Monday assorted links
1. Bukele and the future of El Salvador. A good piece, though I don’t agree with everything in there.
2. The Ohio Supreme Court vs. Aristotle?
3. History of early American tariffs.
4. Some new estimates of what people really enjoy.
What do different countries pay for Olympic gold medals?
Via Cremieux, and here is the related Wikipedia page.
What are Republican analysts getting wrong about free trade?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It is true that 19th century tariffs often were high, but they were not the main reason the US became rich (they were an important means of funding the government, given the absence of an income tax). The best economic research shows that what drove US economic growth was population expansion and capital accumulation. Tariffs raised the price of imported capital goods and thus partially discouraged growth, while the US expansion was actually most rapid in non-tradeable goods.
That is Doug Irwin of course. And this:
The US might end subsidizing its domestic drone sector, for example, given the military importance of those devices. But there are limits to how many sectors the US can support or protect. Looking at some of the successes abroad, it is clear that those manufacturing jobs are often very high status and relatively well paid. They attract some of the best talent, as do chip factories in Taiwan or Korea. The US could benefit from reallocating some efforts to defense and defense-related sectors — but it can’t achieve everything all at once. Instead, it needs to prioritize where to put its best talent.
In some cases there is reason to be concerned, for instance by the decline of Boeing, which if anything has been protected too long by its reliance on government as a major customer. Industrial policy or government protections don’t automatically bring quality or commercial success.
And finally:
- Most economists, whether on the left or right, still support free trade.
With national security qualifications, as noted above. Expertise really does matter, and the US has a lot of expertise in free trade. For all the sneering at rarified concepts such as “neoliberalism,” critics of free trade have no new arguments that economists have not already rebutted. And if Republicans are not going to respect expertise in this matter, do you really think they will follow the best available advice in setting up tariffs and industrial policy?
Recommended, interesting throughout.
Germany fact of the day
Here is the source.
Sunday assorted links
1. Why “p doom” is a fruitless endeavor. A very good piece, puts in one place a lot of reasons why so much of the recent discussion has been fruitless.
2. The rise and stagnation of nuclear energy.
3. How much of China’s growth was Solow catch-up growth?
4. Foreign visitors are now less interested in The Met in NYC (NYT).
Rent Control Reduces New Development: Bug or Feature?
The minimum wage will tend to increase unemployment among low-skill workers, often minorities. To many people that’s an argument against the minimum wage. But to progressives at the opening of the 20th century that was an argument for the minimum wage–progressive’s demanded minimum wages to get women and racial minorities out of the work force.
Something similar may be happening with rent control. Rent control reduces new development. Bug or feature? California Republican Tony Strickland argues that reduced development is a feature. New state laws in California prevent cities from restricting development but if rent control was legal cities could be used it to do the same thing just by making it unprofitable to build.
Politico: Strickland said Weinstein’s rent control measure [allowing cities to use rent control] would block “the state’s ability to sue our city” because Huntington Beach could slap steep affordability requirements on new, multi-unit apartment projects that are now exempt from rent control. Such requirements, he argued, could stop development that would “destroy the fabric” of the town’s quaint “Surf City” vibe…. “It gives local governments ironclad protections from the state’s housing policy and therefore overreaching enforcement.”
“On paper, it would be legal to build new homes. But it would be illegal, largely speaking, to make money doing so,” said Louis Mirante…
Hat tip: Ben Krauss at Slow Boring.
Austin Vernon on emissions reduction (from my email)
Tyler,
Your point about easier reductions abroad goes much further than you wrote about. In the US we have already significantly decreased coal usage so electricity generation is roughly a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity generation accounts for half of emissions in countries like China. Many countries haven’t even installed their first battery system, so there is extensive low hanging fruit. And for a range of reasons the installed cost of solar is much lower abroad than in the US so every dollar goes further. In general the US would be much better off with deregulation (ending tariffs, simplifying tax credits, etc.) over adding any more subsidies. I think it would be a net gain for the industry if all subsidies went away but there was also significant deregulation.
As you point out, it is difficult to move the needle in transportation because the investment required is so much larger than in the electricity sector for roughly the same amount of emissions left to abate. There are sub sectors like trucking and commercial vehicles that could go much faster, but again it is probably better to spend the effort making it easier to install high power chargers than direct subsidies. Companies can and do calculate the total cost of ownership for their vehicles and the next generation of commercial EVs and trucks will be in the green without subsidies for many applications. Another policy/tech pairing with high leverage in the transportation space is rapidly legalizing autonomous EVs as they become available.
