Category: Uncategorized
The recent political revolution is a major shift toward the right
And when I say recent, I mean in the last few weeks. That is the topic of my recent Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.
Start with Australia, where Prime Minister Scott Morrison won a surprising victory last week. Before the election, polls had almost uniformly indicated that his Liberal-National Coalition would have to step down, but voters were of another mind. With their support of Morrison, an evangelical Christian who has expressed support for President Donald Trump, Australians also showed a relative lack of interest in doing more about climate change. And this result is no fluke of low turnout: Due to compulsory voting, most Australians do turn out for elections.
Hard Brexit is alive and well, the European Parliament elections later this week could be a disaster, and Modi seems to be on the upswing in the Indian election. But perhaps most importantly there is this:
One scarcely noticed factor in all of this has been the rising perception of China as a threat to Western interests. The American public is very aware that the U.S. is now in a trade war with China, a conflict that is likely to provoke an increase in nationalism. That is a sentiment that has not historically been very helpful to left-wing movements. China has been one of Trump’s signature causes for years, and he seems to be delighting in having it on center stage.
The Democratic Party is not well-positioned to make China a core issue. Democrats have been criticizing Trump’s tariffs for a while now, and it may be hard for them to adjust their message from “Tariffs Are Bad” to “Tariffs Are Bad But China Tariffs Are OK.” Their lukewarm support for free trade agreements — especially the Trans Pacific Partnership, which could have served as a kind of alternative China trade policy — also complicates matters. The net result is that Republicans will probably be able to use the China issue to their advantage for years to come.
Nor did Obama stand up to China on the militarization of the South China Sea. Do read the whole thing.
Assorted Monday links
1. Uber/Lyft driver collusion?
2. Elba insurance markets in everything: “Guests receive a refund for one night if it rains for more than two hours on any given day during their stay.” (NYT)
3. German economy adjusting OK to immigration surge.
4. U.S. military officers are calling North Korea on a pink phone to talk about the Los Angeles Dodgers (WSJ).
7. AEA now has an ombudsperson (a good idea).
Sunday assorted links
1. Money from Putin and trouble in Austria.
2. Less social discounting from autistics.
3. Jeff Koons is underrated (NYT).
4. “Soil Instead Of Ashes: Human Composting Is About To Become Legal In Washington State.”
6. Newark schools have in fact turned around (The Economist, and I’d like to see a separate piece on whether Mark Zuckerberg deserves any credit for this.)
Saturday assorted links
2. Steven Malanga reviews *Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*.
3. Anand G. on the new Jared Diamond book (NYT).
4. The other Nordic paradox (violence against women).
Harvard and Ronald Sullivan, why Harvard was basically right
I hope your head doesn’t explode, but it seems to me that Harvard and Matt Yglesias are right about the dismissal of Sullivan from his Winthrop House post at Harvard. Matt explains:
Sullivan isn’t a public defender who’s simply taking the clients assigned to him. He’s not even a full-time criminal defense lawyer who just takes whichever clients happen to come through his door. He’s a busy guy who has classes to teach, a dorm to administer, and various other demands on his time. While it’s obviously true that all criminal defendants have a right to an attorney, it’s equally obvious that criminal defendants don’t have a particular right to Ronald Sullivan’s services.
Now, I don’t doubt that Harvard may have acted for what in part are the wrong reasons, namely asymmetric treatment of left-and right wing causes and cases. Still, it seems reasonable to me that Harvard insists that its faculty dorm administrators face a minimum of outside distractions, especially controversial distractions, without having to judge whose fault is the controversy (Sullivan’s fault? Harvard’s fault? the fault of the possibly “snowflaky” students?). Maybe Harvard would have been unfair and inconsistent had another, non-Weinstein defendant been involved, still that does not make Sullivan’s dismissal the wrong decision.
On top of that, having “snowflake” students in the dorm is still a reason to make Sullivan choose either the dorm or the legal case — complainers don’t always have to be correct for their wishes to have some validity. It really is about helping students focus on their studies, and sometimes that might mean removing distractions which distract for maybe not entirely rational reasons. Furthermore, in this case maybe the distraction was rational to some extent (I genuinely do not know on that one as I do not have direct information, Matt thinks yes but in my view leaps to quickly to that conclusion).
