A City Not a Museum

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Good Binyamin Appelbaum piece on the difficulties of building in NYC. The data will be familiar but I especially appreciate this vibe which we need more of:

I hope someday I’ll be walking with my children on the Lower East Side or the Upper West Side or Brooklyn Heights. We’ll pass one of the places where my ancestors lived, and the building will be gone. In its place will stand an apartment building, housing a new generation of New Yorkers.

See also my piece Against Historical Preservation where I wrote:

…a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestor’s ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies.

A textual analysis of Enlightenment ideals

by  Tyler Cowen in

Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, scientific volumes became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, industrial works—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the 17th century. It was therefore the more pragmatic, industrial works which reflected the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s takeoff.

That is from a new research paper by Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy, and Jared Rubin.

Is Tom Cruise actor GOAT?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes says I, and here is Wikipedia for reference.  Adam Ozimek (from my email) agrees:

Rewatching Oblivion tonight and it really holds up. Cinematography and CGI that hasn’t aged at all. And Edge of Tomorrow is a sci fi classic for the ages now, made when he was 52.

Those metacritic scores on the recent Mission Impossible films and Top Gun are extraordinary for action blockbusters.

The Scientology stuff is not great for society, but the man tried to and maybe did save movie theaters. And don’t forget this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2021/05/11/tom-cruise-stands-his-expletive-laden-m-i-7-rant-over-covid-19/5041447001/

And no he hasn’t done a Rain Man style serious role in a while, but he’s shown plenty of range. Did you know how much of his tropic thunder character was his idea? https://youtu.be/a3fKXBNufy4?si=M4YPtGx8PJTHREB3

GOAT I say

Fair enough.  I would start with Risky Business, from 1982, which is genuinely funny and vital and which few other actor GOAT contenders can match.  A Few Good Men and Interview the Vampire I also find to his credit, all from the first decade of what is (so far) five (!) decades of being a dominant force in Hollywood.  Sadly, Jerry McGuire, like Rain Man, turns me off.

Perhaps Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut are his finest achievements?  In any case they show he has a strong presence in art house cinema as well.  Minority Report is seminal and Vanilla Sky has a McCartney song in the soundtrack.

Cruise has worked with top directors, including Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann and John Woo.  He makes creative decisions in his movies as well.  Cruise has won plenty of awards, has longevity and variety in his repertoire, and still is important for pulling in the gross.  He has done many of his own stunts, even at advanced ages.  He also has married three actresses — Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman, and Katie Holmes.  He has dated Melissa Gilbert, Rebecca De Mornay, Patti Scialfa, and Cher, among others.

One of Cruise’s co-stars, Emily Blunt, described him as “insatiably positive.”

Is he “the last great movie star“?  As Hegel once said, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.

Addendum:

Harrison Ford seems to be the only serious competitor?  Cary Grant is a bit too tall, wooden, and British to win, but maybe he comes in third?  Jimmy Stewart didn’t have enough dramatic range.  Clint Eastwood is amazing, but somehow too much a self-contained bubble?  Rock Hudson has degenerated into “Straussian value” in too many of his movies.  Who else?

How to make you stupider

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Maine official who moved to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot on Thursday visited the White House this year to meet with President Biden and previously referred to the Electoral College as a “relic of white supremacy.”

Here is the full story.  This is exactly what I am not going to cover in 2024, so right now you get your miniature, one-time dose.  I am not saying this is not important.  I am saying that reading a lot about it, and commenting on it, will make you stupider.  In fact, the non-elastic Parmenides universe is arranged such that anyone who leaves a comment on this post, no matter what that comments says, will lose two IQ points.

Good luck, and see you next year!

Sunday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. What Kent Hendricks learned this year, always good.

2. NYT calls for the total destruction of all extant major LLMs.  Of course this should be a scandal, and considered an example of unacceptable predatory behavior, but it isn’t.  How is this different from what a super-villain would say?  Brian Chau, telephone!

3. “A sweeping purge of Chinese generals has weakened the People’s Liberation Army, exposing deep-rooted corruption that could take more time to fix and slow Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s military modernization drive amid geopolitical tensions, analysts say.”  And is the CCP moving on Alipay?

4. Where to eat in Madrid.

5. The sources of cost inflation at Auburn University (WSJ).

6. The kinds of questions people are asking GOAT.  Galbraith gets his chance!

7. Milei kissing his girlfriend.  And Milei responding to a critic on socialism.

8. Maxim Lott monitors political bias in chatbots.

9. Hannah Ritchie sanity on climate change (NYT).

10. What Shruti has been reading.

Uber and Traffic Fatalities

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Abstract: Previous studies of the effect of ridesharing on traffic fatalities have yielded inconsistent, often contradictory conclusions. In this paper we revisit this question using proprietary data from Uber measuring monthly rideshare activity at the Census tract level. Using these more detailed data, we find a consistent negative effect of ridesharing on traffic fatalities. Impacts concentrate during nights and weekends and are robust across a range of alternative specifications. Overall, our results imply that ridesharing has decreased U.S. traffic fatalities by 5.4% in areas where it operates. Based on conventional estimates of the value of statistical life the annual life-saving benefits are $6.8 billion. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that these benefits are of similar magnitude to producer surplus captured by Uber shareholders or consumer surplus captured by Uber riders.

The authors, Michael Anderson and Lucas Davis, note that alcohol involvement is reported in approximately 30% of fatal crashes, which is an amazingly high number unless you think a lot of people are driving drunk. I am reminded of a clever paper by Levitt and Porter who use the proportion of crashes involving two drunk drivers to estimate that it is not that lots of people are driving drunk but rather that “drivers with alcohol in their blood are seven times more likely to cause a fatal crash” and “legally drunk drivers pose a risk 13 times greater than sober drivers.” Thus, substituting a sober driver for a drunk driver is a very good thing and so it’s plausible to me that Uber significantly reduces traffic fatalities.

Consider this a public service announcement.

Nicholas Kristof on good things in 2023

by  Tyler Cowen in

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!

The cities meme

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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…

Chile’s pension system out of whack

by  Tyler Cowen in

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.