Wednesday assorted links
1. The evolving economics of cocaine in Colombia (NYT).
2. New NBER paper, surveys theoretical approach to designing research grants.
4. The Trump plan for AI, very different from the Biden Executive Order. This could prove very important.
5. How do we radically improve Britain’s state capacity? Video with Munira Mirza, Dominic Cummings, and Lord Adonis.
6. Six questions for post-liberal Christians.
7. African School of Economics Zanzibar now has a live website.
The changes in vibes — why did they happen?
Clearly it has happened, and it has been accelerated and publicized by the Biden failings and the attempted Trump assassination. But it was already underway. If you need a single, unambiguous sign of it, I would cite MSNBC pulling off Morning Joe for a morning, for fear they would say something nasty about Trump.
Another way to put it is that Trump was a highly vulnerable, defeated President, facing numerous legal charges and indeed an actual felony conviction. Yet he now stands as a clear favorite in the next election. In conceptual terms, how exactly did that happen?
I had been thinking it would be a good cognitive test to ask people why they think the vibes have changed, and then to grade their answers for intelligence, insight, and intellectual honesty.
For instance, I used to read people arguing “Trump is popular because of racism,” but now that view is pretty clearly refuted, even if you think (as I do) that racism has some marginal impact on his support. Or other people have attributed the development to “polarization.” Whether or not you agree with the polarization thesis, it begs the question here, as we could be polarized with Trump as a big underdog.
In any case, thought I should start this process by offering my answers. Here they are, in a series of bullet points:
1. Trump and his team understand that we now live in a world of social media. Only a modest part of the Democratic establishment has mastered the same.
2. The “Trumpian Right,” whether you agree with it or not, has been more intellectually alive and vital than the Progressive Left, at least during the last five years, maybe more. Being fully on the outs, those people were more free to be creative, noting that I am not equating creative with being correct.
3. The deindustrialization of America has mattered more than people expected at first, and has had longer legs, in terms of its impact on public opinion. I would say this one is squarely in the mainstream account of the matter.
4. Many Trumpian and MAGA messages have been more in vibe with the negative contagion effects of our recent times.
5. The Democrats made a big bet that trying to raise the status of blacks would be popular, but at best they had mixed results. Some part of this failing was due to racists, some part due to immigrants with their own concerns, and some part due simply to the unpopularity of the message.
6. The ongoing feminization of society has driven more and more men, including black and Latino men, into the Republican camp. The Democratic Party became too much the party of unmarried women.
7. The Obama administration brought, to some degree, both the reality and perception of being ruled by the intellectual class. People didn’t like that.
8. Democrats and leftists are in fact less happy as people than conservatives are, on average. Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously.
9. The relentlessly egalitarian message of Democrats is not so popular, and furthermore — since every claim must have messengers — it translates in lived practice into an “I am better than you all are” vibe. Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously.
10. The Woke gambit has proven deeply unpopular.
11. Trans support has not been a winning issue for Democrats, but it is hard for them to let it go.
12. Immigration at the border has in fact spun out of control, and that has been a key Trump issue from the beginning of his campaign. And I write this as a person who is very pro-immigration. You can imagine how the immigration skeptics feel.
13. Higher education has been a traditional Democratic stronghold, and it remains one. Yet its clout and credibility have fallen significantly in the last few years.
14. The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.” It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital. Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base.
15. Various developments in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel did not help the Democratic cause. Inflation was very high, and real borrowing rates went up sharply. This is true, whether or not you think it is the fault of Biden, or Trump would have done better. Crypto came under attack. The pandemic story is complicated, and its politics would require a post of its own, but I don’t think it helped the Democrats, most of all because they ended up “owning” many of the longer-lasting school closures.
And we haven’t even gotten to “Defund the police,” the recurring rise of anti-Semitism on the left, and at least a half dozen other matters.
16. In very simple terms, you might say the Democrats have done a lot to make themselves unpopular, and not had much willingness to confront that. Their own messages make this hard to face up to, since they are supposed to be better people.
You might add to this:
17. Trump is funny (he is one of the great American comics in fact), and
18. Trump acts like a winner. Americans like this, and his response to the failed assassination attempt drove this point home.
19. Biden’s recent troubles, and the realization that he and his team had been running a con at least as big as the Trump one. It has become a trust issue, not only an age or cognition issue.
On the other side of the ledger, you might argue, as do many intelligent people, that the Democrats are better at technocracy, and also that Democrats are more respectful of traditional political processes, especially transitions after elections. I’m not here to debate those issues! I know many MAGA supporters are not convinced, most of all on the latter. I’ll simply note that, in the minds of many Americans, those factors do not necessarily outweigh #1-19.
And there you go.
