Tuesday assorted links

1. Autistic 27-year-old Canadian now allowed to end her life.  It’s time to end the Canadian suicide regime as it currently exists: “…the province [Alberta] operates a system where there is no appeal process and no means of reviewing a person’s MAID approval.”

2. Highlights from SF CWT listener meet-up event.

3. “More than 60 percent of Ohio’s driver’s license suspensions do not stem from bad driving; instead, they arise because the driver owes an unpaid debt.

4. Bears take a ride on swan pedalo at Woburn Safari Park.

5. Economics round-up from Zvi.

6. Finding excessive sentencers in the judicial system.

7. On the Bach cello suites.

What I’ve been reading

Christopher Phillips, Battle Ground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East.  A good, “simple enough” introduction to the wars going on in Syria, Yemen, and other parts of the Middle East.  If you are worried you will hate, you can just skip the Palestine chapter.

Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.  About five percent of American women end up having five children or more — what do you learn by talking to them?  (“Which one should I give back?”)  The author herself has eight children.

Beth Linker, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.  For a long time I’ve been thinking there should be a good book on this topic, and now there is one.  Both fun and interesting.

Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing our Broken Democracy argues for proportional representation and accompanying reforms.  Putting aside whether this ever can happen, I am never quite sure how this is supposed to work when nuclear weapons use is such a live issue.

Ethan Mollick is the best and most thorough Twitter commentator on LLMs, he now has a forthcoming book Co-Intelligence.

Andrew Leigh, an Australian MP and also economist, has published The Shortest History of Economics, recommended by Claudia Goldin.

An RCT for income-sharing agreements

Is this the first one?

We conduct a survey-based experiment with 2,776 students at a non-profit university to analyze income insurance demand in education financing. We offered students a hypothetical choice: either a federal loan with income-driven repayment or an income-share agreement (ISA), with randomized framing of downside protections. Emphasizing income insurance increased ISA uptake by 43%. We observe that students are responsive to changes in contract terms and possible student loan cancellation, which is evidence of preference adjustment or adverse selection. Our results indicate that framing specific terms can increase demand for higher education insurance to potentially address risk for students with varying outcomes.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Sidhya BalakrishnanEric BettingerMichael S. KofoedDubravka RitterDouglas A. WebberEge Aksu Jonathan S. Hartley.

Netherlands fact of the day

The country, which is a bit bigger than Maryland, not only accomplished this feat but also has become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. Perhaps even more significant in the face of a warming planet: It is among the largest exporters of agricultural and food technology. The Dutch have pioneered cell-cultured meat, vertical farming, seed technology and robotics in milking and harvesting — spearheading innovations that focus on decreased water usage as well as reduced carbon and methane emissions…

The country has nearly 24,000 acres — almost twice the size of Manhattan — of crops growing in greenhouses. These greenhouses, with less fertilizer and water, can grow in a single acre what would take 10 acres of traditional dirt farming to achieve. Dutch farms use only a half-gallon of water to grow about a pound of tomatoes, while the global average is more than 28 gallons.

Here is the full article, via S.  The article is interesting throughout.  However here is a more recent piece on the Dutch nitrogen revolt.

Teaching the Solow Model

The Solow model is a foundational model for understanding economic growth. Yet it’s typically not taught to principles students because it’s considered too difficult. In Modern Principles, however, Tyler and I develop a super simple version of the model that is fun to teach and accessible to students of all levels. I’ll be talking about the Super Simple Solow model in a short webinar tomorrow (Tuesday March 26) at 1pm est. Register here.

My review of Suno, AI-generated music

Try it here, click on the right on the mention of making full, two-minute songs and use the Explore tab.  To me it is remarkable the resulting AI-generated music is as good as it is.  But it still isn’t anything I would listen to, other than out of curiosity.  It is best at edm, standardized genres such as routine heavy metal, and certain ethnic musics, especially if “the affect” can be created by methods of layering.  Its weakness is an ability to generate the simple, memorable melody, a’la Sir Paul or the other Paul namely Paul Simon.  For my taste there is “not enough music in the music.”  Suno cannot yet create the ineffable something, which is what I listen to music for.

That said, it is not worse than what most people listen to.  It remains to be seen at what pace progress will be made, or whether current approaches, extrapolated to allow for further improvement, can get us to real music, rather than stuff that sounds like music.

*Who’s Afraid of Gender?*

That is the title of the new Judith Butler book, focusing mostly on trans issues.  To be clear, on most practical issues concerning trans, I side with the social conservatives.  For instance, I don’t think trans women have a right to compete in women’s weightlifting contests.  And I have not been happy with how many schools have been teaching about trans issues, due to social contagion effects that are larger than I would have expected.   And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong.  This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things).  But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories?  Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches?  Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner?  Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?

So I am happy to recommend this book, noting that not everyone will like it, to say the least.  My main criticism is that Butler spends too much time with what I consider to be weaker views (e.g., the Pope), and not enough time with the more difficult problems concerning real and potential harms to children.  Her neglect of the latter verges on the intellectually criminally negligent.  And yet the key is to see that it is still a good and interesting book.

*Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon

Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago.  To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age.  In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization.  The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious.  For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man coul dknow more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail.  Moreoever, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact.  Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone.  In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, through strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly.  Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing.  In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious.  Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches.

Here is a recent short essay on Starmaker, first published in 1937.

Applying to Emergent Ventures, and how to get Britain moving again

From the TxP Progress Prize:

But then Tyler asked us, twice in a row, ‘what is your signature product?’ Being honest, we realised even if our pitch was strong at a high level, we’d essentially just submitted a laundry list of ideas for what we wanted to deliver, without much focus. We knew we had to go back to the drawing board.

Then:

The blog prize was designed to advocate solutions, amplify frontier tech, and offer a clear, tractable proposal. We particularly wanted punchy takes that pulled the debate outside the norm and we encouraged people to publish online to prompt discussion. We also rewarded good writing and pointed to pieces we’d been inspired by.

That is from Andrew Bennett and Tom Westgarth.  The theme was “Britain is Stuck: How Can We Get It Moving Again?”  The winners (EV had no role in this selection) were:

Winner (£5000)

Rian Whitton: Firm Power can reduce Britain’s electricity prices

Runner up (£1000)

Alec Thompson: Open Source the Law

Shortlisted (£750)

Ashna Ahmad: Chilean Telexes and the Allocation Problem

Ben Hopkinson: Britain’s Second Cities are Stuck: Let’s Get Them Moving Again

Daniel Timms: The Case for a New City

At the link you will find further commendable mentions.

*Revolusi*

The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, and the author is David van Reybrouck.  An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it.  First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries.  Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar transition from Japanese rule to independence.  Excerpt:

In total no fewer than 120,000 Dutch conscripts would depart between 1946 and 1949, an enormous number that approached the general mobilization before World War II (150,000).  Six thousand recruits who were examined and judged ‘fit for the tropics’ refused to embark.  Many of these were tracked down and hauled out of beds to the military police.  This hunt for deserters went on until 1958!  Strict sentences were passed on 2,565 war resisters.  Almost three-quarters received custodial sentences of up to two years, the rest remain in jail even longer.  Altogether a total of fifteen centuries of prison sentences were pronounced, a remarkably large amount compared to the complete immunity granted to later war criminals.  The conclusion was clear: those who refused to kill were locked up, those who murdered without reason went free.

Recommended, there should of course be more such books on Indonesia.