“US-based academics and those at top-ranked institutions exhibit higher egocentrism and toxicity in their tweets”
Compared to other academics, that is. They are still more reasonable than the general public on Twitter. Here is the paper by Prashant Garg and Thiemo Fetzer. Here is a useful tweet storm about the paper. Via Kris Gulati.
*Jan Morris: life from both sides*
That is the recent biography from Paul Clements, which I enjoyed very much. In part I liked it because I have never much loved her writing, or found it insightful. To me the book (to some degree unintentionally) raises the questions of why so much travel writing does not age well, and why so much travel writing is simply boring to read, even though a trip to the same place might be fascinating.
Here was one good passage:
…at a conservative estimate, Morris’s books alone contain more than five million words — and then there is her journalism and literary criticism, which run to several million more. From the days of the Arab News Agency in 1948 until its conclusion, her career spanned seventy-three years of publication. Every aspect of her life fuelled her writing; her entire published corpus, from 1956 to 2021, totalled fifty-eight books, while she edited a further five volumes.
Posterity will remember Jan Morris. What makes her work sui generis is the genre-less way that she combined topography, the social landscape, history, personal anecdote, and an acute imagination. Morris forged an unlikely style that was vigorous, precise, and entertaining. Hers was a language nourished by the music of childhood, conditioned by The Book of Common Prayer and Shakespeare, energised by journalism, and inspired by travelling the world as a student of human nature. Like all writers, Morris had her foibles: her voluptuous vocabulary included words such as ‘tatterdemalion,’ ‘swagger,’ ‘gallimaufry,’ ‘coruscate,’ ‘fizz,’ ‘parvenu,’ ‘rodomontade,’ ‘gasconade,’ ‘palimpset,’ ‘simulacrum,’ ‘fandango,’ and ‘chimerical.’ The three Morris m’s — magnificent, melancholy, and myriad — ripple through her work, not forgetting her love of the two Welsh h’s —hwyl and hiraeth. Her writing could be indulgent at times, but Morris did not take an exalted view of herself as a writer. She was the one who called her work, in A Writer’s World, ‘hedonistic,’ ‘boisterous,’ and ‘impertinent,’ In a newspaper questionnaire in 1998, Morris was asked how she would like to be remembered, and she replied: ‘As a merry and loving writer.’
As an aside, not all those words cited seem so weird to this writer. Swagger, fizz, and parvenu are in ordinary usage, chimerical too.
Among its other virtues, I feel this book captures British history and British intellectual history very well. In any case, you can buy the book here, and I have ordered some additional Morris works to read. If I really like any of them, I will let you all know.
Thursday assorted links
1. AI to manage your social media accounts?
2. Portland International Airport Recruits Thousands for “Dress Rehearsal”.
3. India’s Farmers Are Now Getting Their News From AI Anchors (Bloomberg).
4. How a council of 50 members of the Austrian public decided to give away a large sum of money (NYT). Effective Altruism it ain’t.
5. “As well as stripping rants of their frightening tone, the AI will step in to terminate conversations it deems have been too long or vile.” FT link. Is this a good way to protect the morale of call center workers?
6. Was Willie Mays the greatest baseball player ever? I recall as a young boy owning some Willie Mays baseball cards. He simply seemed classier and more special than the other players, as if he had some magic, secret power that others did not.
7. Generative models can outperform the experts that train them.
Thomas Schelling meets LLMs?
Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken by these agents in different scenarios. Contrary to prior studies, our research provides both qualitative and quantitative insights and focuses on large language models (LLMs). We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns. We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Qualitatively, we also collect the models’ reported reasonings for chosen actions and observe worrying justifications based on deterrence and first-strike tactics.
That is from a new paper by Juan-Pablo Rivera, et.al., via the excellent Ethan Mollick. Do note that these recommended tactics are for the U.S., so perhaps the LLMs simply are telling us that America should be more hawkish.
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Part XXIV
WashingtonTimes: Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.
A big part of the problem is the piling on to any government program a host of progressive wish-list items including:
• Preference for hiring union workers, who are scarce in some rural areas.
