Category: Uncategorized

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Negotiating with North Korea.

2. A tree with its own zip code.

3. The Straussian theory of employee feedback within corporations.  I don’t quite agree, but interesting nonetheless.

4. MIE: where does fake movie money come from?

5. Is your data worth anything?

6. TikTok now at one billion downloads.

7. “At 42, Bickert is currently one of only a handful of people, along with her counterparts at Google, with real power to dictate free-speech norms for the entire world.”  Oops, correct link for #7 is here.

Which changes in economic policy are actually going to happen?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

A second pattern from U.S. history is that the federal government generally likes to hand out benefits perceived as “free.” This dates at least as far back as the establishment of Social Security in the Great Depression, when the initial benefit recipients weren’t paying taxes into the system.

I therefore expect federal government action on subsidized child care, preschool programs and paid family leave, all financed by increases in budget deficits rather than higher taxes. Such policies would hand out goodies to millions of families, and appeal to women in particular.

Again, ask the basic questions. Is there “pro-family” rhetoric emanating from both left and right? Yes, whether it is the socialist proposals from Matt Bruenig or paid family leave bills introduced by congressional Republicans. Can you imagine members from both parties claiming these issues as their own? Yes. Is there the possibility of free goodies being handed out? Again, yes, as the national debt held by the public is now over $16 trillion.

I consider also tech regulation, trade issues, immigration, Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal, with only the first of those likely to see big changes.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The world’s biggest MOOC?

2. Popular culture has stopped warning us against the dangers of nuclear devastation.

3. For economists: “receiving an education from a top 20 ranked university reduces the need to self-symbolize even when the scholars work for a non-top 20 university after earning the doctorate…academic maturity shows a tendency (albeit not a robust one) to reduce the need to self-symbolize.”  Link here.

4. Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes to start a new conservative media company (they are looking for investors).

5. “…with these new kinds of policies, all it takes to get the financial ball rolling is the occurrence of a trigger, a previously agreed-upon event: an earthquake of sufficient size, say, or a hurricane with winds of a given speed.”

6. What a North Korean official says (NYT).  A good piece.

Toward a theory of random, concentrated breakthroughs

by  Tyler Cowen in

I don’t (yet?) agree with what is to follow, but it is a model of the world I have been trying to flesh out, if only for the sake of curiosity.  Here are the main premises:

1. For a big breakthrough in some area to come, many different favorable inputs had to come together.  So the Florentine Renaissance required the discovery of the right artistic materials at the right time (e.g., good tempera, then oil paint), prosperity in Florence, guilds and nobles interested in competing for status with artistic commissions, relative freedom of expression, and so on.

2. To some extent, but not completely, the arrival of those varied inputs is random.  Big breakthroughs are thus hard to predict and also hard to control.

3. A breakthrough in one area increases the likelihood that further breakthroughs will come in closely related areas.  So if the coming together of the symphony orchestra leads to the work of Mozart and Haydn, that in turn becomes an inspiration and eases the path for later breakthroughs in music, not just Mahler but also The Beatles, compared to say how much it might ease future breakthroughs for painting.

4. Some breakthroughs are very very good for economic growth, such as the Industrial Revolution.  But most breakthroughs do not in any direct way boost gdp very much.  The Axial age led to the creation of significant religions and intellectual traditions, but the (complex) effects on gdp are mostly lagged and were certainly hard to see at the time.

5. Even if Robert Gordon is right that we will never have a new period of material progress comparable to the early 20th century for improving living standards, the next breakthrough eras still might be very important.

6. One possibility is that the next breakthrough will be some form of brain engineering.  People might be much happier and better adjusted, but arguably that could lower measured gdp by boosting “household production” in lieu of market activity.  At the very least, gdp figures may not reflect the value of those gains.

7. Another candidate for the next breakthrough would be institutional changes that make ongoing international peace much more likely.  That would have some positive effects on gdp in the short run, but its major effects would be in the much longer run, namely the prevention of a very destructive war.

8. Judged by the standards of the last breakthrough, the current/next breakthrough is typically hard to see and understand.  It almost always feels like we are failing at progress.

