Category: Uncategorized
What I’ve been reading
Alain Mabanckou, Dealing with the Dead. Most African fiction does not connect with me, and there is a tendency for the reviews to be untrustworthy. This “cemetery memoir,” from the Congo (via UCLA), connected with me and held my interest throughout.
Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. I was in the mood of thinking I don’t need to read another book about these people. Yet this one was so good it won me over nonetheless.
Eddie Huffman, Doc Watson: A Life in Music. A fun book about one of America’s greatest guitarists. Watson was blind from an early age, and he was collecting state disability benefits until he was 40 — a classic late bloomer.
Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor. Call me crazy, but I think Sun Ra and Taylor are better and more important musically than say Duke Ellington. Freeman’s book is the first full-length biography of Taylor, and it is well-informed and properly appreciative. It induced me to buy another book by him. The evening I saw Taylor was one of the greatest of my life, I thank my mother for coming with me.
Carlos M.N. Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible. Ross Douthat recommended this one to me. It is well done, and worth reading, but I don’t find it shifted my priors on whether “impossible” events might have really happened.
I agree with the central arguments of Samir Varma’s The Science of Free Will: How Determinism Affects Everything from the Future of AI to Traffic to God to Bees. I was happy to write a foreword for the book.
Kathleen deLaski, Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter. One of a growing chorus of books suggesting higher education is on the verge of some radical changes.
There is Daniel Brook, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld Visionary of Weimar Berlin. It is good to see him getting more attention.
There is also Brandy Schillace, The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story.
Nick Freiling asks
Across all of history, which human being has been seen, in-person, by the greatest number of people?
Pope John Paul II? Mick Jagger? A baseball player with extreme longevity? (Cal Ripken?) Here is o1 pro, top guess is PJPII.
Wednesday assorted links
2. Technicolor is finally being wound down.
3. Atlantic profile of Aella (salacious text, otherwise safe for work).
4. Show notes from Curt Jaimungal. And his Substack on physics.
5. Ed Leamer, RIP.
6. The budget package passed by the House.
7. Outmigration predicts AfD support pretty well (NYT). It is the less ambitious ones who stay behind who want that party.
8. Bezos Wapo Opinion page announcement in favor of free markets?
9. Loyal’s life extension drug for dogs may be coming to market this year.
Method in the Madness?
We study the link between exposure to anger and performance, something that to our knowledge has not been studied before. We exploit the US version of the nationally syndicated television cooking competition MasterChef and collect data on every instance in which judges objectively demonstrate anger to individual participants in each of the episodes in ten years, from 2010 to 2020, of this competition. Contestants exposed to anger from judges end up higher in the final rankings, increase their probability of success in cooking challenges, as well as their probability of reaching the top three and even winning the competition.
Clever paper from Alberto Chong. Now if only you donkeys would improve your comments.
Are different jobs becoming more alike?
An intriguing but speculative hypothesis:
We document, in the past decade, a reversal in the trend of increasing wage inequality and declining labor mobility patterns across occupations. This is despite a rapid increase in technological progress and increase in technical skills demanded as evident in online job advertisements. We argue that rapid technological progress over the past decade is transforming occupations and driving them closer together, leading to wage convergence and increased mobility. To study this, we introduce a novel measure of occupational distance based on job postings that allow us to represent each occupation as a vector of skills with corresponding weights that evolve over time and space. We compute bilateral distances between occupations using similarity measures and find a steady decline in these distances, indicating occupational convergence. We show that this convergence has led to a decline in wage inequality across occupations and increased labor mobility. Furthermore, we find that occupations that have undergone greater transformation-measured as self-distance over time-exhibit higher wage growth and larger reductions in within-occupation inequality.
That is a recent paper from Manolis Chatzikonstantinou, Mohammad Shahmeer Ahmad, and Alexis Antoniades. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What should I ask Ian Leslie?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. I loved his forthcoming book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. Ian has done other things too, but for the time being those don’t matter. This will be a Beatles episode, and also an episode about artistic collaboration.
So what should I ask him?
Tuesday assorted links
Do Republican policemen differ from the Democrats?
