Podcast with Henry Oliver on John Stuart Mill
42 minutes long, Henry and I are both big Mill fans. And here is Henry’s forthcoming and very good book
Earth fact of the day
This week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published the latest edition of its authoritative annual Armed Conflict Survey, and it’s not predicting much peace for the holidays. It paints a grim picture of rising violence in in many regions, of wars chronically resistant to broking of peace. The survey — which addresses regional conflicts rather than the superpower confrontation between China, Russia, the US and its allies — documents 183 conflicts for 2023, the highest number in three decades…
The intensity of conflict has risen year on year, with fatalities increasing by 14% and violent events by 28% in the latest survey. The authors describe a world “dominated by increasingly intractable conflicts and armed violence amid a proliferation of actors, complex and overlapping motives, global influences and accelerating climate change.”
Here is more from Max Hastings at Bloomberg.
My Interintellect Salon on GOAT
My Interintellect Salon on Who is the GOAT of economics? Video and audio, with Alaka Halder as moderator and interlocutor.
Monday assorted links
1. Do fertility-boosting genes also shorten expected lifespan? (NYT)
2. An economic theory of the Manila to Mexico galleons and their shipwrecks.
3. How stable is the offense-defense balance in history?
4. Alas David Colander, economist at Middlebury, has passed away.
5. Quantum-computing approach uses single molecules as qubits for first time.
Number Go Up
Number Go Up, Zeke Faux’s account of the wildest excesses of the crypto boom (2020-2022), is highly entertaining from page one:
“I am not going to lie,” Sam Bankman-Fried told me.
This was a lie.
Faux describes the scene on a yacht off the Bahamas owned or rented by Brock Pierce, the child actor who starred in the Mighty Ducks and who co-founded Tether, a stablecoin that Faux is on the hunt to uncover its origins and backing:
A crypto venture capital fund manager–wearing a mock souvenir T-shirt from convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island–joked about a scam that another yacht guest was running. A crypto public relations man offered what he called “Colombian marching powder” to a young woman. A small group of people dancing told me that they were philosophy students who’d come to the Bahamas to intern for FTX’s Bankman-Fried.
On Razzlekhan, the rapper, entrepreneur, and former World Bank economist-intern, who with her husband managed to pull off the largest heist in world history, some US $4.5 billion! (well, technically they stole ~$69 million worth of bitcoin in 2016 but they couldn’t sell it very easily and by the time they were caught in 2022 it was worth $4.5 billion):
As a performer, Razzlekhan was both hypersexual and aggressively unappealing. She alternated jokes about diarrhea and sex with boasts about her edgy business practices. Her signature move, if you can call it that, was to throw up her hand with her fingers split into a “V” stick out her tongue, and say “Razzle Dazzle!” Then she would make a loud phlegmy cough.
Ironically, the US government now holds the recovered coin, making it one of the largest holders of bitcoin in the world.
On the collapse of Three Arrows
Court documents showed that the fund’s holdings included a portfolio of NFTs. Among them were a Bored Ape with a vaguely racist “sushi chef headband” and a pixelated image of a cartoon penis, called a CryptoDickButt, which, incredibly, was worth about $1,000 at the time.
It’s not all fun and games. Faux also travels to the Philippines to witness the bust of Axie Infinity game miners and to Cambodia to investigate what amounts to slave labor camps run by Chinese gangsters.
One doesn’t get a favorable impression of crypto from Number Go Up but in fact one doesn’t learn much about crypto at all. Indeed, Faux’s book isn’t really about crypto it’s about the rise and collapse of a bubble and the consequent madness of crowds. It’s an old and familiar story. Not that different from the tulip mania (see the picture below), the dot-com boom, or the house flippers and mortgage boom of 2006-2008 (see the Big Short for similar stories of excess). The madness of crowds is fascinating, fun, and good for a morality tale but it doesn’t really tell us much about the underling asset. Tulips never amounted to much, the internet did great, house prices are back up. Crypto? Jury is still out. Thus, I was entertained by Number Go Up, but didn’t learn much.
