Results for “my favorite things” 259 found
Who is excellent and why?
A few of you have written in and asked me why some people, such as Kevin Lewis and Samir Varma, are designated as say “the excellent Kevin Lewis” on Marginal Revolution.
It is simple — I view this recognition as resulting from a combination of their intelligence and persistence, and thus their excellence in finding and sending me links and interesting commentary. (I have met them both, and they do seem to have other virtues, but those other virtues are not the ones being recognized here.) The word is completely unironic. I view “belief in excellence” as one of the underlying philosophies of MR, and also belief in the notion that excellence should be mentioned and promoted.
In this sense, those designations are quite similar to the ongoing series “My Favorite Things [xxxx]“.
This designation of excellence is also related to why MR does not spend a great deal of time on all of the political depredations of our time. Yes, they are important, but I fear that focusing on them too much would a) make me stupider, and b) distract from an underlying vision of excellence I wish to communicate. I am too selfish to wish to be made stupider in that manner.
More generally, for any media source you are reading, what is the underlying vision of excellence? Or are they just pukers?
If you can trace their underlying vision of excellence (or lack thereof), you will understand much of their material much better.
How outrageous are the new North Carolina laws?
Here is a summary from Politico:
The state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly passed the bills this week during a special session. The new laws reduce the number of positions the governor can hire and fire at will from 1,500 to 300, strip the governor’s party of the power to control the state board of elections, require legislative approval of gubernatorial cabinet appointments, and move the power to appoint trustees for the University of North Carolina to the legislature.
The first sounds like a good change, as in general the professional bureaucracy in American politics should be more powerful, as it is in Western Europe. The second clause — power over elections — sounds like a simple power grab, but can I say I find it an inferior arrangement to vest this responsibility with the legislature? No, and note the new deal gives each party equal representation on the election commission (otherwise the Democrats would hold a majority). The trustee appointment change I find it hard to get worked up about, though it does seem to me more naturally the prerogative of the executive, but the state constitution gives trustee appointment rights to the legislature.
How about “require legislative approval of gubernatorial cabinet appointments,” which sounds pretty severe?
Well, check out the North Carolina state constitution: “Appointments. The Governor shall nominate and by and with the advice and consent of a majority of the Senators appoint all officers whose appointments are not otherwise provided for.” [Later sections seem to cover the “appointments…otherwise provided for.”] Furthermore, this seems like pretty standard practice at various levels of American government.
Perhaps the Republicans have good legal advice, and are likely to win this in the courts, as the source behind the last link is suggesting. As a commentator, a good starting question is whether you have in fact read the North Carolina state constitution.
Overall the story seems to be that the legislature is — within the provisions of the state constitution — seizing more power for the legislature. (You don’t have to like that, given some of the other Republican stances, but don’t confuse the different issues here.) Don’t presidents and governors try to do the same? Succeed in doing the same? Is it perhaps worth criticizing the state constitution, rather than just condemning the Republicans for exercising constitutional powers? Here is a link outlining many of the power grabs in previous North Carolina history, including by the Democrats.
Have your feelings about the filibuster changed as of late?
Is it so much worse if such shenanigans are done in a lame duck period? Would it have been so awful if Clinton had won the presidential election and TPP had passed during the lame duck session, as many people were talking about? Or if the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court had been approved? Do we all condemn the flood of “midnight regulations” that come during each federal lame duck session?
I am very willing to consider limiting the power of lame duck sessions. And I am very willing to believe that the North Carolina legislature made moves in the wrong direction from a utilitarian and also public legitimacy point of view. Furthermore, I am also no expert in North Carolina constitutional law and I would gladly be set straight if I am overlooking some relevant facts on these issues.
In the meantime, I don’t quite see this as a coup d’etat, it seems like a pretty traditional power grab within established constitutional structures, it’s not the Republicans heralding the end of constitutional government in the United States, and I’m not sure that the critics are being entirely consistent in applying the principles articulated in their shrillness. The critical commentary here really does need to up its game. If your argument is simply “I don’t want groups I disagree with to take more power through legitimate means,” well by all means say so!
As for my summary view, the legislative actions do seem unwise to me, they seem to be coming at an especially fraught time, I don’t favor all of the other policy preferences of this legislature, and I think they are extending what is already a series of unwise precedents.
Here are my favorite things North Carolina, none of them refer to politics.
Friday assorted links
1. My favorite things Swiss, redux. These days I would add Peter Zumthor and the Vitra design museum outside of Basel.
2. Theatre of Harmonic Social Motion, a short essay by Anthony Morley. What are the invisible hand mechanisms governing science?
3. When do unions oppose the minimum wage?
4. 3 a.m. interview with philosopher David Estlund.
