Monday assorted links
1. Those new service sector jobs: therapists for climate change anxiety (NYT).
2. Defunct airports of Southeast Asia.
3. Eli Dourado on personal aviation and the coming revolution.
4. The coolest neighborhoods in the world? (can’t say I agree with the list…cool for wimps maybe!)
6. “About 20 per cent of 650 Protestant ministers in Korea recently surveyed by the Ministry Data Institute said they have used ChatGPT to create sermons and about 60 per cent of them found ChatGPT useful in coming up with ideas for sermons.” (FT)
The good news, sort of
But financial markets have mostly been subdued in reaction to the conflagration brewing in Gaza. The benchmark US S&P 500 index has barely budged since the Hamas attack on October 7. Even stock markets closest to the battle zone, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt and the Gulf states, have experienced moderate pullbacks. There has been no rush to safety in bond markets, where prices have been falling, and little drama in oil prices either.
That is from Ruchir Sharma in the FT.
*GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?*
I am pleased to announce and present my new project, available here, free of charge. It is derived from a 100,000 word manuscript, entirely written by me, and is well described by the title of this blog post.
I believe this is the first major work published in GPT-4, Claude 2, and some other services to come. I call it a generative book. From the project’s home page:
Do you yearn for something more than a book? And yet still love books? How about a book you can query, and it will answer away to your heart’s content? How about a book that will create its own content, on demand, or allow you to rewrite it? A book that will tell you why it is (sometimes) wrong?
To be clear, if you’re not into generative AI, you can just download the work onto your Kindle, print it out, or read it on a computer screen. Yet I hope you do more:
One easy place to start is with our own chatbot using GPT-4, and we’ll soon provide custom apps using Claude 2 and Llama 2. In the meantime we’ve provided instructions for how to experiment with them yourself.
Each service has different strengths and you should try more than one. You’ll see the very best performance by working with individual chapters using your own subscription to ChatGPT, Claude, or a similar service. The chapters can be read independently and in any order. Ask the AI if you’re lacking context. Try these sample questions to start.
You can ask it to summarize, ask it for more context, ask for a multiple choice exam on the contents, make an illustrated book out of a chapter, or ask it where I am totally wrong in my views. You could try starting with these sample questions. The limits are up to you.
Here is the Table of Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Milton Friedman
3. John Maynard Keynes
4. Friedrich A. Hayek
5. Those who did not make the short list: Marshall, Samuelson, Arrow, Becker, and Schumpeter
6. John Stuart Mill
7. Thomas Robert Malthus
8. Adam Smith
9. The winner(s): so who is the greatest economist of all time?
The site address is an easy to remember econgoat.ai. And as you will see from the opening chapter, it is not only about economics, it is also a very personal book about me. No Straussian here, I tell you exactly what I think, including of my personal meetings with Friedman and Hayek. If, however, you are looking for a Straussian reading of this project — which I would disavow — it is that I am sacrificing “what would have been a normal book” to the AI gods to win their favor.
And apologies in advance for any imperfections in the technology — generative books can only get better.
Recommended.
A Taxonomy of Methods for Discriminating, Revisited
Twenty years ago, GMU law professor Lloyd Cohen (RIP) guest blogged at MR. His taxonomy of methods of discrimination in university admissions remains timely. What follow is from Lloyd (I have added only the two links). No indent.
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Not all procedures for engaging in racial discrimination are equal. They differ in their legal standing, their social meaning, and their “economic” efficiency. The Supreme Court in distinguishing Grutter and Graatz, and the admissions regimes of the various state universities suggest a useful taxonomy.
