Nicholas Kristof on good things in 2023
Just about the worst calamity that can befall a human is to lose a child, and historically, almost half of children worldwide died before they reached the age of 15. That share has declined steadily since the 19th century, and the United Nations Population Division projects that in 2023 a record low was reached in global child mortality, with just 3.6 percent of newborns dying by the age of 5.
That’s the lowest such figure in human history. It still means that about 4.9 million children died this year — but that’s a million fewer than died as recently as 2016…
Or consider extreme poverty. It too has reached a record low, affecting a bit more than 8 percent of humans worldwide, according to United Nations projections.
All these figures are rough, but it seems that about 100,000 people are now emerging from extreme poverty each day — so they are better able to access clean water, to feed and educate their children, to buy medicines.
Here is the full NYT column, and no he doesn’t deny the bad things that are going on, please don’t engage in the usual mood affiliation people…
Happy New Year to come!
U.S. high-skilled immigration
Major win for the US on high-skilled immigration policy:
“USCIS data show that the number of O-1A visas awarded in the first year of the revised guidance jumped by almost 30%
The number of STEM EB-2 visas after a ‘national interest’ waiver shot up by 55%” pic.twitter.com/PhIvdVxm2K
— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) December 30, 2023
Saturday assorted links
The cities meme
This is making the rounds on Twitter, so I thought I would serve up my somewhat unusual, not quite playing the game by its rules answers:
City I hate: Do I hate any cities? I don’t think so. I do recall being disappointed in Invercargill, New Zealand. I expected a cool, end of the earth vibe, but it was mainly a boring dump. Probably it has improved. Can I even call it a city?
City I think is overrated: Isn’t almost everything good underrated? But perhaps I am disillusioned with Milan.
City I think is underrated: By outsiders? Los Angeles. Residents however pay a lot to live there.
City I like: Busan
City I love: Berlin, Singapore, London
City I feel most myself in: Fairfax County
City I still need to visit: Capetown, Bordeaux, Vilnius, Caracas, Santiago, Cuba, and Tblisi. Muscat too.
City I dream of living in: Fairfax County
Toothpick producers violate NYT copyright
If you stare at just the exact right part of the toothpick, and measure the length from the tip, expressed in terms of the appropriate unit and converted into binary, and then translated into English, you can find any message you want. You just have to pinpoint your gaze very very exactly (I call this “a prompt”).
In fact, on your toothpick you can find the lead article from today’s New York Times. With enough squinting, measuring, and translating.
By producing the toothpick, they put the message there and thus they gave you NYT access, even though you are not a paid subscriber. You simply need to how to stare (and translate), or in other words how to prompt.
So let’s sue the toothpick company!
By the way, I hear they are sending Barbara Eden to jail…
My GOAT podcast with Robert Murphy
He is of the Mises Institute, so plenty of talk about Mises and the Austrians as well.
Bob is very smart and widely read. The other links are here: https://mises.org/library/tyler-cowen-goat-economics, https://soundcloud.com/misesmedia/tyler-cowen-on-the-goat-in-economics
Chile’s pension system out of whack
Together, I estimate these policies have effectively pushed returns down by more than 2 percentage points in most cases as suboptimal asset allocation choices with significant practical implications. Note that a mere 1.5 per cent difference in annual returns over a 35-year period can lead to a 30 to 40 per cent reduction in pension payouts. Additionally, there are three more critical issues to consider.
First, the initial design mandated an insufficient 10 per cent contribution from a worker’s salary. Studies suggest that a 15 per cent to 17 per cent contribution is necessary to obtain an acceptable pension. But there has been political reluctance to increase this figure, which would require workers to sacrifice their current take-home pay for future benefits.
Second, about 30 per cent of Chile’s labour market operates informally, and many workers frequently shift between formal and informal employment. Unfortunately, during informal periods, they seldom contribute to their pension accounts.
Here is more from Arturo Cifuentes in the FT.
Summary trends of 2023
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is my biggest worry:
Another takeaway from 2023 is more depressing: Deterrence is less powerful than I thought. Persistence, combined with a belief in one’s cause, is worth more.
The Israeli military is much stronger than Hamas, for example, and is currently proving that on the ground. Yet that did not stop Hamas from proceeding with a violent incursion into Israel. In Ukraine, substantial support from the US and other NATO nations has not stopped Russia from pursuing a war, even with very heavy losses in terms of its military power and international reputation. Russian President Vladimir Putin simply wants Ukraine, and believes some parts of it rightfully belong to Russia.
None of this is good news for the US, which relies on deterrence to support its numerous alliances. It is also bad news for the world at large, because deterrence tends to support peaceful outcomes and the status quo.
Which leads me to another piece of academic research: I am increasingly inclined to reject psychologist Steven Pinker’s view that the world is becoming more peaceful. Unfortunately, the available evidence suggests that international conflict is on the rise again, after a long period of decline. Cyclical theories of world peace and conflict — in particular the idea that peace eventually breeds the conditions for war — are thus due for an upgrade.
You could add the Houthis to that list as well. I consider AI and governance issues as well.
Friday assorted links
1. How the president of Columbia University avoided much of the current mess (NYT). She also is an economist. And part of how Harvard screwed up the tactics on the PR side.