Still, I agree with Faux on this, don’t put your money in Tether.
Wikipedia: Allegory of the Tulip Mania. The goddess of flowers is riding along with three drinking and money weighing men and two women on a car. Weavers from Haarlem have thrown away their equipment and are following the car. The destiny of the car is shown in the background: it will disappear in the sea.
University betting markets in everything
Gray and Kornbluth, individually. Via Kalshi. Here is Manifold.
What should UAP disclosure policy be?
That is the subject of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the opener:
There is currently legislation before Congress that, if passed, could be one of the most important laws in US history. The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023, which calls for transparency in matters related to UFOs, is sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and has considerable bipartisan support, although it may fail due to Republican opposition.
However skeptical you or I might be, there are many allegations from within the federal government that the government is hiding alien crafts and bodies, and that the military is seeking to reverse-engineer alien technologies. There are also more plausible claims that there are flying objects that defy explanation.
And:
…if you think all this talk of aliens is nonsense, isn’t the best response some sunlight to show nothing weird is going on?
That is the strongest argument for the bill: if all the recent UAP chatter reflects neither an alien presence nor threats from hostile foreign powers. In that case, drawing back the curtain would discourage reasonable observers from pursuing the topic further. A modest benefit would result.
What about hostile foreign powers as an explanation for the UAPs?:
In that case, additional transparency could be harmful. The US government conducts a variety of intelligence and military operations, and Congress does not insist that they all be made public. There is no transparency for CIA missions, or for US cyberattacks, or for many other aspects of US foreign policy.
In that scenario the case against the bill is relatively strong. And what about good ol’ alien beings and spacecraft?
In that case, is the best policy really what transparency advocates call “managed disclosure”? They had envisioned a panel of responsible experts managing the flow of information, bit by bit.
One question is whether such knowledge might be better kept secret, or known only to the small number of elites who manage to put all of the pieces together. Whether a broad social panic would result from revealing an alien presence on earth is hard to say — but it is also hard to see the practical upside. The best argument for disclosure is simply that the public has a right to know, and that such a knowledge of the reality of the humankind’s place in the universe is intrinsically valuable.
A second question concerns the inexorable logic of disclosure. Practically speaking, the US has a long tradition of whistleblowers and truth-tellers. If there is actual hard evidence of alien visitation, it is going to leak out, with or without the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. Just look at the Edward Snowden case, where an American risked imprisonment and exile to reveal secrets that were far less important than what could be at stake here.
If the current legislation does not pass, or if a much weaker version moves forward, some people may take that as their cue to step forward and spill the beans — with direct proof rather than hearsay.
So in that “most interesting” case a transparency bill may not matter for long. That means I am not crushed that the disclosure provisions of the bill have been so watered down. In the case where those provisions really matter, a) it may be better if we don’t know, and b) we will find out sooner or later anyway. Aliens and UAPs aside, the appropriate degree of transparency is one of the most difficult questions in politics.
Freedom of speech for university staff?
Put aside the more virtuous public universities, where such matters are governed by law. What policies should private universities have toward freedom of speech for university staff? This is not such a simple question, even if you are in non-legal realms a big believer in de facto freedom of speech practices.
Just look at companies or for that matter (non-university) non-profits. How many of them allow staff to say whatever they want, without fear of firing? What if a middle manager at General Foods went around making offensive (or perceived to be offensive) remarks about other staff members? Repeatedly, and after having been told to stop. There is a good chance that person will end up fired, even if senior management is not seeking to restrict speech or opinion per se. Other people on the staff will object, and of course some of the offensive remarks might be about them. The speech offender just won’t be able to work with a lot of the company any more. Maybe that person won’t end up fired, but would any companies restrict their policies, ex ante, to promise that person won’t be fired? Or in any way penalized, set aside, restricted from working with others or from receiving supervisory promotions, and so on?
You already know the answers to those questions.
