What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

James J. Walsh, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries.  Eccentric, published long ago, not correct, yet full of vitality and insight.  So many of the key pieces of the West already were in place by that time.  So recommended, this one just has been reissued.  How was the Giotto chapel in Padua possible?  Parsival?  This book gives you a start on those questions.

Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America 1934-1971.  Yes, it made me order and want to read the first volume as well.  This is likely the best biography of Stravinsky and his musical times.

Rochelle Gurstein, Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art.  On the importance of classics, and common standards for classics, if art is going to challenge and improve us.  The book is also sufficiently appreciative of Canova, one of the most impressive artists of all time but somehow these days underdiscussed.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, offers a scientific look at how fatherhood and raising children changes the minds, bodies, and behaviors of men.

Sulmaan Wasif Khan, The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between.  I’ve been following this issue for a long time, so I don’t feel I learned much from this book.  But for most people, especially younger people, it is a very good introduction to the longer history.

Douglas Porch, Resistance and Liberation, France at War 1942-1945.  Too detailed for my purposes, so I stopped reading it.  But this volume seems to be a major historical achievement, and a must read for at least some subset of humans.

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road.  This is the British novel that now everyone there is reading and talkinig about.  A “cast of characters” and “biting portrait” sort of thing, reflecting modern Britain, most of all London, today.  I read about fifty pages, found it highly engaging, and then decided the rest would be a waste of my time.

Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revoluton

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.

After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.

In a remarkable new paper, Juhász, Sakabe, and Weinstein show how the key to this transformation was a massive effort to translate and codify technical information in the Japanese language. This state-led initiative made cutting-edge industrial knowledge accessible to Japanese entrepreneurs and workers in a way that was unparalleled among non-Western countries at the time.

Here’s an amazing graph which tells much of the story. In both 1870 and 1910 most of the technical knowledge of the world is in French, English, Italian and German but look at what happens in Japan–basically no technical books in 1870 to on par with English in 1910. Moreover, no other country did this.

Translating a technical document today is much easier than in the past because the words already exist. Translating technical documents in the late 19th century, however, required the creation and standardization of entirely new words.

…the Institute of Barbarian Books (Bansho Torishirabesho)…was tasked with developing English-Japanese dictionaries to facilitate technical translations. This project was the first step in what would become a massive government effort to codify and absorb Western science. Linguists and lexicographers have written extensively on the difficulty of scientific translation, which explains why little codification of knowledge happened in languages other than English and its close cognates: French and German (c.f. Kokawa et al. 1994; Lippert 2001; Clark 2009). The linguistic problem was two-fold. First, no words existed in Japanese for canonical Industrial Revolution products such as the railroad, steam engine, or telegraph, and using phonetic representations of all untranslatable jargon in a technical book resulted in transliteration of the text, not translation. Second, translations needed to be standardized so that all translators would translate a given foreign word into the same Japanese one.

Solving these two problems became one of the Institute’s main objectives.

Here’s a graph showing the creation of new words in Japan by year. You can see the explosion in new words in the late 19th century. Note that this happened well after the Perry Mission. The words didn’t simply evolve, the authors argue new words were created as a form of industrial policy.

By the way, AstralCodexTen points us to an interesting biography of a translator at the time who works on economics books:

[Fukuzawa] makes great progress on a number of translations. Among them is the first Western economics book translated into Japanese. In the course of this work, he encounters difficulties with the concept of “competition.” He decides to coin a new Japanese word, kyoso, derived from the words for “race and fight.” His patron, a Confucian, is unimpressed with this translation. He suggests other renderings. Why not “love of the nation shown in connection with trade”? Or “open generosity from a merchant in times of national stress”? But Fukuzawa insists on kyoso, and now the word is the first result on Google Translate.

There is a lot more in this paper. In particular, showing how the translation of documents lead to productivity growth on an industry by industry basis and a demonstration of the importance of this mechanism for economic growth across the world.

The bottom line for me is this: What caused the industrial revolution is a perennial question–was it coal, freedom, literacy?–but this is the first paper which gives what I think is a truly compelling answer for one particular case. Japan’s rapid industrialization under the Meiji Restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, codify, and disseminate Western technical knowledge in the Japanese language.

The employment effects of a guaranteed income

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman, Sarah Miller, Here is the link, but I am still sleeping.  Here is the abstract:

We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/ month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.

This is the largest and most extensive RCT of its kind on this issue, and the results are not extremely positive.

*Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Anil Ananthaswamy, an excellent book, it will make the end of year best non-fiction list.  It focuses on machine learning and its offshoots, and you can read it for the story even if you don’t followall of the matrix algebra and the calculus.  It is also the best book I know on how science advances by laying different “bricks,” and later bringing them all together toward a practicable solution.  Recommended.

Hollywood evidence on McCarthyism

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is a new NBER working paper on this topic by Hui Ren Tan and Tianyi Wang, here is the abstract:

We study a far-reaching episode of demagoguery in American history. From the late 1940s to 1950s, anti-communist hysteria led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others gripped the nation. Hundreds of professionals in Hollywood were accused of having ties with the communist. We show that these accusations were not random, targeting those with dissenting views. Actors and screenwriters who were accused suffered a setback in their careers. Beyond the accused, we find that the anti-communist crusade also had a chilling effect on film content, as non-accused filmmakers avoided progressive topics. The decline in progressive films, in turn, made society more conservative.

Here is extensive (positive) commentary by Alice Evans:

    • Dissidents who had organised against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) were 27 to 32 percentage points more likely to be accused.
    • Celebrities – actors with more experience and Academy Award nominations were more likely to be accused.
    • Actors and writers involved in progressive films were more likely to be accused.

Quicker and easier to read than the paper.  I also would like to see numbers on how many exactly were in fact communists.

Will technology improve animal welfare?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

There is, however, some better news on the animal welfare front. The cause is on the verge of some major victories — and they have been earned through technology rather than rhetoric.

The first major development is Ozempic and the other weight-loss drugs in the GLP-1 category. By one estimate, 25,000 Americans start taking these weight-loss drugs every week, and 93 million Americans may meet the criteria for using them. The spread of such drugs to many other countries is likely, especially since they seem to produce health gains above and beyond weight loss.

The logic is simple: People lose weight on these drugs because they eat less, and eating less usually means eating less meat. And less meat consumption results in less factory farming.

This should count as a major victory for animal welfare advocates, even though it did not come about through their efforts. No one had to be converted to vegetarianism, and since these drugs offer other benefits, this change in the equilibrium is self-sustaining and likely to grow considerably. Yes, it is only a partial victory, but total victory was unlikely anyway.

And this:

There is yet a third reason for animal welfare advocates to be optimistic. It is more speculative, but now seems less crazy than it used to: Super-powered AI could help us observe and learn animal languages, thus enabling humans to converse with at least some of the smarter (or at least more articulate?) animals. There is already a project at UC-Berkeley to converse with sperm whales by decoding their language and translating it to English, using techniques drawn from large-language models.

If we could talk with animals — and hear their complaints and descriptions of their own suffering — would we be less likely to eat them and treat them badly? How would we respond to the pleas of dolphins to stop using our nets to catch tuna, a process which kills many dolphins?

This is some chance this strategy could backfire; dolphins, for instance, may not be as charming as people think. Nonetheless, it holds at least some chance of a revolution in how we humans think of our relations with the rest of the animal kingdom.

Do you think there are any animals we could talk into vegetarianism, if only for marginal changes?  If not, why be so optimistic that humans will change?  Or maybe underneath it all, you do think that humans are somewhat special?

Government Litigation Risk and the Decline in Low-Income Mortgage Lending

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is a new paper from W. Scott Frame, Kristopher Gerardi, Erik J. Mayer, Billy Y. Xu, and Lawrence Chengzhi Zhao at the Atlanta Fed:

We study the effect of Department of Justice lawsuits in the 2010s against large lenders for alleged fraud in the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program. The suits led to more than $5 billion in settlements and caused targeted banks and their peers to precipitously exit the FHA market. Difference-in-differences and triple differences tests exploiting geographic variation in exposure to exiting banks show a 20 percent reduction in FHA lending in heavily exposed areas. This reduction was not associated with improved underwriting standards or lower default rates. Large banks’ FHA exit has significantly reduced low-income households’ overall access to mortgage credit.

Via Moses Sternstein, who also discusses it.

The economics of GLP-1

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Frank Fuhrig:

Lean protein “emerged as the biggest winner” on supermarket shelves among shoppers who have taken popular new weight-loss drugs, according to a report using consumer surveys.

Data analytics firm Grocery Doppio’s “State of Digital Grocery Performance Scorecard: H1 2024” found reduced grocery spending among 97% of consumers who had taken GLP-1 medications — glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, including semaglutide drugs Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy, prescribed for diabetes or obesity.

Their grocery bills were down by an average of 11%, yet they spent 27% more on lean proteins from lean meat, eggs and seafood. Other gainers were meal replacements (19%), healthy snacks (17%), whole fruits and vegetables (13%) and sports and energy drinks (7%).

Snacks and soda took the brunt of reduced spending by consumers after GLP-1 treatment: snacks and confectionary (-52%), prepared baked goods (-47%), soda/sugary beverages (-28%), alcoholic beverages (-17%) and processed food (-13%).

In an accompanying survey of U.S. grocery executives, 77% said they would respond to the trend among users of the fast-spreading medications by expanding and deepening assortments including more portion-control sizing and packaging. Another 71% said they would increase digital marketing efforts on health and “food as medicine.”

Past diet trends such as low-carb keto plans have also favored lean protein. A Rabobank research report in March examined the dietary benefits of a greater focus on lean protein and suggested that industry could reformulate ultra-processed foods to raise protein and combat obesity.

Despite the rapid adoption of GLP-1 drugs, grocery sales in January to June 2024 hit $458 billion, up 3.8% compared to the first half of last year, the report showed.

Here is the gated link, via J.  I wonder if the behavior of the later adopters will be any different.  There is, after all, an alternative equilibrium where people simply eat a lot more ice cream, knowing they can do so and still lose weight.