Industry could also transition quickly once alternative systems are in the money. Systems must be cheap and scalable which requires developing the technology and getting solar panel prices close to the global average (right now prices are 2x-3x higher in the US).
Austin
Here is the Austin Vernon Substack.
Claims about Anchorage (from the comments)
Saturday assorted links
1. Yes, brutalism is underrated, including in El Salvador.
2. Oral history film on James C. Scott.
3. Timothy Gowers on the math DeepMind results.
4. How NATO nuclear doctrine is being revised, an important thread.
5. Is the AI boyfriend business taking off?
The French Olympic opening ceremony
I’ve only seen excerpts, but many people are upset. I can vouch “this is not what I would have done,” but perhaps the over the top, deviance-drenched modes of presentation are reflecting some longer-running strands in French culture. La Cage aux Folles? Le Bal des Folles? The whole Moulin Rouge direction? How about Gustave Moreau, not to mention his lower-quality followers? Jean Paul Gaultier? (NYT, “Fashion Freak Show”) Pierre et Gilles?
Zaza Fournier? Even Rabelais.
In my view, these styles work best on the painted canvas, thus Moreau is the one creator on the list I truly like. But please note these Olympics may be less of a break from traditional French culture — or some of its strands — than you may think at first.
I’m kind of tired of this
First of all, I favor the classical liberal strands on the Right, not the New Right strands, as I have argued repeatedly in the past. So I am not trying here to argue for “my guys.” But the degree of misinformation at the current moment is just staggering, and most intellectual commentators seem to be embracing it or at least tolerating it. For one thing, the whole couch´sofa matter just isn’t true. For another, Trump did not just say, at the end of his recent speech, that democracy will end in four years. Listen to the entirety of the very end of the speech. What he said is that he will end electoral fraud if he wins, and thus, in the future, Republicans won’t need all their supporters to vote to give them huge, fraud-proof margins. (To be clear, that claim itself involves some significant misinformation.) He was not heralding the end of democracy.
Or how about the patently absurd claims from Timothy Snyder, famous historian from Yale, who cannot even get right the events from a few days ago?
If you want, track all the links down yourself. In the meantime, a lot of our elites are embarrassing themselves yet again, and that too is very bad for democracy, not to mention intelligence and intellectual honesty.
The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling
Following a 2018 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, 38 states have legalized sports gambling. We study how this policy has impacted consumer financial health using the state-by-state rollout of legal sports gambling and a large and comprehensive dataset on consumer financial outcomes. Our main finding is that overall, consumers’ financial health is modestly deteriorating as the average credit score in states that legalize sports gambling decreases by roughly 0.3%. The decline in credit score is associated with changes in indicators of excessive debt. We find a substantial increase in bankruptcy rates, debt collections, debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies. We also find that financial institutions respond to the reduced creditworthiness of consumers by restricting access to credit. These results are stronger for states that allow sports gambling online compared to states that restrict access to in-person betting and larger for young men in low-income counties. Together, these results indicate that the ease of access to sports gambling is harming consumer financial health by increasing their level of debt.
That is from a new paper by Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio.
Emergent Ventures India, sixth cohort, post and selection done by Shruti Rajagopalan
Akash Kulgod is a 23-year-old cognitive science graduate from UC Berkeley and chief canine comrade at Dognosis, where he is building tech that increases the bandwidth of human-canine communication. He received his EV grant for a pilot study in Northern Karnataka testing the performance of cyber-canines on multi-cancer screening from breath samples. He writes on his Substack.
A travel grant to the four-member team representing India in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bansko, Bulgaria below:
Faraz Ahmed Siddiqui is a 17-year-old high-school senior from Mumbai. He received his EV Grant to participate in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bansko, Bulgaria, where he won a silver medal. He now aims to popularize linguistics in India. He also enjoys studying and teaching Astronomy and Physics. His team (Anshul, Animikha and Diya) also received a travel grant to participate in the Olympiad.
Anshul Krishnadas Bhagwat is an 18-year-old polyglot, and language and linguistics enthusiast. He speaks over 9 languages fluently (English, Hindi, Konkani, Marathi, Kannada, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French) and is learning many more. He (and his team) received an EV grant to participate in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria, where he won an honorable mention.
Animikha Dutta Dhar is a 16-year-old from Kolkata, passionate about mathematics, linguistics and problem solving. She received her EV grant to participate in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria.
