Kolkaata. Still, I could imagine a rational person with interests broadly similar to my own having a quite different list.
6. India has the best food in the world. It is not only permissible but indeed recommended to take all of your meals in fancy hotel restaurants. Do not eat the street food in India (and I eat it virtually everywhere else). It is also permissible to find two or three very good hotel restaurants — or even one — and simply run through their menus. You won’t be disappointed.
7. Invest in a very, very good hotel. It is affordable, and you will need it, and it will be a special memory all its own.
8. Being driven around in the Indian countryside is terrifying (and I have low standards here, I do this all the time in other non-rich countries). If it were safer, I would see many more parts of India. But it isn’t. So I don’t.
9. If you go during monsoon season, your trip will be quite memorable. I cannot say I recommend this (I don’t), but I am myself glad I did it once, in Goa, when monsoon season started early. I got a lot of work done.
10. Do not expect punctuality.
11. Most of the sights in India, including the very famous ones, are overrated. The main sight is India itself, and that is underrated.
12. “In religion, every Indian is a millionaire.”
I thank Yana and Dan Wang and Alex for discussions relevant to this post.
Wednesday assorted links
*The Wandering Earth* (big spoilers here, but not suspenseful in any case)
I can’t say this is a good movie. It has a nonsensical plot (you really can’t get that far from the sun…cold is not the only problem!), unmemorable characters, and mediocre dialog. Still, it is interesting. You see two hours of the Chinese building all sorts of big infrastructure, and imagining their future as world leader. They show Shanghai in ruins, for the first time ever in a Chinese movie. You see that even Chinese directors have been influenced by the 1969 Hollywood movie Marooned, a sign that Chinese world leadership is a bit further away than they may like to think. On the brighter side, it has many more striking visual shots than you would find in almost any Hollywood movie today. It is one of the biggest grossing films in Chinese history.
The movie is basically a retelling of some of the earlier parts of Genesis. The Chinese do in fact succeed in building the Tower of Babel, both physically and linguistically. They survive that which is analogous to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They thwart the Noah’s Ark plan, reject the notion of their own intrinsic sinfulness, and save the remainder of humanity. It is the Chinese Christ figure who sacrifices himself to achieve the happy ending, thereby overturning what might be understood to be the will of God. By the end of the movie the Chinese can indeed “do anything.”
How’s that for thinking big?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Markets in everything: UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
2. Venture Research.
3. Purely evidence-based policy does not exist.
5. The diffusion of military surrender.
6. South Korean cyberfunerals, the ultimate right to be forgotten.
Amazon and taxes: a simple primer
The main reason Amazon as a corporate entity does not pay much in taxes is because the company so vigorously reinvests its profit. The resulting expensing provisions lower their tax liabilities, in some cases down to zero or near-zero. That is in fact the kind of incentive our tax system is supposed to create, and does so only imperfectly, noting that many economists have suggested moving to full expensing.
(NB: You can’t hate both share buybacks and profit reinvestment!)
Amazon pays plenty in terms of payroll taxes and also state and local taxes. Nor should you forget the taxes paid by Amazon’s employees on their wages. Not only is that direct revenue to various levels of government, but the incidence of those taxes falls somewhat on Amazon, which now must pay higher wages to offset the tax burden faced by their employees. Not everyone wants to live in NYC or Queens! (Do you agree with Paul Krugman’s charge that the Trump tax cuts are mainly a giveaway to capital? If so, you probably also should believe that the wage taxes paid by Amazon employees fall largely on capital.)
There is no $3 billion that NYC gets to keep if Amazon does not show up. That “money” was a pledged reduction in Amazon’s future tax burden at the state and local level.
When it comes to the discussion surrounding Amazon and taxes, I can only sigh…
Monday assorted links
2. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, movements in the outflow rate account for most of the variation of the labor force participation rate: the LFPR increases in tight labor markets because fewer workers leave the labor force, not because more nonparticipants enter.” Link here.
3. “Yes, and the best part of it is that most of my studies were actually in philosophy, and I never put that on my CV—that I have a degree in philosophy—at all.” Norway’s sovereign wealth fund manager.
4. How Steph Curry learned how to shoot. An excellent look at how many dimensions of training are required for excellence. And pulling data from Reddit threads about NBA players, including about discrimination.
5. Only male movie stars matter for box office.
6. Economist Donald Harris is upset and the Jamaican media is all over it.
*VC: An American History*, by Tom Nicholas
An excellent and original economic history of venture capital, with lots of new material, brought together in a convenient and readable form. Here is one excerpt:
…nineteenth century whaling can be compared to modern venture capital in at least three respects. First, whaling was the archetypical skewed-distribution business, sustained by highly lucrative but low-probability payoff events. Voyages often lasted several years and and covered geographic areas in the search for elusive whale pod. The long-tailed distribution of profits held the same allure for funders of whaling voyages as it does for a venture capital industry reliant on extreme returns from a very small subset of investments. Although other industries across history, such as gold exploration and oil wildcatting, have been characterized by long-tail outcomes, no industry gets quite as close as whaling does to matching the organization and distribution of returns associated with the VC sector.
The book also covers VC in the Industrial Revolution, to what extent Mellon and Morgan can be thought of as venture capitalists, the institutionalization of venture capital in the 1950s, how the limited partnership structure came to VC, the roles of Intel and Genentech, Sequoia Capital, and the growth of a true Silicon Valley ecosystem.
How about this?:
During the 1970s, San Jose State University was graduating more scientists and engineers than Stanford or Berkeley, while local community colleges within the California system provided crucial access to technical training programs.
Recommended to anyone with an interest in the topic, you can pre-order here.