Covering immigration is a mixed bag
This paper investigates the effect of media coverage on immigration attitudes. It combines data on immigration coverage in French television with individual panel data from 2013 to 2017 that records respondents’ preferred television channel and attitudes toward immigration. The analysis focuses on within-individual variations over time, addressing ideological self-selection into channels. We find that increased coverage of immigration polarizes attitudes, with initially moderate individuals becoming more likely to report extremely positive and negative attitudes. This polarization is mainly driven by an increase in the salience of immigration, which reactivates pre-existing prejudices, rather than persuasion effects from biased news consumption.
That is by Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski and Jérôme Valette, and here is the AEA-gated link, here are less gated copies. You can even see this effect in the MR comments section and also on Twitter. People are not persuaded by good arguments, rather they just think about the issue more, which in many cases leads them into further error and negative contagion.
Those new service sector jobs, Ace Ventura edition
But Butcher relies on old-fashioned detective work and his 10-year-old working cocker spaniel. Together, the pair have recovered hundreds of pets.
“I could work every single day of the week and every weekend there’s so much demand right across the board,” he said. “I probably get about on average 15 emails or calls just on missing cats every single week, a busy week might be as many as 30.”
His successful recovery rate for cats is somewhere between 82% and 85%. And his work has taken him across the world, tracking down a yorkshire terrier who went missing on the Grenadian island of Carriacou, and investigating a corrupt dog rescue centre in Turkey.
Often he recovers the animals within a day – he found a snatched cavapoo by tracking down CCTV, noticing an identifiable sticker in the window of the offending car, and putting out an appeal leading to the too-hot-to-handle dog being found dumped shortly after.
The AIs will not take these jobs anytime soon. Here is more from The Guardian. Via Henry Oliver.
My Shakespeare and literature podcast with Henry Oliver
Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House, the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn’t love Juliet, Girard, the development of individualism, the importance and interest of the seventeenth century, Trump and Shakespeare’s fools, why Julius Cesar is over rated, the most under rated Shakespeare play, prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare as an economic thinker. We covered a lot of ground and it was interesting for me throughout.
Excerpt:
Henry No, I agree with you. The thing I get the most pushback about with Shakespeare is when I say that he was a great thinker.
Tyler He’s maybe the best thinker.
And:
Henry Sure. So you’re saying Juliet doesn’t love Romeo?
Tyler Neither loves the other.
Henry Okay. Because my reading is that Romeo has a very strong death drive or dark side or whatever.
Tyler That’s the strong motive in the play is the death drive, yeah.
Henry and I may at some point do a podcast on a single Shakespeare play.
New Year’s Day assorted links
1. The peso in Argentina is now overvalued (FT).
2. “More than 40 percent of South Koreans below the age of forty have stopped dating. The Korea Development Institute reports that, in 2020, more than 52 percent of South Koreans in their twenties preferred a childless marriage, up from about 30 percent in 2015. More than 30 percent of all Korean households comprise only one person.” Link here.
3. Chinese quadruped robot video.
4. The new Turing test for AI video…”… the characters often look like they’re having some kind of existential crisis about their inability to write.”
5. Zvi on DeepSeek.
Africa facts of the day
This corridor of conflict stretches across approximately 4,000 miles and encompasses about 10% of the total land mass of sub-Saharan Africa, an area that has doubled in just three years and today is about 10 times the size of the U.K., according to an analysis by political risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft…
Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946, according to data collected by Uppsala University in Sweden and analyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two institutes have identified 28 state-based conflicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 countries, more than in any other region in the world and double the count just a decade and a half ago. That tally doesn’t include conflicts that don’t involve government forces, for instance between different communities, and whose number has also doubled since 2010…
The continent is now home to nearly half of the world’s internally displaced people, some 32.5 million at the end of 2023. That figure has tripled in just 15 years.
Here is more from Gabriele Steinhauser, Andrew Barnett, and Emma Brown at the WSJ. In my view, people are not taking these developments seriously enough.
Some Jimmy Carter observations from the 1970s
Usually I am reluctant to criticize or even write about the recently departed, but perhaps for former Presidents there is greater latitude to do so.
I never loved Jimmy Carter, and I saw plenty of him on TV and read about his administration on a daily basis in The New York Times.
I fully appreciate his legacy of deregulation, which far exceeded that of the Reagan administration. Plus Carter appointed Volcker and stood by him. He was honest right after the Watergate scandals, and Camp David was a major achievement and furthermore it has stood the test of time in Egypt. Those are some significant accomplishments, and at the time I felt he was a decent President.
