Category: Uncategorized
Is the bilateral approach to trade liberalization really so bad?
That is my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It seems we are bureaucratizing trade as much as liberating it. Perhaps that is no surprise. If you wish to induce numerous nations to sign on to a deal, you will have to offer exceptions, clauses and conditions for them. The eventual result is that a free-trade treaty morphs into a managed-trade treaty. I still believe that the various trade agreements that have been passed or drawn up are for the better, but I also can’t help being disappointed by them. Note also that progress through the World Trade Organization had ground to a halt even before the election of Trump.
We are now in a setting where the world’s No. 2 economy — China, on its way to being No. 1 — is strongly opposed to free-trade ideals and free flows of information, especially for its own home market.
Enter bilateralism. The smartest case for trade bilateralism is that trade in many goods is already fairly free, but some egregious examples of tariffs and trade barriers remain. Look at agriculture, European restrictions on beef hormones in beef, and the Chinese unwillingness to allow in foreign companies. Targeted strategic bargaining, backed by concrete threats emanating from a relatively powerful nation — in this case the U.S. — could demand removal of those restrictions. Furthermore, the negotiating process would be more directly transactional and less cartelized and bureaucratic.
My colleague John Nye, an economist at George Mason University, has argued that the free-trade revolution of the 19th century came about because of a major trade agreement between Britain and France in 1860. Other European nations were fearful of being locked out of subsequent deals, and they hurried to sign bilateral trade treaties with Britain and France. There was a competition to make deals rather than cartelization of the process.
That said, our current pursuit of this approach does not seem to have enough allies on our side, and thus I doubt if it will work. There is much more in the rest of the column.
Is democracy in danger?
From the highly regarded Daniel Treisman:
Influential voices in academia and the media contend that democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the US. Using a variety of measures, I show that the global proportion of democracies is actually at or near an all-time high; that the current rate of backsliding is not historically unusual; and that this rate is well explained by the economic characteristics of existing democracies. I confirm that breakdowns tend to occur in countries that are poor, have had relatively little democratic experience, and are in economic crisis. Extrapolating from historical data, I show that the estimated hazard of failure in a democracy as developed and seasoned as the US is extremely low — far lower than in any democracy that has ended in the past. Some suggest that undemocratic public attitudes and erosion of elite norms threaten US institutions, but there is little evidence that these factors cause democratic breakdown. While deterioration in the quality of democracy in countries such as Hungary and Poland is itself cause for concern — as is the reversion to authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey — alarm about a global slide into autocracy is inconsistent with current evidence.
The pointer is from the excellent Kevin Lewis.
*High Growth Handbook: Scaling startups from 10 to 10,000 people*
Edited, produced, and partly written by Elad Gil, the book is also a series of interviews with Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, and others.
Marc Andreessen says:
If you don’t start layering in HR once you’ve passed 50 people on your way to 150, something is going to go badly wrong.
Claire Hughes Johnson (COO of Stripe) says:
When I came into Stripe, I had a similar document. I wrote a document back when I was at Google called, “Working with Claire.” And when I first got to Stripe, I adapted it slightly, but it was pretty relevant. I shared it with everyone who was working with me closely, but I have made it an open document. It spread quite quickly through the organization…I think that founders should write a guide to working with them.
Patrick Collison says:
..the CEO ultimately does not have that many jobs, but I think culture is among them. And it ought not be delegated. Briefly speaking, I think there are five top responsibilities of a CEO: being the steward of and final arbiter of the senior management; being the chief strategist; being the primary external face for the company, at least in the early days; almost certainly being the chief product officer, although that can change when you’re bigger; and then taking responsibility and accountability for culture.
Self-recommending, you can order it here.
My Conversation with Elisa New
Here is the audio and transcript, Elisa is a Professor of English at Harvard, with a specialty in poetry, and also star and driving force behind the new PBS show Poetry in America. Most of all we talked about poetry! Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Let me express a concern, and see if you can talk me out of it. I’m going to use the word best, which I know many literary critics do not like, but I believe in the concept nonetheless.
