What I’ve been reading
1. Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. Lots of information about Jane Jacobs, so it has to be a good book and indeed it is. I found Becoming Jane Jacobs more engaging to read, but this one covered the latter part of her life in great detail, unlike the previous bio.
2. Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond. This is not a plot-based novel, rather it is Irish and poetic and much of it I read a second time. Most of you would find it frustrating.
3. Alain Bresson, The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy. I would not describe this as stirring narrative, but that is more the nature of the material than any fault of the author. It is by far the most comprehensive treatment of what we know about the ancient Greek economy. Here is Mark Koyama on theorizing about ancient economies. NB: I have only browsed this book.
4. John Stubbs, Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel. A good detailed biography, focusing more on Swift’s times, Ireland, and religious and political disputes, rather than Swift as writer per se. A very useful supplement to the other major Swift biographies.
5. Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War. The best, clearest, and most instructive military history of the Civil War I have ever read; the pre-history summary of war origins is good too. Someday I should write a full post on all the reasons why I find so many Civil War military history books unreadable, in the meantime this one hit a home run. By the way, the two authors live in Fairfax, VA.
Also noteworthy is Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation.
Richard English, Does Terrorism Work? is a good, balanced historical look at what terrorists have and have not achieved. The best chapter was on Ireland, and the book is mainly non-Muslim examples.
Arrived in my pile, and looking very interesting, are:
Roger E.A. Farmer, Prosperity For All: How to Prevent Financial Crises.
Adrian Goldsworthy, Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World.
Give me video games or give me death
Once the craft approaches Mars — a trip of about 20 months or more — the craft will have to get through the atmosphere, reaching a temperature of 1,700°C, and use rockets to lower the craft gently onto the moon.
That is a description of the new Elon Musk plan to settle Mars. He hinted at the ticket price someday being as low as 200k. By the way, space flight is bad for your eyes, and here is Alex on the dangers of space travel.
I get that planet earth someday may be destroyed, but does that give anyone a private incentive to leave for Mars in the meantime?
Seasteading is looking better all the time…
Arrived in my pile
Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan.
Self-recommending, I will start it as soon as possible.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Missing moods. And apolitical reasons to hate politics.
2. No boo necklace markets in everything. Avoid those monsters.
3. The Jewish-American accent. And Donald Trump’s linguistic style.
4. Alan Turing’s computer-generated music has been restored.
5. “A boom in electric cars means Europe would have to look at building the equivalent of nearly 50 power stations the size of the UK’s planned Hinkley Point nuclear plant, EU experts have warned. And if big fleets of plug-in cars are charged with electricity from power plants burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, overall levels of sulphur dioxide air pollution are likely to rise, a study from the government-funded European Environment Agency shows.” FT link here.
Those new service sector jobs, anti-drone falconer edition the drone wars have begun
It was said before that wedding that there would be ‘White House-level security,’ and there was an anti-drone falconer on the property.
The headline of the story is:
Art scion, 46, marries billionaire’s daughter, 23, in $5million French Riviera fete with ‘White House-level security’ and guests including Heidi Klum, the Olsen twins, Princess Bea and groomsman Owen Wilson
And do note:
The wedding took place at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France
For the pointer I thank Neville Andrew Mehra.
Peter Navarro outlines the Trump economic plan
To score the benefits of eliminating trade deficit drag, we don’t need any complex computer model. We simply add up most (if not all) of the tax revenues and capital expenditures that would be gained if the trade deficit were eliminated. We have modeled only the impacts of implicit profits and wages, not any other economic aspect of the increased activity.
Trump proposes eliminating America’s $500 billion trade deficit through a combination of increased exports and reduced imports. Again assuming labor is 44 percent of GDP, eliminating the deficit would result in $220 billion of additional wages. This additional wage income would be taxed at an effective rate of 28 percent (including trust taxes), yielding additional tax revenues of $61.6 billion.
