Category: Uncategorized

Cosmopolitanism vs. nationalism

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  It is hard to excerpt, but here is the closing bit:

The best way for that to happen is to let practical nationalism reign, while at the margin seeking to soften it with moral cosmopolitanism. Both perspectives are valuable, and neither can be allowed to dominate. Each perspective, standing on its own, is intellectually vulnerable, yet the two outlooks together are not quite fully harmonious. It is this dynamic clash, however, that helps to account for the strength of each.

Try explaining all that, and its required background knowledge, in a 280-word tweet. Yet much of the world manages a pretty fruitful balance between moral cosmopolitanism and practical nationalism. There is a wisdom embodied in this lived experience which neither pundits nor philosophers can convey.

A tempered and centrist cosmopolitanism won’t always command the strongest loyalties, nor will practical nationalism always look so pretty. If we can accept that reality, then maybe we can stop throwing stones at each other.

*The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Michael Malice, and I have to say it will go down as one of the more important albeit objectionable books of this year.  Imagine an well-informed anthropological treatment of Gamergate, PUA, Ann Coulter, Mike Cernovich, Milo, and all the rest of “that stuff,” both its history and how it fits together.

Just to be clear, this book is not written from the perspective of a journalist trying to make these movements look weird, rather it is written from the perspective of an anarchist trying to make these movements look (relatively) normal.  You might find that approach is not affiliated with the proper mood.  I don’t get the sense that Malice is “one of them,” but his “objectivity” might not be the right kind of objectivity.  I’m not going to try to resolve that meta-issue here, I’ll just say that a “normalizing” treatment of “the New Right” has some descriptive virtues, and you might end up more scared and more concerned than if you read a journalistic expose.  That said, I am not sure the author really grasps the non-niceness of so much of this stuff, or the import of that non-niceness.

Every page of this book is interesting, and so I am going to recommend it.  Here is a Kirkus Review, otherwise MSM doesn’t seem to be touching this one at all.  Here is the Amazon link, 79 reviews and an average of five stars.  The reviews themselves are not entirely reassuring.

I thank an MR reader for the pointer.

Sunday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “Overall, our findings on tax-rate and tax-base avoidance of U.S. multinational and domestic firms explain the recent evidence that effective tax rates of domestic firms are at least as low as effective tax rates of multinational firm.”

2. The Tony Soprano house is for sale (NYT).

3. “Trump’s four-minute video about the North’s bright future, showed to Kim in Singapore, may have had more effect than observers once suggested. By now it’s clear that rich and poor North Koreans were sorely disappointed by the breakdown in talks with Trump.”  Story here.

4. The history of the Laffer Curve.  It’s worth noting that Laffer was correct about many of the original applications of the curve.  Should there really have been Swedish and British marginal tax rates of 102 or even 95 percent?  How soon people forget.

5. The law and economics of literary fan art.

The dark side of the internet, in a nutshell?

by  Tyler Cowen in

As incentives to take higher actions increase—due to higher stakes or more manipulable signaling technology—more information is revealed about gaming ability, and less about natural actions. We explore a new externality: showing agents’ actions to additional observers can worsen information for existing observers. Applications to credit scoring, school testing, and web searching are discussed.

That is from a forthcoming JPE paper “Muddled Information,” by Alex Frankel and Navin Kartik.

Heritability of lifetime earnings

by  Tyler Cowen in

Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alternative definitions of earnings, to adjusting for the role of education, and to measurement errors in the measure of genetic relatedness.

That is from a newly published paper by Ari Hyytinen, Pekka Ilmakunnas, Edvard Johansson, and Otto Toivanen.

Physician and Nurse Incomes Have Increased Tremendously

by  Alex Tabarrok in

There has been a lot of ink spilled over the rising cost of health care and in Why Are the Prices So D*mn High? Helland and I do not cover every theory and cannot satisfy every objection. Our goal is more modest. We can say that one major factor in rising health care costs is the rising price of skilled labor.

We argue that there is a direct, obvious, and measurable cause of higher costs in healthcare—namely, the price of skilled labor. No profession other than physicians has seen such large increases in incomes over the past 50 years. Figure 19 shows the real income of physicians from 1960 to 2016, indexed to 100 in 1960. Since 1960 the real income of physicians has increased by a factor of three. By comparison, barbers and bus drivers have seen essentially no increase in real incomes. Median incomes are up only modestly whereas mean incomes, which are pulled up by outliers, are up by only 50 percent.

Moreover, nurse incomes have risen in lock-step with those of physicians.

At the same time, we have hired more physicians and more nurses per capita. As Figure 20 shows since 1960 the number of physicians and the number of nurses has more than doubled.

With more physicians and more nurses each making more, it’s not surprising that the cost of medical care would increase.

Addendum: Other posts in this series.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The technologies that are Canada: “Audible hockey puck could revolutionize the sport for blind players.”  Note: “[It] sounds pretty much like a smoke detector,” Francois Beauregard, who helped come up with the idea for the puck prototype…”It is not made to be harmonious or pleasant.”

2. Was Leonardo da Vinci ADHD? (speculative)

3. Professional football is also much riskier for subsequent heart attacks.

4. Paul Keating, former Australian Prime Minister, on classical music.

5. Homeopathy in the French health care system, but much more than that too.

China fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

We find that party members on average hold substantially more modern and progressive views than the public on issues such as gender equality, political pluralism, and openness to international exchange.

That is from Chengyuan Ji and Junyan Jiang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  Of course this may partly explain why China’s rising middle class is not so outright enthusiastic for democratization.