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My Conversation with Agnes Callard
She is a philosopher at the University of Chicago, here is the transcript and audio. We covered Plato and Socrates, what Plato is on about at all, the virtues of dialog and refutation, whether immortality would be boring, Elena Ferrante, parents vs. gangsters and Beethoven vs. Mozart, my two Straussian readings of her book, Jordan Peterson, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the best defense of reading the classics, and the Agnes Callard production function (physics to classics to philosophy), all in suitably informationally dense fashion.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I have a friend who’s interested in longevity research…and he tells me there’s maybe a 10 percent chance that I actually will live forever due to possible scientific advances. I’m skeptical, but let’s just say I were to live forever. How bored would I end up, and how do you think about this question?
CALLARD: [laughs] I think it depends on how good of a person you are.
COWEN: And the good people are more or less bored?
CALLARD: Oh, they’re less bored. One thing is that you’re kind of having to live with yourself for a very long time if you’re immortal, or even just live for a couple thousand years, and a bad self, I think, is hard to live with. By bad, I don’t just mean sort of, let’s say, cruel to people or unjust. I also mean not attuned to things of eternal significance.
I think you can get by in a 100-year life not being too much attuned to things of eternal significance because there’s so much fascinating stuff out there, and one can go from one thing to the next and not get bored. But if we’re talking about eternity, or even thousands of years, you’d better find something to occupy you that is really riveting in the way that I think only eternal things are.
I think that what you’re really asking is something like, “Could I be a god?” And I think, “Well, if you became godlike, you could, and then it would be OK.”
COWEN: Let me give you a hypothesis. You can react to it. That which is cultural, say, listening to music, I would get bored with, even though wonderful music maybe continually will be created. But those activities which are more primeval, more biological — parenting, sex, food, sleep, maybe taking a wonderful shower — that are quite brute, in a way, maybe I would substitute more into those as an immortal? Yes?
CALLARD: I don’t see why you wouldn’t get just as bored of bodily pleasures.
COWEN: You’re programmed for those to be so immediate and riveting, right? You evolve to be maybe an 80-year-old being, or perhaps even a 33-year-old being, so you are riveted on things like reproduction and getting enough sleep. And that stays riveting, even when you’re on this program to live 80,000 years.
CALLARD: I think that at least some of those activities stay riveting for us over the course of our lives because their meaning changes…
And:
COWEN: Let’s turn now to your new book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. There’s a sentence from the book. Let me read it, and maybe you can explain it. “Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.” What’s a proleptic reason?
This was my favorite part, though perhaps few of you will get the joke:
COWEN: On aspiration, what do you think of Jordan Peterson?
CALLARD: I had this odd feeling. He only became known to me quite recently, in the past couple of weeks. I was listening to him talk, and I was thinking he sounds a little bit like Socrates, but not Socrates. I was like, “Who is that? Who is he reminding me of?” And it’s Xenophon’s Socrates.
Here you can buy her just-published book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. You cannot follow her on Twitter.
Was there a supply overhang before the housing crash?
Kevin Erdmann has a revisionist take, namely no:
How bad was the supply overhang? Surprisingly, the answer may be that there never was one.
We can think about this in terms of stock (the number of homes in the United States) or flow (the rate at which new homes were being built).
In terms of stock, the Census Bureau maintains estimates of both US population and the number of housing units. As shown in figure 1, the ratio of homes to adults in the United States rose in the 1980s as a result of factors such as changing marriage norms. The ratio then declined in the 1990s. The relative number of housing units increased somewhat from 2000 to 2005 but remained below the previous peak level. After the crisis, the decline continued.
…The Census data provide surprisingly little support for the claim that there were too many homes in 2005…
Contrary to Chairman Bernanke’s assumption, at the national level there was no overhang of housing supply that needed to be worked off in 2011. Indeed, even in 2005 there was no national oversupply of housing. Rather, the American economy was burdened by a shortage of housing, especially in the Closed Access cities.
Not surprisingly, three of the worst six “closed” cities are in California (San Francisco, San Diego, and San Jose).
Here is the full study.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Do blockchains and tokens break aggregation theory? I say no, but still there is an interesting idea in this short essay.
2. The beauty premium correlates strongly with personal interaction in a job.
3. More on abortion and prosecution.
4. My 2016 post on why Brexit happened. And Akiva Malamet defends liberalism and men without chests.
5. Profile of Ben Falk and his NBA internet moonshot.
What should I ask Juan Villarino?
I’ll be doing a Conversation with him in early May. He is often known as “the world’s greatest hitchhiker,” here is a NYT profile of him. Excerpt:
Villarino has cataloged every ride he has ever caught: 2,350, totaling about 100,000 miles in 90 countries, or enough to circumnavigate the globe four times.
He is from Argentina, and worked for a while in a Belfast cheese factory. He is described as from a “downwardly mobile middle-class family” and:
In Buenos Aires, three men tried to mug him, but when they realized who he was, the thieves gave him money.
