*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.

In Defense of Plagiarism

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Google plagiarism and you will find definitions like “stealing someone else’s ideas” or “literary theft.” Here the emphasis is on the stealing–it’s the original author who is being harmed. I prefer the definition of plagiarism given by Wikipedia, plagiarism is the *fraudulent* use of other people’s words or ideas. Fraudulent emphasizes that it’s the reader who is being cheated, not the original creator. You can use someone else’s words without being fraudulent. We all do this. If you copy a definition or description of a technical procedure from a textbook or manual you are using someone else’s words but it’s not fraudulent because the reader doesn’t assume that you are trying to take credit for the ideas.

In contrast, a student who passes an essay off as their own when it was written by someone else is engaging in a kind of fraud but the “crime” has little to do with harming the original author. A student who uses AI to write an essay is engaging in fraud, for example, but the problem is obviously not theft from OpenAI. Indeed, in another context the same use of AI would not be fraudulent. If I use AI to help write this post, it’s not fraudulent because the primary purpose of this post is not, as it is with a student essay, to warrant the abilities of the author but rather to convey ideas to the reader. How those ideas came to be expressed in words is secondary and sometimes even irrelevant. 

Indeed, using some else’s words and ideas is often how the world progresses. Plagiarism is a type of intellectual property law and I have long argued that IP law has grown too strong. Patents, for example, are often too broad and copyright is too long. Similarly, I was very much in support of Ed Sheeran in the ridiculous copyright case that ate of years of his life. Sheeran used ideas that had previously been used by many others but even if he had sampled, sampling is not a terrible crime. If I write, ‘he went on a wild goose chase’ or ‘it’s a brave new world’ need I credit the author? If an economics professor says ‘a price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive’, well a little credit to Cowen and Tabarrok would be nice, but sooner or later might this phrase not enter the vernacular? Crediting authors of unique wordplay should have a time limit, after which such wordplay becomes part of the common pool of expressions available for all. Crediting authors of boilerplate shouldn’t even be required.

The reason plagiarism has come to be defined more by “literary theft” than by the “fraudulent use of other’s people’s ideas and words” is that it’s much easier to prove when someone else’s words have been copied than it is to prove fraudulent use. A computer can scan the text of millions of documents to discover “plagiarism” but the computer has a harder time saying what is fraudulent. I argued earlier, that if I used AI to write this post it wouldn’t be fraudulent. But what if Marginal Revolution won a Pulitzer for twenty years of high quality writing and this post were give as an example? Well, its a judgement call.

In short, the focus of any charge of plagiarism should not be on whether someone else’s words have been used. The use of other’s people’s words is a necessary condition for plagiarism but it’s not sufficient. The focus should be on whether readers have been harmed by a fraudulent use of other people’s ideas and words. Focusing on the latter will dispense with many charges of plagiarism.

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.

R.I.P. The Scottish Enlightenment 1697-2024

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Scottish Enlightenment will die on April 1st 2024, exactly 327 years, eight months and 24 days after the incident that provoked it. For on April 1st the Hate Crime and Public Order Act (Scotland) 2021 comes into force, an Act which will criminalise speech and opinion deemed ‘hateful’ even if spoken in the privacy of your own home.

On January 8th 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, a 20 year-old student, was marched the two miles from the Old Tolbooth Prison on the High Street to a windswept sandy hillock just to the west of the causeway that crossed the marshes between Edinburgh and the port town of Leith, known as Gallow Lee. Surrounded by the pious prayers of the clergymen of the Kirk (the Church of Scotland), Thomas was hanged by the neck until he was dead.

What was Thomas – a murderer? A rapist? Was he one of Edinburgh’s notorious ‘Resurrection Men’? No. Young Thomas’s crime was that in an Edinburgh tavern on Christmas Eve 1696, he had a drink and went on a rant offending the Church and its stranglehold on Scottish culture. He was reported, arrested and tried: “The jury found Aikenhead guilty of cursing and railing against God, denying the incarnation and the Trinity and scoffing at the Scriptures.”

Thomas Aikenhead was the last person to be hanged for Blasphemy in Britain. As such he became a martyr and inspiration. The hanging of a young man for the crime of having a rant in a pub late at night became seen as an act of tyranny and oppression so heinous it was the spark that turned a barren minor nation on the north west fringe of Europe into the blazing furnace of ideas that was the Scottish Enlightenment. Ideas that would change the world forever.

… I am truly appalled that the legacy of Aikenhead and the Scottish Enlightenment…has been trashed by the Scottish Parliament and the Yousaf Government. From April 1st 2024, saying the wrong thing at your own dinner table, let alone in a drunken pub rant like young Thomas did, will once again land you in significant trouble with the law, 327 years, eight months and 24 days after Thomas died.

Mr. Yousaf, his ministers and those who drafted and will enforce this law would do well to remember how history judged those who hanged Thomas Aikenhead on that bleak winter morning on the road to Leith. In doing so they should recall that this gross act of overreach and tyranny was the high tide of the power of the Kirk, power which was swept aside by the forces unleashed when the people said ‘enough’.

An important piece from “C.J. Strachan”. Read and circulate the whole thing.

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.

Pacific Heights: A Movie Ahead of Its Time

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Pacific Heights is a 1990 movie starring Michael Keaton, Melanie Griffith, and Matthew Modine. Conventionally described as a “psychological thriller,” or a horror movie it’s actually a Kafkaesque analysis of tenancy rights and the legal system. The movie centers on a young couple, Drake and Patty, who purchase a San Francisco Victorian with dreams of fixing it up and renting several of the units to help pay the mortgage. Their dream turns into a nightmare  when Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) moves in and exploits tenant protection laws to torment and exploit them.