But I did not like his overall vibes, and for a President that is important.
He struck me as a pious moralizer who did not have a great sense of the differences between good and harmful altruism. Somehow morality had to be packaged with some strange form of gentlemanly, southern, cloying self-abnegation.
He sent his daughter Amy to an inferior public school in Washington, D.C., instead of to a top-quality private school.
He went on TV in a sweater and told us to think in terms of privation rather than opportunity. The Cowen family did indeed turn down the thermostats.
He confessed to lusting after women in his heart in a sincere manner that made him sound absurd and out of touch.
Unlike Ronald Reagan, he was not able to moralize effectively about the Soviet Union and its role as evil empire. Yet I always felt he was lecturing me.
He emphasized “human rights” as important for American foreign policy. I am not opposed to that approach, but he made it sound so preachy and unappetizing. Nor was he able to realize that vision, so the country and its leadership simply became more hypocritical.
He seemed to have exactly the wrong temperament for confronting the various crises in Iran.
His voice grated on me, perhaps because I identified it with a particular kind of unself-conscious, preachy moralizing? I do understand we might do well to have some of that moralizing back. Still, I am not going to like it.
Was he ever funny?
I much preferred Ford, and even the evil Nixon and Clinton, not to mention Reagan. It’s a good thing Carter had some major pluses on his record.
The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ~10^9 bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: What neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time? The brain seems to operate in two distinct modes: the “outer” brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals, whereas the “inner” brain processes the reduced few bits needed to control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this.
That is by Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister, via Rohit.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage bet on AI. And the Manifold odds. And Samuel Butler’s Darwin Among the Machines.
2. Addiction predictions for 2025. Includes GLP-1 predictions.
3. My podcast with Kevin Gentry on leadership and taking big chances and how much you can do.
4. “These results suggest that speech about committing murder in movies is increasing over time, even in noncrime movies, regardless of character gender.” Link here.
5, How might you store something digitally for one hundred years?
6. Africa in 2024, by Ken Opalo.
7. Joseph Walker podcast with Eugene Fama.
8. How to like everything more. Good post.
The Cows in the Coal Mine
I remain stunned at how poorly we are responding to the threat from H5N1. Our poor response to COVID was regrettable but perhaps understandable given the US hadn’t faced a major pandemic in decades. Having been through COVID, however, you would think that we would be primed. But no. Instead of acting aggressively to stop the spread in cows we took a gamble that avian flu would fizzle out. It didn’t. California dairy herds are now so awash in flu that California has declared a state of emergency. Hundreds of herds across the United States have been infected.
I don’t think we are getting a good picture of what is happening to the cows because we don’t like to look too closely at our food supply. But I reported in September what farmers were saying:
The cows were lethargic and didn’t move. Water consumption dropped from 40 gallons to 5 gallons a day. He gave his cows aspirin twice a day, increased the amount of water they were getting and gave injections of vitamins for three days.
Five percent of the herd had to be culled.
“They didn’t want to get up, they didn’t want to drink, and they got very dehydrated,” Brearley said, adding that his crew worked around the clock to treat nearly 300 cows twice a day. “There is no time to think about testing when it hits. You have to treat it. You have sick cows, and that’s our job is to take care of them.”
Here’s another report from a vet:
…the scale of the farmers’ efforts to treat the sick cows stunned him. They showed videos of systems they built to hydrate hundreds of cattle at once. In 14-hour shifts, dairy workers pumped gallons of electrolyte-rich fluids into ailing cows through metal tubes inserted into the esophagus.
“It was like watching a field hospital on an active battlefront treating hundreds of wounded soldiers,” he said.
Here’s Reuters:
Cows in California are dying at much higher rates from bird flu than in other affected states, industry and veterinary experts said, and some carcasses have been left rotting in the sun as rendering plants struggle to process all the dead animals.
…Infected herds in California are seeing mortality rates as high as 15% or 20%, compared to 2% in other states, said Keith Poulsen, a veterinarian and director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory who has researched bird flu.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture did not respond to questions about the mortality rate from bird flu.
Does this remind you of anything? Must we wait until the human morgues are overrun?
The case fatality rate for cows appears to be low but significant, perhaps 2%. A small number of pigs have also been infected. On the other hand, over 100 million chickens, turkeys and ducks have been killed or culled.
