Results for “my favorite things” 275 found
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.
Living in Freiburg, Germany
After two years at Harvard, I had finished all of my graduate school courses and oral (!) exams. Then I had a compulsion for what I should do next, something that at the time appeared remarkably stupid, although it worked out very well for me.
At some critical points in my life I have made key decisions with regard to place, including Mexico, Haiti, New Zealand, and as I will write about today, Freiburg, Germany. Each of those decisions fundamentally reshaped my life. None of those decisions were motivated by rational reasons, or indeed much by traditional reasons at all. I simply wanted to do particular things, and then set off to do so.
After two years of study, a Harvard PhD student would be expected to apprentice with a top professor, “live in the basement of the Science Center” (where the computers were those days), and in general become part of the system. Somehow none of that fit me. I decided instead to study for a year in Freiburg, Germany, at the university there, mostly to learn German but also to run away from a particular kind of fate that most of my peers were choosing. And so I departed from Cambridge in 1984-85, aided by a strong dollar and a small grant from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
Other than an Oxford and London summer trip at age 17, it was my first time abroad. I flew over with Kroszner, and we rented a car to drive around Germany for a few weeks before I would settle in Freiburg.
Our first stop was Mainz, which was not too far from Frankfurt airport. I was stunned by everything I saw, ranging from the supermarkets to the food to how the downtown was organized. These days Mainz is regarded as a fairly dull city, but then, for me, it was fascinating beyond belief. Unlike England, Germany struck me as a peer country to the United States, with a roughly equal living standard and in some ways a superior way of life.
Other stops on our trip included the beautiful Baden-Baden, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, the “Romantic Road” in Bavaria, and of course Berlin. The one day I spent in East Berlin terrified me. Not primarily because of the living standards (which were low), but because the people seemed so fearful and intimidated. I decided that communism was far worse than I had thought. I was relieved to return to West Berlin, which at the time had that Cold War, party town, otherworldly feel. Try watching “Wings of Desire” some day.
Once I settled into Freiurg I was on my own. I refused to hang out with the other American students, and so I learned German pretty quickly. I developed a morning routine of walking to buy the International Herald Tribune, working on my dissertation in the morning on a typewriter, and going into town for lunch and some shopping and errands. Freiburg was the closest I ever have come to living in a proper city, though at the time the population was a mere quarter million or so. Nonetheless one could go “in die Stadt,” an entirely meaningful notion if you know the layout.
I even ended up with a German girlfriend, and from her I learned German all that much better.
Frequently I would feel claustrophobic, and so I would depart for Switzerland, where I would feel even more claustrophobic. Still, I loved those trips, as the sense of perpetual motion was sufficient compensation. Over time I have managed to see every Swiss canton, and I am fond of all of them. For Erleichterung I would visit the Netherlands, or one time Chris Weber came by and we drove to Colmar for Alsatian smoked meats, yum. For Thanksgiving there was an Italy trip to Bergamo and Verona. Later in the spring I went to Venice and Florence.
I had a January lecture tour in Vienna (freezing!), with the Carl Menger Institute, and in May a week-long stint in Graz. My German peers found it literally unbelievable that someone my age had published papers I could present and talk about, in addition to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on monetary economics.
I also gave a talk at a jazz club in Vienna, the first (but not last) time I experienced talk-giving as a kind of high class entertainment. I mixed German and English, and told a fair number of jokes, and found I enjoyed that. I am thankful to Albert Zlabinger for arranging that evening.
It was that kind of life. There has never been a year that was more exciting or when I learned more about the world.
Art and painting started making sense to me when I visited the Lenbach Haus in Munich, with Blue Rider works, and the Mondrian museum in The Hague. I retain a special fondness for those artists to this day.
Amsterdam probably was my favorite city, though I now feel it is long since ruined by an excess of tourists. To save money, I would sleep on the houseboats there.
Once I tired of German food, delicious though it may be, I started experimenting on the culinary front, at least as much as I could given my location. That was the time in my life when I started trying everything I could.
It simply stunned me how many things in Germany were better, starting with the bread and orange juice and butter, though hardly ending there.
So every day I learned, learned, learned, and was in pretty constant motion.
By the time I returned to the United States, it was clear I would never be entering on mainstream tracks again.