In my view, the two best American poets are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and they were both a long, long time ago. They were quite early in the literary history of this nation.
Is that a statement about the fame-generating process, a statement about somehow their era was better at generating the best poets because we had a much smaller population, or am I simply wrong in thinking they’re the best American poets?
NEW: I don’t know what to say to you. I revere them. They are the most important poets for me. They invent two ways of being a poet, and two of the ways that so many poets who have followed them also acknowledge.
Would there be Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Carl Sandburg, C. D. Wright, C. K. Williams? Would there be any of those — Frank O’Hara — without Walt Whitman? And they would be the first to say, “No.”
Would there be Susan Howe, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath? All in different ways, would we have them without Emily Dickinson? I don’t know. I’m not sure I can enter . . . Is it that we’ve lost it? I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think we’ve lost it.
COWEN: I turn to European history, again using the “best” word, but it’s plausible to think Homer and Dante are the two best European poets ever in some regards, and they, too, are each quite early in a particular stage of history. What is it about poetry that seems to generate so many people as at least plausible bests who come at the very beginnings of eras?
NEW: Well, isn’t it that poetry is cumulative, and canons are cumulative, and those who are there first, they’re never superseded — unlike, say, for economists who would say, “Adam Smith is a really smart guy, but it’s not like we go to Adam Smith to understand Bitcoin.” They would say, “No. That knowledge has been superseded.”
In literary knowledge, we continue to learn from our predecessors and also continue to feel awe before the persistence of certain phenomena that they . . . Shakespeare saw that Iago was a slippery-mouthed conniver of a kind we still recognize.
We recognize ourselves. We recognize something enduringly human in these oldest of poets, and then, maybe, we elevate them even more.
And:
COWEN: Is it possible that American English isn’t rich enough? I find if I go to Ireland, or especially to Trinidad, I envy the language they have there. They’re both speaking English. If you think of America today, there’s texting, now a long history of television.
Our language is great for quick communication, number one in the world for science. Now there’s social media. Nineteenth-century American English has longer sentences. It’s arguably more like British English. Isn’t the problem just the language we grow up with around us isn’t somehow good enough to sustain first-rate poets?
NEW: It is. It’s so rich. I love the way it evolves, the way my kids don’t say “whatever” anymore. “Whatever” had such incredible potency. “Epic.” When they started to say “epic” had such potency. When hip-hop artists say, “That’s really ill.”
I love the fertility of slang. I love the way mass culture, and its technological limitations, and then its new breaths does funny things to language. I tell my students about this. I say, “You know the way how in ’30s movies, the women are always sweeping around going, ‘Oh, darling,’ in The Thin Man, and there’s this ‘Hi, honey . . .’” [laughs]
If you watch a ’30s movie, and then you watch a ’50s movie, and you see the plasticity and the ingenuity that human beings put into . . . We don’t say, “Hey, kid.” We don’t call anyone a kid anymore. It sounds really archaic and corny.
And:
COWEN: Which is more interesting, Instagram poetry or Facebook poetry?
Definitely recommended, interesting throughout. We talked about Shaq too. After the conversation ended, Elisa said something striking to me, something like: “I liked this conversation because you didn’t ask me about “the humanities,” you asked me about poetry.”
Claims about British and American English
1. The word “cheerio” does not precede 1910, and furthermore it has been obsolete for some time now, and not because it was pushed out by an Americanism.
2. The Brits are correct to insist on “I couldn’t care less,” rather than the American “I could care less.”
3. Americans used to call an umbrella a “bumbershoot,” yet nowadays if they hear the word they often think it is a Britishism. The British slang term is in fact “brolly.”
4. When Americans speak, they prefer “repetitious” over “repetitive,” even though the latter is nine times more common in American text. Perhaps repetitious is more…repetitious.
5. “One-off” is a Britishism that largely has caught on in America.
6. How can they call it “rumpy-pumpy”?
7. “The British use sorry at the rate four times the Americans do.”
All that and more is from the new and fun book The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English, by Lynne Murphy.
Will AI blur the difference between private and public sectors?
