Results for “my favorite things” 259 found
My Conversation with Raj Chetty
Yes, the Raj Chetty. Here is the transcript and podcast. As far as I can tell, this is the only coverage of Chetty that covers his entire life and career, including his upbringing, his early life, and the evolution of his career, not to mention his taste in music. Here is one bit:
COWEN: Now your father, he’s a well-known economist, and he studied econometrics with Arnold Zellner at University of Wisconsin. At what age did he start talking to you about Bayesian econometrics?
CHETTY: [laughs]
COWEN: Which is one of his fields, right?
CHETTY: That’s right, my dad did a lot of early work in Bayesian econometrics with Arnold Zellner, and the academic environment was something I grew up with since I was a kid. I’m the last person in my family to publish a paper. My sisters are also in academia on the medical and bio side. Whether it’s statistics or thinking about scientific questions or thinking about how to change things in the world, that’s the environment in which I grew up from the youngest of ages.
We also discuss his famous papers on kindergarten teachers, social mobility, and the other topics he is best known for working on, including tax salience and corporate dividends. My favorite part is where Chetty explains what I call “the Raj Chetty production function,” namely why he has been part of so many very successful papers, but that is hard to excerpt. There is also this:
COWEN: In music, the group the Piano Guys, speaking of Mormons. Overrated or underrated?
CHETTY: Underrated. I love the Piano Guys.
COWEN: Why?
CHETTY: I think the Piano Guys are great in terms of doing renditions of popular songs.
COWEN: Not too triumphalist? Do you mean the major chords?
CHETTY: Maybe in some cases, but I like them.
COWEN: Bhindi or okra. Overrated or underrated?…
Self-recommending, if there ever was such a thing.
My Conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe
One of my favorites, David was great, here is the link to the podcast, video, and transcript. Here is the opening summary of the chat:
Named one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of our time, Rabbi David Wolpe joins Tyler in a conversation on flawed leaders, Jewish identity in the modern world, the many portrayals of David, what’s missing in rabbinical training, playing chess on the Sabbath, Srugim, Hasidic philosophy, living in Israel and of course, the durability of creation.
Here are a few bits:
WOLPE: So as my friend Joseph Telushkin says, “Polygamy does exist in the Bible, it’s just never successful.” David does have many wives, and very strained and interesting and complex relationships with women. David has the most complicated and most described relationships with women of any character in the Hebrew Bible.
Those qualities that can be negative, in David are to some extent positive. One of the things that draws David out of the charge of simple narcissism is that he really listens, he pays attention — he pays attention to women over and over again. He listens to what they say and changes himself because of it. And that’s not a characteristic of men in the ancient world or the modern one that you can rely on.
And:
COWEN: So again, I’m an outsider in this dialogue, but say I were thinking of converting to Judaism and I were asking you about Hasidic philosophy. Now in terms of some social connections, I probably would fit better into your congregation than into a Hasidic congregation. But if I ask you, on theological grounds alone, is there a reason why I should be hesitant about Hasidic philosophy? From the point of view of theology, what do you think is the greatest weakness there, or your biggest difference with it, given how much you like Heschel?
And:
COWEN: How would you alter or improve rabbinical training?
WOLPE: I’ve given this a lot of thought. Let me just mention one area. When I speak to rabbinical students, I tell them all the time that the single most valuable commodity you have as a rabbi . . . you can answer that yourself, and then I’ll tell you what I think: your voice. Most people are going to come in contact with you when you speak to them. Not all of them, but most. There’ll be more people who come to your services than the number of people at whose bedside you will sit as they die.
And yet, most rabbis — most people — don’t know how to speak.
There is much more at the link, including about Israeli TV, where to visit in Israel, whether King David parallels Trump, the future of biblical commentary in a world of context-less social media, whether Canadian Jews are more likely to stick with the faith, whether Los Angeles is underrated, what is beautiful and significant in Islam, and the Iran nuclear deal and the settlements, among other topics. Self-recommending…
And again, here is David Wolpe’s most recent book David: The Divided Heart, which was the centerpiece for the first part of the discussion.