• Requiring providers to prioritize “certain segments of the workforce, such as individuals with past criminal records,” when building broadband networks.
• Requiring eligible entities to “account not only for current [climate-related] risks but also for how the frequency, severity, and nature of these extreme events may plausibly evolve as our climate continues to change over the coming decades.”
If this sounds familiar, recall my post on Building Back Key Bridge Better (note the date).
By the way, the FCC estimates that 7.2 million locations, i.e. houses and businesses, don’t have broadband access. $42.5 billion is enough to give all 7.2 million locations a 4-year subscription to Starlink (7.2 million locations * $120 per month * 48 months=$42.7 billion), and I am sure Elon would give us a discount so I didn’t include set up costs. Of course, the FCC decided that Starlink was not eligible for the program citing “SpaceX’s failure to successfully launch its Starship rocket.” Note that the FCC made their decision in 2022, years before the program was to rollout.
The polity and culture that is Oregon
Oregon voters will likely decide in November whether to establish a historic universal basic income program that would give every state resident roughly $750 annually from increased corporate taxes.
Proponents of the concept say they likely have enough signatures to place it on the ballot this fall, and opponents are taking them seriously…
“It’s looking really good. It’s really exciting,” said Anna Martinez, a Portland hairstylist who helped form the group behind the campaign, Oregon People’s Rebate, in 2020. If approved by voters, the program would go into effect in January 2025.
Most of the Portland business community opposes the proposal. Here is the full story, via Mark W.
Do not stifle supply and then subsidize demand
That phrasing comes from Arnold Kling, right? It is also the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one bit:
Unfortunately, the US already was setting a bad example for the British. Recent plans from the Biden administration called for a broadly similar approach to housing policy, namely subsidizing demand. Earlier this year, Biden called for $10,000 tax credits for Americans buying starter homes and for those selling them. That too will boost the demand for housing and raise prices, and thus much of the value of the subsidy will be captured by current homeowners.
The Biden plan could increase home prices further yet. If Americans come to expect that the government will act repeatedly to prop up home prices, housing will appear to be a safer investment. Thus there will be yet another reason for demand to rise.
Like Sunak’s, Biden’s plan also calls for more construction, namely two million new or renovated affordable homes. The problem is that in the US, most of the obstacles to new construction come at the city, county and state levels. The Biden plan mentions tax credits for cheaper homes, and there are efforts to jawbone local governments to allow more building. But again, the federal government is better at handing out cash than inducing America’s decentralized political system to deregulate construction. So if this plan were to move forward, the likely outcome — as in the UK — would be subsidized demand and stifled supply, leading to higher home prices.
Lessons our governments still need to learn…
Congratulations to SSI Inc.!
Here is the tweet announcement. Here is Bloomberg coverage from Ashlee Vance.
Wednesday assorted links
2. China’s demographics are not as bad as you might think.
4. Might Russia sell some land to China?
5. Radical claims about batteries.
6. “Using three longitudinal samples of funded and unfunded grant applications from three of the world’s largest funders—the NIH, the NSF, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation—we find that the percentage of promotional language in a grant proposal is associated with the grant’s probability of being funded, its estimated innovativeness, and its predicted levels of citation impact.” Link here.
Accelerating India’s Development
What will India look like in 2047? Combining projections of economic growth with estimates of the elasticity of outcomes with respect to growth, Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development reports:
Even with a strong GDP per capita growth rate of 6 per cent, projections for 2047 paint a sobering picture if we maintain our current course. While India’s infant mortality is projected to halve from 27 per 1000 births to 13 in 2047, it will still be well above China’s current rate of 8. Child stunting will only decrease from 35.5 to 25 per cent, which is only a 10.5 percentage point or 30 per cent reduction in nearly 25 years. In rural India, 16 per cent of children in Class 5 will still not be able to read at a Class 2 level, and 55 per cent of them will still not be able to do division at the Class 3 level.
Bear in mind that this is assuming an optimistic 6% growth rate in GDP per capita. Even more telling is that if growth increased to 8%, infant mortality would only fall to 10 per 1000 (instead of 13). Growth is great. It’s the single most important factor but it’s not everything. If India can double the elasticity of infant mortality with respect to growth, for example, then at the same 6% growth rate infant mortality would fall to just 6 per 1000 by 2047–that’s millions of lives saved. The big argument of Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development is that India can get more development from the same level of growth by increasing the total factor productivity of the state.