Addendum: Of course there was and is plenty wrong with Trump and the Trump administration. But the purpose here is not to compare Biden and Trump, rather it is to see why the Democrats are not doing better. If your response to that question is to cite reasons why the Democrats are better than Trump…well then you are exactly part of the problem.
One view, not to be entirely dismissed
EAs building God. NRxers conquering the state. No more wokes vs chuds, but Thiel vs Karnofsky; Land smiles bitterly. Debates not about bathrooms, but «fear Apocalypse less and Antichrist more» and «we must secure the future of the light cone». I’ve been there, when it all began.
https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/1813052509012824188. And a modest comment from David Brooks.
Andrej Karpathy is founding Eureka Labs, an AI education company
Here is the tweet, which connects to various links of relevance.
Website: eurekalabs.ai GitHub: github.com/EurekaLabsAI 𝕏:@EurekaLabsAI
Tuesday assorted links
1. Marc Nerlove has passed away.
2. Those new Strava jockey service sector jobs.
3. Polostan, new Neal Stephenson novel, with nuclear themes.
4. Mental health AI app with capybaras, it is definitely happening.
5. How cost-effective is the new R21 vaccine compared to existing malaria interventions? Quite effective.
6. Creating space in space: “Their main product is a furnace that will manufacture glass spheres from lunar regolith, which is rich in silicate.”
7. Good FT story on just how premature the EU AI regulation was.
Disappearing polymorphs
Here’s a wild phenomena I wasn’t previously aware of: In crystallography and materials science, a polymorph is a solid material that can exist in more than one crystal structure while maintaining the same chemical composition. Diamond and graphite are two polymorphs of carbon. Diamond is carbon crystalized with an isometric structure and graphite is carbon crystalized with a hexagonal structure. Now imagine that one day your spouse’s diamond ring turns to graphite! That’s unlikely with carbon but it happens with other polymorphs when a metastable (locally) stable version becomes seeded with a stable version.
The drug ritonavir originally used for AIDS (and also a component of the COVID medication Paxlovid), for example, was created in 1996 but in 1998 it couldn’t be produced any longer. Despite the best efforts of the manufacturer, Abbott, every time they tried to create the old ritonavir a new crystalized version (form II) was produced which was not medically effective. The problem was that once form II exists it’s almost impossible to get rid of it and microscopic particles of form II ritonavir seeded any attempt to create form I.
Form II was of sufficiently lower energy that it became impossible to produce Form I in any laboratory where Form II was introduced, even indirectly. Scientists who had been exposed to Form II in the past seemingly contaminated entire manufacturing plants by their presence, probably because they carried over microscopic seed crystals of the new polymorph.
Wikipedia continues:
In the 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, the narrator learns about Ice-nine, an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature and acts as a seed crystal upon contact with ordinary liquid water, causing that liquid water to instantly freeze and transform into more Ice-nine. Later in the book, a character frozen in Ice-nine falls into the sea. Instantly, all the water in the world’s seas, rivers, and groundwater transforms into solid Ice-nine, leading to a climactic doomsday scenario.
Given the last point you will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the hat tip goes to Eliezer Yudkowsky who worries about such things.
Migrant exposure and anti-migrant sentiment
The subtitle of the paper is The Case of the Venezuelan Exodus, and the authors are Jeremy Lebow, Jonathan Moreno-Medina, Salma Mousa, and Horacio Coral. Here is part of the abstract:
We study the mass exodus of Venezuelans across Latin America, which coincided with an unprecedented worsening in migrant sentiment in the countries that received the most Venezuelans. However, we find no evidence that this decrease occurred in the regions within-country that received the most migrants. We do this using multiple migrant sentiment outcomes including survey measures and social media posts, multiple levels of geographic variation across seven Latin American countries, and an instrumental variable strategy. We find little evidence for heterogeneity along a range of characteristics related to labor market competition, public good scarcity, or crime. The results are consistent with anti-migrant sentiment being a national-level phenomenon, divorced from local experiences with migrants.
Keep in mind that domestic natives typically have significant (national-level) misinformed objections to the migrants, such as thinking they are far more numerous than in fact they are. But they don’t dislike the actual presence of the immigrants, quite the contrary.
Why Is Sweden Paying Grandparents to Babysit?
I am not sure the policy is a good idea, but it is worth trying to think through its logic, as I attempt in my latest Bloomberg column. After outlining the case against the change, here is the argument for it:
If you look at Sweden’s policy closely, it adheres pretty well to some basic economic principles: namely, the notion of Pareto improvements, which benefit all parties involved.
Start with the fact that Swedish parents currently receive extensive paid leave upon the birth of a child, and so it can be said they are already paid to look after their children. Whether or not you agree with that policy, it is longstanding and well-established. Take it as a given.