…there are incredibly powerful non-state actors who are also competing furiously to develop this technology. All of the 7 most important technology companies in the world–Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu–are making huge investments in AI, from low level frameworks and silicon to consumer products. It goes without saying that their expertise in machine learning leads any state actor at the moment.
As the applications of machine learning grow, the interactions between these companies and different nation states will grow in complexity. Consider for example road transportation, where we are gradually moving towards on demand, autonomous cars. This will increasingly blur the line between publicly funded mass transportation (e.g. a bus) and private transport (a shared Uber). If this leads to a new natural monopoly in road transportation should it be managed by the state (e.g. the call in London for “Khan’s Cars”) or by a British company, or by a multinational company like Uber?
As Mariana Mazzucato outlined in her fantastic book The Entrepreneurial State, states have historically played a crucial role in underwriting long term, high risk research in science and technology by funding either academic research or the military. These technologies are often then commercialised by private companies. With the rise of visionary and wealthy technology companies like Google we are seeing more high risk long term research being funded by the private sector. DeepMind is a prime example of this. This creates tension when the interests of a private company like Google and a state are not aligned. An example of this is the recent interactions between Google and the Pentagon where over 4000 Google employees protested against Google’s participation in “warfare technologies” and as a result Google decided to not renew its contract with the Pentagon. This is a rapidly evolving topic. Only a week earlier Sergey Brin had said that “he understood the controversy and had discussed the matter extensively with Mr. Page and Mr. Pichai. However, he said he thought that it was better for peace if the world’s militaries were intertwined with international organizations like Google rather than working solely with nationalistic defense contractors”.
Here is more of interest from Ian Hogarth, via…whoever it was that sent it to me!
Tuesday assorted links
1. Rich Lowry on separating families, a contrarian view. Some good points on broader context, but in my view even if he is completely right this is still a major PR disaster for the United States. Nor does the law have to be the way it is. Here is more on the precedents of family separation. This is a longstanding issue.
2. Daniel Klein criticizes Jordan Peterson’s PoMo bashing.
3. A meta-analysis on whether education improves intelligence.
5. Canadian court recognizes three legal parents.
6. IBM debater (NYT).
*Empire of Guns*
The author is Priya Satia, and the subtitle is The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Here is one good bit:
In fact, there were so many transitions between peace and war that it is difficult to establish what “normal” economic conditions were. Eighteenth-century Europeans accepted war as “inevitable, an ordinary fact of human existence.” It was an utterly unexceptional state of affairs. For Britons in particular, war was something that happened abroad and that kept truly damaging disruption — invasion or rebellion — at bay. Wars that were disruptive elsewhere were understood as preservationist in Britain…Adam Smith’s complaints about the costs of war, about the “ruinous expedient” of perpetual funding and high public debt in peacetime, staked out a contrarian position; The Wealth of Nations (1776) was a work of persuasion. His and other voices in favor of pacific development grew louder from the margins. By denormalizing war, liberal political economy raised the stakes of the century’s long final wars from 1793 to 1815, which could be stomached only as an exceptional, apocalyptic stage on the way to permanent peace.
In their wake, nineteenth-century Britain packaged their empire as a primarily civilian enterprise focused on liberty, forgetting the earlier collective investment in and profit from the wars that had produced it..
The book offers many points of interest.
Which technological advances have improved the working of autocracy?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
“What have been the really major advances of the past 20 years?” is one of the most common debated questions in my circles. The smartphone is probably nominated most often, while Google, Facebook and fracking have their advocates too. Yet we hardly ever talk about one of the most important developments, perhaps because it raises uncomfortable political issues: the governance technologies and strategies of authoritarian regimes have become much more efficient…
The big innovation in authoritarian governance has been this: subsequent autocratic leaders, most of all in China, have found ways of both liberalizing and staying in power. The good news is that people living under authoritarian governments have much, much better lives than before. The corresponding bad news is that autocracy works better than it used to and thus it is more popular and probably also more enduring. The notion that autocratic government would fade away, either in practice or as an ideological competitor to Western liberalism, simply isn’t tenable any more…
A second development was when authoritarian leaders realized that absolute prohibitions on free speech were counterproductive, and they learned how to manage an intermediate solution. Allowing partial speech rights is useful as a safety valve, it allows major dissidents to be identified and monitored, and absolute speech prohibitions tended to wreck the economy and discourage foreign investment, leading to unpopularity of the government. At the same time, an autocratic government could come down hard on the truly threatening ideas when needed.
