Amsterdam urban engineering

by  Tyler Cowen in

An average of 18 people a year reportedly drown in the city’s canals: often men, late at night, falling to their deaths while apparently taking a “wild wee”.

Last week, councillors demanded answers to questions on water safety, prompted by the death of Sam van Grondelle, a 29-year-old Amsterdammer who disappeared in October and whose body was discovered three days later in the Veemkade waterway.

As part of a multibillion-euro renovation of the city, the authorities are putting in extra ladders and grab ropes along 200km of crumbling canal wall. However, most of the walls remain high, are poorly lit and are often flanked by an ankle-high “car rail” to stop vehicles rolling in. They form a perfect trip hazard for distracted wanderers.

The authorities are focused on: “…prevention techniques and safety campaigns in the UK and Ireland.”  About ten percent of the drowned men had their flies open.  Here is the full Times of London story.

Sunday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The pessimistic view on Ethiopia.

2. Inside the NBA’s chess club.

3. Brian Goff on education and the cost disease.

4. Genes and depression and bad luck is endogenous.

5. TC on internet writing.  And TC on Bill Laimbeer on passive-aggressive economists.

6. How should state and local governments respond to illegal retail cannabis?

7. Diaper spa for adults, and a licensing issue too.

8. The Karpathy review of Apple Vision Pro.  I likely will try it once there is a small army of people who have figured out the ins and outs and who can serve as tutors, including for setting the thing up.  One reason I am not “first in line” with this device is that it strikes me as a “technology of greater vividness” (a bit like some drugs? or downhill skiing?), and not so much a “technology to understand people and cultures more deeply.”  I think the latter interests me more, and I also do better with the latter.  But perhaps I am wrong!  To be clear, I am not arguing that “technologies of greater vividness” are objectively or intrinsically worse, if anything more people seem to prefer them.

Non-random splat

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is heresy to say this, but I don’t think many people will be listening to the music of Jelly Roll Morton in the future.  It feels “too archived” and less vital than say Haydn, much less Mozart or Beethoven.

So many people are defending Luka on Twitter, but he doesn’t do much to make his teammates better.  And why didn’t Jalen Brunson stick around on the Mavericks?  “Who wants to play with you?” is an underrated metric for assessing player quality, not to mention hire quality more generally.  Luka is on track to be one of the five (three?) greatest scorers of all time, but not one of the fifteen greatest players.  (Are Kevin Durant and Kobe the other two?  Is Dominique Wilkins another great scorer who also was less of a complete player?)

There are various rumors about Taylor Swift and her beau.  But no one says “If those rumors were true, they would just admit it!  It wouldn’t cost them anything in terms of income or endorsements.”  That indicates there is still a significant shortage of tolerance and equal treatment in American society.

Fabio Caruana as an articulate thinker is very underrated.

In the late 1990s I went to visit the Houthis in Yemen, and I don’t think deterrence is going to work against them.

Have any economists or pundits stepped forward and admitted that they underestimated Milei?

My current reason for not buying the Apple Vision Pro is that I am afraid I won’t know how to turn it on and get it working.

Quite possibly Senegal is not a democracy any more.

The Chess Olympiad already (de facto) allows performance enhancers, though not computers.

Steakhouses are now underrated, most of all if you don’t order steak.

There is a (suddenly well-known) person on social media who so embodies modes of argumentation I find objectionable that at first I thought his was a parody account.

Zvi Mowshowitz covers my podcast with Dwarkesh Patel

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is very long, very detailed, and very good.  Interesting throughout!  Excerpt:

Dealing with the third conversation is harder. There is place where I feel Tyler is misinterpreting a few statements, in ways I find extremely frustrating and that I do not see him do in other contexts, and I pause to set the record straight in detail. I definitely see hope in finding common ground and perhaps working together. But so far I have been unable to find the road in.

Here is the whole thing.

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Hans Niemann okie-dokie.  And a response.

2. Should more British homes be built using straw?

3. Base models of LLMs do not seem to skew so much politically.  Substack version here.

4. Cameroon starts first malaria vaccine rollout.

5. What economists thought in the 1980s.

6. Does the solar shield idea have potential? (NYT)

7. NYT profile of Coleman Hughes, a highly intelligent and reasonable man.  Again, here is Coleman’s new book The End of Race Politics.  I will be doing a CWT with him.

8. “Richest five families in Florence 🇮🇹 from 1427 are still the richest today (archival data). Not only the top shows persistence. Any family who was in the (1427) top third is almost certain to still be there today.”  Link here.

9. Ross Douthat on Dan Wang on where the future dynamism lies (NYT).

Vaccine Induced Social Amnesia

by  Alex Tabarrok in
Source: Clinique CME

NYT: In 2022, there were 941 reported cases of measles in the World Health Organization’s European region. Over just the first 10 months of last year, according to an alarming bulletin the W.H.O. issued in mid-December, there were more than 30,000.

This is the kind of spike — a 3,000 percent increase — that looks implausible in headlines….But as the year drew to a close, the European measles outbreak kept growing. Through December, case numbers in the region eventually reached over 42,000, and although the largest outbreaks were in countries most Americans regard as pretty remote (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia), there is also a vicious surge in Britain, which may look plausibly to us as the canary in a coal mine. There, in just one of England’s nine regions, the West Midlands, 260 cases have been confirmed and dozens more suspected, in a country which, as a whole, recorded just two cases as recently as 2021.

As David Wallace-Wells explains, vaccination rates are still 90%+ and down only slightly but measles is so infectious that even amid an otherwise well-vaccinated population, it can sometimes find pockets of low vaccination populations and spread like wildfire.