Let’s say I hired a TA for my Econ 101 class, and then I learned that TA would be defending Edward Snowden in his or her spare time. Probably I would ask for another TA! And that has nothing to do with my view of Snowden, one way or the other, or whether my students have rational views of Snowden or not (I genuinely do not know if they do).
With the Sullivan/Weinstein episode, it is not difficult to imagine the media becoming “too interested” in Winthrop House and Sullivan’s role, for media-prurient reasons, and to the detriment of student focus. It is not crazy for Harvard to choke this off before it gets started, with no animus required toward Sullivan or any particular defendant.
Note also this from Matt:
At least some of the heat around this topic stems from a measure of confusion among the general public as to what the job of faculty dean amounts to. It sounds like a lofty academic post but actually is closer to being a kind of glorified RA — though even this is arguably an overstatement of the role.
Overall, I don’t think this is the right cause for free speech advocates, opponents of PC in universities, etc. It seems to me like a private institution making an entirely defensible governance decision, on a matter which does quite genuinely fall under its governance purview.
Friday assorted links
1. Megan McArdle on Roe vs. Wade.
3. WalkAway: Observational Data on 150 Erstwhile Democrats.
4. New TWA hotel at JFK airport.
5. Yonatan Berman: “We also find that absolute mobility decreases with income. Individuals and families occupying thelower ranks of the income distribution have a higher probability of increasing their income over short time periods than those occupying higher ranks. This also occurs during periods of in-creasing inequality. Our findings stem from the importance of the changes in the composition of income percentiles. These changes are over and above mechanical labor market dynamics and life cycle effects. We offer a simplified model to mathematically describe these findings.” More here.
What is the optimal tax rate on restaurants?
bhauth asks me:
What do you think the optimal tax rate on restaurants would be? The current rates seem high to me:
1) The marginal substitution rate between restaurants and cooking at home is high.
2) Cooking at home uses untaxed labor. Cooking in restaurants uses taxed labor, and then customers pay sales taxes on that taxed labor. Those sales taxes are often *higher* than normal sales taxes, because food from restaurants is a “luxury good”.
Putting aside general fiscal considerations (e.g., to which other taxes are we comparing it?), I see a few main questions here:
a. Yes, eating in restaurants contributes to weight gain, but how much is that a self-control problem vs. an internalized decision of cost vs. benefit?
b. How much do cheap restaurants encourage families to have more children, a social positive in my view?
c. How much do cheap restaurants take away the bonding that arises from the family dinner table experience? And how often is that bonding a net negative with lots of fights and screaming?
d. Will taxing restaurant meals — as opposed to specific taxes on meat — on net lower beef-eating and carbon/methane problems?
e. Do restaurant food suppliers treat farm animals better or worse than do suppliers of home-cooked meals?
I say a-e are mostly hard to measure, so this gives us a common problem in economics: you have one clear, and significant, effect, and a bunch of hard to measure effects which are hard to assign a net value to. Should you be willing to recommend policy on the basis of the one effect you can clearly see, and then widen the confidence bands? Or should you just keep your mouth shut altogether?
What if your audience finds a blog post like this one too complicated or too annoying?
Thursday assorted links
Wednesday assorted links
1. Scott Sumner on trade war vulnerability.
2. Voynich deciphered, it would seem.
3. Can sexual segregation in sports be justified? And more here.
4. Jeff Clemens on minimum wage research.
5. Should we integrate the worlds of fashion and academia? (NYT)
6. Arnold Kling reviews *Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*.
There is no great stagnation, refitted tuk-tuk edition
An Essex man has said he is “over the moon” after setting a new tuk-tuk land speed record, having purchased the three-wheeled Thai vehicle during a “boozy night on eBay”.
Over the course of two laps, Matt Everard reached a speed of 74.306mph (119.583km/h) after being set a target of 68.35mph (110km/h) by Guinness World Records.
Everard, 46, a freight firm boss from Billericay, drove the 1971 Bangkok taxi on Monday at the Elvington airfield in North Yorkshire, with his cousin, Russell Shearman, 49, as his backseat passenger.
Everard, a father of two, has spent more than £20,000 improving the vehicle after buying it from a seller in Bolton in 2017, saying he has worked on “every nut, bolt and bearing”.
Here is the full story, via Michelle Dawson.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Russ Roberts video on the distribution of the gains from economic growth. Essay version here.