5. How did the Brexit idea rise to prominence?
6. Big hack and theft at Ethereum, ongoing story, a big setback for “this kind of stuff.” (Can I call it that?) Here is Izabella Kaminska.
What is the most obscure state according to Wonkblog and Google? And per capita?
The top five most-searched states are, in order, California, Texas, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania. And to answer Tyler Cowen’s original question, the bottom five states, in descending order, are Idaho, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, and, at the absolute bottom of the 50-state barrel: Wyoming.
And searches relative to population?:
You can see that the biggest overperformer is, oddly enough, Alabama — it’s the 24th most populous state, but the 15th most frequently-searched state. It’s hard to say what’s driving the discrepancy, but Google’s data offer some clues. For instance, Google’s nifty Correlate tool shows that many Alabama-related searches have to do with sports scores and events — perhaps tied to the popularity of college sports at the University of Alabama. Or, there may be something unique about the state the causes its residents to use the state’s name in Google searches more often — searching for rules and regulations on things like drivers’ licenses and the like.
Other big overperformers include Hawaii and Alaska, Colorado and Connecticut.
On the other side of the ledger, the state that appears to generate the lowest amount of search interest relative to its size is Indiana.
…Louisiana, West Virginia, New Mexico and Idaho also are considerably under-searched compared to their population.
Separately, I received this email from a loyal MR reader:
I am following your most-obscure-state series with some fascination. However, I think the approach is a bit off, because in many cases small states are less obscure than larger ones. Rhode Island is not obscure precisely because most know of it as the smallest state. And even small states produce outlier individuals that elevate their states’ prominence. Rather, I think you should look at obscurity on a per-capita basis — that is, what state is disproportionately obscure compared to its population, economic footprint, &c.I would suggest Indiana. Our 16th-most-populous state, Indiana is nonetheless relatively obscure for its size.Consider:
- Indiana is overshadowed by many of its larger neighbors; northwestern Indiana is part of Chicagoland; southeast Indiana is tied to the Cincinnati and Louisville areas.
- The best-known historical political figures identified with Indiana are Benjamin Harrison and Dan Quayle — neither well-known.
- Indiana has far fewer Fortune 500 companies based there than any neighbor except Kentucky (and only one more than Kentucky). Indiana’s big firms tend to be major industrial companies like Eli Lilly and Cummins, important but not consumer-facing and thus contributing to obscurity.
- Indiana is a major producer of many products, agricultural commodities and mineral resources, but it is the top producer of few, and so doesn’t gain prominence for them (in the way that people associate dairy with Wisconsin or cars with Michigan).
- Indiana has only one large city, and it’s the 34th-largest U.S. metro area with about 2 million people. States of similar size tend either have much larger metro areas or they have multiple Indianapolis-sized metros.
- Indiana is not especially diverse — 85% white, and few prominent foreign ethnic minorities concentrated there.
- In education, Indiana’s best known big school is Notre Dame, which due to its Catholic heritage is not especially associated in the public mind with the state. Purdue is a strong school but ranked 61 by US News — lower than you might expect for a flagship in a state Indiana’s size.
- Indiana is a place where a lot of notable people are from but where few stay. Think John Roberts, Allan Bloom, Sydney Pollack, Steve McQueen, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Samuelson. (Indiana’s proximity to Chicago contributes to its obscurity by sucking away some of its greatest talents.)
Sports and culture are probably the only arena in which Indiana escape obscurity In sports, this is due to the Hoosier basketball tradition, Larry Bird, Bob Knight, John Wooden, and the Indy 500.
Culturally, Indiana has produced several highlights. In music, the Jackson 5 are indelibly associated with Indiana. The novels of Booth Tarkington stand out. Cole Porter was born and raised there. The Gaither gospel singers are from and based in Indiana. Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a minor classic, is set there. Ben-Hur author Lew Wallace was a lifelong Indianan. Indiana has produced some strong comics — Red Skelton, David Letterman, Jim Gaffigan — although they are not popularly associated with Indiana. Jim Davis of Garfield is from there. Films and TV shows set there? Hoosiers, Breaking Away, Rudy, Parks and Recreation.
…Despite these strong points, the relatively large size of Indiana weighs against them and leaves Indiana the most obscure state on a per-capita basis.Thanks — I continue to enjoy this series and am looking forward to your posts on Rhode Island and Delaware.
Assorted links
1. Rerun of my earlier post “My favorite things Scotland.”
2. David Hume wine cellar may lie behind office block.
3. The National Pygmy Goat Association.
4. Search movie and television dialogue for word usage (some juvenile results)
5. China’s president advises Chinese tourists: not so many instant noodles.
What has San Diego contributed to American culture?