There are three generic forms of racial discrimination not merely in admissions decisions but in other practices and policies as well: (1) express and objective (i.e., points and quotas); (2) facially neutral and objective (e.g., the top 10% of graduates from each high school); and (3) implied and subjective (“we look at the whole person”). From an efficiency perspective the first form of discrimination is the least harmful. It does not corrupt the measure of merit, it only sets a different standard for “minorities.” Its shortcomings are twofold. First, as the Supreme Court decisions in Grutter and Grattz makes abundantly clear it is the one method most likely to be found illegal. This is implicitly related to its second shortcoming, it is so barefaced. It makes clear to both those favored and those harmed that the favored are otherwise inferior in their qualifications.
The second method, using a facially neutral operational measure to achieve a suspect theoretical goal, now favored by the state universities of California, Texas and Florida, in granting admission to those who finish in the top X% of their high school class and by the United Network for Organ Sharing in granting more “points” in the organ allocation scheme for time on the waiting list, has the virtue of being an objective measure, and the virtue (?) of a disguise that reduces shame. Its shortcoming is that its effectiveness in bringing about the preferred ethnic distribution is tied to its inefficiency. It employs an objective measure of merit that substantially distorts. Thus, the rankings of both the favored and the unfavored groups are mis-aligned.
The third measure, a subjective, ad-hoc eclectic judgment, can in practice be a mimic of the first, the second, or anything else. The process becomes a beclouded mystery. This is both its virtue and its vice. There is no clear trail, evidence or standards that mark the favored as inferior–feelings are spared. On the other hand the absence of an objective measure means that the decisionmakers are effectively unanswerable and may indulge in any form of corruption.
Method (1) is clearly falling by the wayside. Is there likely to be a clear political winner between (2) and (3)?
What should I ask Ami Vitale?
Yes I am doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Ami Vitale is an American photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, educator and speaker. In 2018, she published a photo book titled Panda Love which captures pandas within captivity and being released into the wild…
In 1994, Vitale joined the Associated Press (AP) as a picture editor in New York and Washington, D.C.[5][6] She self funded her travel through her work with AP and left for the Czech Republic in 1997.
She moved to Prague, Czech Republic, and spent a year covering the war in Kosovo, traveling back and forth to Prague, and spending a month at a time in the war zone. She later traveled to Angola, and then to the second Intifada in Gaza and Israel. In 2000, she received an Alexia Foundation grant to document a small village in the West African nation of Guinea Bissau.
Vitale currently photographs wildlife and environmental stories in order to educate about global conservation issues. She is a visual journalist working as a photographer for National Geographic, a documentary filmmaker, and a cinematographer. Her recent still photography focuses on wildlife conservation in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. As an ambassador for Nikon and a contract photographer with National Geographic magazine, she has documented wildlife and poaching in Africa, covered human-wildlife conflict, and concentrated on efforts to save the northern white rhino and reintroduce pandas to the wild.
She has traveled to more than one hundred countries. Here is her home page, which includes links to her documentaries. Here is her Instagram.
So what should I ask her?
Sunday assorted links
1. World’s second largest Hindu temple opens…in New Jersey. And another photo.
2. What is the true range of mental imagery?
3. “While the model took over 184K GPU-hours to pretrain, we show that in about 1 GPU hour of finetuning, we effectively erase the model’s ability to generate or recall Harry Potter-related content, while its performance on common benchmarks (such as Winogrande, Hellaswag, arc, boolq and piqa) remains almost unaffected.” Link here.
4. MIE: “Some parents are paying up to $30,000 for a ‘doula’ to create a bespoke moniker for their offspring.”
5. New study on autonomous vehicle performance vs. human performance.
*The Women Who Made Modern Economics*
By Rachel Reeves. Here is the U.S. Amazon listing, but even the Kindle version is not actually available. Here is the UK Amazon listing. Here is a Times of London review of the book: “They [the book’s subjects] range from Beatrice Webb, who, as a founder of the LSE, is a natural choice, to Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Marxist, and Dambisa Moyo, the international aid theorist elevated to the Lords by Boris Johnson.” Note that Reeves is also Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and thus surely worthy of getting U.S. book distribution?
Corporate taxes matter, incentives matter, but does economics matter?
