Results for “cuba” 191 found
How poor does Cuba look?
The question is why anyone might think Cuba is doing OK, relative to northern Mexico. Megan McArdle offers (more than) two points:
3) Deep poverty is much more picturesque than moderate poverty. Poor
countries have their old colonial buildings still standing, because no
one had the money (or the reason) to tear them down and put up
something bigger. The countryside is dotted with adorable houses made
out of natural materials and natives wearing colorful traditional garb.
Animals graze in verdant fields, besides teams of sowers and reapers.
Middle income countries are smoggy, and almost everything looks like a
cheaper, shabbier version of what you get in the US. Scenic landscapes
are despoiled by cinderblock buildings with hideous tin roofs, or
trailers; cities are choked with boxy modern buildings that look
something like our housing projects. The genteel decay that looks
gothic and intriguing on an old Victorian mansion just looks seedy when
it’s eating away at badly poured concrete. Affluent Americans
underestimate the utility value of things like having personal space,
or an automobile.4) Cuba was relatively wealthy in 1959; it therefore has more
of the markers, like old majestic buildings, that we associate with
wealth.
I found the most evident signs of Cuban poverty to be the unceasing supply of articulate and sometimes weakly sobbing mendicants, none of whom sounded like con men, all of whom needed money to buy food and clothes for their families. The most shocking part is what small sums of money they would ask for or be made happy by. Or the numerous women — and I mean ordinary women in the streets — who would offer their bodies to a stranger (handsome though I am) for a mere pittance. Yes in Cuba there is good access to doctors but anesthesia is in short supply and the health care system stopped improving long ago.
If you want to understand northern Mexico, get out of the Tijuana tourist strip and visit Hermosillo. Count the number of new housing developments, and then count how many of them are inhabited by fairly dark-skinned, previously dirt poor, Mexican mestizos. Put that number over the number of buildings in Havana that do not have serious maintenance problems and see if you can divide by zero.
It’s quite possible that a lower middle class Mexican eats better food than you do, but there is no chance of that for anyone in Cuba except the top elite. Powdered milk is a luxury there.
I’ve long thought that Prague looks much richer than it is, and that the ugly northern Virginia or Houston looks poorer than it is. Where else looks deceivingly rich or poor?
The Cuban Cigar Mystery
Why are Cuban cigars good? It’s not as if communist economies are known for producing quality goods so why the exception for Cuban cigars? I have a few hypotheses:
- Cuban cigars are not good. The contrary impression is due to rememberances of things past and the sex appeal of the forbidden fruit. (Testable hypothesis: Are Cuban cigars as highly prized in countries where they are not banned?)
- The Cuban "terroir," the soil, climate and environment are unique. (Maybe but Communists destroy good terroir – see Zimbabwe, the Ukraine etc. – all the time.)
- Castro puts a huge amount of resources and incentives into producing cigars because a) he likes to smoke and b) exporting cigars and doctors is good for the brand image. Cuban cigars are like Soviet chess.
- Castro has basically privatized the cigar industry allowing for significant market incentives.
Comments are open for those who know more about cigars and the Cuban cigar industry.
Mark Cuban’s War against Hollywood
Why don’t we have a convergence to immediately available video-on-demand? Edward Jay Epstein blames Wal-Mart:
What has prevented the studios from closing the video window is simple: Wal-Mart. The company, which is the single biggest seller of DVDs, has made it clear that it does not want to compete with home delivery. Wal-Mart executives told Viacom’s home entertainment division in no uncertain terms that if any studio does away with the 45-day video window for a single title, they would risk losing access to Wal-Mart’s shelf space for all of its titles. Wal-Mart provided studios with more than one-third of their U.S. DVD revenue in 2004. In the face of Wal-Mart’s retail power, the studios have not dared (yet) to do away with the protective video window.
Read: Wal-Mart will lose this battle sooner or later. Here is the full article, which contains much more about Cuban.
Cuban art
Before leaving for Paris I had the chance to give a talk on Latin American art in Tucson. While preparing I spent some time browsing Google Images for fun. One of my favorite Cuban painters is the expressionist Tomas Sanchez, I like the lusciousness of how he paints forests.
Here is another Sanchez. Manuel Mendive has a more primitivist style, here is my favorite Mendive. If you would like something more avant-garde, try Jose Bedia.
Here is one place to buy some reasonably priced Cuban art.
And how about the economics in Cuba?
State-run galleries sell selected works to tourists and pay artists a percentage, but successful artists like Sandra Ramos and The Carpinteros (Dagoberto Rodriques and Marco Castillo) prefer to deal directly with collectors, inviting them into their homes and studios where they do business in dollars that allow them to support their entire families. The opening week of the biennial is a feeding frenzy of foreign buying with collectors arriving in tours organised by US museums or European travel agencies. (The US allows importation of Cuban art and educational materials.)