There are many “big think” books on growth–Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich–but these books are primarily historical and descriptive. The big think books don’t tell you how to develop. Create institutions to strike “a delicate and precarious balance between state and society” isn’t much of a guide to development. Accelerating India’s Development is different.
“Accelerating” opens with two excellent chapters on the political economy of politicians and bureaucrats, outlining the constraints any reforms must navigate. It concludes with two chapters on the future, including ideas like ranked choice voting, representing its aspirations. It’s in-between the constraints and the aspirations, however, that Accelerating India’s Development is unique. I know of no other book that offers such a detailed, analytical, and comprehensive examination and evaluation of a country’s institutions and processes.
Muralidharan’s recommendations are often based on his own twenty years of research, especially in education, health and welfare, and when not based on his own research Muralidharan has read everyone and everything. Yet, he offers not a laundry list but a well-thought out, analytic, set of recommendations that are grounded on political and economic realities.
To give just one example, India’s bureaucracy is far over-paid relative to India’s GDP per capita or wages in the private sector. With wages too high, the bureaucracy is too small–a reflection of the concentrated benefits (wages to government workers), diffuse costs (delivering services to citizens) problem. Lowering wages for government workers is a non-starter but Muralidharan argues persuasively that it is possible to hire new workers from local communities at prevailing wages on renewable contracts. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), for example, is India’s main program for delivering early childhood education. There are 1.35 million anganwadi centers (AWCs) across India and typically a single anganwadi worker is responsible for both nutrition and pre-school education but they spend most of their time on paperwork!
A simple, scalable way to improve early childhood education is to add a second worker to AWCs to focus on preschool education….In a recent study, my co-authors and I found that adding an extra, locally hired, early-childhood care and education facilitators to anganwadis in Tamil Nadu doubled daily preschool instructional time…we found large gains in students’ maths, language and executive function skills. We also found a significant reduction in child stunting and malnutrition…We estimate the social return on this investment was around thirteen times the cost….the ECCE facilitators typically had only a Class 10 or Class 12 qualification and received only one week of training, and were still highly effective.
The example illustrates Muralidharan’s methods. First, the recommendation is based on a large, credible, multi-year study run in India with the cooperation of the government of Tamil Nadu. Second, the study is chosen for the book because it fits Muralidharan’s larger analysis of India’s problems, India has too few government workers which leads to high potential returns, yet the workers are paid too much so these returns are fiscally unachievable. But hiring more workers on the margin, at India’s-prevailing wages, is feasible. India has lots of modestly-educated workers so the program can scale–this is not a study about adding AI-driven computers to Delhi schools under the management of IIT trained educators, a program which would be subject to the heroes aren’t replicable problem. The program is also politically feasible because it leaves rents in place and by hiring lots of workers, even at low wages, it generates its own political support. Finally, note that India’s ICDS is the largest early childhood development program in the world so improving it has the potential to make millions of lives better. Which is why I have called Muralidharan the most important economist in the world.
One of the reasons state capacity in India is so low is premature load bearing. Imagine if the 19th-century U.S. government had attempted to handle everything today’s U.S. government does—this is the situation in India. When State Capacity/Tasks < 1, what should be done? In premature imitation, Rajagopalan and I advocate for reducing Tasks–an idea best represented by Ed Glaeser’s quip that “A country that cannot provide clean water for its citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue.” Accelerating India’s Development focuses on increasing State Capacity but without being anti-market. In fact, Muralidharan proposes making the state more effective by leveraging markets more extensively.
Indian policy should place a very high priority on expanding the supply of high-quality service providers, regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector.
Hence, Muraldiharan wants to build on India’s remarkably vibrant private schools and private health care with ideas like vouchers and independent ratings. Free to choose but free to choose in an information-rich environment. My own inclinations would be to push markets and also infrastructure more–we still need to get to that 6% growth! But I have few quibbles with what is in the book.
