Category: Uncategorized
Thursday assorted links
*Radical Markets*
The authors are Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, and the subtitle is Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.
“Suppose the entire city of Rio is perpetually up for auction.” To be clear, I don’t agree with these proposals. But if you want a book that is smart, clearly written, dedicated to Bill Vickrey, and sees its premises through to their logical conclusions, I am happy to recommend this one. Think of it as a bunch of social choice and incentive mechanisms, based on market-like ideas, though not markets in the sense of a traditional medieval fair.
The authors call for perpetually open auctions, quadratic voting, a kind of apprenticeship system for the private sponsorship of immigrants, a ban on mutual fund diversification within sectors (to preserve competition by limiting joint ownership), and creating more explicit markets in personal data. If nothing else, it will force you to clarify what you actually like about markets, or don’t, and what you actually like about economics, or don’t.
Most of all, I differ from the authors in seeing a larger gap between models and the real world than they do, and thinking we need a greater variety of kinds of evidence before making very radical changes. But at the very least, it is worth thinking through why we do not handle life as a second price auction.
Wednesday assorted links
2. “Want to be Edmonton’s goat boss? Now is your chance.” Who needs those manufacturing jobs anyway?
3. Malcolm Gladwell to teach on-line class on writing.
4. Eugene Volokh and William Baude amicus brief in support of the union fees.
5. Is another Great Recession just around the corner? Well, is it?
My Conversation with Robin Hanson
I am honored to have been able to do this, here is the podcast and transcript. The topics we covered included…the ideas of Robin, most of all: “With Robin, we go meta. Robin, if politics is not about policy, medicine is not about health, laughter is not about jokes, and food is not about nutrition, what are podcasts not about?”
Here is one exchange:
COWEN: Let’s say I’m an introvert, which by definition is someone who’s not so much out there. Why is that signaling? Isn’t that the opposite of signaling? If you’re enough of an introvert, it doesn’t even seem like countersignaling. There’s no one noticing you’re not there.
HANSON: I’ve sometimes been tempted to classify people as egg people and onion people. Onion people have layer after layer after layer. You peel it back, and there’s still more layers. You don’t really know what’s underneath. Whereas egg people, there’s a shell, and you get through it, and you see what’s on the inside.
In some sense, I think of introverts as going for the egg people strategy. They’re trying to show you, “This is who I am. There’s not much more hidden, and you get past my shell, and you can know me and trust me. And there’s a sense in which we can form a stronger bond because I’m not hiding that much more.”
And:
COWEN: Here’s another response to the notion that everything’s about signaling. You could say, “Well, that’s what people actually enjoy.” If signaling is 90 percent of whatever, surely it’s evolved into being parts of our utility functions. It makes us happy to signal. So signaling isn’t just wasteful resources.
What we really want to do is set up a world that caters to the elephant in our brain, so to speak. We just want all policies to pander to signaling as much as possible. Maybe make signals cheaper, but just signals everywhere now and forever. What says you?
HANSON: I think our audience needs a better summary of this thesis that I’m going to defend here. The Elephant in the Brain main thesis is that in many areas of life, perhaps even most, there’s a thing we say that we’re trying to do, like going to school to learn or going to the doctor to get well, and then what we’re really trying to do is often more typically something else that’s more selfish, and a lot of it is showing off.
If that’s true, then we are built to do that. That’s the thing we want to do, and in some sense it’s a great world when we get to do it.
My complaint isn’t really that most people don’t acknowledge this. I accept that people may be just fine leaving the elephant in their brain and not paying attention to it and continuing to pretend one thing while they’re doing another. That may be what makes them happy and that may be OK.
My stronger claim would be that policy analysts and social scientists who claim that they understand the social world well enough to make recommendations for changes—they should understand the elephant in the brain. They should have a better idea of hidden motives because they could think about which institutions that we might choose differently to have better outcomes.
And of course I asked:
COWEN: What offends you deep down? You see it out there. What offends you?
And why exactly does it work to invite your date up to “see my etchings”? And where is “The Great Filter”? And how much will we identify with our “Em” copies of ourselves? There is also quantum computing, Robin on movies, and the limits of Effective Altruism. On top of all that, the first audience question comes from Bryan Caplan.
You should all buy and read Robin’s new book, with Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.
Truly driverless cars
California regulators have given the green light to truly driverless cars.
The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles said Monday that it was eliminating a requirement for autonomous vehicles to have a person in the driver’s seat to take over in the event of an emergency. The new rule goes into effect on April 2.
California has given 50 companies a license to test self-driving vehicles in the state. The new rules also require companies to be able to operate the vehicle remotely — a bit like a flying military drone — and communicate with law enforcement and other drivers when something goes wrong.
That is from Daisuke Wakabayashi at the NYT, via Michelle Dawson.