My Conversation with Margalit Fox
Here is the summary:
The stereotypical obituary is a formulaic recitation of facts — dry, boring, and without craft. But Margalit Fox has shown the genre can produce some of the most memorable and moving stories in journalism. Exploiting its “pure narrative arc,” Fox has penned over 1,200 obituaries, covering well-known and obscure subjects with equal aplomb.
In her conversation with Tyler Cowen, Fox reveals not only the process for writing an obituary, but her thoughts on life, death, storytelling, puzzle-solving, her favorite cellist, and how it came to be that an economist sang opera 86 times at the Met.
Here are the transcript, video, and podcast versions of the dialogue. Here is one excerpt:
FOX: …Things happen. But in general, we try to have a certain level of preparedness with the major figures. We do indeed have the advance obits — all but the top, as it were — written, edited, on file. We have about 1,700.
That said, the vast majority of what my colleagues and I down in the trenches do, probably 90 percent of our working life, are daily obits that are found out about, reported, written, edited, copyedited, put in the paper all in the space of a single day, just like any other article in the paper.
And this:
COWEN: Are there obituaries of economists that stand out in your mind? Or maybe some you’ve written?
FOX: Well, interestingly, there is one. As I said, my original training was in classical music, so my editors almost jumped out of their skins with excitement when they discovered they could assign me the obituary of a Harvard economist named Richard T. Gill.
Now, why did they give that to me? Because as we say in the lede of the obit, “Richard T. Gill, in all statistical probability the only Harvard economist to sing 86 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, died,” etc., etc.
COWEN: Yes, I remember reading that one. That was before I knew that you were you.
FOX: I was me then. You just didn’t know it.
COWEN: Correct.
Do read the whole thing. I asked her about privacy concerns, how well a famous person is really known by his or her family and friends, whether there should be affirmative action in the obituaries section, who is chosen for this exclusive club and why, what one learns reading obituaries (“death sucks”), what is underrated in life (“silence”), why British obituaries are different, and about her very good books on linguistic code cracking from antiquity and Bedouin sign language. And more.
Here is the Conversations with Tyler series. Here is basic information on Margalit Fox. Here is Margalit Fox on Twitter.
My worries about Singapore
Singapore is a well-run place by world standards, and has perhaps the world’s highest quality bureaucracy, yet right now the country faces a somewhat menacing constellation of silent risks, none of their own making:
1. It is possible that the role of the United States in the Pacific Ocean is rewritten rather suddenly. This could come about through either a Trump presidency, or a successful Chinese attempt to grab more in the South China Sea. Can you imagine a Singapore that had to court Japan and India rather than relying on the United States for protection? In this same world Japan is probably more militarized than in the status quo, and possibly even a nuclear power.
2. Singapore sovereign wealth funds and related institutions have been pulling in high returns since the 1970s. Yet the opportunities in both China and Singapore’s own real estate just aren’t there any more. They would be very lucky to pull in four percent a year looking forward. While fiscal risk is minimal, this will crimp expansion plans, especially if Singapore ends up needing to spend more on national defense.
3. It seems increasing pressure is being brought to bear on the Chinese currency yet again. China would like to lower rates to stimulate its economy, and the Fed is likely to raise rates at least once more this year. There is surely a chance that the renminbi simply snaps due to capital outflow. During the Asian currency crisis, the Singaporean dollar fell about twenty percent as a side effect of the turmoil elsewhere. Yet now China is much bigger than South Korea + Thailand + Indonesia were in 1997. Furthermore Singapore is much more of a financial and clearinghouse center. How insulated is Singapore from this China risk? Does anybody know? To what extent might a flow of capital into Singapore mitigate some of this risk?
4. Climate change could well lead to rising water levels for island nation Singapore. Investing in sea walls and other forms of protection could take what percent of gdp? The Dutch are already putting 0.5% of gdp a year into a fund for future water defense.