2. Josh Barro on the incidence of tariffs on Chinese intermediate products.
3. John Cochrane on Free Solo, progress in rock climbing, and economic growth.
4. My *Big Business* podcast with James Pethokoukis.
5. Will California deregulate roadkill consumption?
6. MIE: A Theory of Justice: The Musical.
7. Caravana de mujeres (article in English, however).
Monday assorted links
1. List and ranking of economics blogs.
3. “Alex is a 43-year-old San Franciscan who works in the financial sector. He also eagerly eats uneaten and untouched leftover food off of plates if he spots it out in the open at a public dining establishment, even if it’s off a stranger’s plate…I’m very much a Libertarian and I kind of let people do whatever they want.” Link here, hilarious throughout.
4. A short take on progress in Bangladesh.
5. Multinational offshoring was behind much of employment deindustrialization.
6. Pay transparency in Canada led to lower academic salaries. And a smaller gender gap in salaries.
We’re a Niche, We Just Didn’t Know
That is the new Medium essay by Anna Gát, it is the best attempt I know of to formulate a “new ideology” of sorts, or maybe a new manifesto, but also a post-political one. Here are a few scattered bits:
Let’s imagine the I.I. [Inter-Intellect] as a loose-knit on/offline niche of people with similar mental energy: we seem to have roughly the same companion + kindness + information needs, activity levels and communication preferences…
We seem to prioritize open discussion and collaboration across differences, and establishing projects that can address real-world questions better…
We believe individuals are capable of acting virtuously without external intervention and judging the consequences of their own actions, and that open discussion of our life plans, decisions or progress can inspire others.
“Example over slogans” is the tldr…
Being conscious of this, the I.I. is age-agnostic and instead problem/progress focused.
Interesting throughout.
Sunday assorted links
1. An estimate of SB 50 impacts.
2. Why books don’t work, and why lectures don’t work. Recommended.
3. China is cracking down on Hayekian economists.
4. Danielle Steel’s productivity advice: she averages seven books a year. And she had nine children.
5. “Chinese consumers for the first time last year bought more Cadillacs than Americans did, helping drive profits at General Motors. And though the designs for those Cadillacs may have been drafted in Detroit, nearly all of the luxury automobiles were assembled in China by some of GM’s nearly 60,000 local workers.” Link here.
6. Puffin picture.
7. “Really though who doesn’t want to watch the Air New Zealand safety video?“
Roissy has been deplatformed
Or so I hear, and Google doesn’t bring it up either, not even the shut down version.
I worry about deplatforming much less than many of you do. I remember the “good old days,” when even an anodyne blog such as Marginal Revolution, had it existed, had no platform whatsoever. All of a sudden millions of new niches were available, and many of us moved into those spaces.
In recent times, a number of the major tech companies have dumped some contributors, due to a mix of customer and employee protest. So we have gained say 99 instead of say 100, and of course I am personally happy to see many of the deplatformed sites go, or move to other carriers. Most of the deplatformed sites, of course, I am not familiar with at all, but that is endogenous. I would say don’t overreact to the endowment effect of having, for a while, felt one had literally everything. You never did. You still have way, way more than you did in the recent past.
You might be worried that, because of deplatforming, the remaining sites and writers and YouTube posters have to “walk the line” more than ideally would be the case. That to me is a genuine concern, but still let’s be comparative. Did you ever try to crack the New York publishing scene in the 1990s, or submit an Op-Ed to the New York Times before the internet was “a thing”? Now that was deplatforming, and most of it was due to the size of the slush pile rather than to evil intentions, though undoubtedly there was bias in both settings.
Another “deplatforming” came with the shift to mobile, which vastly favored some websites (e.g., Facebook) over many of the more idiosyncratic competitors, including many blogs (MR has done just fine, I should add).
Developments such as VR, AR, 5G — or whatever — will reshuffle the deck further yet. There will be big winners, many of which are not yet on the scene, and some considerable carnage on the downside. Maybe you won’t be forced off, but many of you will find it worthwhile to quit rather than adapt.
There still has never, ever been a better time to be a writer. What bugs people about deplatforming is the explicitness and potential unfairness of the decision. It’s like prom selection time, where there is no escaping the fact that the observed choices, at least once they get past the algorithms and are reviewed by the companies, reflect very conscious decisions to bestow and to take away. We have painful intuitions about such rank orderings…still, we are better served by the objective facts about today’s diversity and opportunity compared to that of the past.
I thank a loyal MR reader for the initial pointer.