Results for “status” 4117 found
*Elephant in the Brain* — what is really going on in this book?
Not long ago, over lunch, I asked Robin who he wanted to see rise and fall in status, as a result of his book with Kevin Simler. As for who should rise, he cited the book’s epigram to me:
To the little guys, often grumbling in a corner, who’ve said this sort of thing for ages: you were right more than you knew. —Robin
So yes the little guys, but I also stress the cynics as well, or maybe it is the gentle cynics who go through life with a smile.
And who should decline in status? Robin’s lunch answer was again to the point: policy analysts. Policy analysis, while it often incorporates behavioral considerations, when studying say health care, education, and political economy, very much neglects the fact that often both the producers and consumers in these areas have hypocritical motives. For that reason, what appears to be a social benefit is often merely a private benefit in disguise, and sometimes it is not even a private benefit. Things that feel good aren’t always good for you, or for the broader world. Here is Robin’s take on that:
Our new book, The Elephant in the Brain, can be seen as taking one side in a disagreement between disciplines. On one side are psychologists (among others) who say of course people try to spin their motives as being higher than they are, especially in public forums. People on this side find our basic book thesis, and our many specific examples, so plausible that they fear our book may be too derivative and unoriginal.
On the other side, however, are most experts in concrete policy analysis. They spend their time studying ways that schools could help people to learn more material, hospitals could help people get healthier, charities could better assist people in need, and so on. They thus implicitly accept the usual claims people make about what they are trying to achieve via schools, hospitals, charities, etc. And so the practice of policy experts disagrees a lot with our claims that people actually care more about other ends, and that this is why most people show so little interest in reforms proposed by policy experts. (The world shows great interest in new kinds of physical devices and software, but far less interest in most proposed social reforms.)
In ignoring hypocrisy, policy analysts are themselves hypocritical, and thus Robin wishes to downgrade their status, perhaps doubly so. Sorry people!
I find these status questions to be a useful means of thinking about many non-fiction books, sometimes fiction too. I would note it is sometimes hard to market books with the “group X ignores well-known truth from field Y” spin, but perhaps that also means there are intellectual arbitrage gains to be had from studying such works.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Markets in everything: Sol LeWitt sports bra. And there is no great stagnation.
2. Canadian documentary about Jordan Peterson. Covers gnosticism, the Heideggerian side, Jung, etc. Not so much about the anti-PC stuff or the personality psychology.
4. Chetty’s on-line Stanford class.
5. The drone wars heat up, this time in Syria and against Russia.
6. Dylan Matthews on Auten and Splinter and inequality debates.
Saturday assorted links
1. Turntable digitizes your records as they play.
2. Why don’t trees touch each other more?
3. A thread on mentoring across the genders.
4. Mike Konczal on Lindsey and Teles and “getting government out of the way,” recommended, this piece is a good challenge.
5. Most people aren’t that self-aware, nor does introspection necessarily improve self-awareness.
6. “It’s a convincing stand.” (scroll down a bit for that part)
Policing nature
Lasers are to be deployed against Britain’s biggest bird of prey to stop them taking sheep.
Farmers will be able to apply for licences to fire the beams on to hillsides on the west coast of Scotland to discourage sea eagles from areas where they are believed to be feeding on lambs. The method is being trialled by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and its partners in response to concerns among the crofting and farming communities.
White-tailed sea eagles were reintroduced to Scotland in the 1970s and the population stands at an estimated 106 breeding pairs. It is thought that the figure could double within ten years.
According to sheep farmers and crofters, the birds are not only taking large numbers of lambs but threatening rural livelihoods. Laser licences will be granted to farmers in areas where lambs have been taken by the birds.
The beams create patterns that disorientate the birds and make them fly away. The lasers cause the birds no harm and deter other predators from preying on farm animals.
That is from the London Times. And from Jonathan Franzen.
Assorted Friday links
Thursday assorted links
1. Meltdownattack. And more detail here. An actual explanation. NYT. A tweetstorm. Solve for the equilibrium.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Carmen must not die. And the great Barbara Adams Mowat (Folger editions editor) has passed away.