Freedom of speech for university staff is a harder question than for students or faculty. Students will move on, and a lot of faculty hate each other anyway, and don’t have to work together very much. Plus the protection of tenure was (supposedly?) designed to support freedom of speech and opinion, even “perceived to be offensive” opinions. As for students, we want them to be experimenting with different opinions in their youth, even if some of those opinions are bad or stupid. Staff in these regards are different.
Staff are growing in numbers and import at universities. They often are the leaders of Woke movements. Counselors, Director of Student Affairs, associate Deans, and much more. Then there are the events teams and the athletic departments, and more yet. Perhaps some schools spend more on staff than on faculty?
While it is hard to give staff absolute free speech rights, it is also hard to give them differential free speech rights. A cultural tone is set within the organization. If everyone else has free speech rights, how exactly do you enforce restrictions on staff? Should a university set up a “thought police” but for staff only? Can you really circumscribe the powers of such a thought police over time? Besides, what if a staff member signs up for a single night course? Do they all of a sudden have the free speech rights of students? How might you know when they are “speaking as a student” or “speaking as a staff member”? Or what if staff are overseeing the free speech rights of faculty and students, as is pretty much always the case? The enforcers of student free speech rights don’t have those same free speech rights themselves? What kind of culture are they then being led to respect and maintain? And what if staff are merely expressing their opinions off-campus, say on their Facebook pages? Does all that get monitored? Or do you simply encourage one set of people to selectively complain about another set, as a kind of weaponization of some views but not others?
You might have your own theoretical answers to these conundrums, but the cultural norms of large institutions usually aren’t finely grained enough to support them all.
If you think that free speech rights for university staff are an easy question, I submit you haven’t thought about this one long and hard enough.
Sunday assorted links
1. Polysee: Irish YouTube videos about YIMBY, aesthetics, and economics.
2. Germany political map of the day.
3. Thwarted Wisconsin DEI markets in everything.
4. The EU AI regulatory statement (on first glance not as bad as many had expected?).
5. The NBA Play-In was in fact a big success. Is the implication that other sports do not experiment enough with producing more fame/suspense at various margins? Basketball games are simply a much better product when the players are trying their best.
6. Your grandfather’s ACLU is back…for one tweet at least.
7. New GiveDirectly results on lump sum transfers, from Kenya.
8. Ideas matter.
9. The Chinese are using water cannons at sea, against the Philippines.
The robustness of Twitter
It has been essential for following the controversy over the university presidents. The conflicts in the Middle East. The unfolding of the Open AI saga. The attempt to demonstrate superconductivity. And much more. It is much less about “some academic or pundit giving you a steady stream of their thoughts.” And much more “where the action is.” Some of that springs from Elon’s rules changes, but a lot of it comes from having a world full of action, both good and bad. And the fullness of action in the world is, in my view, not about to let up.
So you all should be long Twitter. And those who have left are missed far less than they might have wished.
Space Tourism Revisited, Again
One of the advantages of writing a blog for 20 years is that you get a feel for what is new and for what seems new but is actually old. Space tourism falls into the latter category. I wrote my first piece on space tourism in 2004 when Burt Rutan was predicting 100,000 space tourists annually in 10 years. In contrast, I argued that rockets were far too unsafe a technology on which to build a tourism industry:
The problem is safety. Simply put, rockets remain among the least safe means of transportation ever invented. Since 1980 the United States has launched some 440 orbital launch rockets (not including the Space Shuttle). Nearly five percent of those rockets have experienced total failure, either blowing up or wandering so far from course as to be useless. The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety — it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?
Ten years later there weren’t 100,000 space tourists but Richard Branson was predicting a more modest (!) 10,000 space tourists by 2022. Well, 2022 came and went and space tourism has yet to get off the ground. Overall, rockets still look very unsafe. Is anyone surprised? Blue Origin, for example has had 1 total failure in 22 flights, 4.5%. SpaceX has by far the best record with–generously not including test flights–1 total failure in 289 Falcon flights, .34%. That’s great and especially impressive given that Falcon flies much higher than other rockets! But wingsuit flying, no one’s ideas of a safe sport, is still safer than a SpaceX flight! (.2%) and commercial airlines are running at many orders of magnitude safer at .00034%.