How to Visit India for Normies
In the comments to my post, India has Too Few Tourists, many people worried about the food, the touts and the poverty. Many of these comments are mistaken or apply only if you are traveling to India on the cheap as an adolescent backpacker (nothing wrong with that but I suspect the MR audience is different.) I have spent some time traveling in India including at times with my wife, who puts up with my wanderlust but appreciates a fine hotel, with my teenage children, and once with my elderly mother. So how should normies travel in India?
- Don’t be afraid or ashamed to do the tourist stuff first. The golden triangle, Delhi-Agra-Jaipur is great! There is no shame in following the beaten path.
- For the slightly more adventurous, branch out to Udaipur, my favorite city in India, where you can easily spend a week walking around and doing day trips. Add in Jodphur, stay at the Raas hotel and see the magnificent Mehrangarh fort and stepwell. Try out a tiger safari.
- India has the best hotels in the world. Depending on the season, you can stay in literal palaces for about the same as a good American or European hotel, say $250 a night.
- The food in the hotels is excellent and perfectly safe. The food in high-quality restaurants is perfectly safe. If you want, get some Dukoral in advance and carry some loperamide for extra protection.
- You can rent a comfortable, air-conditioned car with a driver (tell them Alex sent you) for less than it costs to rent a car in the United States. Your driver will pick you up in the morning, take you where you want to go, drop you off in the evening and disappear when not needed.
- The poverty and the dirt and the cows blocking traffic are not a reason to say away but a reason to go to India (drag me in the comments all you like, it is true). In Mumbai, I have seen seen a Ferrari followed by a bullock cart. Where else but in India? It’s important to see real poverty if only because you will appreciate your world all the more and wonder how to keep it. India is rapidly becoming richer. See living history while you still can.
- South India is much richer than North India and much less polluted. My Indian friend from Kerala had never seen a slum before he visited Mumbai.
- India is relatively safe. Of course with 1.4 billion people, bad things happen. Don’t let anecdotes deter you. Overall, it’s safer than the US or say Mexico. Tourists following the above won’t have any problems at all.
- Touts can be a hassle but are not a problem in the tourist sites. In other place, like walking old Delhi, either ignore them completely or hire a guide who will bat the others away.
Here is Tyler’s post on how to travel to India. Slightly more adventurous than what I have outlined but entirely consistent.
Here is a picture of Udaipur.
Steve Davis, Elon Musk’s Go-To Cost-Cutter Is Working for DOGE
A Bloomberg profile of the excellent Steve Davis:
Elon Musk’s deputy Steve Davis has spent more than 20 years helping the billionaire cut costs at businesses like SpaceX, the Boring Company and Twitter ….[now] Davis is helping recruit staff at DOGE, Musk’s effort to reduce government waste, in addition to his day job as president of Musk’s tunneling startup, the Boring Company.
At Boring, Davis has a reputation for frugality, signing off on costs as low as a few hundred dollars, according to people familiar with the conversations — unusual for a company that has raised about $800 million in capital. He also drives hard bargains with suppliers of products like raw steel, sensors, or even items as small as hose fittings, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
His favorite directive for staff doing the negotiations: “Go back and ask again.”
…Davis started working for Musk in 2003, when he joined SpaceX, at the time a new company. He had just earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford University, and distinguished himself at the startup by solving hard engineering problems. At one point, Musk tasked the engineer with finding a cheaper alternative to a part that cost $120,000. Davis spent weeks on the challenge and figured out how to do it for $3,900, according to a biography of Musk. (Musk emailed back one word: “Thanks.”)
…Multitasking has proved a Davis signature, dating back to his student days. While he was working on his doctorate in economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, Davis was working full time at SpaceX and owned a frozen-yogurt shop called Mr. Yogato in Washington’s Dupont Circle. Alex Tabarrok, one of Davis’ professors, remembers him juggling the multiple roles.
“I told him, ‘Look, you’re getting a Ph.D., you can’t be having a job and running a business at the same time,” Tabarrok recalls. “Focus on getting your Ph.D.”
But Davis declined to give up any of his pursuits, at one time incorporating business trends at Mr. Yogato into an academic paper and bringing some yogurt into class for sampling. Tabarrok can’t recall Davis’ grades, but says he stood out anyway. He “had so much energy, and was so entrepreneurial,” Tabarrok says. “It’s been kind of exciting to see him become one of Elon’s most trusted right-hand men.”