With such considerable interest in the biennial, the State has been quick to recognise the potential of the market: an art auction at the biennial raised more than $100,000 to benefit a children’s cancer hospital, with an anonymous collector from Monaco paying $11,000 for a drawing by Kcho, an artist whose signature motif is a simple boat that might be interpreted as an allusion to Cubans’ efforts to escape the island. Somehow Kcho has been co-opted as a quasi-official artist, painting backdrops for Castro speeches and occupying a huge government house.
The bottom line: Censorship or not, if you tax everything else heavily, a good deal of talent will go into the art market. Alex and I wrote about this in our paper An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture (PDF).
How I listen to music
Ian Leslie writes to me:
I’m wondering, have you ever done a post about how you listen to music? Hours per week, times of day, technologies, degree of multi-tasking, etc…and how you choose what to listen to at any given moment. I’d be interested.
I go to plenty of concerts, but that is for another post. And I’ve already written about satellite radio. As for home, I like to listen to music most of the time, noting that if I am writing a) the music doesn’t bother me, and b) I don’t necessarily hear that much of the music. A few more specific points:
1. I don’t like to listen to “rock music” (broadly construed) in the morning.
2. I won’t listen to Mahler, Bruckner, or Brahms in the morning. They are evening music.
3. Renaissance music is best either in the morning or the evening.
4. I don’t listen to much jazz at home any more, though I am no less keen to see a good jazz concert live. Having already spent a lot of time with the great classics, at current margins I am disillusioned with most “jazz as recorded music.”
4b. The same is true of most “world music,” if you will excuse the poorly chosen label. I do subscribe to Songlines, a world music magazine. I buy some of the recommendations on CD, but try out many more on YouTube or Spotify. That is my primary use of those services, at least for music. That is one case where I am sampling to see if I run across new sounds.
5. I don’t like earbuds and never use them.
6. Bach gets the most listening time.
7. For a classical piece I really like, I might own five or more recorded versions, occasionally running up to a dozen. Listening to a poor or even so-so recording of a very good piece is to me painful and to be avoided.
8. Contemporary classical music — which many people hate — gets plenty of listening time. Though not when Natasha is home. Some of those recordings, such as Helmut Lachenmann string quartets, seem to create problems for Spinoza, noting that he is rarely not at home. Perhaps they will be shelved for a few years.
9. I buy new classical music releases recommended by Fanfare, and occasionally from the NYT or Gramophone or elsewhere. As for “popular music” (a bad term), mostly I wait until December and then buy CDs extensively from various “best of the year” lists. I do some Spotify sampling then too, again from those lists.
10. The main stock of recorded music is kept in the basement. There is a separate shelf upstairs for what I am listening to actively at the moment. That shelf might have 200 or so CDs, with some of them scattered on tables, and with some LPs nearby as well.
11. Periodically I go down into the basement and choose which discs will be “re-promoted” to the active shelf upstairs. And if I am done listening to a disc, it goes down to the basement, with some chance of being re-promoted back to upstairs later.
12. If I don’t like a disc, I throw it out, as space constraints have become too binding. (It is cruel to give it away, and no one wants it anyway.) As time passes, I am throwing out more discs. For instance, I love Cuban music but I don’t lilsten to it on disc any more.
Overall, I view this system as optimized for getting to know a core repertoire. It is not optimized for browsing or random discovery. I feel I have a lot of discovery in my musical life, but it comes from reading and information inflow — both extensive — not from listening per se.
And to be clear, I am not suggesting that these methods are optimal for anyone else.
Shrinking populations will limit convergence
By me, from Bloomberg:
The main culprit could be the fertility crisis. In Latin America, for instance, fertility rates are coming in much lower than had been expected. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica and Cuba all have fertility rates of about 1.3. In one decade, Mexico had a 24% drop in births. Brazil, by far the region’s most populous nation, has a fertility rate of about 1.65, and those are likely to fall further. The UN had predicted Brazil’s population to be 216 million this year, but it turns out to be only 203 million. Over time, most Latin American countries can expect shrinking populations.
And:
The upshot, to put it in macroeconomic lingo, is that most underdeveloped countries will be seeing simultaneous contractions in aggregate demand and aggregate supply. That is bad news for economic growth. A national economy can deal with a smaller population, but a continuously shrinking population is very difficult.
More concretely, there will be no demographic dividend to help drive economic growth. Instead, caring for the elderly will become a major economic activity. The taxes and transfers necessary to support retirements will be an additional burden on already weak economies, which in turn may help to keep fertility rates low. Children will not become easier to afford. There could be a low-fertility trap, or even a vicious downward circle. As the young spend more time caring for their aging parents, that too may lower the number of children women wish to have.
