China fact of the day
Marriages in China plunged by a fifth to the lowest level on record last year, a setback to efforts by the government to reverse a demographic crisis threatening the world’s second-biggest economy.
The number of marriage registrations fell to 6.1 million, according to statistics released by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs on Saturday, after a post-pandemic increase to nearly 7.7 million in 2023. The tally for last year marks the fewest marriages since public records began in 1986 and is less than half the peak reached in 2013.
Here is more from Bloomberg News.
What should I ask Jennifer Pahlka?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Jennifer Pahlka (born December 27, 1969) is an American businesswoman and political advisor. She is the founder and former executive director of Code for America. She served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer from June 2013 to June 2014 and helped found the United States Digital Service. Previously she had worked at CMP Media with various roles in the computer game industry. She was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 conferences. In June 2023, she released the book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.
Recently she has been working on the Niskanen Institute state capacity project. So what should I ask her?
Tuesday assorted links
Lift the Ban on Supersonics: No Boom
Boom, the supersonic startup, has announced that their new jet reaches supersonic speeds but without creating much of an audible boom. How so? According to CEO Blake Scholl:
It’s actually well-known physics called Mach cutoff. When an aircraft breaks the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude, the boom refracts in the atmosphere and curls upward without reaching the ground. It makes a U-turn before anyone can hear it. Mach cutoff physics is a theoretical capability on some military supersonic aircraft; now XB-1 has proven it with airliner-ready technology. Just as a light ray bends as it goes through a glass of water, sound rays bend as they go through media with varying speeds of sound. Speed of sound varies with temperature… and temperature varies with altitude. With colder temperatures aloft, sonic booms bend upward. This means that sonic booms can make a U-turn in the atmosphere without ever touching the ground. The height of the U varies—with the aircraft speed, with atmospheric temperature gradient, and with winds.
….Boomless Cruise requires engines powerful enough to break the sound barrier at an altitude high enough that the boom has enough altitude to U- turn. And realtime weather and powerful algorithms to predict the boom propagation precisely.
Here is the crazy part. Civilian supersonic aircraft have been banned in the United States for over 50 years! In case that wasn’t clear, we didn’t ban noisy aircraft we banned supersonic aircraft. Thus, even quiet supersonic aircraft are banned today. This was a serious mistake. Aside from the fact that the noise was exaggerated, technological development is endogenous.
If you ban supersonic aircraft, the money, experience and learning by doing needed to develop quieter supersonic aircraft won’t exist. A ban will make technological developments in the industry much slower and dependent upon exogeneous progress in other industries.
When we ban a new technology we have to think not just about the costs and benefits of a ban today but about the costs and benefits on the entire glide path of the technology.
In short, we must build to build better. We stopped building and so it has taken more than 50 years to get better. Not learning, by not doing.
In 2018 Congress directed the FAA:
..to exercise leadership in the creation of Federal and international policies, regulations, and standards relating to the certification and safe and efficient operation of civil supersonic aircraft.
But, aside from tidying up some regulations related to testing, the FAA hasn’t done much to speed up progress. I’d like to see the new administration move forthwith to lift the ban on supersonic aircraft. We have been moving too slow.
Addendum: Elon says it will happen.
Protection against asteriod strikes
I have some bad news, fellow Earthlings: There is a newly discovered asteroid, called 2024 YR4, headed for our planet. Fortunately, the risk is neither great nor urgent. The chance of impact, which would happen on Dec. 22, 2032, is estimated at only about 2.3%.
The worst-case scenario, though not world-ending, is still horrific. The asteroid is estimated to be between 130 and 330 feet long, and its impact could devastate a major city or, through a tsunami, coastline. For purposes of contrast, the space object that hit Siberia in 1908 is estimated to have been 130 feet long, and it decimated almost 800 square miles of forest. Furthermore, an asteroid strike today could cause a chemical, gas or nuclear accident…
A possibility of 2.3% is not as low as it might sound at first. The chance of drawing three of a kind in a standard five-card poker game, for example, is a about 2.9%. Three of a kind is hardly an unprecedented event.
That probability number keeps on skipping around, so apologies if that is obsolete by the time you are reading this. Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column. And I thank Alex T. for drawing initial attention to this topic, including my own.
