Category: Uncategorized
*Stubborn Attachments* opening week
I thank all of you buyers and reviewers for making the opening week of Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals such a success.
The book hit #1 in 4 Amazon browse subcategories over the last week:
– Macroeconomics
– Commerce
– Philosophy
– Theory of Economics, and also Comparative Economics
Why the U.S.-Saudi relationship has proven so enduring
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, note I am continuing to see a larger backlash on the Saudi issue than one might have expected. The bigger underlying question is this: given all that has happened, so why is the United States still such an ally of the Saudis? It’s longstanding and thus not just about Trump’s possible business dealings. It’s also not just about the oil, here is one excerpt:
One feature of the geography of Saudi Arabia is that its major oil fields stand apart and can be taken over without controlling the major Saudi cities. That is one reason why the Saudis were so wary of Saddam Hussein.
That risk means the Saudis are especially dependent on American military protection. In turn, the U.S. knows it has a lot of leverage over the Saudis, and therefore making deals with the Saudis involves easier enforcement and lower transaction costs. The same cannot be said of deals with Iran. So in the Saudi-Iran rivalry, the U.S. ends up siding with the Saudis.
Historically, Iran has been a very difficult country to capture or control, and the population has fought fiercely to defend Iranian territorial integrity. Iran doesn’t need American protection to the same degree as do the Saudis, and so Iran is more willing to be prickly or openly hostile to the U.S.
Iran shared a border with the former Soviet Union (though not Russia) and shares Caspian Sea rights with Russia, and the two countries often have had close and cordial relations. Iran also is easier than Saudi Arabia for China to reach with its One Belt, One Road initiative, which aims to build close ties with the countries to its west. In sum, Iran is going to diversify its geopolitical bets, which pulls it away from the U.S., even if the issues surrounding nuclear weapons and support for terrorism somehow were resolved.
And this:
Of course, the Saudis have abused their position. They are dependent on the U.S., but they also know America has few other potential regional partners for cooperation on such a large scale. And so the Saudis have engaged in human-rights abuses over the decades, figuring it may harm but will not irrevocably damage relations with America.
There is more at the link, analytical throughout.
Monday assorted links
1. Who gained and lost the most from the Seattle minimum wage hike? (NYT) Paper here.
4. Is the Saudi influence machine running out of steam?
5. Actors are digitally preserving themselves to continue working beyond the grave: “The suite of services that the company offers actors includes a range of different scans to capture their famous faces from every conceivable angle—making it simpler to re-create them in the future. Using hundreds of custom LED lights arranged in a sphere, numerous images can be recorded in seconds capturing what the person’s face looks like lit from every angle—and right down to the pores.” And:
“Digital Domain has scanned signature hairstyles, wardrobes, and props as well. The total process takes up to two days and generates five to 10 terabytes of data, depending on the extent of detail being recorded. The full selection of services can cost a million dollars.”
*First Man* and the great stagnation
I enjoyed this movie, although I would not describe it as a must-see. It is best for showing the rickety and claustrophobic nature of the moon landing program.
Three points struck me in particular, both concerning progress. First, the space shots in this movie are not better than those of Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are even several Kubrick homage shots, and they don’t look any better than the originals, and arguably somewhat worse. Perhaps most cinematic progress has come in shooting or better yet constructing dense scenes, but that does not apply to space.
Second, I walked to my (non-fancy) car and turned on the ignition right after watching the movie. It was immediately striking how much better and more reliable was the software in my car than in the whole well-funded moon program. In this sense technological progress has been immense. That said, most cars in operation today are not that much better than cars from 1969, and they perform more or less the same functions, albeit more safely. Improving car manufacture is not that hard, but improving the usefulness of cars in our daily lives is where the problem lies. So this supports the “the consumer space is already filled out” interpretation of the great stagnation.
Third, perhaps it is the very absence of the internet and advanced information technology that made the moon program possible. When Armstrong arrives at the moon, you realize it is pretty boring and it has not so much to offer, either in 1969 or today. Would they have gone to such trouble if there had been better problems to work on? Well before the end of the movie, I found myself wanting to check my email and refresh my Twitter feed.
By the way, this movie has bombed at the box office, perhaps not a good sign for the revival of adventure in contemporary culture.
*Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom*
Although it can never really be measured, he may also have been, along with Mark Twain, the most widely traveled American public figure of his century…It is likely that more Americans heard Douglass speak than any other public figure of his times. Indeed, to see or hear Douglass became a kind of wonder of the American world. He struggled as well, with the pleasure and perils of fame as much as anyone else in his century, with the possible exceptions of General Ulysses S. Grant or P.T. Barnum. Douglass’s dilemma with fame was a matter of decades, not merely of moments, and fraught with racism.
That is from the new David W. Blight biography of Douglass, outstanding in every way, appearing to rave reviews, and slated for the top tier of the year’s “Best of 2018” non-fiction list.
Sunday assorted links
2. How rent control can raise rents (you need to read through a bit).
Memphis
A few days ago, a few of you thought I was dumping on Memphis. I did say the city is not an economic development success story, but it is perhaps my favorite place to visit in the American South. It has the best musical traditions, for instance generating Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash, all at more or less the same time, with many others later including Lonnie Mack, Isaac Hayes, and Booker T. It is one of the classic barbecue cities, most of all for ribs. Beale Street remains a wonderful place to hear music, as it is not nearly as ruined by tourists as Broadway in Nashville or Bourbon Street in New Orleans. It is also one of the American cities most likely to look as if it is still 1963, or is that 1957? Finally, Memphis is the starting off point for a drive down Highway 61 into the heartland of the Mississippi Delta, one of the essential American journeys and yes you still can hear rural blues music there.
If you have never done a three-day Memphis trip, I would strongly urge this upon you.
The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations
Yesterday I had lunch with a former Ph.D student of mine, who is now highly successful and tenured at a very good school. I was reminded that, over twenty years ago, I was Graduate Director of Admissions. One of my favorite strategies was to take strong candidates who applied for Masters and also offer them Ph.D admissions, suggesting they might to do the latter. My lunch partner was a beneficiary of this de facto policy.
At least two of our very best students went down this route. Ex ante, neither realized that it was common simply to apply straight to a Ph.D program, skipping over the Masters. I believe this is now better known, but the point is this.
At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.
This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life.
Saturday assorted links
1. QuantEcon is a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project dedicated to development and documentation of modern open source computational tools for economics, econometrics, and decision making. Main link here.
3. The new American songbook? Thirty song selections. (How did Oasis and Celine Dion get on this list?)
4. Are there eight main channels of innovation?
5. Nebraska school cook who served kangaroo meat chili loses job.
What I’ve been reading
1. Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. I hadn’t realized that so much was known about her life, or that she spent so much time in Canada, or that she fell into such obscurity during the early part of the twentieth century. She died the same year Rosa Parks was born. I liked this book very much.
2. Tom Miller, China’s Asian Dream: Empire Building Along the New Silk Road. A good look at the new conflicts between China and its southeast Asian and central Asian neighbors. Clear enough to be a good introduction, detailed enough to be useful to those who already know something about the topic.
3. Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation. Alter is one of today’s most important doers, and his forthcoming Hebrew Bible translation is likely to be definitive and the most important act of publication this year. This short volume presents his perspective on what he has done, most of all focusing on how to turn Hebrew into English.
4. Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. How does human psychological growth run in the first seven years, in particular how does it instill “culture” in us? Tomasello address this question in a Belknap Press book by comparing us to chimpanzees and bonobos. Most of all, how does the capacity for shared intentionality and self-regulation evolve in people? This is a very thoughtful and also important book, but I’m not sure it finally succeeds into tying up all the pieces into a broader picture of…shared intentionality.
5. Camille Paglia, Provocations. At first I was discouraged by the notion of a recycled Paglia compilation, but the quality of these pieces is often high and many of them are not readily available elsewhere. The now-classic Sexual Personae is still the best introduction to her work, but if you think you might be tempted by this one, you should buy it. I would put the hit rate at about fifty percent (who else will give you running commentary on the main cinematic adaptations of Homer’s Odyssey?), and it is sad to see so far it has not been seriously reviewed.