9. When a breakthrough comes, you need to ride it for all it is worth.  Arguably you also should embrace the excesses of that breakthrough, not seek to limit them.  It is perhaps your only real chance to mine that mother lode of inspiration.  So let us hope that Baroque music was “overproduced” in the early to mid 18th century, because after that production opportunities go away.  For that reason, “overuse” of the internet and social media today may not be such a bad thing.  It is our primary way of exploring all of the potential of that cultural mode, and that mode will at some point be tamed and neutered, just as Baroque music composition is now dormant.

10. Progress in (many forms of) science may be more like progress in Baroque music composition than we comfortably like to think.  But I hope not.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Mercatus graduate student fellowships, including for shorter-term visiting programs.

2. Decline in EPA enforcement seems to predate Trump.

3. Short history of MMT (have any of them read Arthur Kitson?).

4. Puffin eats fish (photo).

5. “Many social media users have been baffled by the recent appearance of a video clip of a choir in St. Petersburg’s landmark cathedral, Saint Isaac’s, performing a song about total nuclear annihilation of the United States.”  It is a parody of former Soviet propaganda.  But a lot of parody doesn’t work so well in 2019.

My Conversation with Sam Altman

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, the Sam Altman of Y Combinator and Open AI.  We even got around to Harry Potter, James Bond (and Q), Spiderman, Antarctica, and Napoleon, what is wrong with San Francisco, in addition to venture capital and the hunt for talent.  Here is the transcript and audio.  Here is one excerpt:

ALTMAN: I think our greatest differentiator is not how we identify talent, although I will answer that question, but the fact that we treat our own business — we run Y Combinator in the way that we tell our startups to run as a successful startup, which almost no venture capital firm does.

Almost every venture capital firm gives advice they never follow themselves. They don’t build differentiated products. They are not network-affected businesses. They don’t try to build a brand and a community. And they don’t try to make something that gets better the bigger it gets and have the scale effects that anyone would tell you they want in a business.

We at Y Combinator always say we want to get a lot bigger because this is a network effect, this is a network that matters. Most venture capital firms will say out of one side of their mouth, “Oh no, smaller is better,” because they don’t want to work more. Then they’ll tell all their businesses, “The network effect is the only thing that matters.”

Many people are as smart as we are, think about the world in similar ways. But I think we have internalized that we run our firm the same way we tell our startups to operate, and we view the most important thing that we do is to build a network and a network effect.

And:

COWEN: Let me play venture capital skeptic, and you can talk me back into optimism.

ALTMAN: I might not.

COWEN: Let’s say I say, tech has had a stream of big hits: personal computer, internet, cell phone, mobile. You’ve had a lot of rapidly scalable innovations become possible in a short period of time. We’re now in a slight lull. We’re not sure what the next big thing is or when it will come. Without that next big thing, won’t the current equilibrium require a higher rate of picking the right talent than venture capitalists are, in fact, able to do?

ALTMAN: I will talk you out of that one, happily. The most expensive investing mistake in the world to make is to be a pessimist, and it’s a common one. I think that’s actually the most common mistake to make in life. It is true that we are in a lull right now, but it is absolutely, categorically false that — unless the world gets destroyed in a very short term — that we will not have a bigger technological wave then we’ve ever had before.

COWEN: Why can’t I be an optimist but not an optimist about VC? I think new ideas will come through established companies. They’ll be funded by private equity. They’ll happen in China. But the exact formula where you can afford to make so many mistakes because the hits are so big — to what extent does VC rely on that kind of rapid scalability that may not come back?

And:

COWEN: Young Napoleon shows up. What do you think after 5 minutes?

ALTMAN: How young? Like 18-year-old Napoleon or 5-year-old?

COWEN: Before he’s famous, 21-year-old Napoleon.

ALTMAN: From everything I’ve read that would be a definite yes. In fact, the best book I read last year is called The Mind of Napoleon, which is a book of quotes about his views on everything. Just that thick on Napoleon quotes. Obviously deeply flawed human, but man, impressive.

Definitely recommended.

Indian and Pakistani stock markets

by  Tyler Cowen in

Right now the Indian market is up a small amount for the week, of course that may change.

I know you all love to yelp that markets don’t predict well (not what markets do!…that word “predict” is loaded) and that stock markets did not predict WWII, etc.  The lack of an Indian market reaction here is fully consistent with the fact that prediction is very hard.  Investors might simply be unsure which priors to update, and thus prices haven’t changed much.  That is consistent with the work of Philip Tetlock, also indicating that prediction is very hard.  So this kind of market result does not have to conflict with the best knowledge we have from political science and the other social sciences.