In addition, businesses would earn at least a 15% profit margin on the $500 billion of incremental revenues, and this translates into pretax profits of $75 billion. Applying Trump’s 15% corporate tax rate, this results in an additional $11.25 billion of taxes.
Emphasis is added by this author.
Here is the full document (pdf). Here is my earlier profile of Peter Navarro. For the pointer I thank the excellent Binyamin Appelbaum.
Addendum: Scott Sumner comments.
Sentences about macroeconomics
From Brinca, Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan, there is a new NBER paper “Accounting for Business Cycles“:
First with the notable exception of the United States, Spain, Ireland, and Iceland, the Great Recession was driven primarily by the efficiency wedge. Second, in the Great Recession, the labor wedge plays a dominant role only in the United States, and the investment wedge plays a dominant role in Spain, Ireland, and Iceland. Third, in the recessions of the 1980s, the labor wedge played a dominant role only in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and New Zealand. Finally, in the Great Recession the efficiency wedge played a much more important role and the investment wedge played a less important role than they did in the recessions of the 1980s.
You don’t have to agree with each and every claim there to see that a simple AS-AD model won’t give you enough structure to seriously address such questions. And:
The first misconception is that efficiency wedges in a prototype model can only come from technology shocks…In our judgment, by far the least interesting interpretation of efficiency wedges is as narrowly interpreted shocks to the blueprints governing individual firm production functions.
As a good first-order approximation, everything you read about “real business cycle theory” from its non-practitioners in the popular realm is wrong. Except the very phrase “real business cycle theory” isn’t even the correct term here. Better would be “contemporary macroeconomics,” although then the sense-reference distinction is going to play havoc with the first sentence of this paragraph.
Power Poses Are Dead
Dana Carney one of the co-authors of the famous paper (462 citations) that led to the famous TED talk (36 million views) and innumerable articles in the popular press on “power poses” (e.g. This Simple ‘Power Pose’ Can Change Your Life And Career) writes that after reviewing the evidence:
- 1. I do not have any faith in the embodied effects of “power poses.” I do not think the effect is real.
- 2. I do not study the embodied effects of power poses.
- 3. I discourage others from studying power poses.
- 4. I do not teach power poses in my classes anymore.
- 5. I do not talk about power poses in the media and haven’t for over 5 years (well before skepticism set in)
- 6. I have on my website and my downloadable CV my skepticism about the effect and links to both the failed replication by Ranehill et al. and to Simmons & Simonsohn’s p-curve paper suggesting no effect. And this document.
This cannot have been easy to write. Bravo.
Is American Pet Health Care (Also) Uniquely Inefficient?
That is the title of the new NBER paper by Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Atul Gupta, here is the abstract:
We document four similarities between American human healthcare and American pet care: (i) rapid growth in spending as a share of GDP over the last two decades; (ii) strong income-spending gradient; (iii) rapid growth in the employment of healthcare providers; and (iv) similar propensity for high spending at the end of life. We speculate about possible implications of these similar patterns in two sectors that share many common features but differ markedly in institutional features, such as the prevalence of insurance and of public sector involvement.
Note that the number of veterinarians doubled from 1996 to 2013. The authors do not seem to have data on whether cats and dogs live longer in the United States, but I have a surmise…
Here are ungated copies of the paper.
Assorted Monday links
2. Theodore W. Anderson, econometrician, has passed away.
3. Punishment in a world of life extension.
4. NYT reviews Abbey Road in 1969 and basically slams it. The reviewer hated George’s songs on the album and confuses Paul’s voice with John’s, among other mistakes.
5. The visual design problems with U.S. coins.
6. The new Aguiar, Bils, Charles, and Hurst paper on leisure and the decline of work (pdf): “We use estimated “Leisure Engel Curves” to calculate that changes in leisure technology for computer goods broadly, and video games in particular, shift the labor supply curve by an amount between 10 and 25 percent of the observed decline in market work hours for prime age men and between 20 and 45 percent of the decline in market work hours for LEYM [less educated young men].”