Hayes moves in without permission and without paying rent and he changes the locks. It doesn’t matter. When Drake (Modine) shuts off the power and heat, Hayes calls the police and the police explain to Drake:

What you did is against the law….turn the power and heat back on and apologize because according to the California civil code he has a right to sue and most likely he will win. If he’s in, he has rights, that’s how it works.

A lawyer later adds “He’s taken possession so whether he signed a lease or paid money or not he’s legally your tenant now and he is protected by laws that say you have to go to court to prove that he has to be evicted but the net effect of these laws is to…slowly drive you bankrupt and insane.”

What makes Pacific Heights a horror movie is that the tenant’s rights laws depicted are very real. Here’s just one example of thousands from NYC:

As I wrote on twitter “Decades of anti-landlord legislation has created a moocher-class of squatters who steal homes and then call the police on the owners.” Moreover, even today such laws continue to be added to the books. A bill in Congress, for example, would prevent landlords from being able to screen tenants for criminal records.

All of this has been exacerbated recently by COVID laws preventing eviction (some of which remain but which acclimatized some tenants to not paying rent and contributed to court backlogs), court backlogs and the greater ease of finding unoccupied houses using foreclosure data, death announcements, Zillow and so forth. In extreme cases it can take decades to evict a squatter who uses the law to their advantage.

Returning to Pacific Heights, what the movie gets wrong is the second half where Patty (Melanie Griffith) extracts revenge against Hayes. A less cathartic but more accurate ending would have had the couple exhausted with the complexities of tenant law and the court system and finally giving up when they realize that the law is not for them. Instead, they pay Carter Hayes a ransom to leave their own home. Of course, Drake and Patty choose never to rent to anyone ever again.

My excellent Conversation with Marilynne Robinson

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s best and best-known novelists and essayists, whose award-winning works like Housekeeping and Gilead explore themes of faith, grace, and the intricacies of human nature. Beyond her writing, Robinson’s 25-year tenure at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop allowed her to shape and inspire the new generations of writers. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, displays her scholarly prowess, analyzing the biblical text not only through the lens of religious doctrine but also appreciating it as a literary masterpiece.

She joined Tyler to discuss betrayal and brotherhood in the Hebrew Bible, the relatable qualities of major biblical figures, how to contend with the Bible’s seeming contradictions, the true purpose of Levitical laws, whether we’ve transcended the need for ritual sacrifice, the role of the Antichrist, the level of biblical knowledge among students, her preferred Bible translation, whether The Winter’s Tale makes sense, the evolution of Calvin’s reputation and influence, why academics are overwhelmingly secular, the success of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, why she wrote a book on nuclear pollution, what she’ll do next, and more.

And an excerpt:

COWEN: As a Calvinist, too, would not, in general, dismiss the Old Testament, what do you make of a book such as Leviticus? It’s highly legalistic, highly ritualistic. Some Christians read Leviticus and become a split Christian Jew almost. Other Christians more or less dismiss the book. How does it fit into your worldview?

ROBINSON: I think that when you read Herodotus, where he describes these little civilizations that are scattered over his world — he describes them in terms of what they eat or prohibit, or they paint themselves red, or they shave half their head. There are all these very arbitrary distinctions that people make in order to identify with one clan over against another.

At the point of Leviticus, which of course, is an accumulation of many texts over a very long time, no doubt, but nevertheless, to think of it as being Moses — he is trying to create a defined, distinctive human community. By making arbitrary distinctions between people so that you’re not simply replicating notions of what is available or feasible or whatever, but actually asking them to adopt prohibitions of food — that’s a very common distinguishing thing in Herodotus and in contemporary life.

So, the arbitrariness of the laws is not a fault. It is a way of establishing identification of one group as separate from other groups.

COWEN: So, you read it as a narrative of how human communities are created, but you still would take a reading of, say, Sermon on the Mount that the Mosaic law has been lifted? Or it’s still in place?

ROBINSON: Oh, it’s not still in place. We’ve been given other means by which to create identity. Moses was doing something distinctive in a certain period of the evolution of Israel as a people. He didn’t want them to be Egyptians. He didn’t want them to subscribe to the prevailing culture, which was idolatrous, and so on. He’s doing Plato in The Republic. He’s saying, “This is how we develop the idea of a community.”

Having said that, then there are certain other things like “Thou shall not kill,” or whatever, that become characterizing laws. Jesus very often says, when someone says to him, “How can I be saved?” He says, “You know the commandments.” It’s not as if God is an alien figure from the point of view of Christ, whom we take to be his son.

Interesting throughout.

*Build, Baby, Build*, by Bryan Caplan

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is my blurb for the book:

“Bryan Caplan is a pioneer in the use of graphic novels to expound economic concepts. His new book Build, Baby, Build is thus a landmark in economic education, how to present economic ideas, and the integration of economic analysis and graphic visuals. If you want to learn the economics, ethics, and political economy of YIMBY— namely the freedom to build this is the very best place to start.”

And from Bryan:

Please forgive my laughable arrogance, but I assure you that BBB is the most fascinating book on housing regulation ever written. In fact, I assure you that there will never be a more fascinating book on housing regulation!

While objective self-interest impels you to buy the book as soon as it releases, it would be a huge favor to me if you would take the extra step of pre-ordering right away from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Apple Books, or anywhere else. Why? Because all pre-orders count as “first-week sales” for national best-seller lists — and I’m aiming high.

Here is the book’s home page.  It is really very good.