Category: Uncategorized
Damien Hirst markets in everything
The Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas is taking the concept of luxe travel to a whole different level. Its new Damien-Hirst-designed Empathy Suite costs $100,000 a night.
The room is the most expensive in America, beating out one at The Mark hotel, which previously held the accolade at $75,000 a night. And Empathy is also one of the world’s most expensive hotel accommodations, according to The Palms. (In fact, it’s potentially the most expensive: The Royal Penthouse Suite at the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva — at about $80,000 a night — was the world’s most expensive suite in 2018, according to Lonely Planet.)
…The room was designed by world-renowned artist Hirst and showcases a number of his well-known original pieces, like the iconic “Winner/Loser,” with two bull sharks suspended in formaldehyde.
Hirst — who is known for controversial pieces — also created a 13-seat curved bar filled with medical waste, and hanging above the bar is Hirst’s “Here for a Good Time, Not a Long Time,” which features a marlin skeleton and taxidermy marlin.
Here is more text and photos, noting that perhaps the high price is in part “advertising” so that major gamblers feel good when the room is comped to them?
Those new service sector jobs is this one in fact torture?
Imagine: For the rest of your life, you are assigned no tasks at work. You can watch movies, read books, work on creative projects or just sleep. In fact, the only thing that you have to do is clock in and out every day. Since the position is permanent, you’ll never need to worry about getting another job again.
Starting in 2026, this will be one lucky (or extremely bored) worker’s everyday reality, thanks to a government-funded conceptual art project in Gothenburg, Sweden. The employee in question will report to Korsvägen, a train station under construction in the city, and will receive a salary of about $2,320 a month in U.S. dollars, plus annual wage increases, vacation time off and a pension for retirement. While the artists behind the project won’t be taking applications until 2025, when the station will be closer to opening, a draft of the help-wanted ad is already available online, as Atlas Obscura reported on Monday.
The job’s requirements couldn’t be simpler: An employee shows up to the train station each morning and punches the time clock. That, in turn, illuminates an extra bank of fluorescent lights over the platform, letting travelers and commuters know that the otherwise functionless employee is on the job. At the end of the day, the worker returns to clock out, and the lights go off. In between, they can do whatever they want, aside from work at another paying job.
That is by Antonia Noori Farzan at WaPo. The project is called “Eternal Employment.”
For the pointer I thank Peter Sperry.
Friday assorted links
Writers vs. entrepreneurs, publishers vs. venture capitalists
Henry Oliver asks:
In what ways are writers and entrepreneurs similar? Why doesn’t publishing have more of a VC structure and attitude? Could authorship be made more productive and better quality with VC in publishing and theatre? Are movies better at this?
Publishing has one feature in common with venture capital, namely that most financed undertakings are failures and the most profitable successes can be hard to predict in advance. Furthermore, publishers are always on the lookout for the soon-to-be-hot, hitherto unpublished author, the next Mark Zuckerberg so to speak. And books, like software and also successful social networks, are rapidly scalable. You can sell millions with a big hit. But here are a few differences:
1. A lot of VC is person-focused. The VC company builds a relationship with a young talent, and in some cases the hope is that the second or third business makes it, or that the person can be steered in the proper direction early on. Authors, in contrast, are more mobile across publishers, and the publisher usually is buying “a book” rather than “a relationship with the author.” Some wags would say that a publisher is buying a title, a cover, and the author’s social media presence.
2. Entrepreneurs commonly have more than one VC, but authors, for a single book, do not have multiple publishers.
3. For the vast majority of books which do not make a profit, this is evident within the first three weeks of release or perhaps before release altogether. The publisher may drop its resource commitment to the author very quickly, and even yank the PR people off the case. This further loosens the bond between the talent (the author) and the funders of the talent (the publisher). In contrast, VC rounds can last five or ten years, with commitments made in advance and possibly a board seat as part of the deal.