Partisans are divided on policing policy, which may affect officer behavior. We merge rosters from 99 of the 100 largest local U.S. agencies—over one third of local law enforcement agents nationwide—with voter files to study police partisanship. Police skew more Republican than their jurisdictions, with notable exceptions. Using fine-grained data in Chicago and Houston, we compare behavior of Democratic and Republican officers facing common circumstances. We find minimal partisan differences after correcting for multiple comparisons. But consistent with prior work, we find Black and Hispanic officers make fewer stops and arrests in Chicago, and Black officers use force less often in both cities. Comparing same-race partisans, we find White Democrats make more violent crime arrests than White Republicans in Chicago. Our results suggest that despite Republicans’ preference for more punitive law enforcement policy and their overrepresentation in policing, partisan divisions often do not translate into detectable differences in on-the-ground enforcement.
That is from a new paper by Bocar Ba, et.al Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
1969
1969 was a big year for me. Most of all, we left Fall River and moved back to New Jersey, but this time to Bergen rather than Hudson County — Billy Joel comments. I’ll cover Bergen County another time, here were three other developments of import in my seven-year-old life in 1969:
1. The United States landed a man on the moon.
My parents let me stay up late to watch this, thank goodness. Of course I was very excited, and we heard all about it in school. This event drove my later interest in science fiction, space exploration, and also travel by jet. None of those were directions my career or writings went in, but they were early intellectual influences. At this point in the game, how could you not watch Star Trek reruns?
Back then, we all knew something special was happening, even I knew at age seven. I also began to understand that the United States was the country that did this, and what that meant. So I became more patriotic. The command center at NASA seemed to me a great achievement, in a way more impressive than the spaceship.
2. The New York Mets won the World Series.
Alas, I was no longer a Red Sox fan. The important thing here is that the New York Mets season, along with the moon landing of that same summer, was the first thing I truly followed with all of my attention. I learned how to keep on top of something, at least to the greatest degree possible given my constraints (which were extreme, starting with no internet but hardly ending there). In 1968 I watched baseball games, but in 1969 I followed The New York Mets and absorbed all of the available information about them, including reading newspapers, listening to radio talk shows, and digesting statistics on a regular basis.
That is a tendency that has stuck with me, and I first practiced it then and there.
3. I received my first transistor radio.
I don’t hear people talk about this much any more, but for me it was like the arrival of the internet. All of a sudden I was in regular touch with a big chunk of the world. I could hear the new music that was out. Could listen to the news. Find out sports scores. Hear talk shows. Or whatever. The menu was very America-centric, and the sound was terrible, but none of that mattered. The information superhighway had been opened for me.
I heard the Jackson Five song “I Want You Back,” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Those tunes bored me quickly, and I returned to them and their excellence only later. But I knew they were out there, and I knew they were important. At least early on, I preferred The Archies “Sugar, Sugar,” Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy,” and oddities such as Zaeger and Evans “In the Year 2525.” How about “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”?
In fact they did not take me away, rather they ensconced me securely in New Jersey, in the momentous year of 1969.
Monday assorted links
1. Prophets of the Marginal Revolution (POTMR).
2. The best Texas barbecue is increasingly urban (New Yorker).
3. Good, appreciative Hilary Leichter NYT review of the Solvej Balle series. These are a definite recommend from me.
4. Which Germans supported AfD? That alone should show you they are not the good guys.
5. Who are the twenty best English poets?
6. How to watch The Great Planet Parade.
How poverty fell
There is a new and excellent paper by Vincent Armentano, Paul Niehaus, and Tom Vogl on this topic. Here is one paragraph (not from the abstract):
We also see no cases in which changes in transfers (from public and private sources) played a dominant role. Among households that exited poverty, the share of income they obtained from transfers either rose slightly or fell substantially. Among those that entered poverty, the share generally rose substantially or fell slightly. Overall, the data are consistent with progressive redistribution, but not with transfer income accounting directly for a major share of the income gains that moved households above the poverty line. In this sense, the households that left poverty did so largely on their own…
Transitions out of agriculture accounted for a limited role. They did not account for the largest share, let alone the majority, of transitions out of poverty in any country. And the decomposition credits transitions into agriculture with a poverty reducing role: the opposite of the conclusion we reach if we ignore the panel structure of the data and apply older, cross-sectional decomposition techniques to it. More broadly, in every country, households that stayed in the same sector contributed more to poverty decline than households that changed sector. Migration, particularly rural-to-urban migration, also accounts for a limited amount of poverty decline in the three countries (Mexico, Indonesia and South Africa) for which migrants were tracked, with the one notable exception that rural-to-rural migrants accounted for a third of all net poverty decline in Indonesia.