From this list, #2 and #4 are more likely problems, whereas #1 and #3 are more speculative, but by no means in the realm of science fiction. There is the possibility of a perfect storm from all four.
And yet think of how things must have looked in 1965. The Vietnam War was going badly, and most of the trends in Southeast Asia were negative. Chinese Communism was at its nadir with the Cultural Revolution. Indonesia had just massacred 500,000 citizens, many of them Chinese. Singapore itself had just been kicked out of Malaysia, an outcome which its key founders mostly opposed. There was not yet evidence that what later became “the Singapore model” was going to work, and even Japan was not yet an evident success. It was commonly believed that Singapore, Malaysia, or both might collapse into a kind of ethnic civil war. British military expenditures were about 20% of Singapore’s gdp, and it was widely understood that source of income would be going away. Somehow they managed, most of all with the aid of human capital and being in the right place at the right time.
Here is the Singapore Complaints Choir, one of my favorite music videos.
In any case, I am happy to be here once again. For dining, I recommend Sinar Pagi Nasi Padang, at Geylang Serai hawker centre, get the beef rendang. National Kitchen, in the new National Gallery is also very good for a more traditional kind of dining.
My conversation with Cliff Asness
Here is the full transcript, video, and podcast of the chat. Cliff was great from beginning to end. The first thirty minutes or so were an overview of “momentum” and “value” trading strategies, and to what extent they violate an efficient markets hypothesis. Much of the rest covered:
…disagreeing with Eugene Fama, Marvel vs. DC, the inscrutability of risk, high frequency trading, the economics of Ayn Rand, bubble logic, and why never to share a gym with Cirque du Soleil.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I think of you as doing a kind of metaphysics of human nature. On one side, there’s behavioral economics. They put people in the lab, one-off situations, untrained people. But here it’s repeated data, it’s over long periods of time, it’s out of sample. There’s real money on the line, and this still seems to work.
When you back out, what’s the actual vision of human nature? What’s the underlying human imperfection that allows it to be the case, that trading on momentum across say a 3 to 12 month time window, sorry, investing on momentum, will work? What’s with us as people? What’s the core human imperfection?
ASNESS: This is going to be embarrassing because we don’t have a problem of no explanation. We have a problem with too many explanations. Of course, we can observe the data. The explanations you have to fight over and argue over. I will give you the two most prominent explanations for the efficacy of momentum.
The first is called underreaction. Simple idea that comes from behavioral psychology, the phenomenon there called anchoring and adjustment. News comes out. Price moves but not all the way. People update their priors but not fully efficiently. Therefore, just observing the price move is not going to move the same amount again but there’s some statistical tendency to continue.
Take a wild guess what our second best, in my opinion, explanation for momentum’s efficacy is? It’s called overreaction. When your two best explanations are over- and underreaction, you have somewhat of an issue, I admit. Overreaction is much more of a positive feedback. It works over time because people in fact do chase prices. So if you do it somewhat systematically and before them you make some money.
One of the hard things you find out in many fields but I found out in empirical finance is those might be the right explanations but they’re not mutually exclusive.
And here is from the overrated/underrated part of the chat:
COWEN: …In science fiction, the author Robert Heinlein.
ASNESS: Early stuff, underrated. Later stuff, overrated.
COWEN: What’s your favorite?
ASNESS: That is a really — Methuselah’s Children.
COWEN: Ah, good pick.
ASNESS: I could have gone with the obvious. I’m a bit of a libertarian. I could have gone with, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. It’s his most famously libertarian book.
COWEN: But it doesn’t age so well.
ASNESS: No, no. I like Methuselah’s Children.
This was the funniest segment:
ASNESS: I live in Greenwich, Connecticut. In some parts of the world, if you said, “my daddy runs a hedge fund,” I’d say, “what’s a hedge fund?” In Greenwich, Connecticut, the kids say, “what kind of hedge fund is your daddy running? Is he event arbitrage? Trend following? What does dad do?”