There have now been 66 cases in humans in the US. Moreover, the CDC reports that in at least one case the virus appears to have evolved within its human host to become more infectious. We don’t know that for sure but it’s not good news. Recall that in theory a single mutation will make the virus much more capable of infecting humans.
When I wrote on December 1 that A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History Manifold Markets was predicting a 9% probability of greater than 1 million US human cases in 2025. Today the prediction is at 20%.
Once again, we may get lucky and that is still the way to bet but only the weak rely on luck. Strong civilizations don’t pray for luck. They crush the bugs. So far, we are not doing that.
Happy new year.
Updating the best of 2024 lists
Here are my additions to the year’s “best of” movies list:
All We Imagine as Light
A Real Pain (didn’t think I would like it, but it is very good)
Green Border
A strong finish, yes?
I’ve also been listening to Two Star & the Dream Police, and Mount Eerie’s Night Palace, not recommended for most of you but very good nonetheless.
As for the end of the year surprise book, one of the very best from 2024, there is Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV. I’ll be writing more about it in 2025.
Joseph Walker on Australian migration (from my email)
I argued a few days ago that attacks on less skilled immigration might spill over and through contagion effects cause negative attitudes about immigration more generally. At which point I received the following from Joseph:
Australia, I think, shows the contagion effects are a big deal.
We have one of the most skill-biased immigration programs in the world and also one of the most successful approaches to cultural integration in the world.
A significant chunk of our net migration comes in the form of overseas students, who can be put on a pathway to permanent residence and citizenship after completing their degrees. (This program was introduced in 2001, largely to slow our population ageing.)
The international students cross-subsidise the domestic ones, and education is now Australia’s third biggest export after coal and iron ore.
Like the rest of the Anglosphere, our housing market is broken, but this can’t mostly be blamed on international students, since they don’t add to demand for the kinds of housing people are concerned about.
And yet the discourse has soured completely on migrants, especially international students.
A lot of Australian influencers copy and paste US anti-immigration talking points, even though they don’t really map over.*
(As it happens, I’ll be interviewing one of the key architects of Australia’s modern migration system in a live salon in January: https://events.humanitix.com/joe-walker-podcast-abul-rizvi.)
*To be sure, there are valid criticisms of Australian migration policy. Most notably, net migration was mismanaged and unsustainably high over the past two years, driven by a post-pandemic surge in students. In 2022-23, it exceeded 500,000 people (for context: this number is unprecedented and about double pre-pandemic levels). There has also been exuberance and an erosion of academic standards in the university sector. But these mistakes are being addressed, and the broader negativity I’m observing seems unlikely to be appeased by fixing them.
*A Complete Unknown*
I hate most biopics for their predictability, but loved this one. The Dylan character was remarkable, including his musical abilities. The film is willing to admit that Dylan might have been a jerk, no hagiography here. The Pete Seeger and Joan Baez characterizations were at least as good. It was a meaningful and instructive portrait of America in the 1960s. Everything feels real. Here is a very positive Cass Sunstein review.
As for imperfections, it bugged me a wee bit that the chronology of the songs and their order was off. And maybe it was ten minutes too long?
I think it is hard for younger people today to understand the import of Dylan. Does this movie solve that problem? I still am not sure.
Monday assorted links
Questions that are rarely asked
“Which do you think is the best symphony which you never have heard?”
It used to be the first two symphonies of Carl Nielsen, but yesterday I heard them. They are good, probably not great, but in any case I never had heard them before. I have heard more Haydn symphonies than you might think (all of them), so for me the answer is not one of those.
Perhaps now it is something by Lutoslawski? I only know two of them, and I like them. What else does this margin hold? And how long will I need to explore it?
This question gets at two issues. First, how do you assess matters you do not really know? What kinds of evidence do you bring to bear on answering this question?
Second, why do you stop at one margin rather than another? Why don’t you know whatever you think is the best symphony you have never heard? Was your last attempt in that direction such a miserable failure? Are symphonies really so bad? I think not. No matter who you are, there are still some good ones.
So what is stopping you?
That is from EB-CH, a cranky guy but sometimes he has good points. There are (at least) two additional problems<:
1. First, a global recession could scuttle the whole thing on the revenue side.
2. Second, Argentina (not blaming Milei here, I think he understands this) has a tendency to give up on its adjustment programs too early. A temporarily balanced budget does not reflect how a tanking of commodity prices (combined perhaps with other problems) could lead to a future financial crisis once again. The fiscal configuration has to be not only “good enough for now” but truly stress tested. Is the political system down there strong enough to see that through? I suppose we will find out.