Russia fact of the day
Turkish Airlines plans to run daily flights from Istanbul to Buenos Aires from September, up from four times a week in 2022. Weekly flights to São Paulo will increase from seven to 11 times this year, the company said. While the airline explained that demand for these routes was “quite balanced” between the countries, travel agencies in Argentina indicated that it was primarily due to flights from Turkey.
Turkey is less hospitable to Russian migrants than before, and thus it comes to this:
So many Russian babies are being born in the Brazilian city of Florianópolis that parents are banding together to hire an Orthodox priest to baptise the newest members of their families.
Here is the full FT story by Lucinda Elliott. I also would point your attention to this excellent FT long read on the decline of Barcelona. Remember the Catalonian independent movement? Well, here is what that actually brought about — a shrinking of maintenance and investment.
Saturday assorted links
1. My “return of inflation” idea seems to be occurring.
2. New film about the new British science agency ARIA, a kind of British Darpa. Brought to you by Works in Progress.
3. Okie-dokie: “Smoking cannabis on the street in Amsterdam’s red light district will soon be illegal, the city council has announced, as part of a range of bylaws designed to deter tourist excesses and make life more bearable for despairing local people.” And: “The city is still investigating a possible ban on stag and hen parties and the mayor wants to bar tourists from its cannabis coffeeshops.”
4. Tax system of the Faroe Islands.
5. Carlos Saura has passed away, RIP.
6. Good, longish article on how to think about GPTs. The best parts are extremely insightful.
Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell
Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph….I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct….
One might be tempted to dismiss this as another old, white male complaining about the kids but the speaker is Vincent Lloyd, highly-regarded director of Africana Studies at Villanova and the author of Black Dignity, “a radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought…an effort to describe the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement.”
I have no doubt that I would disagree with much of what he has to say but Lloyd has a calling, he believes in his students, in the virtue of teaching and in the power of the humanities to make us better:
…a seminar requires patience. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions. All of this is grounded in a text: Specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, holding seminar participants accountable to something concrete. The instructor gently—ideally, almost invisibly—guides discussion toward what matters.
The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.
A seminar takes time. The first day, you will be frustrated. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Even on the last day, you will be frustrated, though ideally now in a different way. Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes.
It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.
You can feel Lloyd’s pain when his students reject this gift.
Read the whole thing.
My science remarks at the AEI metascience forum
Jim Pethokoukis has transcribed some of them, here is one bit:
There’s a commonly noted productivity slowdown in the Western world starting in 1973 that I and some other people here have written about. I think one neglected factor behind this slowdown is just the destruction of the German-language speaking and central European scientific world, which starts in the 1930s and culminates in World War II. On top of that, you have the Holocaust. The fruits of science take a long time. So if you’re entranced with AI, that is ultimately the result of someone earlier having come up with electricity — Tesla, Edison, others. So before the 1930s, central Europe and Germany is by far the world’s most productive scientific area. And which factors organizationally were behind those successes? To me, that feels dramatically understudied. But you have a 10-, 15-year period where essentially all of that goes poof. Some of it comes over here to the US, a bit to Great Britain, but that’s really a central event in the 20th century. You can’t understand 20th century science without thinking very hard and long about that event.
But in terms of more approximately and more recently, here’s how I would put the importance of metascience or how science is done. It’s how science is done better that will get us out of the Great Stagnation. I don’t think that doing it worse is what got us into the Great Stagnation. So when it comes to what got us into the Great Stagnation, I think the number one culprit is simply we exhausted a lot of low-hanging fruit from combining fossil fuels with powerful machines. At some point, enough people have cars and you get the side airbag. Your CD player has better sound, now you hook in your smartphone or whatever. Those are nice advances, but they’re not really fundamental to the act of driving. So there’s just an exhaustion that happens.
There are other factors, there’s an increase in the level of regulation in a number of ways, some good, some bad, but it’s still going to slow down some amount of progress. And then the energy price shock in 1973 combined with our unwillingness to really go large with nuclear power, right? So all that happening more or less at the same time. And then a few decades earlier, the world took this huge, you know, wrenching gut blow. Now this all means actually, you should be quite optimistic about the future. Here’s the trick to the whole hypothesis, the counterintuitive part. So let’s say the Great Stagnation is not caused by science being done worse. As we’re probably now coming out of the Great Stagnation, we have mRNA vaccines, right? We have ChatGPT, a lot of advances in green energy. Maybe they’re not all sure things yet. Other areas like quantum computing, not a sure thing yet, but you can see that a lot might be coming all based in this new fundamental technology. You could call it computing.