Interesting throughout, as they are known to say…
My favorite fiction of 2014
Overall I found this to be a weak year for fiction, with most of the highly anticipated books disappointing me, including those of Murakami, MacEwan, and David Mitchell. Even the third volume of Knausgaard had extraordinary material through only about fifteen percent of the text; it was worth reading but most of it did not hold my attention very well. Here are the ones I really liked, with the first two being my favorites:
1. Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things: A Novel. A missionary visits space aliens, some of whom embrace the Bible eagerly, almost too eagerly. Meanwhile he and his wife on earth write letters back and forth, showing they are the true aliens to each other. This is the fiction book this year I enjoyed most, and the one I kept on wanting to pick up after I had put it down. It is one of the most resonant portraits of space aliens I have read. yet without it being a science fiction novel. Here is a useful NYT review, describing the book as “defiantly unclassifiable.”
2. Emmanuel Carrère, Limonov, The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, A Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia. This work blends fiction, non-fiction, and occasional social science (was a non-corrupt transformation of the Soviet Union really possible?, Gaidar ultimately decided it wasn’t), but in terms of the subjective experience of the reader it is most like a novel. In addition to its literary quality, this is a deep book about why liberalism will never quite win over human nature. Here is an interesting Julian Barnes review, although it is insufficiently appreciative.
3. Andrés Neuman, Talking to Ourselves, “Women who know what they want never want anything interesting.”
4. Javier Cercas, Outlaws: A Novel, my earlier remarks are here.
5. Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The Booker Prize winner, I thought this was at times too sentimental but an excellent story with some depth too. It deals with an Australian in a prisoner of war camp in WWII and his escapades surrounding that time in his life.
I have yet to start the new Colm Tóibín novel, and I often like his work. I read some of the new Sarah Waters, which struck me as a little too belabored for the time I had to give to it, but a quality work which will please her fans. Cesar Aira wrote some more and he continues to be interesting. I continued a reread of Moby Dick.
I am preparing my list of my favorite non-fiction books of the year and that should be ready before the Christmas shopping season starts.
In the meantime, what new fiction can you all recommend to me?
Your Favorite Things Jerusalem
Next week I will be in Jerusalem for a conference. It’s my first trip to the holy city so I shall be well occupied with the “top-ten” but any recommendations for restaurants or sites that I would otherwise miss are very welcome.
Tyrone’s top ten favorite movies
That was a request from Nick L. My (longer) list is on my home page, scroll down a bit. Tyrone of course is my long-lost brother and evil twin. His list, in no particular order, is:
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
Idiocracy
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Showgirls
Wild Things
Ella Enchanted
The Cable Guy, Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor
Booty Call
Flash Gordon
Pasolini’s Teorema
My podcast with Jerry Brito
You will find it here, Jerry summarizes it like this:
The conversation broadly centers on how the web allows us to find, distill, and sort information as never before, which has profoundly affected people’s consumption of culture and creation of their own economies. During the podcast Cowen touches on Lost and Battlestar Gallactica, the iPad, books, the future of the publishing industry, old and new media, Facebook, Twitter, ChatRoulette, and his favorite things on the internet.
Jerry's entire podcast series is here. Jerry's more professional blog is here. Jerry on music is here; he has the good sense to like M.I.A.
My favorite movie watching season
I always love the Fall, not for the changing leaves, not for the weather, and not for the chance to show off my sweater collection. I love the Fall because it's the best movie season of the year. The months from September to December is when all the distributors bring out their smart, adult, critically favored, award season films. The summer is left to the kids and the action blockbusters, but over the next few months is when all the Oscar contenders will be released. UP IN THE AIR, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR PARNASSUS are just a very few of the smart, cool, quality looking pictures that I'm looking forward to seeing over the next few weeks.