Measles is an especially nasty infection because it can induce “immunological amnesia“, thereby making individuals more susceptible to pathogens that they previously were able to resist.

Ironically, just as measles can induce immunological amnesia, vaccines can induce social amnesia about the severity of diseases, thereby making society more susceptible to pathogens that they previously were able to resist.

Student Demand and the Supply of College Courses

by  Tyler Cowen in

From a recent Jacob Light paper:

In an era of rapid technological and social change, do universities adapt enough to play their important role in creating knowledge? To examine university adaptation, I extracted the information contained in the course catalogs of over 450 US universities spanning two decades (2000-2022). When there are changes in student demand, universities respond inelastically, both in terms of course quantity and content. Supply inelasticity is especially pronounced in fields experiencing declining demand and is more pronounced at public universities. Using Natural Language Processing, I further show that while the content of existing courses remains largely unchanged, newly-created courses incorporate topics related to current events and job skills. Notably, at selective institutions, new content focuses on societal issues, while at less selective institutions, new content emphasizes job-relevant skills. This study contributes uniquely to our understanding of the supply-side factors that affect how universities adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape.

John Cochrane offers comment as well, the first half of the post is interesting on demographics also.

My TLS essay on the Clinton administration

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the link, I am reviewing a bad book on the Clinton administration (A Fabulous Failure, by Lichtenstein and Stern).  Here is one excerpt:

Clinton-era welfare reform is another area where many commentators go astray, and Lichtenstein and Stein are no exception. The Clinton pronouncement “I have a plan to end welfare as we know it” has stuck in people’s minds. The reality is that, after Clinton-era welfare reforms, America spent more money on helping the poor. Welfare payments were attached to work requirements, but the states could redeploy federal money to programmes other than simple welfare payments, so funds for childcare, college scholarships, food stamps and tax credits for the poor all went up. The rate at which children fall into poverty has declined steadily. A significant Medicaid expansion followed under President Obama.

Yet the authors state that “The Era of Big Government is Over” in the section on welfare reform. If you squint you can see periodic references to the fact that Clinton-era welfare reform was not entirely radical, but nonetheless they write that this was “a drastic reform of the welfare system … that did in fact repudiate its New Deal heritage”. Calling the policy “an utterly misogynist step backward”, they note that Clinton’s “reputation as a heartless neoliberal was hereby well advanced within the ranks of progressive America”. Again, argument by adjective displaces the numbers.

And here is my summary judgment:

Too often the authors’ substantive arguments are presented in an “argument by adjective” form, relabelling events, institutions and individuals with negative adjectives or connotations, but without providing enough firm evidence. They write as if describing a policy reform as not having done enough for labour unions is per se a damning critique…

I can’t help but feel this work is largely directed at an internal Democratic Party dialogue. The basic premisses, or even the interpretations of the facts, don’t need to be argued for much. But good Democrats need to be told how to think about their own history. If strong labour unions are a sine qua non for social and economic progress, and if all good (and bad) things come together, how would the rest of history, including that of the Clinton administration, have to read? The notion that such stifling readings have become part of the problem, rather than the solution, does not appear in Nelson Lichtenstein’s and Judith Stein’s book.

I had turned down the previous invitation to review, because I didn’t think the book in question was good enough.

Dengue vaccine seems to be working?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I have been telling people that most major maladies will be fixable over the course of the next few decades…

Religion and the ideological gender gap

by  Tyler Cowen in

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “Europe regulates its way to last place” (WSJ).

2. “Throughout the twentieth century…graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women.”  With smaller family sizes, this no longer seems to be true.

3. “The Poem/1 clock dreams up a new poem every minute to tell you the time.”

4. Vanity Fair on Apple Vision Pro.

5. On Eurasianism.

6. Northern Virginia is set to boom.

Claude of Anthropic does *GOAT*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the new book bot, trained on Claude of course.  Again, I call this a “generative book.”

Very powerful, and I am indebted to those who helped, including at Anthropic and also Jeff Holmes of Mercatus.

Here is the original web site and the original GPT-4 bot, which still is great.  The full title is GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Should We Care?  An audiobook will be coming, can you guess who is reading it?

Why it is difficult for Milei to rein in inflation

by  Tyler Cowen in

Like the heat in the austral summer, inflation in Argentina is high and showing no sign of meaningful relief anytime soon. It rose from a monthly 13% in November to 25% in December and, according to the latest central bank survey, may come in at around 20% in both January and February…

Argentina’s central bank in December lowered real interest rates to deeply negative territory, hoping to reduce the issuance of pesos to pay for those interests—a move that pushes consumers to spend or dollarize their savings, adding to inflation and to the exchange rate premium. In addition, the early lifting of price controls, including administered prices such as health insurance or gas, frontloaded the relative price correction at the expense of inflation.

All this, combined with the lack of a price reference—the central bank is still working on its monetary program—may have led to a so-called “repricing overshooting.”

And:

Moreover, if inflation persists, the December devaluation may soon look insufficient, feeding expectations of a new realignment that, in turn, would give inflation inertia a new push—ultimately leading to a stop-and-go exchange rate pattern that sacrifices the only remaining nominal anchor of the economy.

Add to that that a large portion of the fiscal plan has just been withdrawn from the Omnibus Bill currently under heated debate in Congress, and we are left with only one bullet to bring monthly inflation back to single digits in the near term: a severe—and politically fraught—economic recession.

That is all by Eduardo Levy Yeyati, there is much more and the piece is useful throughout.