This stands a good chance of being the most important paper of the year, and it has many other results of interest.
Sunday assorted links and non-links
1. Julian Gough and Jim O’Shaughnessy podcast, with transcript. Do we live in an evolved universe?
2. Tickets for Edge Esmerelda 2025.
3. Will Trump squander his vibe shift? (NYT)
4. Top Ferrari now goes for $3.7 million (WSJ). And the company is doing very well.
5. From Lawrence: “you can now use Deep Research with o1 or 4o or o3 mini along with documents added. I’ve just double tested it.”
6. Adam Smith and the love of domination.
7. It is Handel’s 440th birthday, here is his Dixit Dominus.
8. “Richard Grenell, Donald Trump’s new KenCen chief, has made his first programming announcement at a Conservative conference in Maryland, promising ‘a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.’” Not much more at the link.
The Ukraine peace deal
The information environment is so soiled right now, it is especially difficult to assess such matters. And I, like many others, am upset about the rhetoric and methods that have been applied from the American side. Nonetheless I think this may be a better deal than its current press indicates. Let me note a few features at the margin, rather than trying to assess the entire situation comprehensively:
1. I don’t know what those mineral rights in Ukraine are worth, but past some level of corruption there is a resource curse (though not for Norway). So losing half of that revenue may not be as bad for Ukraine as it sounds. Was all that oil and gas wealth so good for Russia?
2. For better or worse, the mineral rights deal will, de facto, be renegotiated many times. Read your Williamson and Tirole! So whatever your opinion of what ends up being put on paper this week, think more about solving for the equilibrium over the longer run. The American incentive and willingness to give future aid is now somewhat higher than it would have been, without a mineral rights deal.
3. Since this is Trump’s deal, the Trumpist American right will now have a strong stake in making the deal work. That is significant.
4. At least potentially, Ukraine is now in some funny way “U.S.-certified” by the presence of the mineral rights deal. I do understand the moral hazard problems here, but perhaps the alternative was a slow loss of the war, due to manpower problems of the Ukrainian side.
5. Many people are in denial about how much the current Ukrainian regime, whether justly or not, is unpopular with both Democrats in Congress and with the U.S. deep state. There are far fewer courses of action than many deal critics would like to believe, and it is a mistake to think of all of this as coming from Trump. How exactly would it go trying to push another major Ukraine aid package through Congress?
6. I am not sure what European defense efforts will amount to, but we do see various promises in a constructive direction. Overall I am skeptical, but still there is some motion here.
7. As the prospects for the deal have approached, the Ukraine government bond market has been pretty happy.
So I am hoping for the best, and I consider these views as very subject to rapid revision.
What should I ask Any Austin?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. If you don’t already know, Any Austin is a huge YouTube star. Grok 3 gave me this summary:
Any Austin is a cerebral and innovative YouTube creator whose channel, boasting over 650,000 subscribers, transcends conventional gaming content to explore esoteric, often whimsical intersections of video games and real-world phenomena. Initially gaining traction with series like “Eggbusters,” where he meticulously debunks gaming myths, Austin has evolved into a niche polymath, crafting video essays that blend rigorous research with a dry, absurdist wit—think hydrogeology analyses of virtual landscapes or socioeconomic studies of NPC populations in titles like The Elder Scrolls. A former game journalist for Nintendo Everything and an indie pop musician under the alias Frostyn, he brings a multidisciplinary lens to his work, underpinned by a keen eye for the overlooked details of digital worlds. His content, which ranges from glitch exposés to philosophical musings on gaming’s peripheral elements, appeals to an erudite audience that values intellectual curiosity over mainstream bombast, cementing his status as a singular voice in the platform’s crowded ecosystem.