Davis’s GMU training in political economy will serve him very well in Washington.
See also my previous post, an MR classic, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things–Elon Musk and the Subways.
Addendum: 2013 profile of Steve and another of his businesses, Thomas Foolery a bar in DC where you paid for drinks according to plinko. Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.
Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson Win Nobel Prize for Institutions and Prosperity
The Nobel prize goes to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson for their work on institutions, prosperity, and economic growth. Here is a key piece summarizing their work: Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth.
This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the world by European powers starting in the fifteenth century. We then develop the basic outline of a framework for thinking about why economic institutions differ across countries. Economic institutions determine the incentives of and the constraints on economic actors, and shape economic outcomes. As such, they are social decisions, chosen for their consequences. Because different groups and individuals typically benefit from different economic institutions, there is generally a conflict over these social choices, ultimately resolved in favor of groups with greater political power. The distribution of political power in society is in turn determined by political institutions and the distribution of resources. Political institutions allocate de jure political power, while groups with greater economic might typically possess greater de facto political power…Economic institutions encouraging economic growth emerge when political institutions allocate power to groups with interests in broad-based property rights enforcement, when they create effective constraints on power-holders, and when there are relatively few rents to be captured by power-holders.
See this great MRU video on Institutions for a quick overview! Here from an interview with Acemoglu, is a slightly more pointed perspective. Politics keeps people poor:
Why is it that certain different types of institutions stick?….it wouldn’t make sense, in terms of economic growth, to have a set of institutions that ban private property or create private property that is highly insecure, where I can encroach on your rights. But politically, it might make a lot of sense.
If I have the political power, and I’m afraid of you becoming rich and challenging me politically, then it makes a lot of sense for me to create a set of institutions that don’t give you secure property rights. If I’m afraid of you starting new businesses and attracting my workers away from me, it makes a lot of sense for me to regulate you in such a way that it totally kills your ability to grow or undertake innovations.
So, if I am really afraid of losing political power to you, that really brings me to the politics of institutions, where the logic is not so much the economic consequences, but the political consequences. This means that, say, when considering some reform, what most politicians and powerful elites in society really care about is not whether this reform will make the population at large better off, but whether it will make it easier or harder for them to cling to power.
Those are the sort of issues that become first-order if you want to understand how these things work.
One interesting aspect of this year’s Nobel is that almost all of AJRs Nobel work is accessible to the public because it has come primarily through popular books rather than papers. The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Why Nations Fail, and the The Narrow Corridor all by Acemoglu and Robinson and Power and Progress by Acemoglu and Johnson are all very readable books aimed squarely at the general public. The books are in many ways deeper and more subtle than the academic work which might have triggered the broader ideas (such as the famous Settler Mortality paper). Many of the key papers such as Reversal of Fortune are also very readable.
This is not to say that the authors have not also made many technical contributions to economics, most especially Acemoglu. I think of Daron Acemoglu (GS) as the Wilt Chamberlin of economics, an absolute monster of productivity who racks up the papers and the citations at nearly unprecedented rates. According to Google Scholar he has 247,440 citations and an H-index of 175, which means 175 papers each with more than 175 citations. Pause on that for a moment. Daron got his PhD in 1992 so that’s over 5 papers per year which would be tremendous by itself–but we are talking 5 path-breaking, highly-cited papers per year plus many others! (Of course, most written with excellent co-authors). In addition, he’s the author of a massive textbook on economic growth. More than any other economist Daron has pushed the cutting-edge of technical economics and has also written books of deep scholarship still accessible to the public. In his overview of Daron’s work for the John Bates Clark medal Robert Shimer wrote “he can write faster than I can digest his research.” I believe that is true for the profession as a whole. We are all catching-up to Daron Acemoglu.
Indeed, in reading a book like Why Nations Fail and papers like The Network Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations (one of my favorite Acemoglu papers) and The Uniqueness of Solutions for Nonlinear and Mixed Complementarity Problems it’s difficult to believe they are co-authored by the same person. Acemoglu is as comfortable talking history, politics, and political economy as he is talking about the economics of recessions and abstruse mathematics.