This paper combines administrative tax data and a model of global investment behavior to evaluate the investment and firm valuation effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017, the largest corporate tax reduction in the history of the United States. We extend the canonical model of Hall and Jorgenson (1967) to a multinational setting in which a firm produces in domestic and international locations. We use the model to characterize and measure four determinants of domestic investment: domestic and foreign marginal tax rates and cost-of-capital subsidies. We estimate elasticities of domestic investment with respect to each and use them to identify the structural parameters of our model, to quantify which parts of the reform mattered most to investment, and to conduct policy counterfactuals. We have five main findings. First, the TCJA caused domestic investment of firms with the mean tax change to increase by roughly 20% relative to firms experiencing no tax change. Second, the TCJA created large incentives for some U.S. multinationals to increase foreign capital, which rose substantially following the law change. Third, domestic investment also increases in response to foreign incentives, indicating complementarity between domestic and foreign capital in production. Fourth, the general equilibrium long-run effects of the TCJA on the domestic and total capital of U.S. firms are around 6% and 9%, respectively. Finally, in our model, the dynamic labor and corporate tax revenue feedback in the first 10 years is less than 2% of baseline corporate revenue, as investment growth causes both higher labor tax revenues from wage growth and offsetting corporate revenue declines from more depreciation deductions. Consequently, the fall in total corporate tax revenue from the tax cut is close to the static effect.
That is from a new NBER paper by Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Matthew Smith, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick. How many times has the NYT told you otherwise? As I’ve noted in blog posts over the last six years or so, the standard literature already was indicating that such tax cuts are relatively effective (though no panaceas). I hope this settles the matter, though I fear it will not…
Via Jason Furman, who also reproduces some nice pictures from the piece.
The polity that is Argentina
The current Peronist government has created or increased at least 27 taxes, often by decree. At least seven new exchange rates have been invented under this administration. In the run-up to the election, Mr Massa abolished income taxes for 99% of registered workers, increased wages for public employees and handed out a bonus in pesos worth $100 (converted at the official exchange rate) for pensioners.
Populism has contaminated trade, too. Successive Peronist administrations have cut the country off from international commerce in order to protect workers and keep domestic prices down. Trade as a percentage of gdp is just 33%, among the world’s lowest (it is 84% in Mexico and 64% in Chile). Such governments have also bashed the country’s main export sector, agriculture, as an oligarchy, and sought to hobble it by imposing export restrictions on farm produce. Exports of soya, the country’s main product, are taxed at 33%.
All of this means that most Argentines prefer to do things off the books. Banks, which in the past have effectively confiscated savings under government orders, are avoided. Domestic credit to the private sector is only 11% of gdp, compared with 83% in Chile.
Here is more from The Economist, an excellent survey.
Saturday assorted links
2. A new accelerator for research leaders, from Ben Reinhardt.
3. The political diversity of neighborhoods may in fact now be increasing.
4. “One player at Michigan State University now makes $750,000 a year, according to the group that pays him.” (NYT) The story is remarkable throughout.
5. Wemby in action.
*Eighteen Days in October*
That is the new and excellent book by Uri Kaufman, and the subtitle is The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East. Here is one excerpt:
The ordeal of the 314 Israelis who fell into captivity during the 1973 war — 248 in Egypt, 66 in Syria — did not end when they returned home. All were sent to a facility — not to be treated for post-traumatic stress, which was then only thinly understood — but to find out what they had told their captors. The facility was located in the Israeli town of Zichron Yakov; the men sent there nicknamed it “Stalag Zichron.” It was a nice play on words because it literally translated to “Stalag Memory.” Interrogators plumbed the depths of their memories, even giving some “truth serum,” ostensibly to treat shell shock. In interviews of these soldiers years later, the word that comes up again and again is humiliation. Elazar asked the men, “Why didn’t you do what Uri Ilan did? What didn’t you commit suicide?” On a radio program interviewing the survivors of Mezakh, former chief of staff Chaim Laskov said that “falling into captivity, surrendering, these are evasive things. An order to surrender is illegal. The only proper order is ‘every man for himself.'”