So the hurdle that science has to clear to get us out of those accumulated institutional and low-hanging fruit barriers, that’s a higher hurdle than it used to be. So if the current scientific advances are clearing that higher hurdle, you should actually be quite optimistic about them because they’ve passed through these filters. So you have these other developments. Oh, ‘90s internet becomes more of a thing. Well, that was nice for a few years, you know, Walmart managed its inventory better. 1995 to 1998 productivity goes up, wonderful. That dwindles away. It’s then all worse again. If we really are now clearing all the hurdles, you should be especially optimistic. But it also means science policy, how science is done, how it’s organized, how it’s funded is way more important than during all those years. Those years when we were stuck, you were reshuffling the deck chairs. Not on the Titanic, but what’s like a mediocre company that just keeps on going. I don’t want any name names, but there’s a bunch of them. You were reshuffling the deck chairs there, and now we’re reshuffling the hall enterprise. It’s a very exciting time, but science matters more than ever.
There is more at the link, good throughout.
New facts about the game theory of balloons
But it turns out that China’s effort has been underway for more than a decade. According to a declassified intelligence report issued Thursday by the State Department, it involves a “fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations” that have flown over 40 countries on five continents.
That is from the Washington Post. And:
Balloon operations obviously make sense for the Chinese. The United States has military bases in Japan and elsewhere from which it can launch daily flights by P-8 and other surveillance planes that fly perilously close to Chinese airspace. China doesn’t have similar options.
The frequency of these American “Sensitive Reconnaissance Operations,” or SROs, has increased sharply from about 250 a year a decade ago to several thousand annually, or three or four a day, a former intelligence official told me. China wants to push back, and collect its own signals; it wants its own version of “freedom of navigation” operations. Balloons are a way to both show the flag and collect intelligence…
Let’s look at another tit-for-tat motivation: China claims in its internal media that the Pentagon has aggressive plans to use high-altitude balloons, in projects such as “Thunder Cloud.”
It turns out the Chinese are right. Thunder Cloud was the name for the U.S. Army’s September 2021 exercise in Norway to test its “Multidomain Operations” warfighting concept, following a similar test in the Pacific in 2018, according to the Pentagon’s Defense News.
Here is my previous post on the game theory of the balloons. Worth a reread.
I never knew this was a Bacharach-David song
Little Red Book, by Love. RIP, Burt Bacharach. His was some of the first music I knew, most of all “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” I don’t even think I knew he wrote that song, but it was in one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater.
Most of all, as a teenager, I thought of Burt Bacharach as “my parents’ music,” in a not entirely positive way. I associated it with muzak, where his compositions were played often. Then one day (long ago) I woke up and realized “Hey, Burt Bacharach is one of America’s great all-time great songwriters!” Which he was and is. It is a good thing in life to have these “Burt Bacharach moments.” They don’t need to have anything to do with your parents. But you should be able to wake up and one day just realize “Hey, that’s great!” Burt Bacharach moments, keep them in mind.
I hadn’t known he was mentored by Milhaud, as mention in this WaPo obituary. He was renowned as a good-looking playboy, leading to this:
His 2013 memoir “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” a title borrowed from one of his hits, revealed his shortcomings as a husband and father. An admittedly “selfish” man much of his life, he invited his ex-wives — Stewart, Dickinson and Sager — to contribute to provide their perspective.
I wonder what their “Burt Bacharach moments” were.
Friday assorted links
1. Back from the autumn, Fraser Nelson interviews me in London.
2. “I’m one of two honey sommeliers in the US.”
3. Herbert J. Wallberg has passed away.
4. How to use ChatGPT to improve your business plans.
5. My podcast on economics growth, and other matters, with David McWilliams of Ireland.
6. Several universities to experiment with micro nuclear power. If there is anything to turn you anti-nuclear…
A new and possibly important paper
The title is the somewhat awkward: “A Macroscope of English Print Culture, 1530-1700, Applied to the Coevolution of Ideas on Religion, Science, and Institutions.” The abstract is informative:
We combine unsupervised machine-learning and econometric methods to examine cultural change in 16th- and 17th-century England. A machine-learning digest synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. The topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Using the data generated via machine-learning we then study facets of England’s cultural history. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became more scholarly over time and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already in the 16th century. Estimating a VAR, we explore the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas induced strong responses in the other two domains. Revolutions did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science.