Countries with falling populations will produce fewer inventors and entrepreneurs. Smaller domestic markets will make it harder to crack export markets. Toyota succeeded, for instance, because it first did well in Japan (a relatively populous country), and then refined the quality of its products and competed overseas. When the home market is smaller, economies of scale are more difficult and it is harder for companies to gain purchase.
Populations in these once-emerging economies may be hit harder than birth rates will indicate. After all, North America, Western Europe, Japan and South Korea have falling birth rates, too. Many of these countries will find it economically necessary to take in more immigrants, if only to pay for their retirement systems or to work as caregivers. That could be a further drain on populations in the less wealthy countries. Japan is already preparing its immigration plans.
Worth a ponder, and a worry. The upshot may be this:
It won’t be all bad: Poorer countries, like wealthier ones, will benefit from biomedical advances. And as societies age, their crime rates may fall. Yet while life in many of these countries may feel more secure, they won’t be able to follow the dynamic paths of Japan and South Korea, or even those of Greece or Portugal. Memories of radical economic growth may begin to fade, which may make it harder to reboot growth.
I thank Robin Hanson for a pointer to this topic.
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
Thursday assorted links
1. The Milei deregulation announcements (in Spanish). Here is the recorded message, with subtitles.
2. “Nearly 4% of Cuba’s population reached the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal years ‘22-23.” Link here, have you noticed that Latin America is central to the news again?
3. AI discovers a new structural class of antibiotics. And “The authors got GPT-4 to autonomously research, plan, and conduct chemical experiments, including learning how to use lab equipment by reading documentation (most were operated by code, but one task had to be done by humans)”, link here.
4. Cowen’s Second Law: “The survival time of chocolates on hospital wards: covert observational study.”
Which are the most underperforming parts of the world? (from my email)
You’ve written about undervalued economies in the past, but after visiting the Bay Area, I wonder what you think are the most underperforming places in the world? Define “place” as you wish, but I mean underperforming relative to easily achievable/median policy mixes. So less “what if Albanians acted like Singaporeans” and more “what if LA improved land use.”
I ask because the Bay Area, despite its achievements, seems like a candidate (Paul Graham seems to think so), as does Southern California which cedes the world’s most livable climate to cars. Various parts of Mexico come to mind. Eritrea sits on a key trade route with little to show for it. My Bosnia is a disappointment relative to neighbors. West Virginia?
Always eager to hear your thoughts.
That is from Haris Hadzimuratovic. I have a few nominations:
1. Albania I think will end up much richer, more or less on a par with parts of the former Yugoslavia. The country has enjoyed a growth spurt lately. So Albania is a good pick, but it is converging and soon won’t be a pick anymore.
2. Egypt and Lebanon should be much richer. You cannot cite their neighbors in support of that claim, but they are both extremely cultured places. Lebanese migrants in particular have done very well elsewhere.
3. Armenia should be much richer. Armen Alchian would agree.
4. Belarus should be richer than Russia, not poorer than Russia.
5. Nicaragua should be modestly richer than it is.
6. Venezuela was once the richest country in Latin America, now it is among the poorest. Cuba too.
(You will notice that communism is implicated in 3-6, and arguably #1 too.
7. Yemen should be richer, though I would not expect it to be rich.
What else?
Google searches for inequality (from my email)
From Jared Sleeper:
I was surprised to see this magnitude of effect. Google searches for “inequality” are twice as high during the academic year as they are during the summer. They double in September vs. August and then collapse by 50% in June vs. May.
My Conversation with Noam Chomsky
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Noam Chomsky joins Tyler to discuss why Noam and Wilhelm von Humboldt have similar views on language and liberty, good and bad evolutionary approaches to language, what he thinks Stephen Wolfram gets wrong about LLMs, whether he’s optimistic about the future, what he thinks of Thomas Schelling, the legacy of the 1960s-era left libertarians, the development trajectories of Nicaragua and Cuba, why he still answers every email, what he’s been most wrong about, and more.
I would stress there is no representative sample from this discussion, so any excerpt will not give you a decent sense of the dialogue as a whole. Read the whole thing, if you dare! Here is one squib, in fact it is the opener, after which we ranged far and wide:
COWEN: If I think of your thought, and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, what’s the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and liberty?
CHOMSKY: Von Humboldt was, first of all, a great linguist who recognized some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood. But in the social and political domain, he was not only the founder of the modern research university, but also one of the founders of classical liberalism.
His fundamental principle — as he said, it’s actually an epigram for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints, free to inquire, to create, to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary authority of any sort restricting or limiting them.