4. Venture capitalists will introduce their entrepreneurs to an entire network of supporting talent and connections. Publishers will edit and advise on a manuscript, but it is much more of an arm’s length relationship, and a publisher might do very little to bring an author into any kind of network.
5. The major publishing houses are clustered in Manhattan, just as the major venture capitalist firms are clustered in the Bay Area. But the publishers don’t find a pressing need to have their authors living in or near NYC, though for some other reasons that is convenient for the author doing eventual media appearances.
6. Publishers often care a great deal about an author’s preexisting platforms, such as Twitter followers or ability to get on NPR. Venture capitalists realize that a very good product can overcome the lack of initial renown. When Page and Brin started Google, they didn’t, believe it or not, have any Twitter followers at all. In fact, you couldn’t even Google them.
What else?
Thursday assorted links
1. Why did hats fall out of fashion?
2. Vero on U.S. industrial policy (NYT).
3. Deepfakes are not yet such a problem.
5. Rolf Degen on “popular belief.” And asparagus.
The real threats to free speech on campus
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is an excerpt:
…being at a state school is hardly a guarantee of tolerance. Teaching at a state university does widen the scope of what a professor can say without being fired. But ongoing student protests or unfavorable treatment from colleagues can make continued employment so unpleasant that a person simply decides to leave. In my experience, most professors aren’t in it for the money — rather, they love their work. Loving your work is a gift that can be taken away rather easily, regardless of whatever formal legal protections there may be.
Or consider the position of a student. You might have the legal right to start a pro-Trump group on campus. But you might be dissuaded from doing so if you fear your professors would respond by writing you mediocre letters of recommendation.
What really matters on campus is what the most obstreperous participants in these debates consider to be acceptable behavior and speech, and how far they will take their protests. These individuals are usually those with relatively little to lose from strident behavior, and perhaps some local status to gain. They may be students, or they may not; they can be student counselors, or faculty members, or even low-level university bureaucrats.
I explain in the piece why my own university, George Mason, has been strong in this regard. And I am not crazy about the new proposed Trump executive order:
The relevant troublemakers are hardly ever university administrators. Yet they would inevitably become entangled in any tighter federal free-speech regulations. I have found such administrators to be pragmatic and able to see multiple sides of an issue, even if I do not always agree with their stances. Their primary goal is usually to get the rancor and protests to go away, so the business of the university can return to normal. Placing more constraints on their behavior could actually weaken their hand — by limiting their ability to mollify unruly student groups, for instance.
The full piece offers several additional arguments of note, so do read the whole thing. Here is my conclusion:
I’m all for free speech, whether for public or private schools. But the fight has to be won in the hearts and minds of students and workers, not by the federal government.
Hypnotist markets in everything
Those new service sector jobs:
This hypnotist charges half a bitcoin for helping you remember your lost cryptocurrency password…
“If you’ve got, you know, $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 worth of bitcoin in a wallet and you can’t get access to it, there’s a lot of stress there,” he says. “So it’s not just as simple as saying, okay, we’re going to go do a 30-minute hypnosis session and enhance your memory.”
Miller declined to specify the exact number of participants in his bitcoin password recovery program or how much money he’s recovered, citing client confidentiality. However, he says that there are currently “several people” in his program, who are experiencing varying degrees of success.
Generally, a person who created their password more recently will have an easier time unlocking this memory, he says. Likewise, a client who is feeling low stress will have an easier time remembering their password than one under high stress.
Miller is located in Greenville, South Carolina.
For the pointer I thank Nick Glenn.
Wednesday assorted links
Tuesday assorted links
1. Status networks and proof of work.
2. Zack Beauchamp interviews Brad DeLong. And commentary from Ross (NYT).
3. “…unfunded pension benefits grow faster under Democratic-party mayors.”
