Category: Uncategorized
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.
Paywall sentences to ponder
Non-subscribers visiting WSJ.com now get a score, based on dozens of signals, that indicates how likely they’ll be to subscribe. The paywall tightens or loosens accordingly: “The content you see is the output of the paywall, rather than an input.”
Here is the full Nieman Lab article, you all have a good enough score to read it, just like at MR.
Quinn Slobodian’s *Globalists*
The subtitle is The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Imagine a novel and interesting coverage of the post-war Austrian School, here relabeled the “Geneva School,” a well-done partial history of the WTO and EU, and a book where the central characters are not only Mises and Hayek, but also Alexander Rüstow, Wilhelm Röpke, and Michael Heilperin.
And it’s written by a Wellesley historian who appears to be entirely sane and responsible throughout.
The main lesson, and here these are my own words not those directly of the author, is that various liberals came to realize that their dreams for a free world order in fact involved quite an extensive international legal apparatus, far removed from the traditional nightwatchman state. The EU and the “Four Freedoms” are in this view the actual instantiation of historic classical liberalism, arguably more than anything the United States has done of late. And if you don’t like the over-regulation and excess bureaucracy of the EU, well maybe you’d better realize those are difficult to avoid secondary consequences of having the international law be so strong as to actually constrain state power (again my words, not Slobodian, though his book may lead you to this idea).
Wilhelm Röpke it turns out is the (a?) bad guy, and I have to say I always considered him a third-rate, misguided agrarian thinker. It turns out his views on Africa were not entirely sound, and furthermore he sought to pull the rest of the liberals away their “economic libertarianism,” keeping in mind that Hayek already favored a social welfare state and socialized health insurance, among other interventions.
I folded over 12 separate pages in this book, which is considerably higher than average.
That all said, I don’t quite buy onto the whole story. I read Hayek as rebelling against the vanquished Austro-Hungarian Empire, rather than keeping it as a mental model for reform. Nor am I persuaded by the idea of a identifiable “Geneva School,” whether as an independent group or as a sub-branch of the Austrians. In my view, the connections running through Geneva are historical ones (various people and institutions got put there), not intellectual in nature. Haberler and Machlup I would have covered in greater detail, and that would have strengthened the author’s core thesis. Oddly, there is no mention of Melchior Palyi at all.
pp.271-272 have a good fifteen-point summary of what the Geneva School is supposed to stand for, you might try #5: “World law trumps a world state. International institutions should act as mechanisms for protecting and furthering competition without offering spaces for popular claims-making.”
Henry Farrell has very good remarks on the book. You can pre-order it here.
And by the way, use of the word “neoliberalism” in a book’s title is almost always a major negative signal, but here it is actually appropriate.
Thursday assorted links
1. NPR does a round of overrated vs. underrated with me.
2. MIE: David Attenborough raves. That last word is a noun, by the way.
3. Thread on mass shooting and contagion effects.
4. Animals are losing their vagility (NYT).
5. Against cuteness.
What I’ve been reading
1. Jörn Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War. This is probably the meatiest and most comprehensive WWI book yet published. It covers the origins of the war, preparation for fighting, public reactions, war aims, the course of battle, war economies, internal politics, the battlefields, how it ended, and more, all at 1,060 Belknap Press pages. Translated from the German, it doesn’t exactly spring to life in your lap, but it is consistently intelligent and thoughtful. Amazingly the author is only fifty years old.
2. Martin Goodman, A History of Judaism. Imagine a scholarly history of Judaism, told from the points of view of the time, rather than treating so many events as lead-ups to later anti-Semitism: “My attempt to provide an objective version of Judaism may strike some readers as naive.” I found the book to be a useful mood affiliation jiu jitsu, plus it has plenty of information that competing sources don’t, most of all about the immediate post-Temple period. Recommended.
William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age, covers the rise of numerical reasoning in 17th century Britain.
Domenico Starnone’s self-contained short novel Trick is now out, translation and introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri.