Emergent Ventures winners 48th cohort
Minh Nguyen, Dallas, 16, to address problems of space debris.
Serena Chen and Valerie Wu, Taipei and Los Angeles, better blood transportation.
Griffin Li, Boston, 19, general career support, issues in market pricing on apps.
Jamie Croucher, London, for a new scientific society, Society for Technological Advancement.
Sri Anumakonda, Carnegie Mellon, robotic hands.
Ben James, London, lowering the price of electricity.
Lucio Aurelio Moreira Menezes, Fortaleza and Stanford, computational biology.
Lauren Gilbert, London, a progress-oriented magazine for the developing world?
Annika Baberwal, Dubai, 8th grade, helping race cars run faster.
Bernardo Melotti, Bologna/Stanford, equipment to speed biological advances.
Elyas Sepahi, London, mathematics and machine learning.
Harishvin Sasikumar, Vancouver, 17, brain interfaces.
The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills
This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills—potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Saturday assorted links
1. John Brennan clarifies on UAPs.
2. “For the rest of the world, including Europe, wide adoption of US dollar stablecoins for payment purposes would be equivalent to the privatization of seigniorage by global actors,” notes Hélène Rey, an economist, who fears rising “tax evasion” and “lower demand for non-US government bonds”. FT link here.
3. “Puffins have been seen on the Isle of Muck in County Antrim for the first time in years, after a major scheme to remove invasive brown rats.” Link here.
5. Is there some economic recovery in Nigeria?
6. Charles Murray on finding religion.
7. Ross Douthat with Paul Kingsnorth (NYT).
The spatial construction of Incan monies?
Money can be many things, but this to me is a new one. Or is it?
Stretching for 1.5km and consisting of approximately 5200 precisely aligned holes, Monte Sierpe in southern Peru is a remarkable construction that likely dates to at least the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1400) and saw continued use by the Inca (AD 1400–1532). Yet its function remains uncertain. Here, the authors report on new analyses of drone imagery and sediment samples that reveal numerical patterns in layout, potential parallels with Inca knotted-string records and the presence of crops and wild plants. All this, the authors argue, suggests that Monte Sierpe functioned as a local, Indigenous system of accounting and exchange.
That is newly published research from Jacob L. Bongers, et.al. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Was Brexit worse than we had thought?
This paper examines the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning micro-literature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
*The Science of Second Chances*
The author is economist Jennifer Doleac, and the subtitle is A Revolution in Criminal Justice. Excerpt:
We found that adding anyone charged with a felony to the law enforcement DNA database in Denmark reduced future criminal convictions by over 40 percent. Again, people responded to the higher probability of getting caught by committing fewer crimes. Being added to the database also increased enrollment in school and rates of employment — signs that folks really were on a better path. This effect was largest for the youngest men, those ages eighteen to twenty-four.
Incentives matter. An excellent book, recommended, due out next year.
Friday assorted links
1. Coetzee started as a programmer.
2. How is the Norwegian wealth tax working out?
3. Netta Engelhardt talk on the black hole information paradox. I think of it as a talk on faster than light travel.
4. Did prisons just replace mental hospitals?
5. “Date me” doc from a highly intelligent and aesthetic woman.
“Some Economics of Artificial Super Intelligence”
I promised to pass along serious models of pending AI doom, especially if they are peer-reviewed or at least headed for such. The AI doomer types still are dropping the ball on this, but one economist has made a contribution and so here it is from Henry A. Thompson:
Conventional wisdom holds that a misaligned artificial superintelligence (ASI) will destroy humanity. But the problem of constraining a powerful agent is not new. I apply classic economic logic of interjurisdictional competition, all-encompassing interest, and trading on credit to the threat of misaligned ASI. Using a simple model, I show that an acquisitive ASI refrains from full predation under surprisingly weak conditions. When humans can flee to rivals, inter-ASI competition creates a market that tempers predation. When trapped by a monopolist ASI, its “encompassing interest” in humanity’s output makes it a rational autocrat rather than a ravager. And when the ASI has no long-term stake, our ability to withhold future output incentivizes it to trade on credit rather than steal. In each extension, humanity’s welfare progressively worsens. But each case suggests that catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. The dismal science, ironically, offers an optimistic take on our superintelligent future.
You may or may not agree, but as usual the point is to build out a literature, not to regard any single paper as the final word. Via the excellent Joy Buchanan.
My first trip to Tokyo
To continue with the biographical segments:
My first trip to Tokyo was in 1992. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and my friend Dan Klein contacted me and said “Hey, I have a work trip to Tokyo, do you want to meet me there?” And so I was off, even though the flight was more of a drag than I had been expecting. It is a long way up the Pacific.
Narita airport I found baffling, and it was basically a two hour, multi-transfer trip to central Tokyo. Fortunately, a Japanese woman was able to help us make the connections. I am glad these days that the main flights come into Haneda.