The Effect of European Monarchs on State Performance
We create a novel reign-level data set for European monarchs, covering all major European states between the 10th and 18th centuries. We first document a strong positive relationship between rulers’ cognitive ability and state performance. To address endogeneity issues, we exploit the facts that (i) rulers were appointed according to hereditary succession, independent of their ability, and (ii) the widespread inbreeding among the ruling dynasties of Europe led over centuries to quasirandom variation in ruler ability. We code the degree of blood relationship between the parents of rulers, which also reflects “hidden” layers of inbreeding from previous generations. The coefficient of inbreeding is a strong predictor of ruler ability, and the corresponding instrumental variable results imply that ruler ability had a sizeable effect on the performance of states and their borders. This supports the view that “leaders made history,” shaping the European map until its consolidation into nation states. We also show that rulers mattered only where their power was largely unconstrained. In reigns where parliaments checked the power of monarchs, ruler ability no longer affected their state’s performance.
By Sebastian Ottinger and Nico Voigtländer, from Econometrica. Here are less gated versions. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Greenland Next
Hat tip: Max
The exhaustion of rents
A computer expert who has battled for a decade to recover a £600m bitcoin fortune he believes is buried in a council dump in south Wales is considering buying the site so he can hunt for the missing fortune.
James Howells lost a high court case last month to force Newport city council to allow him to search the tip to retrieve a hard drive he says contains the bitcoins.
The council has since announced plans to close and cap the site, which would almost certainly spell the end of any lingering hopes of reaching the bitcoins. The authority has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land.
Here is the full story, via Michael Rosenwald. It is of course amazing that the local authority owning the dump has no interest in recovering the money for itself.
Monday assorted links
1. One way the demand for donkeys and horses might rise (speculative).
2. Is France the anti-frontier?
3. “We found that extreme temperatures and added precipitation each independently amplified social-media activity, effects that persisted within individuals.” Big effects.
4. AI art at auction, at Christie’s. The Holly Herndon is a bargain, and will go for well over its estimate.
5. Cass Sunstein, What are We in the Midst Of? (All of those?)
6. “Marketers need to be writing for AI” (Bloomberg)
7. Times of London resurrects its “Best books of the year” Sunday feature, the best feature of an excellent newspaper.
8. I guess since the CDC deleted the information on cat to human avian flu transmission, it isn’t true? (NYT)
9. The Anthropic Economic Index. And the related research paper.
Dwarkesh’s Question
One question I had for you while we were talking about the intelligence stuff was, as a scientist yourself, what do you make of the fact that these things have basically the entire corpus of human knowledge memorized and they haven’t been able to make a single new connection that has led to a discovery? Whereas if even a moderately intelligent person had this much stuff memorized, they would notice — Oh, this thing causes this symptom. This other thing also causes this symptom. There’s a medical cure right here.
Shouldn’t we be expecting that kind of stuff?
It’s a very good question. In 2023, I quipped, “I think they have, we just haven’t asked them.” Maybe, but less clear today. Dwarkesh reports that there have been no good answers.
Niall Ferguson on world music
Worlds collide, as Niall is interviewed (very effectively) in Songlines magazine, and yes I am a loyal subscriber. Excerpt:
As part of the Empire series, Ferguson also went to West Africa and filmed in Sierra Leone and, subsequently, Ghana and Senegal. He regrets not seeing Youssou N’Dour, who wasn’t going to be on stage until 2am, as they had to be up early to film. At the same time, he says he got turned on to Amadou & Mariam and Tinariwen. “But Africa’s such a vast continent you’ll never know all the music. [BBC] Radio 3 is often throwing things at me that I’m not expecting. Thank God the BBC is willing to play unusual and esoteric African music, and I’ve benefitted hugely from that eclectic programming.”
He is quick to mention Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, who were formed by a group of Guinean refugees during the civil war in Sierra Leone. “Their song ‘Living Like a Refugee’ is an anthem for our times,” he says…
It’s such a gift to listen to [the] music of Tinariwen or Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars and enjoy it and not think ‘I’m now listening to African music.’ It’s just as life-affirming as Mozart.”
Recommended.