A different and mortgage-related reason why monetary policy stimulus is weaker at lower rates
Using a household model of mortgage prepayment with endogenous mortgage pricing, wealth distributions and consumption matched to detailed loan-level evidence on the relationship between prepayment and rate incentives, we argue that the ability to stimulate the economy by cutting rates depends not just on the level of current interest rates but also on their previous path: 1) Holding current rates constant, monetary policy is less effective if previous rates were low. 2) Monetary policy “reloads” stimulative power slowly after raising rates. 3) The strength of monetary policy via the mortgage prepayment channel has been amplified by the 30-year secular decline in mortgage rates. All three conclusions imply that even if the Fed raises rates substantially before the next recession arrives, it will likely have less ammunition available for stimulus than in recent recessions.
That is from David W. Berger, Konstantin Milbradt, Fabrice Tourre, and Joseph Vavra, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
2. Revisiting my 2009 Crooked Timber post on law and economics.
3. Europe’s privacy laws are so tough, they are taking names off the doorbells in Vienna. In Vienna, a doorbell isn’t just a doorbell, right?
4. A blog devoted to good podcast episodes.
5. The rich aren’t jerks after all.
6. Why doesn’t ancient fiction talk more about feelings? (or does it?)
7. There is no good system for updating genetic information (NYT).
*The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind*
That is the forthcoming Raghuram Rajan book, due out February 26, 2019.
Is “political correctness” the ultimate hack of the Left?
Yes says I, in my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one bit:
To put it simply, the American left has been hacked, and it is now running in a circle of its own choosing, rather than focusing on electoral victories or policy effectiveness. Too many segments of the Democratic Party are self-righteously talking about identity politics, and they are letting other priorities slip.
Of course there is a lot of racism out there, which makes political correctness all the more tempting. Yet polling data suggests that up to 80 percent of Americans are opposed to politically correct thinking in its current manifestations. Latinos and Asian-Americans are among the groups most opposed, and even 61 percent of self-professed liberals do not like political correctness.
I give some examples (Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard lawsuit) of how these issues can harm the fortunes of the Left. Here is the basic model:
I now wonder if, in the internet era, every political movement is hackable. Political involvement requires a certain kind of ideological motivation, and ideologies are imperfectly rational. So a smart hacker can redirect the attention of groups in other, less productive directions. Just put some inflammatory words or video on the internet and you can induce the left to talk more about identity politics.
Consider that political action is a public good (bad) of sorts, motivated in part by private expressive concerns. Pursuing expressive action can lead to results-oriented value (disvalue). So find the people who are acting that way, and put a “expressive value only” version of the dog bone before them, to compete with what they have been chasing.
The correct “hacking” words, memes, and images are found by trial and error, but once the fervently expressive left-wing responses are observed, the techniques are honed and refined pretty quickly.
And what about the hacking of the Right?
Has the right-wing been hacked? I suspect so. The president himself is part of the hack, and the core motivation is the desire to “own the libs,” a phrase I didn’t hear much five years ago. We’ve now entered an era in which too many are self-obsessed and too few are effective.
Of course a few questions come to mind:
1. Are all views hackable in this manner?
No, but views which appeal to moral superiority are usually hackable, because displays of the resulting preening are often counterproductive.
2. Once a hack occurs, can you reverse it or defend against it?
Knowledge is not always as useful as you might think.
3. Has libertarianism been hacked?
Yes, it was hacked into an ill-conceived alliance with Republicans on too many issues, under the promise of some policy victories.
4. Do the hacks on each side interact?
Well, if conservatives feel they “own the libs” by irritating their sense of political correctness, the polarization can explode pretty quickly.
Addendum: There is also this paragraph in the piece:
The biggest day-to-day losers from the political correctness movement are other left-of-center people, most of all white moderate Democrats, especially those in universities. If you really believe that “the PC stuff” is irrational and out of control and making institutions dysfunctional, and that universities are full of left-of-center people, well who is going to suffer most of the costs? It will be people in the universities, and in unjust and indiscriminate fashion. That means more liberals than conservatives, if only because the latter are relatively scarce on the ground.
Recommended.
Thursday assorted links
1. Tweetstream review of Stubborn Attachments. And another, shorter one, from the child too. Thank you all for making publication day such a success.
2. Chengdu plans to launch artificial moon. (How’s that for sustainable economic growth?)
3. Harshita Arora now has a blog.
4. “white [American] liberals are [now] well to the left of the black electorate on some racial issues…”
5. How can the governing of Singapore be improved? A Reddit thread.