2. The culture that is Ann Arbor: “Sterilized Ann Arbor deer may get yoga mats to help with recovery.”
3. Is the world running short of sand?
5. MIE: Slavoj Zizek mini-skirts.
6. “The agreement stipulated that after becoming dentists, her sons would pay her 60 percent of their net profits until the total amount paid reached 50 million new Taiwan dollars, or just under $1.7 million.” Link here (NYT).
Tuesday assorted links
1. Laura Deming on longevity research.
3. NYT obituary for Calestous Juma.
4. “I’ve seen the future and it involves robot rationing of toilet paper…”
5. Cowen’s Second Law: “…the findings indicate that recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.” In other words, perfectionism is increasing over time.
Why I write for Bloomberg View
A while ago I promised you my take on Bloomberg View [BV], and why I decided to work for them. They don’t know I am doing this post, I don’t in any official or even unofficial way speak for Bloomberg View or for the broader company, and I hope they don’t get mad at me for attempting this brief capsule treatment. And it is fine if you wish to dismiss this as biased pleading, because it is.
One of the most striking features of BV, from my personal point of view, is how many of the writers I was actively reading and following before they started with BV. For instance:
1. A few years ago I tracked down Adam Minter for a Sichuan lunch in Shanghai, to talk with him about recycling, China, the metals trade and used goods, and his general take on things. Adam is one of the very best writers for mastering small, apparently obscure details, based on years of personal travel and research, and then showing how they reflect broader and more important truths. Adam later started writing for Bloomberg.
2. Megan McArdle and I have had periodic lunches and chats since I first met her in 2004 (?), when I was presenting an early version of Stubborn Attachments to Victor Niederhoffer’s Junto seminar in New York City. She was one of the very first economics bloggers, along with John Irons and Brad DeLong. The next time I see her we will again debate when and whether the world is going to end, and whether Panda Gourmet really does have the best cold noodles in Washington, D.C. (yes).
3. I met up with Christopher Balding for a lunch in Hong Kong, as he came over from Shenzhen. I was a fan of his China blog and research, and lo and behold Christopher ended up writing for Bloomberg. Here are his New Year’s resolutions.
4. Cass Sunstein is one of the polymaths of our time, and the #1 cited legal scholar, not to mention a Star Wars fan, and I interviewed him for Conversations with Tyler. I don’t have to tell you where he writes now, or that his favorite musician is Bob Dylan.
5. I’ve had periodic email contact with Stephen R. Carter, of Yale Law School, as the two of us share many common interests and reading habits. He’s now with Bloomberg View.
6. Virginia Postrel is a “dynamist” thinker of major significance, and I’ve been following her work for more than twenty years. I hope she does more with the topic of textiles. Here is a 2014 video she and I did together (mostly her) on the topic of glamour.
7. A few years ago, Noah Smith and I decided to get together at the AEA meetings, most of all to talk about Japan (Noah is fluent in Japanese and lived there for a good while). He was then still a professor before he made the decision to work for Bloomberg full-time. Last year, I took a long Uber ride to meet Noah for Thai food in Berkeley.
8. Conor Sen started blogging, and I thought: “This guy is awesome and has unique perspectives rooted in finance and housing and demographics and Atlanta.” Soon enough, Bloomberg hired him. Conor deservedly made this list of the year’s most interesting people.
8. I was a fan of Stephen Mihm’s work on history and economic history, before he started with BV.
9. And now we have Ramesh Ponnuru and Michael Strain, two of the very best market-oriented, right of center yet also eclectic columnists.
I don’t mean to neglect all the other people who write for Bloomberg View, as this list is determined by whom I knew before there was any Bloomberg connection. As for some of the others, Leonid Bershidsky is an amazing polymath, the “every column is full of information” Noah Feldman has a new and wonderful book on James Madison, there is Joe Nocera and Justin Fox and Barry Ritholz, and I am trying to schedule a Conversation with the great Matt Levine, who always knows more than you think he does, even after taking this clause into account. When I met Matt I simply uttered: “Matt Levine, only you can do what you do!” Is any other greeting required?
One day I woke up and realized these people write for Bloomberg View, or that people like them were going to, and then it occurred to me that maybe I should too. And there are still Bloomberg View writers I haven’t really discovered yet. (By the way, one reason all these people are so good is because of the consistently excellent editors.)
What is the common element behind all of these writers? I would say that Bloomberg View tends to hire reading-loving, eclectic polymaths, with both academic knowledge and real world experience, and whose views cannot always be predicted from their other, previous writings.
