What happened in 17th century England (a lot)

by  Tyler Cowen in

East India Company founded — 1600

Shakespeare – Hamlet published 1603

England starting to settle America – 1607 in Virginia, assorted, you could add Harvard here as well

King James Bible – 1611

The beginnings of steady economic growth – 1620 (Greg Clark, JPE)

Rule of law ideas, common law ideas, Sir Edward Coke – 1628-1648, Institutes of the Laws of England, four volumes

Beginnings of libertarian thought – Levellers 1640s

Printing becomes much cheaper, and the rise of pamphlet culture

John Milton, Aeropagitica, defense of free speech, 1644

King Charles I executed – 1649 (leads to a period of “Britain without a King,” ending 1660)

Birth of economic reasoning – second half of 17th century

Royal African Company and a larger slave trade – 1660

General growth of the joint stock corporation

Final subjugation of Ireland, beginnings of British colonialism and empire (throughout, mostly second half of the century)

Discovery of the calculus, Isaac Newton 1665-1666

Great Plague of London, 1665-1666, killed ¼ of city?

Great Fire of London, 1666

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

Social contract theories – John Locke 1689

Bill of Rights (rights of Parliament) — 1689

Birth of modern physics – Newton’s Principia 1687

Bank of England — 1694

Scientific Revolution – throughout the 17th century, places empiricism and measurement at the core of science

The establishment of Protestantism as the religion of Britain, both formal and otherwise, throughout the century, culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

London – becomes the largest city in Europe by 1700 at around 585,000 people.

England moves from being a weak nation to perhaps the strongest in Europe and with the strongest navy.

Addendum: Adam Ozimek adds:

…first bank to print banknotes in Europe, 1661

Discovery of the telescope 1608

First patent for a modern steam engine 1602

What should I ask Benjamin Moser?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is one outdated bit from his home page:

Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize.

I am a big fan of his new book on the Dutch painters, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters.  He lives in Utrecht and is also an expert on Brazil.  Here is his Wikipedia page.  Here are other assorted writings by him.

So what should I ask him?

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. America’s wealthiest metropolitan areas in 1949.

2. Twins stolen at birth reunited by TikTok video.

3. Which immigrants to America end up most right-wing/left-wing?

4. “The [New Zealand] airport has since penguin-proofed its perimeters.”  A small blue penguin, of course.

5. Markets in everything those new service sector jobs the culture that is Japan all the servers at this restaurant have dementia, and NPR says it is true.

6. Benjamin Yeoh podcast with Hannah Ritchie on sustainability.

7. “We find that most empirical papers published in the AER are not robust, with no improvement over time.“

Central African Republic estimate of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Published in the journal Conflict and Health last April, the report suggests that the world’s deadliest humanitarian crisis in 2022 was not in Afghanistan, Ukraine, or other places featured regularly in the news — but in CAR.

The Central African Republic has neither reliable birth and death registries nor regular censuses. To figure out how many people were dying, Karume’s team traveled by car, boat, motorcycle, and foot to conduct interviews across the country. When they analyzed their survey data, they estimated that nearly 6 percent of CAR’s population died within 2022, in a country with a median age around 15. Scaling for population size, this toll would amount to a loss of more than two New York Cities. And yet, the world outside of Africa is barely aware that CAR is a country. The title of the team’s report asks: “How can we not know?”

Here is more, by Amy Maxmen, via Dylan Matthews.

What are the actual dangers of advanced AI?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the focus of my latest Bloomberg column, 2x the normal length.  I cannot cover all the points, but here is one excerpt:

The larger theme is becoming evident: AI will radically disrupt power relations in society.

AI may severely limit, for instance, the status and earnings of the so-called “wordcel” class. It will displace many jobs that deal with words and symbols, or make them less lucrative, or just make those who hold them less influential. Knowing how to write well won’t be as valuable a skill five years from now, because AI can improve the quality of just about any text. Being bilingual (or tri- or quadrilingual, for that matter) will also be less useful, and that too has been a marker of highly educated status. Even if AIs can’t write better books than human authors, readers may prefer to spend their time talking to AIs rather than reading.

It is worth pausing to note how profound and unprecedented this development would be. For centuries, the Western world has awarded higher status to what I will call ideas people — those who are good at developing, expressing and putting into practice new ways of thinking. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions greatly increased the reach and influence of ideas people.

AI may put that trend into reverse.

And on arms races:

If I were to ask AI to sum up my worries about AI — I am confident it would do it well, but to be clear this is all my own work! — it might sound something like this: When dynamic technologies interact with static institutions, conflict is inevitable, and AI makes social disruption for the wordcel class and a higher-stakes arms race are more likely.

That last is the biggest problem, but it is also the unavoidable result of a world order based on nation-states. It is a race that the Western democracies and their allies have to manage and win. That is true regardless of the new technology in question: Today it is AI, but future arms races could concern solar-powered space weapons, faster missiles and nuclear weapons, or some yet-to-be-invented way of wreaking havoc on this planet and beyond. Yes, the US may lose some of these races, which makes it all the more important that it win this one — so it can use AI technologies as a counterweight to its deficiencies elsewhere.

In closing I will note for the nth time that rationalist and EA philosophies — which tend to downgrade the import of travel and cultural learning — are poorly suited for reasoning about foreign policy and foreign affairs.

Rasheed Griffith podcast with Andrew Mellor

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio and transcript, Mellor is the author of one of my favorite books in recent years The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music & Culture.  Excerpt:

Rasheed: I’m going to jump right into the first question. Why are there no great Swedish composers?

Andrew: That’s a good question. That is one many of us have asked ourselves many times. There’s something about Sweden’s status in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, where it didn’t have this desperation to prove itself and to emancipate itself.

It had been a great nation, and it had been a huge imperial power, and it had lost everything. In a very modern sense, it came to the conclusion that that’s fine. We can exist as a small nation. Again, we don’t need to prove ourselves. We can just focus on a kind of creativity and happiness. And the legacy of that is still felt very much in Sweden today.

I just think the Swedish music isn’t that interesting in relation to theirs. It’s not that progressive. It’s very nice, but it didn’t push the envelope like Sibelius and Nielsen did. And therefore, it doesn’t still seem so relevant. I don’t know why.

It must be somehow connected to Sweden’s grand aristocratic history. It’s idea of itself. It’s always been the Nordic nation with nothing to prove almost. Maybe it still enjoys that status today. So yes, I don’t know, maybe, maybe there are more boring reasons for it, like the education system there or the system of progress and patronage was a little more tied up feudally, so talent didn’t necessarily get through. That’s the interesting thing about Carl Nielsen, of course, is that he was an absolute nobody, a working-class poor young man from a nothing family who, succeeded as a classical musician at a time when normally that you would have had to have status and education to have succeeded.

And of course, he had an education, but only because he was pushed into it by his community kind of gathering around him and raising the money for him to study. The short answer is, I don’t know, I haven’t worked it out yet. Maybe you have some thoughts on it.

And:

In the UK, Every BBC orchestra is headed by a Finn.

Recommended.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Who invented butter chicken?

2. What tech fashion looks like.

3. What top Finnish conductors earn.  Amazing that they even have a list of ten.

4. Arc is still underrated, but the world is waking up.

5. 1517 Fund has a new science support program.

6. Why might a public authority use the word “obtundity” on a sign?

7. The widening ideology gap between men and women (FT).  Key graphs are in this tweet.  Various hypotheses are in this long Twitter thread.

Surgery is Not FDA Regulated

by  Alex Tabarrok in

What would happen if the FDA regulated pharmaceuticals much less than currently? I have pointed to one useful comparison, new uses of old drugs do not have to go through FDA required efficacy trials in the new use. In other words, new uses of old drugs are regulated for safety-only. Thus,
“off-label prescribing” provides a window on to what a world of safety-only FDA regulation would look like. Off-label prescribing surely results in errors and problems but overall physicians tell us that off-label prescribing is highly beneficial and critical to good medical care.

Maxwell Tabarrok points to another useful comparison, surgery. Surgery is not FDA regulated, despite having many of the same asymmetric information problems as pharmaceuticals. Some surgical procedures are surely ineffective and unsafe. Yet, once again, the FDA-absent surgery market appears beneficial overall and like other markets it improves over time with greater safety and more efficacy. For example,

In the US, the death rate from medical and surgical care complications declined by 39% from 1999 to 2009.

Would we be better off if every new surgical procedure had to go through FDA-required efficacy trials before it could be offered to consumers?

Neither of these comparison proves that a world with less FDA regulation would be a better world but both refute the stories of a world run amuck in the absence of the FDA. In essence, the reason is that the world contains many sources of approval, recommendation, certification and review beyond the FDA and these would grow in scope and stature absent the FDA.

See Maximum Progress for more.

Addendum: More excellent Tabarrok material: The Spice Must Flow: The Dutch-Portuguese War-Part 1.

What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Here is from Wikipedia:

Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.

Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis.  So what should I ask her?

My Conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, here is the episode summary:

Rebecca F. Kuang just might change the way you think about fantasy and science fiction. Known for her best-selling books Babel and The Poppy War trilogy, Kuang combines a unique blend of historical richness and imaginative storytelling. At just 27, she’s already published five novels, and her compulsion to write has not abated even as she’s pursued advanced degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and now Yale. Her latest book, Yellowface, was one of Tyler’s favorites in 2023.