In honor of the AEA meetings I was going to do “My Favorite Things San Diego” but frankly I came up with what is more or less a total blank. Eddie Vedder? I like Tom Waits. Lots of athletes. What else?
San Diego, by population, is the eighth largest city in the United States. Yet it seems to have had hardly any cultural influence. What gives?
Movie, set in: Almost Famous, or perhaps A Day Without a Mexican.
End of story, unless you can tell me more. I’m sure to enjoy the weather, though I’ll look longingly at Tijuana just across the border.
Manila notes
How the mothers talk to, smile at, and elevate their small children reminds me uncannily of Mexico. It was actually Mexico, not Spain, that ruled the Philippines for centuries. You can tell how bad the traffic or the flooding is by the clucking sounds made by the taxi drivers. There is a lot of boxing on TV, and you will regularly be surprised by which food items turn out to taste the best. Don’t rule out the baked goods or the chicken minestrone soup.
This is a surrealistic dream country, combining fractured elements of an earlier global economy in strange and unpredictable ways. If you’re not paying attention you can think you are somewhere else — Acapulco? Lima? Los Angeles? but in which years? — and yet you are regularly pulled back to the Filipino reality, if only by seeing the Chinese dragons perched in front of the Spanish colonial church. “My Favorite Things Filipino” would all be moments of disorientation. The traditional exotic spots now seem pseudo-exotic to me, at least compared to Manila, which forces you to rethink everywhere else you have visited.
Someone should write a New Yorker article about how Filipinos use music in public spaces. The mango is superb, even by the standards of tropical countries. If I lived here, I would learn how to talk with my eyebrows. They don’t like to criticize each other. Martha Stewart is brought up and discussed by high status Filipinos without irony.
The ability to appreciate the Philippines is a Turing test of some sort, but I am not yet sure for what.
For ESEADE
Here is the post my favorite things Argentina, from two years ago. Not much change since then. Here is my post on B.A., arguably my favorite city. Here are other Argentina posts.
Assorted links
1. James Flynn on IQ, at Cato Unbound.
2. My favorite things Swiss; several Swiss asked me to repost this, I can report the list hasn’t changed much in the last year. Zurich is wonderful on Mondays.
3. When asked, I will report. My favorite blog post (of mine that is, and as distinct from the notion of best) is "Luring Alex to Lunch".
Article about me
How else can one title such a post? Here it is, from New York magazine. Excerpt:
Among this new crowd of economists, Cowen, a 45-year-old professor at George Mason University just outside D.C., is a cult hero, insofar as he co-runs an influential blog called marginalrevolution.com. You don’t need to be an economist to enjoy it. There are only a handful of posts a day, but the range of ideas is awe-inspiring. Cowen weighs in on everything from “wage compression”–when bosses give raises at a rate below productivity gains–to household pets, arguing that “if you must support the life of either a cat or a dog, choose the undervalued cat.” (Dogs’ friendly disposition increases the odds of their being well-cared for by other people, while the natural diffidence of cats makes them more susceptible to neglect).
Here is their selection from the series "My Favorite Things"…
Out Stealing Horses
This newly translated novel is as good as they say it is. You can add it to My Favorite Things Norwegian.
Buy it here. Here is the first chapter.
The Lives of Others
That’s the new German movie with the rave reviews and the foreign language film Oscar, but don’t be fooled. The movie is technically excellent, but not thoughtful. It is part of a more general, and disturbing, trend in contemporary German culture to whitewash the past. The film shows many small acts of defiance against the Stasi, as if to redeem an otherwise sorry East German record. Last year — fortunately I cannot remember the title — we were shown the German martyrs against the Nazis.
Don’t economists emphasize the marginal unit? Can’t we have at least one movie about small acts of defiance? In principle yes, but characters implausibly discover the brotherhood of man and viewers are fed uplifting final homilies, a’la Schindler. Natasha, who lived with her equivalent of the Stasi for many years, had a similar reaction of partial disgust and incredulity.
My friends consider me a cultural Germanophile (I could do "My Favorite Things German" for weeks), but I tend to be a cynic about the blacker historical episodes in the German past. I used to hate the slow, tortuous, and pretentious Nazi-Angst movies of Fassbinder and his ilk, but they’ve aged surprisingly well, and they came much closer to striking the appropriate tone.
Addendum: Here is one good review (spoilers); by the way if you know the Hong Kong original, Infernal Affairs, you’ll find The Departed almost impossible to watch. I walked out.
Paris advice
1. A few of the best restaurants are Pierre Gagnaire, Taillevent, Le Cinq, and perhaps Guy Savoy. Most critics might put Gagnaire as number one.