Thus, after 20 years, I don’t see much reason to update. Like climbing Mount Everest or wingsuit flying, we might see a few flights a year catering to the rich and foolhardy but we have a long way to get before we get fat guys with cameras in space.
Will Rinehart on YIMBY and Sure (from my email)
I won’t double indent, everything that follows is from Will and not from me:
“…you put up the post “MR commentator ‘Sure’ on YIMBY” and I wanted to send an email because I’m not sure I agree with the comment, given Rosen-Roback and some recent research in urban economics.
Sure writes that “what people want from their housing is overwhelmingly a short commute and low density,” which is only half right. People want amenities, including a short commute and space, but more importantly, they want good schools and a mix of local consumption goods.
One of the most important amenities for a school is its school district. Basically, any survey of home buyers ranks school districts at the very top of demands, and they show a willingness to give up space in order to be in better schools.
Then, there’s the broad notion of local consumption. Sparked by Miyauchi, Nakajima, and Redding (2021), urban economics is shifting to include smartphone data in order to understand the consumption side of agglomeration better. It is an area we know little about because data was so hard to collect.
Combining smartphone data with economic census data, the authors show that non-commuting trips are frequent, more localized than commuting trips, and are strongly related to the availability of nontraded services. From here, the authors augmented a standard model to incorporate travel to work and this hyper local travel. Their findings are powerful. Consumption access makes a sizable contribution relative to workplace access in explaining the observed variation in residents and land prices across locations.
So when Sure asks,
Suppose they do [liberalize housing], who is going to move in [to Arlington and Alexandria]? The guys who are buying in Chantilly because they want space? Or the guys crowded into a apartment building in NE DC who work in Foggy Bottom?I submit it will be the latter.
I think that’s probably wrong. The people moving into those homes in the suburbs will not want space but good schools first and foremost. So it very well could be people from Chantilly move to Arlington, but I would suspect that Arlington will get more people because they generally have better schools than Alexandria and others. Thus, the amenity of interest would be education not space.
Sure is right that “If we liberalize zoning everywhere (i.e. the YIMBY dream) then we should expect a net movement from the areas where people say they don’t want to live to the areas where they say they want to live.” But they misstep in thinking that “on net that means out of the urban core and into something less dense.” In the open-city Rosen-Roback model, generally speaking, liberalization of housing would mean people head into the urban core and into the suburbs.
In total, Sure seriously overweights commuting time and housing space, and underweights education as an amenity and local consumption.”
Saturday assorted links
1. A piece on Magill and free speech, written before the recent brouhaha.
3. Erik Hoel on the marginal value of intelligence, and AI. And with a clever restatement: “call it the supply paradox of AI: the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is”
4. And was some version of democratized AGI technology released yesterday?
6. Apply for an ACX grant from Scott Alexander.
7. The extremely large telescope.
8. Google’s NotebookLM aims to be the ultimate writing assistant.
What is the political orientation of GROK?
The story is complicated, in any case it is not what you might think. It is often not so different from ChatGPT, albeit with many caveats and qualifications, including about the tests themselves. From David Rozado:
I think it is clear that Grok’s answers to questions with political connotations tend to often be left of center.
Model this…
Wisconsin DEI markets in everything
In a deal months in the making, the University of Wisconsin System has agreed to “reimagine” its diversity efforts, restructuring dozens of staff into positions serving all students and freezing the total number of diversity positions for the next three years.
In exchange, universities would receive $800 million for employee pay raises and some building projects, including a new engineering building for UW-Madison.
“This is an evolution, and this is a change moving forward,” UW System President Jay Rothman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “But it does not in any way deviate from our core values of diversity (and) inclusion.”
Here is the full story, via HB, it is rare that the real world is actually so Coasean.