Scientific public opinion polling has been another advance in authoritarian states. In 1987, the Economic System Reform Institute of China conducted the first Chinese public opinion survey, a breakthrough event. Under Chairman Mao in contrast, the incentive was to report only the good news. In the 1990s, however, Chinese public opinion surveys boomed and also became much more scientific.
There is much more at the link, one of my more interesting columns as of late.
American families shouldn’t be separated, either
That is the title of my Bloomberg column, here is my basic proposal:
Let’s take one-tenth of those women and move them from prison to house arrest, combined with electronic monitoring. That would allow for proximity to their children. If the U.S. isn’t plagued by a subsequent wave of violent crime — and I don’t think it will be — let us try the same for yet another tenth. Let’s keep on doing this until it’s obviously not working.
And:
According to one 2010 study, more than 1.1 million men and 120,000 women in U.S. jails and prisons have children under the age of 17.
And:
From 1991 to 2007, the number of children with a mother in prison more than doubled, rising 131 percent. About two-thirds of the women in state prisons are there for nonviolent offenses. Sixty percent of those women have children under the age of 18, and in one survey one-quarter of the prisoners’ children were under the age of 4. Forty-one percent of the women in state prison had more than one child…One estimate suggests that 11 percent of the children of imprisoned mothers end up in foster care.
We can do this.
Monday assorted links
1. Brief for an inclusive anti-canon (in philosophy, and otherwise). And a transcendental argument for liberalism.
2. Krugman on the possibility of a trade war.
4. Applying Moneyball techniques to team chemistry in sports — also the next frontier for management?
Why consume the most recent news?
Here is another left-over question from my recent talk:
How do you think about when it makes sense for to consume the most-recent news, in light of Robin Hanson’s “news isn’t about info”? How would you advise the rest of us?
I consume the news avidly for (at least) these reasons:
1. For professional reasons, I am required to do so. That said, I am happy to note the endogeneity of that state of affairs. Consuming the news is fun, though in a pinch more sports, games, and the arts could serve much of the same role.
2. I actually care what is happening.
3. Consuming the news is one of the best ways of testing your views about the past. We are always revaluing what we thought we knew, in light of new data. Brexit teaches us that the UK was never quite so well integrated into the EU. The election of Trump may imply that certain late 19th century strands of American politics are enduring, and the evolution of the racial income gap will induce us to reassess various policies of the last few decades.
Under this theory, reading a lot of history books should raise the return to following the news. For most people, they haven’t read so many books and at the margin they need more books rather than more news. In this sense, following the news doesn’t make intellectual sense for most people, though they may need it for social bonding, signaling, and conversation purposes.
I would stress the concomitant point that following the news does not make one a much better predictor of the future, if at all. It may even cause people to overweight the most recent trends, due to availability and recency bias.
4. I also use the news to make history more interesting to me. It is easier to get “wrapped up” in the news, if only because of the social support and the element of dramatic suspense. If somehow the Balkans no longer existed, I would find it hard to wish to understand that “…the medieval Serbian Orthodox Church had established a new see at Pec in Kosovo in 1297…” As it stands, my interest in that event is sufficiently intense, and it remains important for understanding the current day.
5. It is perhaps addictive that the news comes every day. But that is a useful discipline. If you follow the news, you will work at it every day, more or less. Better those compound returns than to do something else once every three months and a half.
In essence, the news is a good, cheap trick for getting yourself to care more about things you should care about anyway, but maybe don’t.
Sunday assorted links
1. Classic Merkelism (16/16). And a more worrying thread.
2. Harvard Asian-American ouch: “Harvard admissions evaluators — staffers who are likely under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities — rate Asian-American applicants far lower on subjective personality traits than do Alumni interviewers who actually meet the applicants.” And double ouch.