2. Michelin "two-forkers" are quite good, but you must book to get in. In general you can’t get a seat in a decent Parisian restaurant unless you either book or show up at opening. If you are wandering around looking for good food at 8:30 p.m., or for that matter 1 p.m., you are unlikely to do well.
3. In The Louvre, spend an hour in the Poussin room and also obsess over Watteau’s Voyage to Cythera.
4. In Musee d’Orsay, gaze at Courbet’s Origin of the World (sorry, I can’t link to the image on a family blog but do Google it) and Puis de Chavannes, in addition to the usual delights.
5. Go see the medieval tapestries at Musee Cluny.
6. Spend a few hours walking the main roads of the Left Bank. Start at Invalides and take the major arteries through to the Islamic Center. Walk, walk, walk.
7. Watch The Triplets of Belleville and spend hours walking through the (rapidly gentrifying) working-class neighborhoods of the Right Bank. The Metro is splendid but it robs you from seeing the greatest walking city on earth (Buenos Aires is number two). Don’t take it. Walk, walk, walk.
8. Go into a good cheese shop and spend $40. Focus on the weirder cheeses. Buy the non-pasteurized delights. Sit down with a baguette and some fruit as well, finishing the meal with small squares of outrageously priced dark chocolate. Throw in a sausage for good measure. Keep the cheese leftovers in your room at night and eat them for breakfast the next day. And the day after that. See how many days they will keep, you will be surprised.
9. Rue de Bussi and thereabouts has a convenient collection of cheese, fruit and bread shops, and it is in an excellent part of the Left Bank.
10. Internet Cafes are hard to come by. You must rely on the dumpy area near Centre de Pompidou. I find Paris to be the hardest city to blog from.
11. See a "world music" concert from Algeria, Madagascar, or the Congo. Or try contemporary music at IRCAM.
12. Here is my previous post My Favorite Things French. Douse yourself in Godard films before going. Start with Breathless, Band of Strangers, and My Life to Live.
13. If you want to read recent French social science (if you can call it that), try Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou’s Metapolitics, and Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus. Don’t get too upset if these books only make intermittent sense. At least they are alive. For a recent hit novel, try Houllebecq’s The Elementary Particles.
Comments are open, and I encourage all of you but especially John Nye and Barkley Rosser — both Paris experts — to make a few suggestions for my friend.
How is AI education going to work?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the first part of the argument:
Two kinds of AI-driven education are likely to take off, and they will have very different effects. Both approaches have real promise, but neither will make everyone happy.
The first category will resemble learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Duolingo, GPT-4, and many other services. Over time, these sources will become more multimedia, quicker in response, deeper in their answers, and better at in creating quizzes, exercises and other feedback. For those with a highly individualized learning style — preferring videos to text, say, or wanting lessons slower or faster — the AIs will oblige. The price will be relatively low; Khan Academy currently is free and GPT-4 costs $20 a month, and those markets will become more competitive.
For those who want it, they will be able to access a kind of universal tutor as envisioned by Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age. But how many people will really want to go this route? My guess is that it will be a clear minority of the population, well below 50%, whether at younger or older age groups…
Chatbots will probably make education more fun, but for most people there is a limit to just how fun instruction can be.
And the second part:
There is, however, another way AI education could go — and it may end up far more widespread, even if it makes some people uneasy. Imagine a chatbot programmed to be your child’s friend. It would be exactly the kind of friend your kid wants, even (you hope) the kind of friend your kid needs. Your child might talk with this chatbot for hours each day.
Over time, these chatbots would indeed teach children valuable things, including about math and science. But it would happen slowly, subtly. When I was in high school, I had two close (human) friends with whom I often talked economics. We learned a lot from each other, but we were friends first and foremost, and the conversations grew out of that. As it turns out, all three of us ended up becoming professional economists.
This could be the path the most popular and effective AI chatbots follow: the “friendship first” model. Under that scenario, an AI chatbot doesn’t have to be more fun than spending time with friends, because it is itself a kind of friend. Through a kind of osmosis, the child could grow interested in some topics raised by the AI chatbot, and the chatbot could feed the child more information and inspiration in those areas. But friendship would still come first.
Worth a ponder.
What I’ve been reading
1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create. Could the be the best book on NFTs? I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future. In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.” Do you pass or fail this test? The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…
2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans. Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work. Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture. Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.” A wonderful chronicle of a very particular time, artistic and otherwise.
3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman. The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition. But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.
4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis. One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment. For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well. Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay. Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you! If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare. Recommended, for all those who care.
5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus. It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away. I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024. The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened. The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.
William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.