Over the last year, I think I would nominate Ross Douthat as The Best Columnist. But overall I think Bloomberg View has assembled the most talented and diverse group of opinion contributors out there, bar none.
On top of all that, BV is perhaps the least gated major opinion website.
In addition to the writing, I also very much enjoy working for a great company. Not all media outlets can offer that.
Anyway, forgive the biased rant, that is my take for today! They also serve nice snacks and have an amazing art collection in the NYC building.
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
Assorted Thursday links
1. Why did Bitcoin take so long? And is it ugly?
2. Cashless restaurants in NYC (NYT).
3. “...infants who look like their father at birth are healthier one year later. The reason is such father–child resemblance induces a father to spend more time engaged in positive parenting.” If looks could kill…
4. Are wealthier millionaires happier?
6. Does faculty tweeting help the reputation of universities?
Saturday assorted links
1. Walden has been adapted into a video game.
3. Anti-semitism in Sweden (NYT).
4. Traits that are most similar between spouses.
5. Luigi Zingales is running a new podcast, this one with Kate Waldock.
6. Does a single social science variable explain everything? (speculative)
Star Wars and net neutrality
That’s why the latest Star Wars trilogy is so dark: It’s looking more and more like real life, where the credits never roll and problems can always recur…The Last Jedi premiered a few hours after we learned that the FCC had reversed its stance on net neutrality; we all sang “Yub Nub” back in 2015 when that vote went one way, but we know now that the war wasn’t won.
Here is the Ben Lindbergh piece on the pessimistic themes in Star Wars. Ted Cruz also serves up some unusual remarks.
Sunday assorted links
2. “Wine glass capacity in England has increased sevenfold in 300 years.”
3. The Economist appreciates Juan Rulfo.
4. Social psychology, meet Herodotus (on alcohol).
6. Star Wars 10k price range markets in everything. And to drive the point home, don’t romanticize the hunter-gatherer.
Have cryptoassets created $0.5 trillion in social value?
Vitalik Buterin poses that question, do read his whole storm. Here are the last three tweets:
How many Venezuelans have actually been protected by us from hyperinflation?
How much actual usage of micropayment channels is there actually in reality?
The answer to all of these questions is definitely not zero, and in some cases it’s quite significant. But not enough to say it’s $0.5T levels of significant. Not enough.
Let me set aside the question of enabling grey or black market activities, and let us put aside the bubbly component of these assets, which may or may not be real. I’d like to focus on the underlying fundamentals.
Furthermore, crypto-assets have not consumed half a trillion in social costs, though I’d like to see the electricity bill. So mine is the concrete question: insofar as crypto-assets have served as hedges and stores of value, is that social value or just a private return at some offsetting rent-seeking-based social cost?
Stores of value
Let’s say I build a warehouse and store some furniture in it, because I am moving and I don’t want to throw out the sofa but need to keep it somewhere for a month. The gains from storing that furniture can be captured by standard cost-benefit methods, and few would doubt that is a legitimate private and also social efficiency. I am carrying “sitting capacity” into the future.
With crypto-assets, I am carrying wealth more generally into the future. The person who most wants that payoff structure for the wealth carry will end up owning the crypto-asset.
Do I hold and carry forward that wealth at the expense of other people? Is creating a crypto-asset, in welfare terms, a bit like being a counterfeiter and thus rent-transferring and wasteful? Or is it more like storing a sofa while moving house?
Or is the crypto-asset more like an insurance contract, and thus again wealth-enhancing? I see it as performing a mix of the store of value and insurance functions.
If the crypto-asset is rent-seeking (the electricity cost aside), exactly whose purchasing power is diminished? Presumably the Bitcoin and Ether millionaires spend more of their money and drive prices up for others. But it seems that is a pecuniary externality, not a real social cost of the kind that would justify a judgment of socially wasteful rent-seeking.
Maybe it makes more sense to view the crypto-assets as a new kind of insurance contract: “if some of my other assets go bust, Ether will keep me afloat.”
But who am I buying insurance from?
