*The Return*
I rarely like adaptations of classics on the big screen, but I give this one (trailer) high marks. Ralph Fiennes plays Odysseus and Juliette Binoche has the role of Penelope — you cannot imagine better castings. The film is fully serious, and understands the classic text extremely well, without being slavish to it. It understands the implicit politics in the story. And while you know the ending (more or less), it is truly dramatic and suspenseful at the psychological level. Don’t be put off by the so-so reviews, how many film critics today have a decent command of Homer?
Thursday assorted links
2. China coal consumption fact of the day uh oh.
3. John Cochrane on Bob Hall and consumption.
4. Are high stock prices and tech stagnation compatible?
5. OECD on the macro productivity gains from AI. One of the better estimates in my view.
Unconventional Indicators of National Aspiration
What are your top indicators of national aspiration? Percentage of GDP devoted to R&D would be a good conventional indicator. What about some unconventional indicators? My top five:
1) Top marginal tax rate
2) Space Program
3) Distance to travel to mother’s home
4) Tallest statue
5) Cultural exports
On these, the US and India perform well. India leads on tallest statue and its space program is impressive for a developing country. Cultural exports are currently low but historically high–I would not be surprised at a rebound. A lot of eastern European countries such as Hungary and Romania have flat taxes with top rates of 10-15%. Israel has a space program.
I am always surprised by how little people tend to move from the family home. In the US:
…80% of young adults migrate less than 100 miles from where they grew up. 90% migrate less than 500 miles. Migration distances are shorter for Black and Hispanic individuals and for those from low-income families
If anything this seems to be down in the US despite the much greater ease of moving today than in the past.
Your unconventional indicator?
Hat tip: Connor.
Why are Top Scientists Leaving Harvard?
Harvard magazine has an excellent interview with three scientists, Michael Mina, Douglas Melton and Stuart Schreiber, all highly regarded in their fields of life sciences, who have recently left Harvard for the private sector.
Why did they leave? Mina tells an incredible story of what happened during the pandemic. At the time Mina was a faculty member at the Chan School of Public Health, he is extremely active in advising governments on the pandemic, and he brings Harvard millions of dollars a year in funding. But when he tries to hire someone at his lab, the university refuses because there is hiring freeze! Sorry, no hiring for pandemic research during a pandemic. In my talk on US Pandemic Policy I discuss the similar failure of the Yale School of Public Health and how miraculously and absurdly Tyler stepped in to save the day. The rot is deep.
Melton also notes the difference in speed of response between the public and private/commercial sector:
Polls have shown that principal investigator biologists now spend up to 40 percent of their time—it’s a shocking number, 40 percent of their time—writing grants.
In industry, the funding allows for very rapid change. There’s no writing a grant and waiting six months to see if it could get funded, and then waiting another six months for the university to make arrangements to receive the funds. The speed with which you can move into a new area is not comparable.
Years ago, the pharmaceutical industry rarely did discovery research. But now, pharmaceutical companies do basic science. That’s been a good shift, in my opinion, but it’s been a shift.
“The computational resources, the sequencing, the chemical screening— it’s not comparable to what we can do in any university.”
Everything gets done much quicker. For example, when you want to file for a patent at a company, the next morning there are two patent attorneys in your office ready to write that patent. The computational resources, the sequencing, the chemical screening— it’s not comparable to what we can do in any university. It’s a whole order of magnitude different.
Our last hire at GMU took well over a year to complete. It’s outrageous. There are no functional reasons why universities should be so slow. Don’t forget, Harvard has an endowment of $50 billion!
Melton also asks whether a new private-public partnership model is possible:
Why can’t we find a way—since many of our undergraduates and graduates will end up working in industry—why can’t we find a way for them to do their studies and their Ph.D. and their postdoctoral work in conjunction with Harvard, with MIT, and with Vertex? There are reasons for that, but we haven’t been imaginative enough to think about a compromise.
Hat tip: R.P.
UK fact of the day (52 snippets from 2024)
In the UK, more than half of crimes are estimated to be caused by alcohol consumption.
From Yuri, here are 51 others, not mainly about the UK: “More countries have produced a nuclear bomb than mass-produced a jet engine.”
Is Indian food the world’s best?
From my latest Bloomberg column:
Why is the food so good? I have several overlapping hypotheses, most of them coming from my background as an economist. Interestingly, India’s culinary advantages can be traced to some good and some not-so-good aspects of Indian society.
First, food supply chains here are typically very short. Trucking, refrigeration and other aspects of modernity are widespread, but a lot of supply chains are left over from a time when those were luxuries. So if you are eating a vegetable, there is a good chance it came from nearby. That usually means it is more fresh and tastes better.
The sad truth is that India still has very high rates of food spoilage, especially when food is transported longer distances. The country is making significant progress building out its transportation networks, but in the meantime the American culinary tourist enjoys the best of all worlds: Our purchasing power is high, and we can spend our money eating super-local.