Diya Agrawal is an 18-year-old from Bangalore and is interested in biology, law and linguistics. She received an EV grant for applying to colleges in the US and to participate in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria.
Yakara Ganesh is a 24-year-old social entrepreneur and the founder of Samskar Electronics. He received his EV grant to develop the “Samskar Toy” an interactive device to educate young children about sexual abuse (a very big, and underreported problem in India).
Arpit Shukla is a 25-year-old social entrepreneur and researcher from Varanasi. He received his EV grant to develop and test his low-cost AI based bone conduction hearing aid for those with hearing loss and disability. The device is programmed to prevent the loss of voice data and has active noise cancellation.
Parth Verma is a 26-year-old mechanical engineer and the founder of Bakz4ever. He is working on Carbon Bank Technology, a 2-in-1 climate solution for low-cost Direct Air Carbon Capture with Long Duration Energy storage, to support and stabilize a 100% renewable grid.
Shivaganesh Gaddam is the founder of Zeni5, an innovative neobanking solution designed specifically for students, offering a convenient platform to manage their payments and benefits, introduce them to financial literacy, and reward them through digital gold cashbacks on every purchase.
Shweta Dalmia is a 26-year-old entrepreneur from Delhi, the Founder & CEO of Climapreneur. She received her EV grant to scale her podcast; through which she is bringing forward insights on the climate startup and nonprofit ecosystem and presenting opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Atul Singhal and his co-founder Sudhanshu Singh received their EV grant for scaling their startup Cuvette, which helps connect students from small towns in India looking for internships and jobs in the field of software development to employers. Currently, Cuvette is already being used by 400K+ users and they have around 6,000+ partner companies.
Anagha Rajesh is a 21-year-old chemistry major at BITS Goa and believes the future of computing will be driven by biomolecules. She received an EV grant to build a bacteria-driven DNA nanochip to enable next generation computing and storage. Prior to this, Anagha spent four years building and scaling Yours Mindfully, a mental health non-profit that impacted over 10,000 people.
Gautham Pasupuleti is the CEO and Managing Director of Biodesign Innovation Labs in Bangalore. He received his EV grant to further develop and scale RespirAID, a patented medical technology offering a safe, affordable, and reliable alternative to manual ventilation.
Shashank Aswathanarayana is a 34-year-old music technologist, percussionist and a postdoctoral research scholar at American University. He received an EV grant to travel across Southern India to build a complete acoustic image of Hindu temples.
Shankar Sri is a 22-year-old founder of Sputnik Brain (rebranded in the US as Neural Inception). He’s building a nonsurgical neural interface to democratize access to happiness through the brain’s serotonergic circuits to initially solve the issue of treatment-resistant depression, and eventually hopes to create a suffering-free human civilization.
Rahul Sagar is Global Network Associate Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. He built Ideas of India, a new database that indexes every English-language periodical published in India from 1800-1950. Over 150 researchers have tracked down and indexed these lost publications, resulting in 300,000 entries from over 400 periodicals sourced from 175 libraries worldwide. Rahul’s EV grant will support a hunt “off the grid,” sending out teams to manually search in libraries that only have paper records of their holdings, in the hope of uncovering endangered archives.
Hardeep Gambhir is a 20-year-old from New Delhi/Toronto, interested in improving education and the future of humanity. He received his EV grant for general career development and to take a gap year from university to build his education/community initiative called The Residency, a home for the ambitious.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, fourth cohort, and fifth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Russia facts of the day
A further bump in real wages of up to 3.5 per cent is expected this year, alongside an expected 3 per cent jump in real disposable income, according to Russia’s Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting. The unemployment rate, forecast to hit between 7 and 8 per cent in 2022, is at 2.6 per cent — a record post-Soviet low.
Here is much more from Courtney Weaver and Anastasia Stognei in the FT. Now model that!
Friday assorted links
1. Two Patrick Collison citations on mentorship.
3. Nick Whitaker puts forward AI policy.
4. “The US economy has been expanding for 15 years, only interrupted by 2 months of contraction in early 2020″…and…”The US economy has now been in an expansion for 51 months with annualized real GDP growth of 4.5% over that time.” Links here.
5. “Children’s outcomes are most strongly related to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with, such as those in their own birth cohort, suggesting that the relationship between children’s outcomes and parental employment rates is mediated by social interaction.” That is from some new Chetty mobility results. WSJ coverage here.
That is from Student.