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Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Mark Zuckerberg at the Ford Rouge Plant.  It is one of America’s great sights.

2. Jacques Derrida interviews Ornette Coleman (pdf).

3. Profile of the new AfD leader.

4. Jill Lepore and writing.

5. Massive wind tunnel for Shaolin monks to do their exercises there is no great Shaolin stagnation.  Designed by Latvian architects.

6. “Low wage workers responded by commuting out of states that increased their minimum wage.”

7. Was Erdogan an authoritarian all along?

*Masters of Craft*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Richard E. Ocejo, and the subtitle is Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy.   Here is one summary bit:

The three transformations that frame the content of this book — the restructuring of elite taste around omnivorousness, the changing of traditional community institutions into destinations of the new cultural elite in retail, and the recoding of work in the new economy — combine to explain how these jobs and businesses have become upscale, cool, and desired.

The jobs are bartender, distiller, barber, and butcher.

…these new elite manual labor jobs give men — mainly those of a certain race and social class standing — the chance to use their bodies directly in their work, as men did in the industrial era but do so less often today, as well as their minds, which grants them greater status in these jobs than they would otherwise have.  They are simultaneously respected knowledge workers and skilled manual laborers, and perform their work in public.  Men are thus able to use these jobs to achieve a lost sense of middle-class, heterosexual masculinity in their work.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the evolution of labor markets, how America will respond to ongoing automation, the production of status, and the role of men in an increasingly feminized society.  It is more of an “thick description, insights throughout” book than an “easy to sum up the bottom line” treatment.  Here is the book’s home page.  Here is a very positive FT review of the book.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. No great stagnation in horse blankets.

2. What if female scientists were treated like celebrities? (short video)

3. The New Zealand Project — can the Kiwis stop being so complacent?

4. Lifetime psychedelic use predicts liberal political views, though cocaine use does not.

5. A typology of liberal and post-liberal religious views of politics.

6. Geofencing parts of Iraq and Syria against drones.

My *Stubborn Attachments* podcast with FT Alphaville

by  Tyler Cowen in

Stubborn Attachments is the advance peek bonus book I offered to those who pre-ordered The Complacent Class.  I once described Stubborn Attachments as follows:

In that work, I outline a true and objectively valid case for a free and prosperous society, and consider the importance of economic growth for political philosophy, how and why the political spectrum should be reconfigured, how we should think about existential risk, what is right and wrong in Parfit and Nozick and Singer and effective altruism, how to get around the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, to what extent individual rights can be absolute, how much to discount the future, when redistribution is justified, whether we must be agnostic about the distant future, and most of all why we need to “think big.”

Here is the FT Alphaville blog post, with a link to the podcast, and here is the iTunes version of the podcast, it is unlike any other podcast I have done.  About the book, Cardiff Garcia writes:

Unlike the last few sequences of Tyler’s longer published works — the books on culture and economics, the self-help via economics wisdom books, and the Stagnationist trilogy — Stubborn Attachments is foundational Tyler. It represents the Tyler from which the distinctive contrarian and provocative and educational and speed-reading and culture-savvy and eccentric Tylers all emerge.

It is also the most comprehensive expression of Tyler’s particular brand of libertarianism that I have read.

There is also a “desert island” section of the podcast, where Cardiff asks me which bodies of film, for instance which directors, I would most want to have on a desert island.  He also asks me to construct my NBA “Dream Team,” which indeed I do for him.

What about Trump’s plan to cut the corporate tax rate?

by  Tyler Cowen

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and here is one part of my argument:

This argument for a corporate tax cut — “let’s borrow more now while rates are relatively low” — is remarkably like the argument that Keynesians have been using for more government infrastructure spending for years. The main difference is that here the spending would be done by private corporations rather than the federal government. You may or may not believe the private expenditures will be more socially valuable than the government expenditures, but if you think we can afford one kind of stimulus we probably can afford the other. And as I said, the private rate of return on investment probably is higher than the government’s borrowing rate, even if you think that government spending would yield higher returns yet.

Of course that argument does not require unemployed resources.  On the micro side, I find it amusing when people suggest that the rate of return on government infrastructure is high, but that corporations have nothing better to do than to sit on their cash.  It is hard to have it both ways!  Imagine arguing that biomedical R&D through the NIH yields high returns, but that pharma investment to commercialize the resulting drugs or devices does not.  National parks aside, most government investment is in inputs, and thus for it to have a high marginal rate of return someone on the output side has to have a high marginal rate of return as well.