And:
India also has high income inequality. That means there is plenty of cheap labor competing to cook for diners with higher incomes. The “thickness” of the competition leads to innovation and experimentation — there are a lot of restaurants, food stalls, truck stops and the like. It is a buyer’s market. Furthermore, some of India’s best dishes, such as Bengali sweets, are very labor-intensive. Indian desserts that are mediocre in US restaurants receive the proper care and attention in Kolkata.
And:
Then there is the cultural side. India is a “food nation.” When I ask locals which are the best places to eat, which I regularly do, I am repeatedly struck by how many have strong opinions. When everyone is a food critic, standards rise accordingly. It also makes it easy for the visitor to get quality recommendations.
There are further good arguments at the link. In Bangalore I had a superb meal, Kayasth food, by Manu Chandra in Lupa, this was a special menu:
*The Triumph of Politics*
The author is David A. Stockman, and the subtitle is Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. This is for me a re-read, all DOGErs and aspiring DOGErs should give this book an initial read, as it covers why the Reagan attempts to pare back government largely failed. Excerpt:
But I hadn’t recoked that there would be so much opposition on our side of the aisle. I was shocked to find that the Democrats were geting so much Republican help in their efforts to keep the pork barrel flowing and the welfare state intact. I had been worried because the votes didn’t add up, not the economic plan.
I had also come to realize that in my haste to get the Reagan Revolution launched in February, we had moved too fast. There were numerous loose ends. The spending reductions needed to pay for the tax cuts had turned out to be even bigger and tougher than I had originally thought.
And:
Over the next eight months, the President’s pen remained in his pocket. He did not veto one single appropriations bill, all of which combined came in $10 billion [sic] over the line. Come to think of it, he did use his pen — to sign them.
Stockman of course was what you might call the DOGE leader of the early 1980s. His final take is that the Reagan Revolution failed because it misunderstood what the American people truly want from their government. For better or worse, they want privilege and also protection from misfortune, not efficiency or maximum economic growth.
Essential reading, for some of you.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Scott Sumner on ngdp guardrails. o1 pro responds.
2. Michael Grunwald on factory farming and its economics and environmental impact (NYT).
3. 100 economists who signed a petition against Milei.
5. Using AI to diagnose disease through retinal images.
6. Why did the Industrial Revolution happen?
A nuclear fusion plant in Virginia?
A company pioneering the use of fusion for commercial energy plans to build the nation’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Virginia by the early 2030s, Gov. Glenn Youngkin and other state and company officials said Tuesday.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), based in Massachusetts, said it will invest billions of dollars to build the unique facility, which — if the technology can be proved — promises to supply about 400 megawatts of electricity, enough energy to power about 150,000 homes, according to a state news release.
Here is more from The Washington Post.
Why you should be talking with gpt about philosophy
I’ve talked with Gpt (as I like to call it) about Putnam and Quine on conceptual schemes. I’ve talked with it about Ζeno’s paradoxes. I’ve talked with it about behaviourism, causality, skepticism, supervenience, knowledge, humour, catastrophic moral horror, the container theory of time, and the relation between different conceptions of modes and tropes. I tried to get it to persuade me to become an aesthetic expressivist. I got it to pretend to be P.F. Strawson answering my objections to Freedom and Resentment. I had a long chat with it about the distinction between the good and the right.
…And my conclusion is that it’s now really good at philosophy…Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic. More than that, I’ve had many philosophical discussions with professional philosophers that were much less philosophical than my recent chats with Gpt.
Here is the full Rebecca Lowe Substack on the topic. There are also instructions for how to do this well, namely talk with Gpt about philosophical issues, including ethics:
In many ways, the best conversation I’ve had with Gpt, so far, involved Gpt arguing against itself and its conception of me, as both Nozick1 (the Robert Nozick who sadly died in 2002) and Nozick2 (the imaginary Robert Nozick who is still alive today, and who according to Gpt has developed into a hardcore democrat), on the topic of catastrophic moral horror.
And as many like to say, this is the worst it ever will be…
Emergent Ventures 39th cohort
Karina Bao, San Francisco, to translate the autobiography of Morris Chang.
Theodor Grether-Murray and Marta Bernardino, high school in Montreal, Portugal, noise cancelling technologies for the ocean.
Jim Larsen, Denver, electricity and infrastructure and geothermal energy in Indonesia, Substack.
Sunir Manandhar, San Francisco/Kathmandu, ports and transportation, and better automation in industrial vehicles.
Ahad Hassan, NYC, to attend a neurodiagnostics conference in Abu Dhabi.
Kenneth Sarip, high school in San Ramon, CA, neurotech.
Jasmine Sun, San Francisco, for full-time writing and Substack.
Stella Tsantekidou, London, general career support, to write a book on feminism.
Conrad Scheibe and Daniel Coupak, high school in the London area, rocket company.
Badis Labbedi, Tunisia, University of Chicago, physics and math.
Ivan Prymachenko, Kyiv, Prometheus, scalable quality online training programs for Ukrainians.