Here is Any Austin on Twitter. So what should I ask him?
Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow
I’ve already covered much of this in my podcast with Dwarkesh, but I thought it would be useful to write it all out in one place. I’ll assume you already know the current state of the debate. Here goes:
1. Due to the Baumol-Bowen cost disease, less productive sectors tend to become a larger share of the economy over time. This already has been happening since the American economy originated. A big chunk of current gdp already is slow to respond, highly inefficient, governmental or government-subsidized sectors. They just won’t adopt AI, or use it effectively, all that quickly. As I said to an AI guy a few days ago “The way I can convince you is to have you sit in on a Faculty Senate meeting.” And the more effiicient AI becomes, the more this trend is likely to continue, which slows the prospective measured growth gains from AI.
2. Human bottlenecks become more important, the more productive is AI. Let’s say AI increases the rate of good pharma ideas by 10x. Well, until the FDA gets its act together, the relevant constraint is the rate of drug approval, not the rate of drug discovery.
2b. These do not have to be regulatory obstacles, though many are. It may be slow adopters, people in the workplace who hate AI, energy constraints, and much more. It simply is not the case that all workplace inputs are rising in lockstep, quite the contrary.
3. The O-Ring models makes AI hard to work with. The O-Ring model stipulates that, in some settings, it is the worst performer who sets the overall level of productivity. (In the NBA, for instance, it may be the quality of the worst defender on the floor, since the player your worst defender is supposed to guard can just keep taking open shots.) Soon enough, at least in the settings where AI is supposed to shine, the worst performer will be the humans. The AIs will make the humans somewhat better, but not that much better all that quickly.
This is a variant of #2, but in more extreme form. A simple way to put it is that you are not smart enough to notice directly how much better o5 will be than o3. For various complex computational tasks, not observed by humans, the more advanced model of course will be more effective. But when it comes to working with humans, those extra smarts largely will be wasted.
3b. The human IQ-wages gradient is quite modest, suggesting that more IQ in the system does not raise productivity dramatically. You might think that does not hold across the super-intelligent margin the machines will inhabit, but the O-Ring model suggests otherwise, apart from some specialized calculations where the machine does not need to collaborate with humans.
4. I don’t think the economics of AI are well-defined by either “an increase in labor supply,” “an increase in TFP,” or “an increase in capital,” though it is some of each of those. It is more like “some Star Trek technology fell into our backyard, and how long will it take us to figure out how to integrate it with other things humans do?” You can debate how long that will take, but the Solow model, the Romer model and their offshoots will not give us reliable answers.
5. There is a vast literature on the diffusion of new technologies (go ask DeepResearch!). Historically it usually takes more time than the most sophisticated observers expect. Electricity for instance arguably took up to forty years. I do think AI will spread faster than that, but reading this literature will bring you back down to earth.
6. Historically, gdp growth is remarkably smooth, albeit for somewhat mysterious reasons. North America is a vastly different place than it was in the year 1600, technologically and otherwise. Yet there are remarkably few years when the economic growth rate is all that far from two percent. There is a Great Depression, some years of higher growth, some stagnation, and a few major wars, but even in those cases we are not so far from two percent. I do not pretend to be able to model this satisfactorily (though the above factors surely have relevance in non-AI settings too), but unless you have figured this puzzle out, do not be too confident in any prediction that is so very far from two percent.
7. I’ve gone on record as suggesting that AI will boost economic growth rates by half a percentage point a year. That is very much a guess. It does mean that, with compounding, the world is very different a few decades out. It also means that year to year non-infovores will not necessarily notice huge changes in their environments. So far I have not seen evidence to contradict that broad expectation.
8. Current prices are not forecasting any kind of very rapid transformation. And yes market traders do know about AI, AGI, and the like.
9. None of these views are based on pessimism about the capabilities of AI models. I hear various views, often from people working in the area, and on the tech per se I have an optimism that corresponds to the weighted average of what I hear.