Now imagine that you are an ambitious Swedish doctor or lawyer, climbing the career ladder, and are self-aware enough to realize you do not always have entirely the right degree of natural patience necessary for parenting. In that case, you might prefer to go back to work following the birth of your child. Under the status quo ex ante, you could not work and draw your normal salary and still get the full child-care benefit, even though some child benefits are paid automatically.
There is thus a potential inefficiency in the system. You may stay at home just to get the money, even when an alternate arrangement might be better for everyone.
Now add grandparents to this equation. If the grandparents can be paid to take care of your child, all of a sudden the extended family as a whole doesn’t lose the money by having the parent go back to work. Instead, that money is transferred to the grandparents, so the work disincentive is diminished.
And economists will tell you that the parents and grandparents can do their own settling up. If the grandparents are well-to-do, for instance, and eager to spend time with their grandkids, they might funnel some of that money back to the parents or the child, either directly or indirectly. In some cases, on net, the grandparents may not end up getting paid anything at all.
In essence, you can think of this policy as a model designed to maximize gains from trade.
One side effect is that, to the extent the parent who returns to work is a high earner, government tax revenue will increase. That will help pay for the policy, partially if not entirely.
The logic for this policy may hold all the more for single parents.
Worth a ponder. When it comes to issues of transferability of benefits, there are few a priori answers.
CWT listener meet-up for DC is cancelled for tomorrow evening
Because of the extreme heat (which doesn’t bother me, by the way, I was out shooting baskets today), nonetheless that is the prudent move. Here is information on the September rescheduling.
J.D. Vance was selected
You can comment on that here…
Good news on Covid and your brain
Results: All six cognitive tests, measured before January 1, 2020, are significant predictors of infection status during the pandemic. The two subjective cognition measures show no significant association with infection. We replicate earlier cross-sectional findings of a negative association between COVID-19 infection and subsequent cognition. However, once accounting for baseline cognition, no significant associations are found for either the tests or the subjective measures. For three of the six cognitive tests the effects change signs.
Conclusions and relevance: We find no evidence for a negative association between COVID-19 infection and subsequent measures of cognitive functioning. The associations found in earlier studies may at least partly reflect reverse causation.
That is from a new research paper by Bas Weerman, et.al. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Monday assorted links
1. Janet Yellen and her dining abroad (NYT).
2. Simulation arguments, a research paper in philosophy.
4. “Canada remains the only G-7 country with higher [carbon] emissions than in 1990.” (WSJ)
5. “Ukraine’s population will crash to a mere 15mn people by 2100.”
6. The new and growing “divorce divide” in American politics.
Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise Reviewed by Furman
Jason Furman (eight years as a top economic adviser to President Obama) is an excellent economist who reads a lot of books. His Goodreads has 2300 books read, with some 1200 reviews in economics, fiction, history and science. I greatly enjoyed his latest review of Zola’s The Ladies Paradise which came about after he “asked a colleague in the English department if any fiction had positive depictions of business and capitalism (other than Ayn Rand).” Here is Furman’s review:
A 19th century novel that is a paean to the consumer welfare standard.
…The department store is really the leading character in this book, the protagonist of the Bildungsroman. It is like a living, breathing creature with needs, desires and most importantly constant growth. It becomes increasing complex, mature and alive as it develops. From a few departments to many, takes over more and more of the square block—eventually engulfing the one stubborn holdout. The novel also has amazing depictions of innovations, not just classical invention (e.g., an improved type of umbrella at one point) but also management of inventory, holding sales, selling some products at a loss, advertising, managing inventories, and more. I never thought an entire chapter of a novel (and they’re long chapters) devoted to inventory management could be so thrilling but that one was nothing compared to the description of the sale.
In the shadow of the Ladies Paradise are a number of small shops that are having an increasingly difficult time competing. The larger shop buys out some, builds on innovations by others, and aggressively competes on price with still others. Émile Zola does not sugarcoat the pain of all of this, depicting deaths and suicide attempts in the wake of the store. But he does not blame all the maladies on the Ladies Paradise itself and, consistent with the consumer welfare standard, he keeps the focus on the ways in which this profit ultimately benefits customers. Moreover, some of the small businesses do innovate in ways that help keep themselves in business: “longing to create competition for the colossus; [a small business owner] believed that victory would be certain if several specialized shops where customers could find a very varied choice of goods could be created in the neighbourhood.”
Interestingly there is a chapter that reads like an explanation of an economic model, Bertrand competition, in which two competitors keep lowering prices by smaller and smaller amounts until they are pricing as low as they possibly can (their marginal cost). What made this especially interesting to me was that The Ladies Paradise was published in 1883, the same year Joseph Louis François Bertrand published his model.