And:
They [Villarino and his wife] continue to live on about $7 a day each and travel as they always have, leading a life almost entirely on the highway, without a fixed address or jobs or bills.
Here is his blog and also a link to his self-published book. Here is his blog in Spanish. So what should I ask him?
Some simple Bitcoin economics
That is a new paper by Linda Schilling and Harald Uhlig, here is the abstract:
How do Bitcoin prices evolve? What are the consequences for monetary policy? We answer these questions in a novel, yet simple endowment economy. There are two types of money, both useful for transactions: Bitcoins and Dollars. A central bank keeps the real value of Dollars constant, while Bitcoin production is decentralized via proof-of-work. We obtain a “fundamental condition,” which is a version of the exchange-rate indeterminacy result in Kareken-Wallace (1981), and a “speculative” condition. Under some conditions, we show that Bitcoin prices form convergent supermartingales or submartingales and derive implications for monetary policy.
In this framework, I would attribute the volatility of the recent Bitcoin price to a) sometimes being in the speculative equilibrium or uncertainty about such, b) regulatory uncertainty, and c) uncertainty about the hedging or store of value properties of Bitcoin and other cryptoassets. If you are interested in other considerations, here is a good Jimmy Song essay on why Bitcoin might be special. And see this paper by Garratt and Wallace, though unlike with Schilling and Uhlig I am less sure how they are modeling the black/gray market uses for Bitcoin as a transactions medium.
Monday assorted links
1. Why whales got so big. And too tall for the NBA?
2. Inside the world of instruction manuals.
3. Attempts to encourage science in Africa (The Economist).
4. Michael Anton will now be taking a flight to Hillsdale, Michigan. I don’t expect it to crash.
6. The great Kamel Daoud on leaving Algeria (NYT).
7. “Tropes like the pursuit of individual rights do not speak to a majority of Chinese filmgoers.“
What if we paid for Facebook?
Geoffrey Fowler asks that question, here is one bit from his analysis:
You can actually put a dollar figure on how much we’re worth to the social network. Facebook collected $82 in advertising for each member in North America last year. Across the world, it’s about $20 per member. Facebook the company is valued at about $450 billion because investors believe it will find even more ways to make money from collecting data on its 2 billion members.
You might imagine charging Americans $82 a year, though at that price the overall network would be smaller and of lower value to users. Alternatively, Zeynep Tufekci wrote (NYT):
Internet sites should allow their users to be the customers. I would, as I bet many others would, happily pay more than 20 cents per month for a Facebook or a Google that did not track me, upgraded its encryption and treated me as a customer whose preferences and privacy matter. [She earlier had cited 20 cents per month as their profit per customer…TC takes all of these numbers with a grain of salt.]
Like Jonathan Swift, I have a simple proposal: don’t use “Facebook the service,” and conduct all of your social networking on WhatsApp, which by the way is owned by “Facebook the company.” WhatsApp is fully encrypted, and it has no algorithms and indeed few bells and whistles of any kind. From each person, messages are stacked in sequential order. You can send photos and you can delete content, permanently I believe. You can set up groups. There is some kind of microphone function, though I’ve never figured it out. And did I mention it is totally free? Zero ads too. Nor is the page cluttered, nor do you get these little notifications: “You have 37 messages, 49 notifications, 23 friend requests, 81 pokes, and a partridge and a pear tree,” etc.
Everything you are asking for exists now, from “Facebook the company,” though it is not “Facebook the service.”
Problem solved! Oh, wait, you’re not interested…? What should I infer from that?
Addendum: I do get that if everyone switched from “Facebook the service” to WhatsApp, the cross-subsidy would diminish and the terms of WhatsApp would change. But still, at the margin, and in the meantime, plenty of people — including you — could switch and I expect this deal can remain the same. Be a free rider! Our democracy may depend on it.
Edward Tenner’s *The Efficiency Paradox*, or are big tech and finance actually the same?
The author is Edward Tenner and the subtitle is What Big Data Can’t Do. Overall, I prefer to read Tenner on engineering more narrowly construed, but still I found some novel and interesting ideas in this book, as you might expect.
Most notably, I was struck by his claim that the rise of “Big Tech” and the rise of finance are more or less the same thing. Many of the tech innovations are in fact transactional innovations, and both the “financialization” revolution and much of social network tech promulgate the idea of “life as a portfolio,” albeit portfolios of different kinds. Both have an ideal of “friction-free commerce,” or social interactions, as the case may be, and of course in both cases this is organized by code.
Furthermore, if you make buying and finding things much easier, finance as a percentage of gdp likely will go up. Do not forget that Jeff Bezos was first a young star at Shaw, a hedge fund. Is it any accident that finance and tech are often, these days, competing for the same pool of talented young quant workers?