It’s later than you think
Here is a short essay by Hollis Robbins on AI and education, excerpt:
Every faculty member should begin to write a detailed memo specifying the following: “What specific knowledge do I possess that AGI does not? What unique insights or capabilities can I offer that exceed AGI systems? Which students, and in which topics, would benefit enough to pay to learn from me and why?” Faculty who cannot produce this memo with concrete, defensible answers have no place in the institution. There is no middle ground.
Every dean must immediately audit their course catalog against one criterion: what advanced knowledge or skills does this course offer that AGI cannot replicate? Each course must demonstrate specific knowledge transfer or skill development that exceeds AGI capabilities. It will become obvious that the highest value courses are those aligned with specific faculty expertise. General education courses focused on basic knowledge transfer become indefensible. If the information is general enough to be called “general education,” AGI can deliver it more effectively than any human instructor. This will eliminate most of the current curriculum.
Universities will retain faculty in three categories: those advancing original research beyond AGI capabilities, those who teach the use of advanced equipment and sophisticated physical skills, and those handling previously undiscovered source materials or developing novel interpretations that outstrip AGI’s analysis. In the sciences, this means laboratory-based faculty who validate AGI-generated research proposals and offer advanced hands-on training with advanced equipment. In engineering and the arts, it’s faculty who guide students in high-level physical manipulation, augmented by AI tools. In the humanities, it’s scholars working with newly discovered primary sources, untranslated manuscripts, or archaeological evidence not yet processed by AI, as well as those creating fundamentally new interpretive frameworks that transcend AGI’s pattern-recognition capacities.
The curriculum narrows dramatically. Most lecture courses disappear. What remains are advanced research seminars where faculty share findings from new source materials or original experiments, intensive laboratory and studio sessions for hands-on skills, and research validation practicums where students learn to test AGI hypotheses. This represents a 60-70% reduction in current faculty positions, with remaining roles requiring fundamentally different capabilities than traditional academic work.
There is more of interest at the link.
New York City fact and poetic passage of the day
If the coastline of the New York Harbor region were stretched out, it would be longer than the state of California. New York City’s waterfront is bigger than those of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston combined. As vast as it is, the area that is officially known as the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary is even more staggering in its complexity, encompassing such a concatenation of inlets, margins, banks, strands, runnels, rivers, reefs, rivulets, coves, creeks, and kills; of brooks, basins, bays, shoals, shores, islands, islets, and peninsulas, of jetties, bluffs, heights, scallops, spits, crags, beaches, reaches, bends, bights, channels, sandbars, sounds, and points, as to be virtually unmatched in the United States.
That is from the new and fun book by Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America.
Sunday assorted links
1. Quantum technologies for health care? (speculative!)
2. ChatGPT comments on Tanner Greer.
3. Mercatus looking to hire additional AI policy scholars.
5. “The owner of the theatre I’ve performed at a few times invited me to put on my own economics-themed comedy variety show :). The first one will take place February 17 at 7pm: EconLOL, the world’s first, best, and only economics-themed comedy variety show. There will also be a livestream.”
Minimum Wages, Efficiency, and Welfare
Recently Alex raised some doubts, to say the least, about the Card-Krueger view of minimum wage hikes. Well, it turns out there is more, and a new consensus is on the verge of forming. Here are David Berger, Kyle Herkenhoff, and Simon Mongey, from a new Econometrica piece:
Many argue that minimum wages can prevent efficiency losses from monopsony power. We assess this argument in a general equilibrium model of oligopsonistic labor markets with heterogeneous workers and firms. We decompose welfare gains into an efficiency component that captures reductions in monopsony power and a redistributive component that captures the way minimum wages shift resources across people. The minimum wage that maximizes the efficiency component of welfare lies below $8.00 and yields gains worth less than 0.2% of lifetime consumption. When we add back in Utilitarian redistributive motives, the optimal minimum wage is $11 and redistribution accounts for 102.5% of the resulting welfare gains, implying offsetting efficiency losses of −2.5%. The reason a minimum wage struggles to deliver efficiency gains is that with realistic firm productivity dispersion, a minimum wage that eliminates monopsony power at one firm causes severe rationing at another. These results hold under an EITC and progressive labor income taxes calibrated to the U.S. economy.
Here is the link to Econometrica. Here is an earlier NBER working paper version.