And it is not just consumers. The novel depicts how the productivity gains the Ladies Paradise makes as a result of its scale and its innovations are passed through to workers in the form of higher pay and improved benefits. For example, early on there is a brutal depiction of the process of laying off workers during the slow time of year. Later on, the store develops a system that is more like furloughs with insurance. And also, unlike the small shops in the area, it has opportunities for advancement within the store, moving up the ranks of managerial positions. Notably, all of this is not because of the benevolence of the owner (as it is in a few other 19th century novels) but because of competition from other stores so the need to attract and retain talent.
All of this makes employment in the colossus considerably better than the smaller, neighboring shops where people are poorly paid, lack opportunities for advancement and face harassment. Although it is still not all wonderful—for example, the department store frowns on women who are married and dismisses them when they have children.
Overall, the combination of low prices for consumers and high expenses—including pay and benefits to attract and retain employees—mean that the business has a very thin profit margin but applies that margin to a very large base: “Doubtless with their heavy trade expenses and their system of low prices the net profit was at most four per cent. But a profit of sixteen hundred thousand francs was still a pretty good sum; one could be content with four per cent when one operated on such a scale.”
The biggest wrinkle in the consumer welfare standard is some of the ambivalence Zola has about consumer preferences themselves….The idea that people—or women to be more specific—are buying things they do not “need” but “desire” is an issue it grapples with. And that desire can even rise to the level of a mad frenzy, like the sales it depicts or the shoplifters, some of them affluent but driven by an almost mad desire to acquire lace, silk, and more.
All of this is embedded in a larger economic and technological system that is operating in the background: large factories in Lyon that are producing at scale in a way that is symbiotic with the department store, rail transportation to bring the constant inflow of goods, a mail system that supports catalog purchases, and more.
…I’m still astounded about how breathtaking fiction can be made which understands and depicts the ways in which innovation and scale combine with competition to generate benefits for consumers and workers—while also not sugarcoating the many that lose from this process.
What I’ve been reading
1. Kimmo Rentola, How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War. An excellent book, especially good on linking the Winter War with the fighting of 1944 and also the postwar settlments. Winner of the Lauri Jäntti prize, who would have thought otherwise?
2. Sjeng Scheijen, Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935. My biggest learning from this volume was simply how important Vladimir Tatlin was as a leader of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s. He might have mattered as much as Malevich? It is worth buying and reading a book for an insight such as that. Here is a short video of a good Tatlin exhibit from Basel, twelve years ago. The book also offered this sentence: “The affinity between the anarchists and the futurists is not so surprising.”
As a follow-up, I’ve also been reading Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution, also very good.
3. Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann. What is it like to be an unusual woman writer, with unusual proclivities, and have to build up or rebuild your work life in the countryside? There is now a whole book on this topic. Does it really mean you have to write down a complete inventory of all household possessions? (apparently) Beautifully written, very British, will frustrate those who seek generalization but recommended nonetheless.
4. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings, edited by Emiliano Bugatti. Mostly a picture book, this one convinced me I need to visit Treviso, Italy. The Brion Tomb is nearby, not to mention the Canova museum, both designed by Scarpa. He also showed that first-rate architecture never quite ended in Venice proper. I hadn’t known that Scarpa’s earliest works date as far back as the mid-1930s, and that he died by falling down a flight of stairs.
5. Céline, War. A newly unearthed novel by a great classic author is rare to come by, but here we have one. The text is not fully intact, but enough is there for reading to be a sufficiently integrated experience. It is in fact one of the best novels on the horrors of war, and now is not such a bad time to revisit that theme.
I enjoyed Susan Tomes, Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives, but it is too skimpy on the moderns. No coverage of Uchida or Ursula Oppens or Angela Hewitt?
Jack Weatherford, Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China is a good follow-up to his earlier work.
In my pile is Anthony Gregory, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State.
Why isn’t there an economics of animal welfare field?
On Friday I was keynote speaker at a quite good Brown University conference on this topic. I, like some of the other people there, wondered why animal welfare does not have its own economics journal, own association, own JEL code, and own mini-field, much as cultural economics or defense economics developed several decades ago. How about its own blog or Twitter feed? You might even say there is a theorem of sorts: if an economics subfield can exist, it will. And so I think this subfield is indeed on the way. Perhaps it needs one or two name-recognized economists to publish a paper on the topic in a top five journal? Whoever writes such a breakthrough piece will be cited for a long time to come, even if many of those citations will not be in top-tier journals. Will that person be you?
I do understand there is plenty about animal welfare in ag econ journals and departments, but somehow the way the world is tiered that just doesn’t count. Yes that is unfair, but the point remains that this subfield remains an underexploited intellectual profit opportunity.
Addendum: Here is a new piece by Cass Sunstein.