Accelerating India’s Development is an exceptionally rich and insightful book. Its comprehensive analysis and innovative recommendations make it an invaluable resource. I will undoubtedly reference it in future discussions and writings. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and improving life in the world’s largest democracy.
Eating well in Stockholm
Yes, the fancy expensive places are great. But more generally, I recommend that you order the dishes with game and lingonberries, most of all lingonberries. Soups here are above average, and I do not generally love soups. The pizza is surprisingly good, make sure you order it with “pizza salad,” which turns out to be cabbage. If you are craving non-Western food, I would try Persian before Indian or Chinese. At breakfast, butter is consistently good. Overall, Stockholm is a quality food city, though it is not superb when it comes to breadth.
What I’ve been reading
Jill Ciment, Consent: a memoir. A good short book on how you can have a creepy life for decades, and not be so aware of it. In this case, a 17-year-old girl (Ciment) ends up marrying a man who first slept with her when he was 47 and married. They had an apparently normal marriage for decades, or did they? How much does “creepy” matter anyway? She doesn’t seem to be complaining about unhappiness. But is it just wrong anyway?
Hugh Warwick, Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation. A well-written and subtle account of the tensions and paradoxes involved in attempts to conserve nature. What if conserving one animal leads to the destruction of others? I am slowly learning how many British people are obsessed with hedgehogs. And I hadn’t known how much the importation of earthworms in the 18th century, from Britain to North America, shaped the environment.
Ebbe Dommissse, Anton Rupert: The Life of a Business Icon is a very favorable biography of who was probably South Africa’s richest man, with cigarettes being the central part of his business empire. For a contrasting perspective, read Pieter h de Toit, The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaire’s Club.
Charles King, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. This is what you would want from a book on Handel’s Messiah. I hadn’t known that Handel was briefly supported by the Medici in Florence. By the way, Suzuki will be conducting the Messiah in DC in late December, be there or be square!
Phumlani M. Majozi, Lessons from Past Heroes: How the rejection of victimhood dogmas will save South Africa. A libertarian Zulu approach to what the subtitle promises.
David Albright with Andrea Stricker, Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Its History, Dismantlement, and Lessons for Today. It is odd how little-mentioned this episode in world history has become, in any case this is the go-to book on it, interesting throughout.
Still in my pile is Nathaniel Popper’s The Trolls of Wall Street: How the Outcasts and Insurgents are Hacking the Markets, which covers the WallStreetBets phenomenon.
“Analyzing my text messages with my ex-boyfriend”
With sentiment analysis over time, messages containing the word “sorry, and more. Trends! There is also a graph on how often “marginalized identity” was discussed, and presented below is the graph for the word “love.” The blue spikes come from the ex-boyfriend.
Recommended, here is the link, via Michael Rosenwald.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Profile of Jennifer Harris, “Queen Bee” of Bidenomics? (NYT)
2. “1982 was a pivotal year for science-fiction and horror cinema. Eight beloved movies — “E.T.,” “Tron,” “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Blade Runner,” “Poltergeist,” “The Thing” and “Mad Max: The Road Warrior” — were released within six weeks.” Link here NYT.
5. The changes to the California AI bill.
6. Bird flu update (NYT).
Are we overestimating the foreign-born population by about 2 million?
It seems so, here is one study from the Chicago Fed, by Kristin Butcher, Lucas Cain, Camilo Garcia-Jimeno, and Ryan Perry:
Standard estimates based on the main household survey used to shed light on labor markets—the Current Population Survey (CPS)—suggest that after a significant drop during the pandemic, recent rapid growth has brought the foreign-born population back to, or above, levels predicted by the pre-pandemic trend. However, we document that the weighting factors used to make the CPS nationally representative have recently displayed some unusual movements and conclude that standard estimates of the foreign-born population may currently be too high. We also show that recent labor market indicators are inconsistent with increased foreign-born induced slack.
Ive also read some privately-produced Zonda research, with a letter from the U.S. Census (neither on-line), basically supporting this conclusion, in the range of 1.7 million to 2.2 million. So the current foreign-born population in the U.S. isn’t near as unprecedented as some people would like you to believe.