China fact of the day
The Chinese government estimates females found 55 percent of new Internet companies and more than a quarter of all entrepreneurs are women. In the U.S., only 22 percent of startups have one or more women on their founding teams, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya for their book ‘Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology.’
That is from Shai Oster and Selina Wang. Some of that may stem from the one-child policy, but note ex-communist countries have relatively good records of producing female CEOs.
Is “hard Brexit” becoming more or less likely?
You can argue it either way. On one hand, the forward march of the UK economy, and the inability to develop a coherent negotiating position, militate in favor of a relatively quick and condition-less Brexit. The European Union is not offering any very flexible intermediate deals, perhaps to punish future would-be leavers. On the other hand, the consequences would be sobering (FT):
Research by the FT shows the scale of the UK-based banks using passporting to sell into the EU. The group of 96 banks has assets of £7.5tn, directly employ more than 590,000 people and make annual profits of around £50bn.
Bank executives say EU passporting makes up 20-25 per cent of the London business of international investment banks, including the five big US players, who have assets of £1.5tn and staff of 21,000 in their UK-based banks, and the two big Swiss, which have assets of £415bn and staff of more than 6,000.
And:
…John Holland-Kaye, chief executive of Heathrow, warned that leaving the EU customs union would “add massive overhead” for businesses and port operators. “Can you imagine operating something like the Euro[tunnel] if you had to suddenly build in all these checks in place? It would be completely unmanageable,” he told the FT.
This explainer of the “gravity model of trade” shows the UK could not make up lost EU business elsewhere in the world. Oil and a few other commodities aside, you trade with the countries that are next to you.
Overall, the Brexit stakes are higher than a few months ago, and that is making the final outcome harder not easier to predict.
Sunday assorted links
1. Doubts about the supposed Chinese skeletons found in Rome, 3-5th century A.D. Still, China to Rome just isn’t that far, and it is naive to believe this kind of contact didn’t exist. Study the history of the Polynesians.
2. The main influences on Sam Bowman.
3. Puffin topology, with violin (short video).
4. Afghan Bistro in Springfield, the best Afghan food I’ve had, get the Aushak, kadu, and eggplant.
5. Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, newly released in an accessible, English subtitled form, shows that even his “minor” works are better than almost anything else.
*Hitler’s Soldiers*
The author is Ben H. Shepherd and the subtitle is The German Army in the Third Reich. That may seem like a timeworn topic, but I found this book consistently fresh and interesting, also well-written, analytic throughout, one of the year’s best non-fiction studies. Here is one bit:
Two occupied populations whom the German army particularly tried to cultivate were the Muslim peoples of the Crimea and the Caucasus. The Sunni Tatars comprised a quarter of the Crimea’s population, and German army administrators saw them, as they would also come to see their Muslim brethren in the Caucasus, as presenting an opportunity to woo Islam in the Soviet Union for political and military gain. The Germans granted the Tatars religious rights and concessions and reintroduced major religious holidays, and Manstein’s otherwise infamous November 1941 order required his troops to treat the Tatars with respect…the Germans appointed a Muslim committee to re-establish the religious infrastructure.
…Yet the failings of German occupation were soon apparent to these Muslim peoples.
Overall the message is that the German army was less effective and less moral [sic] than many other historians had suggested. Recommended.
Are lies better than hypocrisy?, with special reference to some current events
When should you place a higher penalty on transparently false outright repeated lies, and when should you be more upset by hypocrisy, namely a mix of altruism and self-interest and greed and defensiveness, bundled with self-deception and pawned off to everyone including yourself as sheer goodness? In recent times the question has taken on further import.
