Category: Uncategorized
Friday assorted links
1. Ivory trafficking routes. And the case against trade in elephant tusks.
2. What does class now mean in Britain?
3. Underrated: learning how to cook at crummy restaurants (NYT).
5. The man who is spending $1 billion to own every pop song.
Thursday assorted links
2. “No, under the current structure and financing arrangements, they [the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk] are prohibited from earning any income in any form.” Get the picture?
3. No, don’t read this piece, but in the meantime I will note I can no longer tell what is satire.
The new culture of matching
When Jenica Andersen felt the tug for a second child at age 37, the single mom weighed her options: wait until she meets Mr. Right or choose a sperm donor and go it alone.
The first option didn’t look promising. The idea of a sperm donor wasn’t appealing, either, because she wanted her child to have an active father, just like her 4-year-old son has. After doing some research, Ms. Andersen discovered another option: subscription-based websites such as PollenTree.com and Modamily that match would-be parents who want to share custody of a child without any romantic expectations. It’s a lot like a divorce, without the wedding or the arguments.
Here is more from Julie Jargon at the WSJ.
How is Twitter disrupting academia?
Kris on Twitter asks that question. I have a few hypotheses, none confirmed by any hard data, other than my “lyin’ eyes”:
1. Twitter exists as a kind of parallel truth/falsehood mechanism, and it is encroaching on traditional academic processes, for better or worse.
2. Hypotheses blaming people or institutions for failures and misdeeds will be more popular on Twitter than in academia, but over time they are spreading in academia too, in part because of their popularity on Twitter. Blame makes for a more popular tweet.
3. Often the number of Twitter followers resembles a Power law, and thus Twitter raises the influence of very well known contributors. Twitter also raises the influence of the relatively busy, compared to say the 2009 world where blogs held more of that influence. Writing blog posts required more time than does issuing tweets.
4. I believe Twitter raises the relative influence of women. For one thing, women can coordinate with each other on Twitter more easily than they can in academic life across different universities.
5. Twitter can damage the career prospects of some of the more impulsive tweeting white males.
6. On Twitter is is easier to judge people by their (supposed) intentions than in academia, so many more people will be accused of acting and writing in bad faith.
7. On Twitter more people do in fact act in bad faith.
8. Hardly anyone looks better on Twitter, so that contributes to the polarization of many professions, especially economics and those professions linked to political issues. Top economists don’t seem so glamorous any more, not even in their areas of specialization.
9. Academic fields related to current events will rise in status and attention, and those topics will garner the Power law retweets. Right now that means political science most of all but of course this will vary over time.
10. Twitter lowers the power of institutions more broadly, as institutions typically are bad at Twitter.
What else?
Wednesday assorted links
1. Are novel writers becoming less diverse?
2. NYT covers the AEA meetings.
3. Chinese hotpot chain sets up quant investment business.
4. Aragon Court fundamentals, interesting.
5. Claims about U.S. vs. Chinese high school education (speculative).
Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism
There is now transcript and audio from the Holberg debate in Bergen, Norway, courtesy of the CWTeam, here is their summary of the event:
This bonus episode features audio from the Holberg Debate in Bergen, Norway between Tyler and Slavoj Žižek held on December 7, 2019. They discuss the reasons Slavoj (still) considers himself a Communist, why he considers The Handmaid’s Tale “nostalgia for the present,” what he likes about Greta Thunberg, what Marx got right about the commodification of beliefs, his concerns about ecology and surveillance in communist states like China today, the reasons academia should maintain its ‘useless character,’ his beginnings as a Heideggerian, why he is distrustful of liberal optimism, the “Fukuyama dilemma” we face, the importance of “empty manners,” and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: You know the old joke, what’s the difference between a Communist and a Nazi? Tenure.
[laughter]
ŽIŽEK: You mean university tenure?
COWEN: Yes. It’s a joke, but the point is you don’t need Communism. You are much smarter than Communism.
I would describe the proceedings as “rollicking,” including the segment about “smoking the prick.”
40-year-old tractors are now a hot commodity
Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.
Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.
“There’s an affinity factor if you grew up around these tractors, but it goes way beyond that,” Peterson said. “These things, they’re basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace it.”
BigIron Auctions, a Nebraska-based dealer that auctioned 3,300 pieces of farm equipment online in two days last month, sold 27 John Deere 4440 tractors through 2019.
The model, which Deere built between 1977 and 1982 at a factory in Waterloo, Iowa, was the most popular of the company’s “Iron Horse” series of tractors, which used stronger and heavier internal components to support engines with greater horsepower. The tractors featured big, safe cabins, advancing a design first seen in the 1960s that is now standard.
A sale of one of those tractors in good condition with low hours of use — the tractors typically last for 12,000 to 15,000 hours — will start a bidding war today. A 1980 John Deere 4440 with 2,147 hours on it sold for $43,500 at a farm estate auction in Lake City in April. A 1979 John Deere 4640 with only 826 hours on it sold for $61,000 at an auction in Bingham Lake in August.
Maybe there is a great tractor stagnation or in some cases even retrogression? Here is more from Adam Belz, via Naju Mancheril.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Why is children’s TV so weird and mesmerizing? A little slow at the beginning, but recommended.
2. Products Elad Gil wishes to see.
3. The empire strikes back: Dominic Cummings not allowed to hire civil servants directly. And: “One of the UK’s top employment lawyers previously told the Guardian that the post was “quite outrageous from an employment law perspective”.”
4. Robert Trivers on Jeffrey Epstein.
5. Why some knots work and others do not.
6. Thirteen tips for engaging with physicists, from a biologist.
How to retaliate against foreign adversaries
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Maybe Trump’s threat to attack cultural sites was not meant literally, but rather as a brash reminder that his retaliatory actions will not be constrained by world opinion, international law or the views of American elites. If so, such a signal, to be effective, has to harm the Iranian regime. Trump’s message shows that he doesn’t understand the calculus of retaliation very well.
Assassinating a military leader by drone, by contrast, is something the U.S. can do but the Iranian government cannot, at least not easily or without provoking even greater retaliation. That makes such a policy an effective deterrent in the short run, as it hurts the actual decision maker, and indeed that is what Trump chose to do.
By mentioning cultural sites, he in essence has decided to follow a very strong signal of action with a much weaker signal of words. If you are a hawk, you should understand that Trump’s talk of cultural sites is weakening his core message that retaliation will be effective. It is usually better game theory to follow up a highly impactful action with relative silence, but silence never has been Trump’s strong suit.
There is much more to the argument at the link.
Monday assorted links
1. Amish rules: “Children of richer Amish parents are less likely to leave the community.”
2. Those new service sector jobs: “When Mark Holmgren had his arm amputated this spring, he couldn’t stand the thought of his severed limb ending up in the trash. Instead, he had his arm bones cleaned, mounted and preserved for posterity.”
3. Making sugar more efficient.
4. A Grand Canal museum for China? I will visit.
5. Which books are abandoned the most often? (Gwern, a knotty problem of estimation)
6. Further evidence on U.S. consumers bearing tariff costs, also relevant for market power debates. And yet further data on the question.
“Let them eat Whole Foods!”
This latest front in the food wars has emerged over the last few years. Communities like Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Fort Worth, Birmingham, and Georgia’s DeKalb County have passed restrictions on dollar stores, prompting numerous other communities to consider similar curbs. New laws and zoning regulations limit how many of these stores can open, and some require those already in place to sell fresh food. Behind the sudden disdain for these retailers—typically discount variety stores smaller than 10,000 square feet—are claims by advocacy groups that they saturate poor neighborhoods with cheap, over-processed food, undercutting other retailers and lowering the quality of offerings in poorer communities. An analyst for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, for instance, argues that, “When you have so many dollar stores in one neighborhood, there’s no incentive for a full-service grocery store to come in.” Other critics, like the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, go further, contending that dollar stores, led by the giant Dollar Tree and Dollar General chains, sustain poverty by making neighborhoods seem run-down.