COWEN: Now, you’ve argued that Humboldt was a Platonist of some kind, that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence. Are you, in the same regard, also a Platonist?
CHOMSKY: Leibniz pointed out that Plato’s theory of reminiscence was basically correct, but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence — in other words, not an earlier life, but rather something intrinsic to our nature. Leibniz couldn’t have proceeded as we can today, but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature. For people like Humboldt, what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the instinct for freedom. Basic, fundamental human property should lie at the basis of our social and economic reasoning.
It’s also the critical property of human language and thought, as was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution — Galileo, Leibniz — a little later, people like Humboldt in the Romantic era. The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.
Humboldt’s formulation was that language enables language and thought, which were always pretty much identified. Language enables what he called infinite use of finite means. We have a finite system. We make unbounded use of it. Those conceptions weren’t very well understood until the mid-20th century with the development of the theory of computation by Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and other great mathematicians, 1930s and ’40s. But now the concept of finite means that provide infinite scope is quite well understood. In fact, everyone has it in their laptop by now.
COWEN: Was it the distinction between natural and artificial language that led Rousseau astray on politics?
I will say that I am very glad I undertook this endeavor.
The return of American immigration
Over the past two and a half years, immigration into the American labour market has increased by 4mn workers, and the working age immigrant population has now finally reached its pre-pandemic trend level.
More than 900,000 immigrants became US citizens during 2022 — the third highest level on record and the most in any fiscal year since 2008, according to Pew. The largest numbers came from Mexico, India, the Philippines and Cuba, and the highest growth in flows were from Cuba, Jamaica, the Philippines, India and Vietnam.
Bottom line — the US seems to be returning to pre-Trump, pre-pandemic rates of immigration.
Here is more from Rana Foroohart at the FT.
Again, don’t ban TikTok
You cannot trust the banning entity with the powers you are about to give it:
The RESTRICT Act, a proposed piece of legislation which provides one way the government might ban TikTok, contains “insanely broad” language and could lead to other apps or communications services with connections to foreign countries being banned in the U.S., multiple digital rights experts told Motherboard.
The bill could have implications not just for social networks, but potentially security tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) that consumers use to encrypt and route their traffic, one said. Although the intention of the bill is to target apps or services that pose a threat to national security, these critics worry it may have much wider implications for the First Amendment…
Under the RESTRICT Act, the Department of Commerce would identify information and communications technology products that a foreign adversary has any interest in, or poses an unacceptable risk to national security, the announcement reads. The bill only applies to technology linked to a “foreign adversary.” Those countries include China (as well as Hong Kong); Cuba; Iran; North Korea; Russia, and Venezuela.
The bill’s language includes vague terms such as “desktop applications,” “mobile applications,” “gaming applications,” “payment applications,” and “web-based applications.” It also targets applicable software that has more than 1 million users in the U.S.
Here is the full story. Here is my previous post on banning TikTok, now that we see the actual proposed ban I consider my earlier arguments an understatement. Should it really be possible that you could get 20 years in prison for using a VPN to bypass such a ban? 20 years behind bars is unlikely, but more broadly this is a sign that we are addressing the TikTok problems with very much the wrong policy instruments.
South Park Commons — the collectives model for spurring innovation
From the NYT circa 2017:
…the [South Park] Commons aims to fill a hole in the tech landscape. Northern California is littered with incubators and accelerators, organizations like Y Combinator and Techstars that help small companies develop and grow. This is something different, a community you can join before you have founded a company or even when you have little interest in founding one.
The Commons is a bit like the hacker spaces that have long thrived in the Valley — places where coders and makers gather to build new software and hardware — but it moves beyond that familiar concept. Its founder, for one thing, is a female engineer turned entrepreneur turned executive.
From SPC itself:
SPC is a de-risking platform. The community addresses the social and intellectual components of risk—it provides a close-knit, high-talent group during the idea stage so members can reach founder-market fit before attempting product-market fit. The SPC Fund plays the more traditional role of de-risking finances: our recently-launched Community Grant works much like Emergent Ventures; the Founder Fellowship (we’re currently accepting applications) is designed to get would-be founders to take the plunge; and we participate in the broader VC ecosystem with some later-stage investments.
Reminds me of the Junto Club, not to mention the 18th century more broadly; SPC itself cites Junto as a model. Think of it as a technical community of people without full-time jobs, plus a venture fund. On the ground, technologists hang out with potential founders. Here is TechCrunch on SPC.
Which are other recent examples of successful “community” models for spurring innovation?
A Chatbot for my Talent book with Daniel Gross
You will find it here, by a GMU undergraduate Momin Kaleem, working out of an incubator. Ask the bot and receive some answers from the book or inspired by the book. How can he make this better for other authors, he wishes to know?