Here are Previous MR posts on Daron Acemoglu including this post on democracy where I find the effect of democracy on growth to be ho-hum. Here is Maxwell Tabarrok on Acemoglu on AI. Here is Conversations with Tyler with Acemoglu and a separate conversation with Simon Johnson.
As noted, one of my favorite Acemoglu papers (with Carvalho, Ozdaglar, and Tahbaz-Salehi) is The Network Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations. Conventional economics models the aggregate economy as if it were a single large firm. In fact, the economy is a network. An auto plants needs steel and oil to operate so fluctuations in the steel and oil industry will influence production in the auto industry. For a long time, the network nature of production has been ignored. In part because there are some situations in which a network can be modeled as if it were a single firm and in part because it’s just much easier to do the math that way. Acemoglu et al. show that aggregate fluctuations can be generated by sector fluctuations and that organization of the network cannot be ignored. This is a modern approach to real business cycles. See also my post on Gabaix and granular fluctuations).
In recent work, Acemoglu and Restrepo have created a new way of modeling production functions which divides work into tasks, some of which are better performed by capital and others by labor. Technological change is not simply about increasing the productivity of labor or capital (modeled in standard economics as making one laborer today worth two of yesterday’s) but about changing which tasks can best be done by capital and which by labor. As a task moves from labor to capital the demand for labor falls but productivity increases which generates demand for other kinds of labor. In addition, as capital replaces labor in some tasks entirely new tasks may be created for which labor has a comparative advantage. A number of interesting points come out of this including the idea that what we have to fear most is not super-robots but mediocre-robots. A super-robot replaces labor but has an immense productivity advantage which generates wealth and demand for labor elsewhere. A mediocre-robot replaces the same labor but doesn’t have a huge productivity advantage. In an empirical breakdown, Acemoglu and Restrepo suggest that what has happened in the 1990s and especially since 2000 is mediocre-robots. As a result, there has been a decline in labor on net. Thus, Acemoglu is more negative than many economists on automation, at least as it has occurred recently. Acemoglu and Restrepo is some of the best recent work going beyond the old tired debates to reformulate how we think of production and to use that reformulation to tie those reformulations to what is actually happening in the economy.
Solow thought of technical change as exogenous which is still the first-pass approach to thinking about technical change. Acemoglu in contrast focuses on price and market size. In particular, the larger the market the greater the incentive to invest in R&D to serve that market (see also my TED talk). Thus, technical change will tend to be cumulative. A sector with a productivity improvement will grow which can make that sector even more remunerative for further technical advances (depending on elasticities). This matters a lot for environmental change because it suggests that a relative small intervention today–including subsidizing research on clean technologies–can have a huge payoff in the future because by directing technical change in the right direction you make it easier to switch later on. (from this interview)
But let’s think of the logic of directed technical change with cumulative research. The less we do on green technology today, the less knowledge is accumulated in the green sector, so the bigger is the gap between fossil-fuel-based technology and energy, and the cleaner energy, so the harder it will be in the future to close that gap. With more proactive, decisive action today, we already start closing the gap, and we’re making it easier to deal with the problem in the future.
Simon Johnson has also written important books on banking and finance including and that was before the big run up in American debt! James Robinson has written widely on African development and colonialism and African development more generally.
Overall, I’d say that this is an award for political science and for popular economics in the very best sense of economics that matters. Go buy their books and read them!
What I’ve been reading
1. Anna Bogutskaya, Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us. A fun read about the importance of horror movies in contemporary culture, and a lament that we underrate them.
2. Daniel Tammet, Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum. This is probably the best book of profiles of high-achieving autistics, with the chapter on Dan Ackroyd especially interesting. Do note that the writing style is autistic, which you may consider either a plus or a minus. And “Are we there yet?”
3. Michael Haas, Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler. A detailed, well-organized and captivating look at this story. My conclusion, though, is that the Germanic compositional scene already was starting to reach dead ends in terms of quality and innovation?
4. Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict. A good look at the festering problems in place before 1948. Among other things, it shows how many of the current arguments and debates have very deep roots, and just how far back the lack of trust goes.
5. Luke Stegemann, Madrid: A New Biography. Madrid is now one of the world’s very very best cities. You can judge tomes like this by how many other books they induced you to read or buy, and in this case the number was eight. I bought a whole catalog of color plates by the 18th century still life painter Melendez, for instance. Recommended.