Tuesday assorted links
1. “Dolce & Gabbana used drones to carry handbags down the runway instead of models.”
2. The Uchida concert. It was remarkable how many people I know I bumped into there.
3. Bryan Caplan responds on education. I say businesses can simply use and encourage cheaper methods of signaling for potential employees. You don’t need “new and weird” systems, rather there is already considerable diversity within higher education and quantities can shift in the interests of economization. From another corner, Taleb reviews his reviewers.
4. What is mood?: a computational perspective.
5. How is the Sidewalk Labs Toronto waterfront project going?
Do children’s social and political movements tend to be effective?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Children are effective messengers because they are difficult to convincingly attack. It’s easier to forgive their excesses and their mistakes, and they are not constrained by having full-time jobs. The very fact that children are doing something attracts news coverage. If even a child sees the need to speak out, we all should be listening; they of course have the greatest stake in America’s future.
Today, President Donald Trump dominates media cycles in an unprecedented manner. It’s thus not surprising that two of the social movements that seem to be breaking through — #NeverAgain and the immigration reform pleas from the Dreamers — have children in prominent roles. Young people, like our president, are somewhat fresh and unfiltered, albeit with different content. They are harder to mock than, say, Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. Emma González, an attack survivor, only joined Twitter this month (@Emma4Change), and she already has more followers than does the National Rifle Association.
Do read the whole thing.
How much do public sector unions matter politically?
A recent paper by Mr. Hertel-Fernandez and two colleagues may foretell what Democrats can expect if Mr. Uihlein and his fellow philanthropists succeed. It found that the Democratic share of the presidential vote dropped by an average of 3.5 percentage points after the passage of so-called right-to-work laws allowing employees to avoid paying union fees. That is larger than Democrats’ margin of defeat in several states that could have reversed their last three presidential losses.
That is from Noam Scheiber and Kenneth P. Vogel at the NYT. You may have read that “…the Supreme Court [Monday] hears a case that could cripple public-sector unions by allowing the workers they represent to avoid paying fees.” Yet the Democratic Party seems increasingly dependent on such funds. By the way, the cited research paper, by Feigenbaum, Hertel-Fernandez, and Williamson, also reports this:
The weakening of unions also has large downstream effects both on who runs for office and on state legislative policy. Fewer working class candidates serve in state legislatures and Congress, and state policy moves in a more conservative direction following the passage of right-to-work laws.
So the stakes here are probably high.
Monday assorted links
1. Thread on the best way to come across new ideas.
2. Profile of Nathan Myrhvold.
3. So many of these movies are bad or overrated or both. Some start being good at #34 or so. Some.
4. Hailu Mergia, Dulles taxi driver (NYT).
6. Thread on the forthcoming Italian election.
7. The liquidity trap hardly makes a difference for the multiplier.
The case for autocratic term limits
To the extent many people think they have some chance of reaching the very top, political and party mechanisms may attract more first-rate talent. Furthermore, information transmission decays when more and more of the rent-seeking is aimed at the very top person, and that person does not turn over with time. Do not report the complete truth! That rise in toadying further discourages top talent from entering into political competitions.
When this happens, it is also a sign that a political system has lost some of its ability to protect autocratic leaders after their terms are up, so this can be as much symptom as cause of bad events.
Who are the most underrated and overrated libertarian thinkers?
A while back, freethinker had a request: “name the most overrated and underrated libertarian thinkers”
Here are the most underrated:
1. Robert Nozick. Super-duper smart, always open and probing, and incredibly well-read. Somehow other libertarians seem to undervalue that he independently became one of the world’s greatest philosophers, perhaps because they have not done the same.
2. Herbert Spencer: In his day, he often was considered perhaps the greatest thinker of his time or even his century. That wasn’t quite right, but he did build a comprehensive system for the social sciences, understood the primacy of sociology and anthropology, outlined some of the better arguments for liberty, developed an early version of complexity theory, and the “Social Darwinist” caricature of him was exactly that. He even influenced literary theory and rhetoric. On the more practical side, read Social Statics.
3. Gustav de Molinari. He tried to think about governance more seriously than the other late 19th century, early 20th century Belgian libertarians. He understood the primacy of war, focused on futurism, and flirted with both anarchist and multi-lateralist constraints on state power. He hasn’t received much attention since Murray Rothbard promoted his ideas, though see these works by David Hart.
4. Whichever critic of slavery was libertarian enough to count as libertarian for your purposes. Bartolomé de las Casas? Lysander Spooner? William Lloyd Garrison? Take your pick.
Ayn Rand and Ludwig Mises belong in a separate category, because they both have overzealous disciples who so overrate them. That in turn makes them somewhat underrated almost everywhere else. Rand’s cocktail party analysis of the sociology of capitalism-hatred remains one of the great contributions to political thought, plus she reaffirmed the necessary high status of the business producer. Mises’s Liberalism and also Socialism were two of the best books of the first part of the 20th century. So I am happy to call them both underrated, subject to the above not entirely insignificant caveat.