(One Japan trip, right before pandemic, I decided to spend a whole day in Narita proper. Definitely recommended for its weirdness. Raw chicken was served in the restaurants, and it felt like a ghost town except for some of the derelicts in the streets. This experience showed me another side of Japan.)
We stayed in a business hotel in Ikebukuro, a densely populated but not especially glamorous part of Tokyo. It turned out that was a good way to master the subway system and also to get a good sense of how Tokyo was organized. I had to one-shot memorize the rather complicated footpath from the main subway station to the hotel, which had been chosen by my friend’s sponsors. As we first emerged from the subway station, we had, getting there the first time, to ask two Japanese high schoolers to help us find the way. They spoke only a few words of English, but we showed them the address in Japanese and they even carried our bags for us, grunting “Hai!” along the way, giving us a very Japanese experience.
In those days very little English was spoken in Tokyo, especially outside a few major areas such as Ginza. You were basically on your own.
I recall visiting the Sony Center, which at the time was considered the place to go to see new developments in “tech.” I marveled at the 3-D TV, and realized we had nothing like it. I felt like I was glimpsing the future, but little did I know the technology was not going anywhere. Nor for that matter was the company. Here is Noah, wanting the Japanese future back.
Most of all, Tokyo was an extreme marvel to me. I felt it was the single best and most interesting place I had visited. Everywhere I looked — even Ikebukuro — there was something interesting to take note of. The plastic displays of food in the windows (now on the way out, sadly) fascinated me. The diversity, order, and package wrapping sensibilities of the department stores were amazing. The underground cities in the subways had to be seen to be believed (just try emerging from Shinjuku station and finding the right exit). The level of dress and stylishness and sophistication was extreme, noting I would not say the same about Tokyo today. This was not long after the bubble had burst, but the city still had the feel of prosperity. Everything seemed young and dynamic.
I also found Tokyo affordable. The reports of the $2,000 melon were true, but the actual things you would buy were somewhat cheaper than in say New York City. It was easy to get an excellent meal for ten dollars, and without much effort. My hotel room was $50 a night. The subway was cheap, and basically you could walk around and look at things for free. The National Museum was amazing, one of the best in the world and its art treasures cannot, in other forms, readily be seen elsewhere.
Much as I like Japanese food, I learned during this trip that I cannot eat it many meals in a row. This was the journey where I realized Indian food (!) is my true comfort food. Tokyo of course has (and had) excellent Indian food, just as it has excellent food of virtually every sort. I learned a new kind of Chinese food as well.
The summer heat did not bother me. I also learned that Tokyo is one of the few cities that is better and more attractive at night.
I recall wanting to buy a plastic Godzilla toy. I walked around the proper part of town, and kept on asking for Godzilla. I could not figure out why everyone was staring at me like I was an idiot, learning only later that the Japanese say “Gojira.” So in a pique of frustration, I did my best fire-breathing, stomping around, “sound like a gorilla cry run backwards through the tape” imitation of Godzilla. Immediately a Japanese man excitedly grabbed me by the hand, walked me through some complicated market streets, and showed me where I could buy a Godzilla, shouting “Gojira, Gojira, Gojira!” the whole time.
I came away happy.
My side trip, by the way, was to the shrines and temples of Kamakura, no more than an hour away but representing another world entirely. Recommended to any of you who are in Tokyo with a day to spare.
Now since that time, I’ve never had another Tokyo trip quite like that one. These days, and for quite a while, the city feels pretty normal to me, rather than like visiting the moon. Fluent English is hard to come by, but most people can speak some English and respond to queries. You can translate and get around using GPS, AI, and so on. The city is much more globalized, and other places have borrowed from its virtues as well.
Looking back, I am very glad I visited Tokyo in 1992. The lesson is that you can in fact do time travel. You do it by going to some key places right now.
Markets in everything?
Wealthy foreign gun enthusiasts paid Bosnian Serb forces for the chance to shoot residents of Sarajevo during the siege of the city during the 1990s, according to claims being investigated by Italian magistrates.
The investigation was prompted by new evidence that “weekend snipers” paid handsomely to line the hills around Sarajevo and join in the Bosnian Serb siege, which killed more than 11,500 people between 1992 and 1996 during the Balkan Wars.
The investigation into the alleged “human safari” in Sarajevo has been opened after years of research by the Italian writer Ezio Gavazzeni, who said a key source was a former Bosnian intelligence officer.
“What I learnt is that Bosnian intelligence warned the local office of the Italian secret service … about the presence of at least five Italians who were taken to the hills above Sarajevo to shoot civilians,” he told the Italian daily La Repubblica.
Here is more from the Times of London.
Thursday assorted links
2. John Cochrane on causal identification.
3. What are the density trends in major cities around the world?
4. “You Can Now Invest In A Hedge Fund Dedicated To Hermès Bags.”