Dare I sneak the electricity back into the argument, and claim I am buying a form of implicit insurance from the electricity company? In this view of the world, electricity companies, without knowing it, and in conjunction with some basic crypto facts publicized first by Satoshi, started offering new assets for sale/construction. Some people wanted to buy those assets, and the process of doing so created these new carry-able “things,” namely crypto-assets. In essence, a bunch of people agreed to make cryptographic skill something to be rewarded and that created some new Arrow-Hahn-Debreu securities, the value being contingent on both electricity abilities and crypto abilities.
As the purchases of electricity proceeded, and the new ADS securities fell into the market, both consumer and producer surplus went up. In this view, the electricity costs are no more rent-seeking costs than are the bricks in the building of the insurance company.
Think of crypto-assets as assets whose value depends upon the reliability of “a particular kind of cryptography plus surrounding technologies including electricity.” That value really does seem to vary with the market portfolio in strange, non-traditional ways, validating its use as a hedge.
Now, let’s say that quantum computing made many crypto problems much easier to crack? Crypto-assets probably would decline in value or at least they would become riskier (given that forks and governance changes might result, exact predictions are a little tricky).
In other words, crypto-assets are bets on the future progress of crypto technologies, with a corresponding beta of the sort found in traditional finance theory.
Why have crypto-assets risen in value so sharply? Well, at first few people realized they wanted assets with that risk profile, or even that such assets existed (they were too busy thinking of Bitcoin as an alternate form of currency). As more people saw the potential here, the price rose rapidly. Of course there may be bubbly components of the price too.
In the longer run, insurance-useful crypto-assets should yield sub-par returns, precisely because of their insurance and storage values.
Getting back to Buterin’s point
So what then are the major social gains from current crypto-assets? Buterin misses a big but non-glamorous gain: by serving as efficient stores of value and by providing a new kind of insurance, they help people spend more money. And indeed that is what so much of finance is about, namely enabling higher levels of consumption. Is that going to account for half a trillion worth of social value? Likely not. Is it higher than electricity bill? We don’t know, but so far the presumption — the bubbly part of the price aside — ought to be yes. After all, the value of storing your sofa is higher than the electricity bill of the warehouse, otherwise the storage would not happen.
Possibly significant factors I have not considered: Benefits specific to the Ethereum platform, whether hedging itself is always socially valuable, the welfare economics of the bubbly part of an asset price.
Just remember the password people!
I have some tricks for doing this, which I have scrawled in the inner part of the margin of the manuscript. Here is Matt Levine on Bitcoin:
I half-joked yesterday that “perhaps the cost of bitcoin storage — keeping your private key in a vault, worrying about hackers, etc. — is so high that arbitrageurs need to charge $1,000 for a month of it,” but maybe it’s the right explanation? Everything I read about bitcoin storage is utterly exhausting. “A private key printed out on a sheet of paper, cut into pieces, and distributed among family members who don’t know how to put it back together; an encrypted file loaded on a USB stick and buried in the backyard; a password committed only to memory;” a private key engraved on a metal plate and stored in a safe; a safe deposit box at a bank; an account at an exchange that gets hacked and loses its customers’ bitcoins. Buying bitcoin futures is a way to get exposure to bitcoin and avoid the bitcoin-storage problem: You never have to store bitcoins because you never own bitcoins; you just get paid dollars for the amount that bitcoin goes up. But the storage problem doesn’t go away; you just offload it to the arbitrageur who provides you the bitcoin exposure. Maybe the arbitrageur needs to charge you $1,000 to cover her storage costs. If you think these markets are efficient, then the gap between the futures and the spot is telling you how much — in out-of-pocket expenses, in theft risk, in psychic pain — it costs to store bitcoin.
Here is more from Matt:
If I told you that there was an asset that is an excellent store of value even in inflationary conditions, how much of your gold portfolio would you reallocate to that asset? One percent? Three percent? Fifty percent? All of it? Sure, whatever, if you believed me. But we are just assuming that bitcoin actually fulfills that function, in order to decide its valuation. Bitcoin has had a pretty good run, but so far it’s a short one; there’s no historical experience of bitcoin retaining its value in periods of global financial crisis or rich-world inflation or even just, you know, people not talking about bitcoin for a minute. So far the evidence that bitcoin is a good store of value consists of the fact that bitcoin’s price keeps going up. That is not bad evidence! But it is not a ton of evidence to build a store-of-value valuation around.
If Matt told me, I would allocate at least two percent.