I have always assumed, and I believe it's conventional wisdom in the industry, that these kinds of films come out at the tail end of the year in order to remain in voters minds come Oscar ballot time, which is immediately in the new year. The thinking is that any film that comes out in the early part of the year will be forgotten and overlooked compared to the more recent offering, regardless of it's artistic merit. Aside from it being a sad commentary on the shortness of our memories I'm wondering if this is entirley true. I'm taking a leap here and turning to the educted readers of MR for their feedback, but I wonder if like the proven business observation that when a second carpet shop opens beside the first it's competition, when a third opens it becomes the carpet district and is good for all of them. Is there something about a grouping of similarly aimed films coming out all at once, even from competing distributors, that increases the box office for all as opposed to having them spread out evenly throughout the year? I know I'm drawing a parellel between geography and the calendar, and perhaps that's a classic apples and orange mix, but I can't help but wonder if creating a film 'season' is not conferring a benefit to all the films that are released in this period.
Where is our economy headed?
The ever-interesting Brad DeLong is on a real roll lately. Read his post on current economic trends. Here is my favorite part:
…more important than the short-run cycles are the long-run trends. Labor productivity growth in the United States rose from 1.2% per year from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s to 2.3% per year in the late 1990s to 4.2% per year–so far–in the 2000s. How much of that second jump-up in productivity growth will be sustained? We do not know, but it is safe to bet that some of it will. (Me, I don’t believe those numbers: I prefer to look at the income rather than the product side of the National Income and Product Accounts, and say that the three economy-wide productivity numbers are 1.2%, 3.1%, and 3.2% respectively, with the difference between the income and product side blamed on an erratic “statistical discrepancy.”) When will the rapid productivity growth that we have seen in the United States and ascribed to information technology spread to the rest of the rich countries? We do not know, but we do know that one of these years it will make itself visible. How long will it take world trade in information-services like form-processing, accounting, and customer service to truly boom as a result of the internet and the fiber-optic cable in the same way that the iron-hulled ocean-going steamship and the submarine telegraph made world trade in staple goods–not just luxuries and preciosities–boom in the late nineteenth century? Once again we do not know, but once again we do know that one of these years it will make itself visible.
It is time for governments, firms, investors, workers, and parents worldwide to begin betting on the long-run trends that have become visible over the past decade. Such bets probably won’t pay off in the next year, or two, or three. But they surely will start to pay off sometime in the next ten.
I will direct your attention again to Brad’s recent post comparing Bob Rubin and Paul O’Neill. I think it is one of the finest things an economist has written on bureaucracy, ever.
Saturday assorted links
1. “The US suburban vacation – one of my favorite things about this business.”
2. Mark Skousen on gross output measures. And founding engineer & founding designer for building a LLM-augmented digital reader (job ad).
3. Identified flying objects, not flying.
4. Air Genius Gary Leff blogs Beenie Man.
5. A closer look at political bias in ChatGPT.
6. James Buckley, RIP, at 100 years old. He was the fourth of ten children.
Thursday assorted links
1. Open AI lessons for science policy. And Steve Landsburg and GPT-4 are not in synch.
2. “Every single street lamp in New Zealand’s capital city is at risk of plunging without warning on to the footpaths below them.” And can anything stop the feral hog invasion?
3. Survey of Tyler Cowen’s “My Favorite Things.”
4. Brian Potter on how did solar power get cheap.
5. Clearinghouse for LLMs in scientific research workflows.
Friday assorted links
1. Eastward travel benefits NBA teams.
2. How does copyright for AI-created art work?
3. Why aren’t smart people happier?
5. “Fund managers who run marathons deliver higher risk-adjusted returns.” (speculative)
6. What would Cole Porter say? “My Favorite Things,” or rather yours?
Friday assorted links
1. Redux of my 2018 post “My Favorite Things Ukraine,” closes with this: “Overall, this is a stunningly impressive list, though there are legitimate questions as to who and what exactly counts as Ukrainian. They’re still trying to sort that one out, which is part of the problem.” The comments are interesting too.
2. Is progress in mathematics understudied?