6. Michael H. Kater, After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany. Another excellent work. From this book I took away the (unintended?) conclusion that the German written and cinematic contributions have not aged well, due to excessive (but understandable) preoccupations with Naziism and the Second World War. The greatest German postwar cultural contributions in fact are Richter, Beuys, Kiefer, Baselitz, Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, and Can. The less literal artistic forms dealt with the war obsession in more effective and lasting ways, noting that some Kiefer works still have this problem.
Self-recommending is Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment, and Other Essays. The essays on Frost, Auden, and Bradbury are some of my favorites.
Jordan Ott’s Back to the Future: How to Reignite American Innovation is exactly that.
Speaking of Kraftwerk, I also enjoyed the new Simon Reynolds book Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today Reynolds is very good at covering parts of music history that other people ignore.
More to come!
What to think about ranked choice voting?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one key segment:
Game theory can help explain how ranked choice voting changes the behavior of candidates, as well as the elites who support them. Consider a ranked choice election that has five or six candidates. To win the election, you can’t just appeal to your base. You also can’t alienate your opponent’s base. You want supporters of other candidates to regard you as “not too bad,” because if they hate you, they could rank you very low and get you tossed out of the running quickly.
Candidates are thus encouraged to moderate their positions and their behavior — that is, not to call each other too many names. If the favorite candidate of one voter calls the favorite of another “weird,” for example — to choose an example not quite at random — the latter voter might respond by voting down the name-caller to the very bottom.
The result? Negative campaigning diminishes, and politics moderates. The effect can be especially pronounced in party primaries, which sometimes are dominated by the most extreme voters.
The candidates also compete in different ways. In particular, they try to outdo each other when it comes to constituency service, which is a way of being popular without offending anybody.
The broader evidence on ranked choice voting shows that, when used, it has made US politics more moderate. Alaska’s ranked choice voting helped moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski beat her more ideological opponents in 2022. In Idaho, some conservatives regard ranked choice voting with suspicion, fearing it is a plot to neutralize their influence.
In Ireland, politics is fairly non-ideological on most matters of policy, and elections are not typically seen as major, course-altering events. After more than a century with this system, the Irish seem happy to keep it.
The lesson here is that it is not possible to evaluate ranked choice voting in the abstract. It usually makes politics less extreme and less ideological, but those are descriptive terms, not normative ones. I would prefer California’s politics to be less ideological, for example, but that is because it embodies an ideology distinct from mine. And sometimes the more extreme and ideological positions are entirely correct, as for instance John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of women’s suffrage and birth control in the 19th century.
In general, ranked choice voting is best for places where voters feel things are already on the right track and ought to stay there. It is a voting system for the self-satisfied. Which parts of contemporary America might that describe? No voting method yet devised can settle that question.
PR for the UK?
I say no, we have enough European governments with proportional representation already. Should not someone allow for the possibility of more decisive action?
Estimates are suggesting that Labour won two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote, more or less. So that induces the usual cries of misrepresentation of the electorate (it also reminds us that virtually all electoral systems are not “democratic” in the naive sense of that term). But Britain has many serious problems, and I would rather see one party given a decisive mandate to handle them. And I write that as someone who is not in general rooting for the Labour Party — virtually all of my favorite British politicians are Tories, even if I do not like what that party has become as a whole.
Contrast the British with the recent French election. The distribution of votes was not altogether dissimilar, but the Britsh have “a landslide,” while the French have a possibly ungovernable situation.
I do love checks and balances, but the UK needs to defeat NIMBY and fix the NHS. Now it is Labour’s turn to try. Here is a broad outline of Labour’s 100-day plan. Not exactly what I would choose (see Wooldridge at Bloomberg), but if they get two or three big things right the regime still could be a success.
Note that the margins for the Labour victorious seats are extremely low, which means there is an ongoing constraint on the exercise of government power. I am not so worried about an “elected dictatorship.” If anything, it may not be decisive enough.
Another consideration is that PR for the UK could end up meaning the rise of an Islamic party of some kind, of course with minority status. I suspect that would worsen rather than improve democratic discourse in Britain, and perhaps hinder immigrant assimilation as well. I don’t want that to happen, and so it is another reason why the UK should not switch to a PR system.
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.