She sat down with Tyler to discuss Chinese science-fiction, which work of fantasy she hopes will still be read in fifty years, which novels use footnotes well, how she’d change book publishing, what she enjoys about book tours, what to make of which Chinese fiction is read in the West, the differences between the three volumes of The Three Body Problem, what surprised her on her recent Taiwan trip, why novels are rarely co-authored, how debate influences her writing, how she’ll balance writing fiction with her academic pursuits, where she’ll travel next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world?

KUANG: What do you mean by work so much better?

COWEN: Singapore today, per capita — it’s a richer nation than the United States. It’s hard to think, “I’d rather go back and redo that whole history.” If you’re a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, “We’ll take what we got. It was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us.” People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right?

Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China. Now that it’s back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again, so it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism.

KUANG: It’s true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about a historical counterfactual such as, “Oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today?” Or “would Hong Kong have the culture it does today?” Because we don’t really know.

Also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do, as well, because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. It feels like a useless comparison to say, “Oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn’t?” Et cetera.

COWEN: It seems, if anywhere we know, it’s Hong Kong. You can look at Guangzhou — it’s a fairly close comparator. Until very recently, Hong Kong was much, much richer than Guangzhou. Without the British, it would be reasonable to assume living standards in Hong Kong would’ve been about those of the rest of Southern China, right? It would be weird to think it would be some extreme outlier. None others of those happened in the rest of China. Isn’t that close to a natural experiment? Not a controlled experiment, but a pretty clear comparison?

KUANG: Maybe. Again, I’m not a historian, so I don’t have a lot to say about this. I just think it’s pretty tricky to argue that places prospered solely due to British presence when, without the British, there are lots of alternate ways things could have gone, and we just don’t know.

Interesting throughout.

Why hasn’t the opioid epidemic converged to manageable levels?

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is a new NBER working paper on this very good question by David M. Cutler and J. Travis Donahoe:

Opioid overdose death rates in the United States have risen continuously for over three decades, increasing 2,142 percent in total from 1990 to 2020. This is surprising. One might expect drug epidemics to be self-limiting, as policy and individual behavior reacts to observed deaths. We study why opioid deaths have risen so greatly and for so long. We consider three reasons for a prolonged epidemic: exogenous and continuing changes in demand or supply, and spillovers in demand for opioids across users, which we term “thick market externalities.” We show there is no evidence of sufficiently large exogenous changes in the demand or supply of opioids that could explain such a prolonged increase in death rates. We test for spillovers using county-level data on opioid deaths from 1991–2018 and opioid shipments from 2006–2009, combined with data on friendships and distance between counties. Estimating a model with addiction and spatial spillovers, we find large spillovers in opioid use and deaths across areas. A shock that increases opioid death rates by 1 in an index county causes 0.38 to 0.76 more deaths in other counties because of spillovers. Because opioids are addictive, this leads to even more deaths and spillovers in future years. In some specifications, these effects are large enough to generate a continuously increasing epidemic without any ongoing changes in demand or supply. We estimate spillovers explain 84 to 92 percent of opioid deaths from 1990 to 2018 and are the main reason deaths have increased for so long.

Is there any way to make the spillovers in demand less strong?

How and why do legal codes differ across red and blue states?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Polarization in the traditional sense is not very important:

…this study examined the criminal codes of the six largest deep red states and the six largest deep blue states – states in which a single political party has held the governorship and control of both legislative bodies for at least the past three elections. It then identified 93 legal issues on which there appeared to be meaningful difference among the 12 states’ criminal law rules. An analysis of the patterns of agreement and disagreement among the 12 states was striking. Of the many thousands of issues that must be settled in drafting a criminal code, only a handful – that sliver of criminal law issues that became matters of public political debate, such as those noted above – show a clear red-blue pattern of difference.

If not red-blue, then, what does explain the patterns of disagreement among the 12 states on the 93 criminal law issue? What factors have greater influence on the formulation of criminal law rules than the red-blue divide?

The Article examines a range of possible influences, giving specific examples that illustrate the operation of each: state characteristics, such as population; state criminal justice characteristics, such as crime rates; model codes, such as the ALI’s Model Penal Code; national headline events, such as the attempted assassination of President Reagan; local headline cases that over time grow into national movements, such as Tracy Thurman and domestic violence; local headline cases that produced only a local state effect; the effect of legislation passed by a neighboring state; and legislation as a response to judicial interpretation or invalidation.

In other words, not only is the red-blue divide of little effect for the vast bulk of criminal law, but the factors that do have effect are numerous and varied.

That is from a new paper by Paul H. Robinson, Hugh Rennie, and Clever Earth.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.