Helena Rosengarten, Berlin soon Cambridge MA, “Ozempic for sleep.”
Ansh Chopra, San Francisco, to turn classic books into video using AI.
Again, here is Nabeel Qureshi’s software for querying about EV winners.
Thomas Storrs on elastic data supply (from my email)
Regarding your post yesterday Are LLMs running out of data?, the National Archives has 13.5 billion pieces of paper and only 240 million are digitized. Some of this is classified or otherwise restricted, but surely we can do better than less than 2%.
NARA says they aim to increase this to 500 million by the end of 2026. Even with an overly generous $1/record estimate, it makes sense to me for someone to digitize much of the remaining 13 billion though the incentives are tricky for private actors. Perhaps a consortium of AI companies could make it work. It’s a pure public good so I would be happy with a federal appropriation.
Admittedly, I have a parochial interest in specific parts’ being digitized on mid-20th century federal housing policy. Nonetheless, supply of data for AI is obviously elastic and there’s some delicious low-hanging fruit available.
The National Archives are probably the biggest untapped source of extant data. There are hundreds of billions of more pages around the world though.
Tuesday assorted links
1. This year’s Spanish Scrabble champion can’t speak Spanish and doesn’t read books.
2. The changing ancestry of Russian tsars.
3. Bankers using drugs, the latest version of the story (WSJ).
4. The importance of the opening of the Suez Canal.
5. Is there a Puritan name resurgence in America?
6. From a reader: Perplexity analyzes Tyler Cowen.
8. Luke Burgis writes up the forthcoming Rene Girard documentary. And direct link to the trailer.
The Marginal Revolution Podcast–Options!
Today on the MR Podcast Tyler and I talk about The Quest to Price Options. First, we run through the amazing history of option pricing theory from Bachelier to Black, Scholes and Merton with stops in between for Einstein, Samuelson, Thorpe and Kassouf.
We then look at how understanding options changes how one sees the world. Here’s one bit:
TABARROK: In the Hayekian-Mises business cycle theory, the interest rate is really the key thing. Everyone’s just following the interest rate. Interest rate falls because of government increases supply of money or something like that and everyone just goes into investment.
COWEN: Yes. It was Black himself who said, “No, it’s changes in the risk premium that are doing the work.” That was what he was working on before he died. The papers of mine he wanted to see, were actually on the same idea. The changes in the risk premium might be driving investment. How do we think about those in a business cycle context?
TABARROK: Yes. Those seem to be much more important than the pure interest rate itself. There’s a lot of investment decisions that you can think about like an option. Suppose you have a 10-year mineral lease, which gives you the right to drill an oil well anytime in the next 10 years. Well, when should you drill? It seems obvious that the higher the price of oil, the greater should be your incentive to drill. The price of oil goes up and down. You don’t want to drill the well and then find out that oil prices have dropped below the cost of extraction.
Once the well has been drilled, the costs are sunk, literally in this case. You can think about the decision to drill the oil well as exercising the option to drill. You want to use some model to figure out when, given the volatility of oil prices, is the optimal time to drill the well.
COWEN: It’s related to seeing all these underdeveloped or undeveloped storefronts in American cities. Oh, there’s something that used to be a store. Now, it’s all boarded up. Why don’t they put something in there? Why doesn’t the price adjust? Sometimes it’s regulation, legal issues, but sometimes it’s option value.
You’re not sure what you’re going to put in. You don’t want to have to remodel the thing again. Maybe it should be a restaurant, but your town is not yet ready for a Brazilian churrascaria and, in the meantime, everyone’s waiting.
….It’s a major problem in economicdevelopment. The Danish government is relatively credible. Many, but not all, parts of the US government are. That enables investment and growth. There’s plenty of countries, if you just look at the books, a lot of their laws don’t sound that much worse, say, than US laws. They might even sound better but no one knows what the law will be two, three, 10 years from now. It’s just harder for them to mobilize the proper incentives.
This is our last podcast of the year. What topics should we take on next year?
Subscribe now to take a small step toward a much better world: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube.
*The Nvidia Way*
I quite liked this new book by Tae Kim, offering a 245 pp. history of the company. Here is a useful review from the WSJ.
I can note that recently, a bit before Thanksgiving, I had the chance to visit Nvidia headquarters in Santa Clara, receive a tour, see some demos, and (a few days earlier) chat with Jensen Huang. I am pleased to report very positive impressions all around. My intuitive sense also jives with the portrait painted in this book.
As for my impressions of Nvidia, I was struck by the prevalence of large, attractive plant displays in the headquarters, and also how much care they take to ensure quietness on the main corporate floors and spaces (I notice funny things about companies). The geometric shapes and designs, for whatever reason, reminded me of the early 1970s movie Silent Running. If I visit an AI company, in the hallways many people will recognize me. At Nvidia nobody did, except those who invited me in. That too is an interesting contrast.
I am honored to have seen their lovely facilities.