4. Summers on MMT. And Scott Sumner on MMT.
5. Boston is the most politically intolerant place in the U.S.
6. The average age of U.S. college presidents is rising rapidly.
7. David Brooks on Medicare For All (NYT).
Monday assorted links
The culture and polity that is Brazil
Pentecostalist Churches, like Macedo’s Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, which promise instant wealth, offer competing live prophecies and other supernatural theatre, and exorcise demons in public. The leading Brazilian polling organisation, Datafolha, estimated them at 30 per cent of the voting population this time around, and they have electoral discipline…
The evangelists are everywhere. In the prisons, in the favelas, among the black poor, but increasingly also appealing to the financially insecure middle classes. Over the last decade, defections from the Catholic population are estimated at 1 per cent per year, but this is arguably accelerating. Bolsonaro may not achieve much else, but he may well prove to be the first president of post-Catholic Brazil, with a new moral order perpetuated by a new television regime. The rest of Latin America is not far behind.
Such is life in Bolsonaro’s Brazil! Here is the full piece, a letter to the LRB by Christopher Lord, via Alexander Papazian.
The impact of the Trump trade war
We analyze the short-run impacts of the 2018 trade war on the U.S. economy. We estimate import demand and export supply elasticities using changes in U.S. and retaliatory war tariffs over time. Imports from targeted countries decline 31.5% within products, while targeted U.S. exports fall 9.5%. We find complete pass-through of U.S. tariffs to variety-level import prices, and compute the aggregate and regional impacts of the war in a general equilibrium framework that matches these elasticities. Annual losses from higher costs of imports are $68.8 billion (0.37% of GDP). After accounting for higher tariff revenue and gains to domestic producers from higher prices, the aggregate welfare loss is $6.4 billion (0.03% of GDP). U.S. tariffs favored sectors located in politically competitive counties, suggesting an ex ante rationale for the tariffs, but retaliatory tariffs offset the benefits to these counties. Tradeable-sector workers in heavily Republican counties are the most negatively affected by the trade war.
Here is the full paper, by Pablo D. Fajgelbaum, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Patrick J. Kennedy, and Amit K. Khandelwal. Full pass-through, of course, means that monopoly in these markets is likely not such a big deal.
Sunday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
1. The old blogosphere vs. current social media. (He should have blogged it, however.)
2. The Singapore chewing gum ban.
3. Training teachers how to shoot.
4. Hidden insults in an on-line Taiwanese game?
5. The golden age of the piano is now.
6. Ethiopia’s coffee ritual is being exported to China and Japan.
The Mormon asymptote?
…compared to some other religions, Mormonism is not doing too badly. Mormonism’s US growth rate of .75 percent in 2017 — kept in positive territory by still-higher-than-average fertility among Mormons — is actually somewhat enviable when compared to, for example, the once-thriving Southern Baptists, who have bled out more than a million members in the last ten years. Mormonism is not yet declining in membership, but it has entered a period of decelerated growth. In terms of congregational expansion, the LDS Church in the United States added only sixty-five new congregations in 2016, for an increase of half a percentage point. In 2017, the church created 184 new wards and branches in the United States, but 184 units also closed, resulting in no net gain at all.
By some estimates (p.7), only about 30 percent of young single Mormons in the United States go to church regularly. The idea of the Mormon mission, however, is rising in import:
More than half of Mormon Millennials have served a full-time mission (55 percent), which is clearly the highest proportion of any generation; among GenXers, 40 percent served, and in the Boomer/Silent generation, it was 28 percent.
In contrast, “returning to the temple on behalf of the deceased” is falling (p.54).
Mormons are about a third more likely to be married than the general U.S. population, 66 to 48 percent. But note that 23 percent of Mormon Millennials admit to having a tattoo, against a recommended rate of zero (p.162).
And ex-Mormon snowflakes seem to be proliferating. For GenX, the single biggest reason giving for leaving the church was “Stopped believing there was one church”. For Millennials, it is (sadly) “Felt judged or misunderstood.”
That is all from the new and excellent Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church.
Oxford University Press also sent me a copy of J. Brian O’Roark Why Superman Doesn’t Take Over the World: What Superheroes Can Tell us About Economics, which I have not yet read.