And this short bit:
It was Napoleon who famously prayed that if he had to face an enemy, please God let it be a coalition.
Recommended.
Building credibility?
Or do they want you to like and admire them? Or maybe they are just telling the truth?
It’s no surprise that social media brims over with videos from real estate influencers. What’s astonishing is that property owners and landlords, some of the most broadly despised people in the country, are logging on to boast about the most ruthless and loathsome things they do. In one video, the protagonist of an account called Build Wealth With Gustavo laughingly bemoans the damage an evicted resident has done to his “house in the hood”; soon, he’s transforming it into an attractive $100,000 rehab project. In another, a landlord exhibits the “nightmare” of a rental trailer trashed by tenants, explaining that rents are so high “because of people like this.” Scroll on, and you might find a maintenance man dancing in the wreckage of an eviction while onscreen text explains his plans to add to the former occupant’s debt. “So who really got the last laugh,” it reads, alongside a smiley-face emoji.
Here is more from the NYT, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Don’t forget the comments of Alex T.
The death of deterrence?
https://twitter.com/RLHeinrichs/status/1715171574167261313
Not to mention Hamas attacking in the first place (you also can debate at whom the Houthis were aiming, probably not the U.S. per se). And the 32 dead and 11 Americans unaccounted for.
Forget about moralizing and sides-taking for a moment, and just try to think this through as a game. Either a) attacks of this nature recur and escalate, or b) the U.S. and/or Israel act to reestablish deterrence? If b), what kind of act would suffice to reestablish some kind of effective deterrence? Again, to think clearly please try to steer your attention away from the moral question of what you think the U.S. and/or Israel should do.
I date the decline (but not death) of deterrence to when Iraq fired 42 Scud missiles into Israel in 1991 and the Israelis did not retaliate. That decision was widely praised at the time, and perhaps correctly. Still, since then people have been solving for the equilibrium…and now that new equilibrium seems to be upon us. What would Thomas Schelling say? This is all worth a very serious ponder.
Friday assorted links
1. Robin Hanson theorizes about aliens.
2. Wokeness is maybe the source of lower well-being on the Left?
3. Rubber Soul but only bass and drums.
4. Dror Poleg is running “a ventures approach to peace.”
5. Italy will ban “synthetic meat.”
6. Salim Furth book review on Japanese urbanism.
8. Poll data on shifting U.S. views on Israel and Palestine.
My excellent Conversation with Jacob Mikanowski
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why isn’t Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer?
MIKANOWSKI: That’s interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My dad’s a computer scientist. His father set up one of Poland’s first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction: he used to read the Tales of Pirx the Pilot and the Ijon Tichy stories — the robots, the short, fun ones — like they were fairy tales. I grew up with them.
I think — actually I have trouble going back to those. I’d go back to Solaris, and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it’s had lasting influence. But there’s something pessimistic about them. They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. Maybe that makes them hard to digest. Also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take.
I think there’s been a little bit of a Lem revival, though. I know technologists, some people like them; futurologists like him. I like him.
COWEN: Some of the cybernetics tales, they seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I’ve seen this mentioned once, but it’s not generally known: the idea that you use them to talk to, that they’re weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles — that’s very much in Lem, quite early.
MIKANOWSKI: I think people should go back to them. I think — I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien alien. Now it’s like, well, this is a little bit of what we’re doing with virtual reality and AI. It’s like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people? You could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness, without anything behind it — without a consciousness.
There’s something seductive about it, and there’s something monstrous about it. I think he was there way ahead of anyone else, and people should be going back to them. Maybe they will.
Of course we talk about the Suwalki Gap as well. And this: “Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well-informed people would not?”
Recommended, interesting throughout. Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.