5. What does it mean for an experiment to be beautiful?
8. New Yorker fact checkers confirm that AI song really did hit #1 on the C&W charts.
9. Here is the 5.1 Thinking model on different kinds of humor in Woody Allen movies, and then a follow-up question on the influence of Bergman. Impressive, as is the model more generally.
Waymo
Waymo now does highways in the Bay area.
Expanding our service territory in the Bay Area and introducing freeways is built on real-world performance and millions of miles logged on freeways, skillfully handling highway dynamics with our employees and guests in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This experience, reinforced by comprehensive testing as well as extensive operational preparation, supports the delivery of a safe and reliable service.
The future is happening fast.
My Conversation with the excellent Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Donald discuss the Buddha’s 32 bodily marks, whether he died of dysentery, what sets the limits of the Buddha’s omniscience, the theological puzzle of sacred power in an atheistic religion, Buddhism’s elaborate system of hells and hungry ghosts, how 19th-century European atheists invented the “peaceful” Buddhism we know today, whether the axial age theory holds up, what happened to the Buddha’s son Rahula, Buddhism’s global decline, the evidently effective succession process for Dalai Lamas, how a guy from New Jersey created the Tibetan Book of the Dead, what makes Zen Buddhism theologically unique, why Thailand is the wealthiest Buddhist country, where to go on a three-week Buddhist pilgrimage, how Donald became a scholar of Buddhism after abandoning his plans to study Shakespeare, his dream of translating Buddhist stories into new dramatic forms, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Fire is a central theme in Buddhism, right?
LOPEZ: Well, there are hot hells, and there are also cold hells. Fire comes up, really, in the idea of nirvana. Where we see the fire, I think most importantly, philosophically, is the idea of where did the Buddha go when he died? He was not reborn again. They say it’s really just like a flame going out, that is, the flame ends. Where did the fire go? Nowhere, that is, the wood that was producing the flame is all burned up, and you just end. Nirvana is not a place. It’s a state of extinction or what the Buddhists call cessation.
COWEN: What role does blood sacrifice play in Buddhism?
LOPEZ: Well, it’s not supposed to perform any role. There’s no blood sacrifice in Buddhism.
COWEN: No blood sacrifice. How about wrathful deities?
LOPEZ: Wrathful deities — there’re a lot, yes.
COWEN: Then we’re back to supernatural. Again, this gets to my central confusion. It’s atheistic, but there’s some other set of principles in the universe that generate wrathful deities, right?
LOPEZ: Wrathful deities are beings who were humans in one lifetime, animals in another, and born as wrathful deities in another lifetime. Everyone is in the cycle of rebirth. We’ve all been wrathful deities in the past. We’ll be wrathful deities in the future unless we get out soon. It’s this universe of strange beings, all taking turns, shape-shifting from one lifetime to the next, and it goes on forever until we find the way out.
COWEN: Are they like ghosts at all — the wrathful deities?
LOPEZ: There’s a whole separate category of ghosts. The ghosts are often called — if we look at the Chinese translation — hungry ghosts. The ghosts are beings who suffer from hunger and thirst. They are depicted as having distended bellies. They have these horrible sufferings that when they drink water, it turns into molten lead. They’ll eat solid food — it turns into an arrow or a spear. Constantly seeking food, constantly being frustrated, and they appear a lot in Buddhist text. One of the jobs of Buddhist monks and nuns is to feed the hungry ghosts.
COWEN: Is it a fundamental misconception to think of Buddhism as a peaceful religion?
And:
COWEN: …If one goes to Borobudur in Java — spectacular, one of the most amazing places to see in the world.
LOPEZ: Absolutely.
COWEN: We read that it was abandoned. It wasn’t even converted into a tourist site or a place where you would sell things. Why would you just toss away so much capital structure?
LOPEZ: I think it just got overgrown by the jungle. I think that people were not going there. There were no Buddhist pilgrims coming. The populace converted to Islam mostly, and it just fell into decline, just to be revived in the 19th, 20th century.
COWEN: Turn it into a candy store or something! It just seems capital maintenance occurs across other margins. The best-looking building you have — one of the best-looking in the world — is forgotten. Don’t you find that paradoxical?
Definitely recommended, interesting throughout and I learned a great deal doing the prep. One of my favorite episodes of this year. And I am happy to recommend all of Donald’s books on Buddhism.
Prediction markets in everything? Tariff refund edition
Oppenheimer changed its terms from offers earlier this year. The firm said it would consider bids starting at 20 percent per refund claim pertaining to “reciprocal” or IEEPA tariffs and 10 percent for tariffs tied to fentanyl.
Gabriel Rodriguez, the president and co-founder of A Customs Brokerage, in Doral, Fla., and a recipient of several emails from Oppenheimer, said he believed Oppenheimer was offering to pay the equivalent of 80 cents on the dollar per claim.
Here is more from the NYT, via Amy.
Lô Borges, RIP
Here is the obituary, via John.