Here is one good bit from Tenner:
We have all heard of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. Only technical specialists and historians have heard of Jacobus Verhoeff. Yet when Bezos planned to transform online retailing, bookselling was a natural beginning because, thanks to Verhoeff’s algorithm, more books had standardized product numbers than any other category of merchandise.
You can buy the book here.
Sunday assorted links
1. Is the scientific paper obsolete?
2. Solve for the goat equilibrium.
3. They are still not telling us what happened in Havana (or elsewhere).
4. Prosecution before Roe vs. Wade. And a British case. And Ross Douthat on Kevin Williamson. And Henry on said topic and conservative intellectuals more generally.
5. “Subvocalization signals are detected by electrodes and turned into words using AI.”
6. Jonathan Zittrain on a fiduciary approach for Facebook (NYT).
A simple point about Conversations with Tyler
As you may know from the series, I put in a good amount of preparation for each guest, generally absorbing as much of their life’s work as I can get my hands on. Even for authors where I have read plenty of them before, I try to reread them fairly comprehensively and all at once, plus some of the secondary literature, criticisms, and the like. And of course hardly anyone else does this in such a concentrated manner, even if they over time have read everything an author has produced.
Virtually everyone I have done this with has gone up in my eyes as a result. Both as a content creator and as a “carrier of a career.”
Just keep that in mind the next time you are tempted to criticism a well-known person harshly. Or for that matter a less well-known person.
You don’t understand them as well as you might.
*A Quiet Place* (the only spoiler is about the basic premise)
Yes this is a horror movie but no you don’t have to like horror movies to want to see it, you only have to like original movies. I am not giving away much by telling you this is largely a silent movie, as the humans know if they make sounds or speak they will be hunted and killed. (Which family member’s relative bargaining power increases when talk is relatively difficult?) It is one of the most implicitly Christian movies I have seen, though no reviewer seems to have noticed. Think monasticism, devils, baby Moses, the unwillingness to consider abortion as an option, silos of grain, and Shyamalan’s (underrated) Signs. It’s also one of the most insightful films on disability issues, although further explanation there would indeed give you too many spoilers. Here are various reviews, mostly full of spoilers.
Saturday assorted links
2. “The 1970 census found 42% of black households owned their own homes. Today, the number is also 42%.” Link here.
3. Puffin beaks are fluorescent and we had no idea discovery by accident. By the way “”They can see colours that we can’t comprehend,” Dunning said.”
More arguments against blockchain, most of all about trust
Here are more arguments about blockchain from Kai Stinchcombe, here is one ouch:
93% of bitcoins are mined by managed consortiums, yet none of the consortiums use smart contracts to manage payouts. Instead, they promise things like a “long history of stable and accurate payouts.” Sounds like a trustworthy middleman!
And:
Auditing software is hard! The most-heavily scrutinized smart contract in history had a small bug that nobody noticed — that is, until someone did notice it, and used it to steal fifty million dollars. If cryptocurrency enthusiasts putting together a $150m investment fund can’t properly audit the software, how confident are you in your e-book audit? Perhaps you would rather write your own counteroffer software contract, in case this e-book author has hidden a recursion bug in their version to drain your ethereum wallet of all your life savings?
It’s a complicated way to buy a book! It’s not trustless, you’re trusting in the software (and your ability to defend yourself in a software-driven world), instead of trusting other people.
Here is the full essay, via Chris F. Masse. Here is Kai’s earlier essay on blockchain.
What I’ve been reading and not reading
Linda Yueh, What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems. Think of this as the updated Heilbroner.
John Blair’s Building Anglo-Saxon England is a remarkable look at the archaeological and historical evidence on what went on before 9th century A.D. This is not a book of irresponsible generalizations.
Sebastian Edwards has a new, forthcoming book American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle Over Gold.
Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, is a useful and readable treatment of the history of how businesses acquired various kinds of “personhood.”
Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank, Root-Cause Regulation: Protecting Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century is an interesting book, written under the premise that the Continental model of labor safety and labor market regulation is a good thing, including for Latin America.
David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India.
I have only browsed Fawaz A. Gerges, Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash that Shaped the Middle East, but it looks quite good.
Ge Zhaoguang, What is China?: Territory Ethnicity Culture & History is the result of a China scholar considering all the questions suggested in the subtitle. I was not ever astonished, but it is about time we all read more books by the Chinese about China.
Self-recommending is Richard Sylla and David J. Cowen, Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and Debt.
I spotted several intellectual and emotional fallacies in Zadie Smith’s Feel Free: Essays.
Friday assorted links
1. Do hierarchical Bayesian models of delusion succeed? And embedding beneficial regularities does not seem to make visual search easier. Hardly any of you should read these links or even click on them.
2. How is Chinese governance changing?
3. Did the Confederacy not inflate enough?
4. Cecil Taylor has passed away; he was one of the greater jazz musicians and one of the three or four best concerts I have seen.
5. A rundown of all the supplementary resources available with Modern Principles of Economics.