Category: Uncategorized

*Who’s Afraid of Gender?*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of the new Judith Butler book, focusing mostly on trans issues.  To be clear, on most practical issues concerning trans, I side with the social conservatives.  For instance, I don’t think trans women have a right to compete in women’s weightlifting contests.  And I have not been happy with how many schools have been teaching about trans issues, due to social contagion effects that are larger than I would have expected.   And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong.  This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things).  But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories?  Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches?  Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner?  Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?

So I am happy to recommend this book, noting that not everyone will like it, to say the least.  My main criticism is that Butler spends too much time with what I consider to be weaker views (e.g., the Pope), and not enough time with the more difficult problems concerning real and potential harms to children.  Her neglect of the latter verges on the intellectually criminally negligent.  And yet the key is to see that it is still a good and interesting book.

*Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon

by  Tyler Cowen in

Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago.  To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age.  In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization.  The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious.  For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man coul dknow more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail.  Moreoever, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact.  Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone.  In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, through strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly.  Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing.  In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious.  Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches.

Here is a recent short essay on Starmaker, first published in 1937.

Applying to Emergent Ventures, and how to get Britain moving again

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the TxP Progress Prize:

But then Tyler asked us, twice in a row, ‘what is your signature product?’ Being honest, we realised even if our pitch was strong at a high level, we’d essentially just submitted a laundry list of ideas for what we wanted to deliver, without much focus. We knew we had to go back to the drawing board.

Then:

The blog prize was designed to advocate solutions, amplify frontier tech, and offer a clear, tractable proposal. We particularly wanted punchy takes that pulled the debate outside the norm and we encouraged people to publish online to prompt discussion. We also rewarded good writing and pointed to pieces we’d been inspired by.

That is from Andrew Bennett and Tom Westgarth.  The theme was “Britain is Stuck: How Can We Get It Moving Again?”  The winners (EV had no role in this selection) were:

Winner (£5000)

Rian Whitton: Firm Power can reduce Britain’s electricity prices

Runner up (£1000)

Alec Thompson: Open Source the Law

Shortlisted (£750)

Ashna Ahmad: Chilean Telexes and the Allocation Problem

Ben Hopkinson: Britain’s Second Cities are Stuck: Let’s Get Them Moving Again

Daniel Timms: The Case for a New City

At the link you will find further commendable mentions.

*Revolusi*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, and the author is David van Reybrouck.  An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it.  First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries.  Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar transition from Japanese rule to independence.  Excerpt:

In total no fewer than 120,000 Dutch conscripts would depart between 1946 and 1949, an enormous number that approached the general mobilization before World War II (150,000).  Six thousand recruits who were examined and judged ‘fit for the tropics’ refused to embark.  Many of these were tracked down and hauled out of beds to the military police.  This hunt for deserters went on until 1958!  Strict sentences were passed on 2,565 war resisters.  Almost three-quarters received custodial sentences of up to two years, the rest remain in jail even longer.  Altogether a total of fifteen centuries of prison sentences were pronounced, a remarkably large amount compared to the complete immunity granted to later war criminals.  The conclusion was clear: those who refused to kill were locked up, those who murdered without reason went free.

Recommended, there should of course be more such books on Indonesia.

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. 101 things Leila would tell her past self.

2. “The colonel was then carried to the Dotonbori river and tossed into the murky water.”

3. Leadership lessons from Shakespeare’s Henriad.

4. Good thread on the Apple case.

5. Where do the major African economies stand? And fellowship in Tanzania.

6. U.S. life expectancy is rising again.

7. First flight of the Boom Supersonic jet.

How credible is the Milei plan?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a good Substack essay by Nicolas Cachanosky, excerpt:

Inflation expectations depend on what is expected to happen to the budget in the months to come. It is natural, then, to ask whether the observed surpluses are sustainable in the months ahead.

Answering this question requires looking at two things. First, how was the fiscal surplus achieved in January? Second, what is the expected behavior of revenues and expenditures?

The information for the first question is included in the table below, which shows its values in constant terms (February 2024). In real and accumulated terms, fiscal revenues decreased 2.5%, while expenses collapsed by 38%. Where is spending being cut the most? Numbers show that 57% of the adjustment falls on the shoulders of the private sector, while the remaining 43% falls on the government. Contrary to Milei’s repeated statements, most of the austerity is being borne by households and the private sector, whose patience limit is unknown.1 Some of these spending cuts are achieved by postponing transfers and payments to a future month…

Is this sustainable? Can Milei and Caputo continue to put this level of pressure on the already suffering households? There is no data yet for January, but just in December, real salaries in the (registered) private sector fell by -11.5% and 3.7% contraction in the monthly economic activity estimator. A report by IDESA shows that retirement income levels are as low as they were during the 2001 crisis. Worrisome, Empiria Consultores shows that the average salary is now below the poverty rate (figure below). Of course, I’m not saying all of this is Milei’s fault, who received a destroyed economy, but this is the economic and social situation upon which he is adding even more pressure.

