Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday assorted links
1. The demand for telephone operators.
2. Visions of ARPA, from Policy Exchange, a genuinely good short, free book on how to create new ARPAs.
3. “Happy Birthday” in the styles of ten famous classical composers. Recommended, for those who care.
4. How conservatism is changing, with a nod to Leo Strauss.
The “Little Divergence” — England vs. Iberia
From a new paper by António Henriques and Nuno Palma:
Why did the countries which first benefited from access to the New World – Castile and Portugal – decline relative to their followers, especially England and the Netherlands? The dominant narrative is that worse initial institutions at the time of the opening of Atlantic trade explain Iberian divergence. In this paper, we build a new dataset which allows for a comparison of institutional quality over time. We consider the frequency and nature of parliamentary meetings, the frequency and intensity of extraordinary taxation and coin debasement, and real interest spreads for public debt. We find no evidence that the political institutions of Iberia were worse until at least the English Civil War.
From the paper:
Our argument that the mid seventeenth-century is when English political divergence truly began gains support from the fact that this is also when English GDP per capita started to grow persistently,structural change began, and fiscal capacity took off in comparative terms…The idea that Iberian political institutions at the start of the sixteenth century (or evenearlier) were more absolutist than those in England and the Netherlands does not standup to close historical scrutiny.
Note by the way that Portuguese coinage was stable 1500-1800 throughout, and the same cannot be said for England or the Dutch Republic. For the time being, score at least one for the primacy of economics over the primacy of politics.
What should I ask Ross Douthat?
Here is my first CWT with him, I will be doing another, based in part around Ross’s new book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, reviewed by me enthusiastically here. So what should I ask him?
Martin Gurri, philosopher and social scientist
I am pleased to announce that Martin Gurri is joining Mercatus as an affiliated scholar. As you probably may know, Martin is the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, one of the more important and more prophetic social science books of our time.
Here is Martin’s recent short piece for Mercatus on revolt, populism, and reaction. Here is a 21-minute podcast with Martin.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Lottery-based science funding, from New Zealand. And Matt Warner of Atlas on state capacity and liberty.
2. Girls named Alexa are being teased a lot.
3. Obituary for the great George Steiner (NYT). Much as I admire the knowledge of Lehmann-Haupt, the piece does not come close to reflecting just how much Steiner knew and could command in his writings and language.
4. Markets in everything. Yup. And the purity spiral in the knitting world, with reference to Timur Kuran.
5. “This may provide exploratory evidence that “state capacity” in certain domains eg innovation, health and education – might be important. This adds to the debate on “state capacity libertarianism” and in terms of current UK policy may inform on whether investing in an “ARPA organisation” or other areas of state capacity is a positive return on investment.” Here are the regressions. Lots at the link, and very nice visuals, a dose of sanity in exposition too, all from Ben Yeoh.
*Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius of the Enlightenment*
By Ronald S. Calinger, what a beautiful book, clearly written, conceptual in nature, placing Euler in the broader history of mathematics, the funding of science, and the Enlightenment, all in a mere 536 pp. of text. Here is one bit:
At midcentury Leonard Euler was at the peak of his career. Johann I (Jean I) Bernoulli had saluted him as “the incomparable L. Euler, the prince among mathematicians” in 1745, and Henri Poincaré’s later description of him as the “god of mathematics” attests to his supremacy in the mathematical sciences. Euler continued to center his research on making seminal contributions to differential and integral calculus and rational mechanics, and producing substantial advances in astronomy, hydrodynamics, and geometrical optics; the state projects of Frederick II required attention especially to hydraulics, cartography, lotteries, and turbines. At midcentury, when d’Alembert and Alexis Claude Clairaut in Paris, Euler in Berlin, Colin Maclaurin in Scotland, and Daniel Bernoulli in Basel dominated the physical sciences, Euler was their presiding genius.
Nor had I known that Rameau sent his treatise on the fundamental mathematics of music to Euler for comments.
Definitely recommended, you can order it here.
Monday assorted links
1. New book on Never Trumpers by Robert Saldin and Steve Teles. And should a Fields medalist be mayor of Paris? (NYT)
3. Jennifer Doleac on Thomas Sowell.
4. Interns: “A résumé audit study with more than 11,500 applications reveals that employers are more likely to respond positively when internship applicants have previous internship experience. Employers are also less likely to respond to applicants with black-sounding names and when the applicant is more distant from the firm.”
Pigouvian in-kind time horn tax in Mumbai
For the Mumbai’s perpetual honkers, who love to blare the horns of their vehicles even when the traffic signal is red, the Mumbai Traffic Police has quietly come up with an unique initiative to discipline them in order to curb the alarming rise in the noise pollution levels in the country’s commercial capital.
From Friday (January 31, 2020), it has installed decibel meters at certain select but heavy traffic signals to deter the habitual honkers through a campaign named ‘The Punishing Signal’.
Joint Police Commissioner (Traffic) Madhukar Pandey said that the decibel monitors are connected to traffic signals around the island city, and when the cacophony exceeds the dangerous 85-decibel mark due to needless honking, the signal timer resets, entailing a double waiting time for all vehicles.
Here is the full story, and for the pointers I thank Sheel Mohnot and CL. Here is a relevant ad for the policy. Here is Alex on honking as signaling.