Technology in Kubrick’s *2001: A Space Odyssey*
This post serves up some spoilers of detail, though no major spoilers of plot until the penultimate “you must go see it” paragraph. Upon a re-viewing of this movie, I found the following striking:
1. There is a Skype-like service for phone calls, but it never occurs to anyone that something like sending an email might be possible or even desirable. A lot of major and even apparently simple technological advances just aren’t that self-evident. The cameras in the movie also remained quite primitive and clunky, even by pre-smart phone standards. Maybe people expected a great stagnation in cameras back then.
2. At the time, Kubrick apparently thought it plausible that the audience would buy into common, widespread and indeed commercially viable space travel by 1992. The film was released in 1968.
3. Pan American flies people into outer space, and apparently used this new market to avoid total bankruptcy. Their stewardesses still have silly hats and costumes, and they act in a vaguely self-demeaning manner.
4. The film shows some signs of recognizing that Moore’s Law might happen. Hal for instance is advanced AI, but he is not huge in size. And the portrait of voice recognition technology is quite realistic.
5. Stars do not twinkle in outer space, however.
6. Hal 9000 would be less creepy with a female voice, and indeed Apple and Amazon figured that out some while ago. Note to my tech friends: do not program your personal assistant bots with a resentful, quivering, paranoid, passive-aggressive male voice.
7. The movie seems to suggest that chess-playing computers are a major achievement, when in fact this was mastered relatively easily, compared to many other AI problems. The movie shows this chess game, with Hal as Black. It is the kind of game you might expect a strong computer to play against a human, namely with a finish based on visually counterintuitive tactics.
8. It is a truly dystopic vision to think that Howard Johnson’s will be serving us food in space.
9. The first time I saw the movie, which I believe was in the mid-1970s, I was more stunned by seeing Americans talking to Russians “as if they were normal people” than by any of the technology.
Here is a good Wikipedia page on technologies in the movie. Now a few spoilers:
The movie, which I had not seen in many years, I found quite stunning. It took so many chances, and with so much self-confidence that the originality could be pulled off. Imagine opening a film with minutes of discordant Gyorgy Ligeti music, played against a dark screen, with no signal that this is even part of the movie. Then you see a long scene with apes, no dialogue to speak of, and no explanation of how this might fit into a commercially viable product. Finally the Solow residual is explained! There is not only no love story, the film arguably has no characters, Hal aside. Kubrick often expects ballet music to keep you interested, and various movements in space are stretched out to interminable length, yet almost always with striking aesthetic success. You could generously describe the ending as “underexplained.” Hardly anything happens in the movie, and yet at the same time it encapsulates the entire history of humanity with extra material on both sides, beginning and end, and a nod in the Hegelian direction.
Go see it on the large screen if you can — I can’t think of any film that is so much worse (or simply different) on TV as this one. It is one of the better movies ever made, and it dates from a time near Hollywood’s peak. It is sad that nearly two generations of Americans now do not know this creation as it was intended to be seen, and indeed must be seen. On 7 p.m. on a Saturday night, the theatre had no more than twenty people in attendance. When it comes to culture, salience usually matters more than you might think.
*Divided: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls*
That is the new book by Tim Marshall, yes Trump and Israel and the like, but it goes much further than that. Here is one excerpt:
Since 1971, Assam’s population has more than doubled, from 14.6 million to over 30 million, much of which is due to illegal immigration. Hindu nationalists have argued that the area might have a Muslim majority by 2060. In 2015 there were 19 million Hindus and 11 million Muslims, nine of the twenty-seven districts being Muslim majority. Equally importantly, the 2017 census showed that people who are ethnically Assamese are now a minority in the state as a whole, and as people continue to arrive their proportions will continue to drop.
This is a depressing but thought-provoking book. Bangladesh, by the way, is smaller than the state of Florida, but has 165 million people. And I had not known there are about 800,000 Nigerians in South Africa. You can order the book here.