2. Profile of Stevenson and Wolfers.
3. A typology of who is easiest and hardest to troll on-line. For instance: “People who are focused on economic issues are harder to troll. People who care primarily about social issues are easier to troll.”
4. Scott Sumner on my macro podcast with David Beckworth.
5. A claim that NYT will lose their copyright case. And Rohit. And Kevin Fischer. So far Open AI is favored in the betting markets.
Request for requests
In the year to come, what would you like to read more about on MR? Comments are open…
My pick for the best movie of the year, in which I share a bill with Kevin Spacey
Tyler Cowen, economist and author of Marginal Revolutions
May December
I found May December to be the most interesting movie of the year. It examines deep questions about who envies whom, what a meaningful life consists of, what about possession is satisfying, art versus artifice, the nature of celebrity, and how hard it is to live without worrying about what other people think. The stars are Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and the director is Todd Haynes. The plotline (these are not spoilers) is that a grown woman had sex with a male seventh-grader, was sent to prison, and later ends up marrying him and having his children. Natalie Portman plays the role of a well-known actress who comes by to learn their story, so that she may better play the woman in a movie. The biggest cinematic influence is perhaps Bergman’s Persona, as we increasingly see different ways in which the two women are parallel or “twinned” in their stories. The movie poster reflects this. The highlight is when Natalie Portman explains to a group of teenagers what it is like to do a sex scene in a movie. In an era where Hollywood is supposed to be stale, this one resets the clock.
From The Spectator, there are many other (lesser) picks as well.
Thursday assorted links
1. Claims about coffee, and how to make it taste better.
2. Ed Glaeser on the changing fact of NYC (NYT).
3. Jacques Delors, RIP at 98 (FT).
4. New breakthroughs in biotech.
5. Age differences in romance.
6. The New Left takes some digs at The Beatles. An unfair but interesting piece, sometimes getting it right. Quite a good piece at its peaks.
7. David Brooks’s Sidney Awards go to small magazine pieces this year (NYT).
The Sullivan Signal: Harvard’s Failure to Educate and the Abandonment of Principle
The current Harvard disaster was clearly signaled by earlier events, most notably the 2019 firing of Dean Ronald Sullivan. Sullivan is a noted criminal defense attorney; he was the director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and he is the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, he advised President Obama on criminal justice issues, he represented the family of Michael Brown. He and his wife were the first black Faculty Deans in the history of the college.
Controversy erupted, however, when Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team. Student protests ensued. The students argued that they couldn’t “feel safe” if a legal representative of a person accused of abusing women was also serving in a role of student support and mentorship. This is, of course, ridiculous. Defending an individual accused of murder does not imply that a criminal defense attorney condones the act of murder.
Harvard should have educated their students. Harvard should have emphasized the crucial role of criminal defense in American law and history. They should have noted that a cornerstone of the rule of law is the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, irrespective of public opinion.
Harvard should have pointed proudly to John Adams, a Harvard alum, who defied popular opinion to defend hated British soldiers charged with murdering Americans at the Boston Massacre. (If you wish to take measure of the quality of our times it’s worth noting that Adams won the case and later became president—roughly equivalent to an attorney for accused al-Qaeda terrorists becoming President today.)
Instead of educating its students, Harvard catered to ignorance, bias and hysteria by removing both Sullivan and his wife from their deanships. Harvard in effect endorsed the idea, as Robby Soave put it, that “serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus.” Thus Harvard tarred Sullivan and his wife, undermined the rule of law and elevated the rule of the mob. Claudine Gay, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, contributed to the ignorance, bias and hysteria. (It’s also notable, that Sullivan also criticized Harvard’s handling of the investigation of Roland Fryer as being “deeply flawed and deeply unfair.” This may have been Sullivan’s real sin, as the investigation of Fryer was under Dean Claudine Gay.)
Thus, we see in the Sullivan episode disregard for free speech, unprincipled governance in which different rules are applied to different actors in similar situations, and a bending to the will of the mob, all issues which have repeated themselves under the Gay regime. Sad to say, however, that these flaws were not so much ignored at the time as lauded.
Harvard followed the mob and when the mob turned and the season changed it had left itself no defense.
Addendum: See also Tyler, My thoughts on the Harvard mess.
Sure on non-profit university board motives (from the comments)
2023 CWT retrospective episode
Here is the link, here is the episode summary:
On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including the most popular and underrated episodes, the origins of the show as an occasional event series, the most difficult guests to prep for, the story behind EconGOAT.AI, Tyler’s favorite podcast appearance of the year, and his evolving LLM-powered production function. They also answer listener questions and conclude with an assessment of Tyler’s top pop culture recommendations from 2013 across movies, music, and books.
And one excerpt:
COWEN: That’s a unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don’t even want to do it, but you feel, “If I don’t do it, I’ll regret not having done it.” Just like we didn’t get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he’s far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is.
I thought half of Chomsky was quite good, and the other half was beyond terrible, but that’s okay. People, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. They had this picture — what’s it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? Then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that’s what they came for, like a horror movie.
HOLMES: The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, “I turned it off. I couldn’t listen to it.” But actually, most people listened to it. It did, actually, probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode, on average, people listen to.
COWEN: How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No.
Fun and interesting throughout. If you are wondering, the most popular episode of the year, by far, was with Paul Graham.
Here is the link, though not on the whole worth threading through.