Sunday assorted links
*A Treatise on Northern Ireland*, by Brendan O’Leary
This three-volume set is quite the remarkable achievement, and it would have made my best books of 2019 list (add-ons here) had I known about it earlier. It starts with “An audit of violence after 1966,” and then goes back to the seventeenth century to begin to dig out what happened. It has more detail than almost anyone needs to know, yet at the same time it remains unfailingly conceptual and relies on theoretical social science as well, rather than merely reciting names and dates. How about this?:
The breakdown of hegemonic control in Northern Ireland [mid- to late 1960s] exemplifies Tocqueville’s thesis that, when a bad government seeks to reform itself, it is in its greatest danger.
Here is an excerpt from volume II:
The thesis advanced here is that hegemonic control was established between 1920 and 1925 by the UUP, and, aside from a few exceptional moments, exercised successfully until 1966. After 1925 opportunities for effective opposition, dissent, disobedience, or usurpation of power were minimal. The major possibilities of disruption came from the outside, from independent Ireland or from Great Britain, from geopolitics, or the world economy. Eventually, when external forces of disruption combined with major endogenous changes, hegemonic control would be contested, and would shatter. But at no juncture did Northern nationalists or Irish Catholics in the North internalize the UUP’s rhetoric, or become significantly British by cultural designation. When the civil-rights movement learned to exploit the claim to be British citizens entitled to British rights, the regime’s days were numbered.
I will continue to spend time with these volumes, which will not be surpassed anytime soon. Unlike in so many history books, O’Leary is always trying to explain what happened, or what did not. You can order them here.
As a side note, I find it shocking (and I suppose deplorable) that no American major media outlet has reviewed these books, or put them on its best of the year list, as far as I can tell. We are failing at something, though I suppose you can debate what. And I apologize to O’Leary for missing them the first time around.
Saturday assorted links
The dynamics of motivated beliefs
A key question in the literature on motivated reasoning and self-deception is how motivated beliefs are sustained in the presence of feedback. In this paper, we explore dynamic motivated belief patterns after feedback. We establish that positive feedback has a persistent effect on beliefs. Negative feedback, instead, influences beliefs in the short run, but this effect fades over time. We investigate the mechanisms of this dynamic pattern, and provide evidence for an asymmetry in the recall of feedback. Finally, we establish that, in line with theoretical accounts, incentives for belief accuracy mitigate the role of motivated reasoning.
That is from the new AER by Florian Zimmerman. And from the paper proper:
We find that negative feedback is indeed recalled with significantly lower accuracy, compared to positive feedback, which suggests that the dynamic belief pattern we have identified is indeed driven by the selective recall of information. Next, we make use of additional outcome variables and a placebo condition to delve into how selective recall operates. In a nutshell, the following patterns emerge. Our results suggest that participants are able to suppress the recall of unwanted memories. Furthermore, participants appear to suppress the recall of not only negative feedback but also the IQ test more broadly. Our results lend direct support to key modeling assumptions in Bénabou and Tirole (2002, 2004). From a policy perspective, our findings suggest that policy interventions aimed at correcting self-servingly biased misperceptions via information or feedback are unlikely to be effective in the long run due to people’s ability to forget or suppress information that threatens their desired views.
The paper also shows that incentives matter and can improve the problem. For instance, if you tell people that they will have to recall the information at some point in the future, and will receive a monetary reward for accuracy, there is considerably less selective forgetting.
Friday assorted links
1. Pee-Wee Herman comeback in the works. And building a modern Congressional Technology Assessment Office.
2. Keeping a business running during a pandemic.
3. NBA loses possibly $100 million or more in China revenue. And: “Our findings suggest that nationalist propaganda can manipulate emotions and anti-foreign sentiment, but does not necessarily divert attention from domestic political grievances.”
4. 25 greatest classical pianists of all time? A good list, except for Rachmaninov at #1, and I am pleased to have heard virtually all of the moderns in concert. I would add Leif Andsnes and take off Lang Lang and Clara Haskil. And come on people — Pollini has to be top ten (he is not on the list at all), in spite of his recent age-related decline. And Grosvenor is a fine pianist, but I wouldn’t quite put him in this exalted territory, replace with Rudolf or even Peter Serkin? And if you are looking for peaks, Michelangeli surely belongs as well. Solomon?
5. Ryan Bourne on state capacity libertarianism. I will note that a possible coronavirus pandemic would likely boost the plausibility of state capacity libertarianism.
7. John Cochrane on woke academia, recommended, and horrifying.
The economist as scapegoat
Russ Roberts defends Milton Friedman (and many others, implicitly), excerpt:
What about spending for public schools? Has that been reduced in this allegedly draconian neoliberal era?
In 1960, per pupil expenditure for elementary and high school students was just under $4000. In 1980, when the neoliberal ideology allegedly began its ascendance, it was a little less than $8000. The latest numbers from 2015–2016 are just under $15,000. All numbers are corrected for inflation (in 2017–2018 dollars). So under this time of alleged cutbacks and resource starvation, per pupil expenditures rose dramatically.
What about transportation infrastructure? Total spending is up in real terms. What about as a percentage of GDP? There has been a decline since 1962 as a percentage of GDP but the numbers are basically flat since 1980…
What about investment in non-defense research and development, and health? Up dramatically since 1980 in real terms.
There is much more at the link, including excellent visuals.
Loo markets in everything
If you need a toilet while on the go, trust Toto Ltd. to come up with a solution. Just summon one up with your smartphone, the company says.
The toilet manufacturer unveiled the “mobile toilet concept” at the CES tech show held in Las Vegas in early January. The company intends to develop an exclusive app that brings a portable restroom trailer to a spot near the location the call is made.
Here is the full story, via Nigel B.