Here is the full article, via Walter Olson.
The politics of zero-sum thinking
The tendency to see life as zero-sum exacerbates political conflicts. Six studies (N = 3223) examine the relationship between political ideology and zero-sum thinking: the belief that one party’s gains can only be obtained at the expense of another party’s losses. We find that both liberals and conservatives view life as zero-sum when it benefits them to do so. Whereas conservatives exhibit zero-sum thinking when the status quo is challenged, liberals do so when the status quo is being upheld. Consequently, conservatives view social inequalities—where the status quo is frequently challenged—as zero-sum, but liberals view economic inequalities—where the status quo has remained relatively unchallenged in past decades—as such. Overall, these findings suggest potentially important ideological differences in perceptions of conflict—differences that are likely to have implications for understanding political divides in the United States and the difficulty of reaching bipartisan legislation.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Shai Davidai and Martino Ongis. Via Matt Grossmann.
Sunday assorted links
2. A retirement home for whales?
3. Disagreement on disagreement. Note that the top option “Willing to bet on position” is incoherent, because to each bet there is a counterparty with the opposite opinion. Of those indicators, I say go first with the Turing test score.
4. A two-meter floodwall for St. Mark’s square in Venice?
5. Henry Oliver with advice for Dominic Cummings.
6. “Northern Virginia is estimated to get 71 percent of the new jobs in the period, compared to 15 percent in the District and 14 percent in suburban Maryland…” NoVa on the march.
State support for nuclear power
John Cochrane, in a series of interesting observations on State Capacity Libertarianism, notes:
I don’t see just why nuclear power needs “state support,” rather than a clear workable set of safety regulations that are not excuses for anyone to stop any project.
Apart from the fact that our government created nuclear power at great expense and hurry, I would most of all cite the Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnities Act of 1957 Here is Wikipedia:
The Act establishes a no fault insurance-type system in which the first approximately $12.6 billion (as of 2011) is industry-funded as described in the Act. Any claims above the $12.6 billion would be covered by a Congressional mandate to retroactively increase nuclear utility liability or would be covered by the federal government. At the time of the Act’s passing, it was considered necessary as an incentive for the private production of nuclear power — this was because electric utilities viewed the available liability coverage (only $60 million) as inadequate.
I am less clear on where the insurance industry stands on this matter today, but in general American society has become far more litigious, and it is much harder to build things, and risk-aversion and infrastructure-aversion have risen dramatically. Furthermore:
- Jurisdiction is automatically transferred to federal courts no matter where the accident occurred.
- All claims from the same incident are consolidated into one Federal court, which is responsible for prioritizing payouts and sharing funds equitably should there be a shortfall.
- Companies are expressly forbidden to defend any action for damages on the grounds that an incident was not their fault.
- An open-ended time limit is applied, which allows claimants three years to file a claim starting from the time they discover damage.
- Individuals are not allowed to claim punitive damages against companies.
So the odds are that without a Price-Anderson Act America’s nuclear industry would have shut down some time ago, with no real chance of a return.
More generally, I am not sure which level or kind of liability should be associated with “the free market,” especially when the risks in question are small, arguably ambiguous, but in the negative scenarios involve very very high costs. Which is then “the market formula”? That question does not make much sense to me, so it seems to me that, details of the Price-Anderson Act aside, all scenarios are by definition somewhat governmental.
What are the most important lessons for Dominic Cummings and British civil service reformers?
Please leave your suggestions in the comments, only on-topic comments are welcome. If you are not quite up to speed, again here is a link to the relevant Dominic Cummings blog post. Or here is a good summary from The Economist.
After digesting all of your marvelous inputs, I will write a synthetic post of my own, with the best of your ideas and some of mine as well.