“Here’s the part of the 2016 story that will be hardest to explain after it’s… over: Trump did not deceive anyone.”
reporters take Trump literally and not seriously. We take Trump seriously but not literally.
in general, i prefer liars to hypocrites. A liar knows the truth and is cold-bloodedly trying to deceive you, probably for material profit or personal advantage, or malevolence – but in himself he knows the truth and so the situation is less unreal than with the hypocrite; for the hypocrite’s motive is often self-righteousness mingled with material profit and personal advantage. And the hypocrite believes his own lies, so the situation is wholly unreal, saturated with deception. With the liar one can at least guess there is a real human being somewhere behind the lies, watching, calculating; and sometimes in the midst of the deception one catches this real human being’s eye, and there is a moment of mutual recognition – that he is lying and he knows she is lying, and you know too, but of course neither will say so. With the hypocrite, all is false – through and through deception.
For purposes of illumination, say you treat this as a principal-agent problem. You sometimes prefer if your children lie to you transparently than if they are more deviously hypocritical, even if the lies in the former case are greater. The former case establishes a precedent that you can see through their claims, and they will not try so hard to disguise the fraud. So transparent lies about taking out the garbage are excused if you know you can see through the later claims about drugs and drink and prepping for the SAT.
You are more worried about the hypocrite when you see bigger decisions and announcements down the road than what is being faced now. You are more worried about the hypocrite when you fear disappointment, and have experienced disappointment repeatedly in the past. You are more worried about the hypocrite when you fear it is all lies anyway. Lies, in a way, give you a chance to try out “the liar relationship,” whereas hypocrisy does not. You thus fear that hypocrisy may lead to a worse outcome down the road or at the very least more anxiety along the way.
But note: for a more institutional and distanced principal-agent relationship, it is often incorrect, and indeed dangerous, to rely on your intuitions from personalized principal-agent problems.
When it comes to how the agent speaks to allies and enemies, you almost always should prefer hypocrisy to bald-faced lies. The history and practice of diplomacy show this. Allies and enemies, especially from other cultures, don’t know how to process the lies the way you can process the blatant lies of your children, friends, and spouse. They will think some of these lies are mere hypocrisy and that can greatly increase uncertainty and maybe lead to open conflict. North Korea aside, the prevailing international equilibrium is “hypocrisy only,” and those are the signals everyone has decades of experience in reading.
Josh Barro tweeted:
People pretending to be better than they are is what holds society together.
International society too.
There is such a hullaballoo in my Twitter feed every day about the lies. “It is now time to expose the lies!” I feel sad when I read this, because many of the American people already are putting up with the lies or even welcoming them. I do not see that as a correct course of action, as it is confusing personal morality with the abstract rules and principles that underlie social order (which is what voters almost always do, by the way). We need continuing hypocrisy in the international order, and thus from our distanced political agents, even if we don’t want more of it in our personal lives.
I do not see enough people trying to understand lies vs. hypocrisy. In fact it is tough for many people to make this leap, because doing so requires a Hayekian stress on the distinction between the personal and the abstract political and rules-based order. That distinction does not always come easily to the non-Hayekians who comprise most of my Twitter feed. They are very quick to invoke their own personal morality to attempt to settle political disputes.
Note also that if citizens care more about hypocrisy than lies, the media will in turn be harsher with hypocrisy than outright lies. Some foundations will be covered (and criticized) more than others, even if the less-covered foundation has done more wrong and in a more blatant manner. Covering hypocrisy also usually involves a longer story with more successive revelations and more twists and turns and narrative suspense and room for ambiguity and competing interpretations.
Furthermore, in this equilibrium the defenders of the morality of the hypocritical agent will in fact make things worse for that agent. The hypocrisy will become not just a personal hypocrisy of the agent, but rather a broader, almost conspiratorial hypocrisy of greater society. So the more you think one (hypocritical) agent is getting unfair press coverage, and the more you defend that agent, the worse you make it for that agent.
Talking about the lies of the lying agent may help that agent win popularity, by turning voter attention to the “lies vs. hypocrisy” framing rather than “experience vs. incompetence.” The lying agent has at least some chance in the former battle, but not much in the latter.
I wonder if earnest Millennials have a special dislike of hypocrisy.
Think about it. Or if not, at least pretend you will.