The Pakistan stock exchange, by the way, is down a few percentage points but not seeing massive carnage.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Paul Krugman pursues the MMTers (NYT).  I’m never going to enter that derby.

2. Douthat on community and big government (NYT).

3. Good thread on Kashmir, general background.

4. What does the public think of eugenics?  Sad but not surprising.

5. Cass Sunstein’s On Freedom comes out today.

6. “In certain situations, there appear differences between the behavior of people trained in economics and other groups, but as the existing evidence is mostly ambiguous, a comprehensive picture of the nature and sources of these differences has not yet emerged.”  Link here.

*Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new and forthcoming book by David G. Blanchflower, here is one excerpt:

The high-paying union private-sector jobs for the less educated are long gone.  Real weekly wages in April 2018 in the United States were around 10 percent below their 1973 peak for private-sector production and non-supervisory workers in constant 1982-84 dollars.  In the UK real wages in 2018 are 6 percent below their 2008 level.

And:

In the post-recession period underemployment has replaced unemployment as the main indicator of labor market slack.

This is a very good book for anyone wishing to rethink what is going on in labor markets today.  In his view there is plenty more slack, as evidence by sluggish wage behavior.  You can pre-order here, due out in June.

*IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new and excellent and I am tempted to label definitive book by James W. Cortada.  The author worked at IBM for thirty-eight years, a reasonable qualification to attempt such a tome.  Here is one excerpt:

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Social Security win to the evolution of IBM.  That one piece of business, along with its effects on other agencies and businesses, wiped out the Great Depression for IBM.  That transaction handed IBM a potential market of 20,000 other companies that would need to process social security data.  When the books were closed on IBM’s business in 1937, revenue had increased by 48 percent of 1935’s, and by the end of 1939, by 81 percent of 1935’s.

And then for the 1960s:

IBM’s System 360 was one of the most important products introduced by a U.S. corporation in the twentieth century, and it nearly broke IBM.  A short list of the most transformative products of the past century would include it…

On April 7, 1964, IBM introduced a combination of six components, dozens of items of peripheral equipment, such as tape drives, disk drives, printers, and control units, among others; and a promise to provide the software necessary to make everything work together — a mindboggling total of 150 products…manuals describing all the machines, components, software, and their installations and operation filled more than 50 linear feet of bookshelves.

But later on, by the 1970s:

With ten layers of management, each with staffs, it was probably inevitable that bureaucracy would grow.

The research and background context is amazing and the book is readable throughout.  You can pre-order here.

*Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am very excited about my next book, due out April 9:

I view this work as an antidote to many of the less than stellar arguments circulating today.  It looks like this:

Table of contents

1. A new pro-business manifesto

2. Are businesses more fraudulent than the rest of us?

3. Are CEOs paid too much?

4. Is work fun?

5. How monopolistic is American big business?

6. Are the big tech companies evil?

7. What is Wall Street good for, anyway?

8. Crony capitalism: How much does big business control the American government?

9. If business is so good, why is it disliked?

Here is part of the Amazon description:

An against-the-grain polemic on American capitalism from New York Times bestselling author Tyler Cowen.

We love to hate the 800-pound gorilla. Walmart and Amazon destroy communities and small businesses. Facebook turns us into addicts while putting our personal data at risk. From skeptical politicians like Bernie Sanders who, at a 2016 presidential campaign rally said, “If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist,” to millennials, only 42 percent of whom support capitalism, belief in big business is at an all-time low. But are big companies inherently evil? If business is so bad, why does it remain so integral to the basic functioning of America? Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen says our biggest problem is that we don’t love business enough.

In Big Business, Cowen puts forth an impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role in a balanced, productive, and progressive society. He dismantles common misconceptions and untangles conflicting intuitions.

You can pre-order here on Amazon.  Here at Barnes & Noble.  Here at Books a Million.  Here at Itunes.  Here at IndieBound.  From PlayGoogle.  From Kobo.

Here is the publisher’s home page.  Definitely recommended…and if you are a regular MR reader, no more than five to ten percent of this book has already appeared on this blog.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

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.