The most overrated libertarian qua libertarian might be Milton Friedman. He is not overrated as an economist, if anything he is still considerably underrated. But as a libertarian? For a guy that smart, I’m not sure he added much to the corpus of libertarian ideas, and I recall one closing segment to a Free to Choose episode where he couldn’t out-argue Peter Jay on some basic issues of political philosophy. And have the Friedmanite ideas of school vouchers and social security privatization really held up as so central? Friedman and Rothbard really didn’t like each other, and each was right about what the other couldn’t do.
Could the tech companies run *everything* better?
Under one view, the major tech companies lucked into some pieces of rapidly scalable software. They are phenomenal at producing and distributing such software, but otherwise they put on their pants one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. They are not especially productive at marginal activities beyond their core competencies.
Under the second view, the major tech companies have developed new managerial technologies for hiring, handling, and motivating super-smart employees. That is the reason why the tech companies have become phenomenal at producing and distributing rapidly scalable software. But if tech companies turn their attention to other productive activities, they would do very very well. Alex for instance thinks that Apple ought to buy a university. Or you might expect that Google’s “scallion fried fish” dish would be especially tasty. After all, do not smarter people make for better cooks?
Yet a third view starts with the idea of labor scarcity, at least for the very talented folks. Good, ambitious, non-risk-averse managerial talent is super, super-scarce. The tech companies have a lot of it — good for them — and they pay for it by producing and distributing readily scalable software. In that setting, there is usually some slack within the tech company, so if the tech company takes on a new activity, it will excel at it, at least provided it does not try to move beyond the margin allowed by its collected, on-call talent. Yet if the tech company were to undertake a massive expansion into many non-tech fields, it would be just as talent-constrained as anyone else.
Which are these three views is correct? What if you had to pick three percentages that sum to one? How about 30-30-40?
Is there another contending view I am missing?
Addendum: A very important question is at what rate the existence of the tech companies boosts the incentive for individuals to become one of these very talented cogs in the machine of grand productivity. Training and talent-spotting matters! And just as tennis players keep on getting better, so can we expect the same from talented, high-cooperation workers, at least as long as the rewards are rising.
Is this actually the variable that determines how much good the big tech companies do for the world as a whole?
Saturday assorted links
1. The re-promotion of Peter Navarro.
2. Norway is worried about winning too much (NYT). They even offer aid to other countries to compete against them, for fear that otherwise the rest of the world will lose interest in those sports.
3. Profile of Peter Sloterdijk.
4. Were women better represented in Victorian fiction?
5. A lot of the gains from tax reform are going to domestically-oriented firms (The Economist).
Friday assorted links
1. “As yet, Arabfuturism is much more of a sentiment in flux than a movement.”
2. Statues being removed from Skopje in a bid to appease Greece.
3. The return of the commissars?
4. Do people dislike uncertain advice?
5. Does the tenure process induce focus on American topics?
6. Flier and Rhoads on expanding the supply of labor in health care.
You would have thought armed conflict with Russia would be a bigger story
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The relative lack of attention being paid to the news that U.S.-backed forces killed 200 to 300 Russian mercenary soldiers this month in Syria seems like a non-barking dog to me.
In many years, this might have been the most disruptive story, holding the headlines for weeks or maybe months. Circa February 2018, it didn’t command a single major news cycle.
What outsiders know about the event is still fragmentary, but it sounds pretty ominous. One Bloomberg account notes: “More than 200 contract soldiers, mostly Russians fighting on behalf of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, died in a failed attack on a base held by U.S. and mainly Kurdish forces in the oil-rich Deir Ezzor region.” It is described as the biggest clash between U.S. and Russian forces since the Cold War. It seems that the Russian mercenaries are pretty closely tied to the Russian government.
And:
One Russian commentator called this event “a big scandal and a reason for an acute international crisis.” American foreign policy expert Ian Bremmer noted, “At some level, it’s startling that isn’t the biggest news of the year.” Yet I have found that I know plenty of well-educated people, with graduate degrees and living in and near Washington, who aren’t even aware this occurred. The story has fallen into a memory hole, in part because neither the Americans nor the Russians wish to escalate the conflict.
Is this unusual affair a one-off, or an indication of a more basic shift in the world? I am starting to believe the latter.
Finally, do solve for the equilibrium:
As the tolerance for particular instances of conflict rises, the temptation to allow or initiate such conflicts rises, if only because the penalties won’t be so large. Eventually more parties will experiment with violent sorties.
Here is further coverage from The Washington Post, from today, the most detailed article to date, but it is already way down on their front page.