Here is another part of my argument:

The pessimist might wonder whether companies would take their windfall and invest it at all. Many companies might simply hold the gain in money management accounts. In this scenario, the tax plan probably won’t be worth passing, as American companies would have nothing useful to do with the free resources, even when given a nudge to invest. That should induce a fairly panicky response, including radical deregulation of business and fiscal austerity on entitlements, but I don’t see critics of the tax plan following up on this view consistently.

There is much more at the link, and do note my rather significant caveats on the plan.  And here is Kevin Williamson on the plan.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy.  LitHub wrote: “Even in the wake of Knausgaard and Ferrante it is hard to find a literary phenomenon that has swept Europe quite like the autobiographical project of Édouard Louis.”  I don’t know that I enjoyed this book very much, but it was an effective fictional experience.  Most of all it scared me that such a tale of poverty and abuse could be so popular in Europe these days.  Recommended, but in a sobering way; I would rather this had been a bestseller in 1937.

2. Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs.  A novel about the consequences of a Delhi terrorist bombing that is both deep and compelling to read, full of surprises as well.  Here is a useful NYT review.

3. Edward T. O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age.  This focuses more on George’s connection to social and labor movements, and less on George as an economist or land theorist, than I would have liked.  Still, it is an information-rich narrative that most of all brings the times and movements surrounding George to life.

4. Andrew Marr, We British: The Poetry of a People.  A good introduction to its topic, most of all for the mid-twentieth century, with plenty of poems reproduced.  Here is a Louis MacNeice poem, Snow:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

 

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various

 

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes —

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands —

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Matchmaker markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Mishpacha Magazine featured an article by Philanthropist, Shlomo Yehuda Rechnitz of Los Angeles California discussing his view and approach to the age gap problem in frum circles and calling the current situation a Shidduch Catastrophe. In the article he discussed an idea to help solve the age gap and offered an incentive to marry off older girls for the upcoming year…

INCENTIVE: Subsidize money paid to the matchmaker:

For the upcoming calendar year of 5775, Mr. Rechnitz is offering to supplement the shadchanus of anyone successful in marrying off a girl age 25 or older, to a boy her age or younger, so that they receive a total compensation of $10,000. Certain minor conditions apply. This offer isn’t only for professional shadchanim. It applies to anyone and everyone, every age, race, or gender who makes a successful Shidduch that meets the criteria.

Shlomo Yehuda Rechnitz has approached the mission of marrying off all the girls in Los Angeles with the same intensity as he does for his own daughters. All the major shadchanim are aware that when any Los Angeles girl doesn’t have the funds for plane fare for a date, the shadchan can — without asking — automatically book the tickets and rental car, if necessary, for either the boy or girl, on the Rechnitz account. In addition, any shadchan who marries off a Los Angeles girl has his shadchanus supplemented to $4,000. If the shadchan can get a couple to date at least four times, they receive $500.

There is video at the link, and the comments offer several points of interest as well.  I am told by one reader that the 19k bounty has been discontinued.  Here is related coverage from Time, with an extensive discussion of the Mormon dating crisis as well.  Here is a very interesting article on Orthodox dating in Jerusalem.

For the pointers I thank Yehuda S.

The culture and polity that is Singapore, strategic sand reserve edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Lim had told me that Singapore holds a strategic sand reserve, for emergencies.  It lies somewhere near the area called Bedok, I said.  I spotted it one day as I rode past in a taxi.  The site was strewn with No Trespassing signs, installed by the Housing and Development Board, a government agency.  Fenced off from the public, the giant trapezoidal dunes shone bone-white in the sun and caramel in the shade, as the sand waited to be summoned.

That is from an excellent piece by Samanth Subramanian (NYT), about Singapore, land, and preparing for climate change.  The Singaporean constitution also devotes several pages to outlining how the government will manage its investments.

Sunday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Profile of Macron.

2. Is Facebook bad for you?

3. “Take back control? Make America great again? Restore the caliphate? We can do better than these. Storytellers, now is the time to try.”  Link here.

4. Ben Casnocha on The Complacent Class.

5. The Founding Fathers were science geeks.  And Indonesian “hobbits” were African in origin.

6. “A dentist in Alaska has been accused of performing a tooth extraction while riding a hoverboard.”

7. “Every year the medical testing industry catches a half-million horseshoe crabs to sample their blood.“

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The best short guide I’ve seen to Lagos.

2. “At 2,573 pages, it contains a complete account of Sloterdijk’s sphero-immunological thoughts.”

3. A failed artist ponders his own work and history, recommended.

4. What happened to Google book search?  Excellent piece, also recommended.

5. Interview with Dave Donaldson, Clark award winner.

6. Christopher Caldwell on Christophe Guilluy, the French thinker who is having an impact today.