Here is Martin Kenenguiser on Milei’s progress.  Here is Ciara Nugent in the FT on Milei and state companies.  Here is Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the WSJ: “A fiscal balance achieved in January isn’t sustainable, the economy is in recession, and inflation expectations by market participants at over 200% for the year are nothing to brag about. A $9 billion increase in international reserves isn’t a surge in confidence. It’s the result of printing pesos to buy the dollars and then issuing debt at high interest rates to sop up those pesos.”  I do not blame Milei, but it is still far from obvious that the current plan is going to work.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. How to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists.

2. The Zvi with a bunch of things, including commentary on some recent economic models of AI.

3. Dean Ball on how to regulate AI.  And Dean’s Substack on related issues.

4. Did Easter Island invent writing independently?

5. The new Thiel winners.

6. “I’m not sure I have a full model of how this works, but the situation where nearly 100% of credentialed experts are Democrats seems to me to have made both parties’ epistemics worse than they were 20 years ago.” — from Matt Yglesias.

Indiana’s new intellectual diversity law for universities

by  Tyler Cowen in

Indiana’s Republican governor has just signed new law that introduces “intellectual diversity” as a standard for tenure decisions in state universities. Under the law, campus boards of trustees will determine what intellectual diversity consists of, and lack of such diversity can be grounds for denying tenure. Intellectual diversity also must be considered in the post-tenure review process.

Please note that while I sympathize with many of the complaints I am against this new law, as I explain in my latest Bloomberg column:

Under some scenarios, right-wing and conservative professors could easily end up worse off under this new system. For purposes of argument, let’s assume the worst of a left-leaning academic department, namely that they intentionally prevent conservative professors from getting tenure. Under the new law, there is a chance that a Board of Trustees might grant tenure to a conservative voted down by the department. How would a department of committed lefties address that problem? They’d avoid hiring conservative professors at all, for fear of having their tenure decisions overturned.

Even if you think a Board of Trustees can intervene in tenure decisions in a meaningful and informed manner, they cannot run a job search, which involves going through hundreds or even thousands of applications. The bias merely will be shifted to some other part of the process.

And:

Further issues arise from how the law creates a channel that students and university employees can use to complain about the political orientations of faculty members. The net effect will be to shift power to students, which means easier classes and more grade inflation. Are those trends likely in the longer run to support conservative or classical education values in our universities? As a long-time teacher for almost forty years, I suspect not.

There are further good arguments at the link.

Is an Economic Growth Explosion Imminent?

by  Tyler Cowen in

On the road, I haven’t had a chance to read this paper yet, but I pass it along as a matter of interest:

Theory predicts that global economic growth will stagnate and even come to an end due to slower and eventually negative growth in population. It has been claimed, however, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may counter this and even cause an economic growth explosion. In this paper, we critically analyse this claim. We clarify how AI affects the ideas production function (IPF) and propose three models relating innovation, AI and population: AI as a research-augmenting technology; AI as researcher scale enhancing technology; and AI as a facilitator of innovation. We show, performing model simulations calibrated on USA data, that AI on its own may not be sufficient to accelerate the growth rate of ideas production indefinitely. Overall, our simulations suggests that an economic growth explosion would only be possible under very specific and perhaps unlikely combinations of parameter values. Hence we conclude that it is not imminent.

That is from Derick Almeida, Wim Naudé, and Tiago Sequeira.

Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by  Tyler Cowen in

We conducted the first randomized controlled trial to study the effect of AI assistance on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned law school students to complete realistic legal tasks either with or without the assistance of GPT-4. We tracked how long the students took on each task and blind-graded the results. We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly—where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the same amount of time regardless of their baseline speed. In follow up surveys, participants reported increased satisfaction from using AI to complete legal tasks and correctly predicted the tasks for which GPT-4 were most helpful. These results have important descriptive and normative implications for the future of lawyering. Descriptively, they suggest that AI assistance can significantly improve productivity and satisfaction, and that they can be selectively employed by lawyers in areas where they are most useful. Because these tools have an equalizing effect on performance, they may also promote equality in a famously unequal profession. Normatively, our findings suggest that law schools, lawyers, judges, and clients should affirmatively embrace AI tools and plan for a future in which they will become widespread.

That is by Jonathan H. Choi, Amy Monahan, and Daniel Schwarcz, forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Have CEOs changed?

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is a recent paper by Yann Decressin, Steven N. Kaplan, and Morten Sorensen:

Using more than 4,900 assessments, we study changes in the characteristics and objectives of CEOs and top executives since 2001. The same four factors explain roughly half of the variation of assessed CEO characteristics in this larger sample of executive assessments as in Kaplan and Sorensen (2021). After the global financial crisis (GFC), the average interviewed CEO candidate has lower overall ability, is more execution oriented / less interpersonal, less charismatic and less creative / strategic than pre-GFC. Except for overall ability, these differences persist in hired CEOs. Interpersonal or “softer” skills, if anything, decline over time for both CEO candidates and hired CEOs. Pre- and post-GFC, we find a positive correlation between the ability of assessed CEOs and other C-level executives assessed at the same company, suggesting that higher ability executives complement each other. Finally, we look at the relation of the objectives for which the CEOs are interviewed to CEO characteristics.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.