By Peter Grazjl and Peter Murrell, here is the paper itself. Via the excellent and ever-aware Kevin Lewis.
How to tip more effectively
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one part of the argument:
Consider a scenario in which the initial effects of tipping are self-reversing — that is, wages will fall to offset the value of tips. If the official wage is $10 an hour and tips are on average $10 an hour, that adds up to $20 an hour. If tips from everybody — not just you, but everybody — go up by another $3 an hour, the new net wage is $23 an hour.
At that higher wage, more people will apply for the job. The increased supply of labor will allow the boss to pay less than $10 an hour; it might suffice to pay only $7. Under the new regime, with tips at $13 an hour and the formal wage at $7 an hour, $3 per hour has essentially been transferred from customers to restaurant owners. The workers don’t end up with any extra money, but the owners have snookered the customers into paying a higher share of the wage bill.
In this case, you would do better by sneaking an individual worker some money on the side. That way, at least one person would get some extra cash, while you would avoid being part of a system that results in less burden on the employer.
Note that during a labor shortage, as we currently are experiencing in many sectors, part of the benefit of tips goes to customers. The higher net wage pulls more labor in the door and improves service quality. And here are the conclusions of the piece:
- If it is only you who is tipping more, and not all customers, the gains probably go to the worker.
- For that reason, if you are going to tip more, give cash to an actual human rather than in response to a touch-screen prompt.
- If you want to give a collective tip, under normal conditions you won’t much help workers.
- Under abnormal conditions, which currently prevail, even a collective tip is more likely to reach workers, as well as attract more labor to the workforce and help your fellow customers.
- In the longer run, however, a collective tipping system will serve to transfer some of the wage burden from employers to customers.
Don’t forget general equilibrium incidence!
How should you talk to ChatGPT? A User’s Guide
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, it will make ChatGPT work better for you. Here is one bit:
Ask ChatGPT “What is Marxism?” for example, and you will get a passable answer, probably no better than what you would get by using Wikipedia or Google. Instead, make the question more specific: “Which were the important developments in French Marxism in the second half of the 19th century?” ChatGPT will do much better — and it’s also the kind of question it’s hard to use Google and Wikipedia to answer.
ChatGPT will do better yet if you ask it sequential questions along an evolving line of inquiry. Ask it about the specific French Marxists it cites, what they did, and how they differed from their German counterparts. Keep on going.
ChatGPT does especially well at “compare and contrast.” In essence, ChatGPT needs you to point it in the right direction. A finely honed question gives it more fixed points of reference. You need to set the mood and tone and intellectual level of your question, depending on the kind of answer you want. It’s not unlike trying to steer the conversation at a dinner party. Or, to use another analogy, think of working with ChatGPT as like training a dog.
Another way to hone ChatGPT’s capabilities is to ask it for responses in the voice of a third person. Ask, “What are the costs of inflation?” and you might get answers that aren’t wrong exactly, but neither are they impressive. Instead, try this: “What are the costs of inflation? Please answer using the ideas of Milton Friedman.”
By mentioning Friedman, you have pointed it to a more intelligent corner of the ideas universe. If Friedman isn’t the right guide for you, choose another economist (don’t forget yours truly!). Better yet, ask it to compare and contrast the views of two economists.
There are further tips at the link. Which are the tips that you know?
Thursday assorted links
Richard Hanania on AGI risk
To me, the biggest problem with the doomerist position is that it assumes that there aren’t seriously diminishing returns to intelligence. There are other potential problems too, but this one is the first that stands out to me…
Another way you can have diminishing returns is if a problem is so hard that more intelligence doesn’t get you much. Let’s say that the question is “how can the US bring democracy to China?” It seems to me that there is some benefit to more intelligence, that someone with an IQ of 120 is going to say something more sensible than someone with an IQ of 80. But I’m not sure a 160 IQ gets you more than a 120 IQ. Same if you’re trying to predict what world GDP will be in 2250. The problem is too hard.
One can imagine problems that are so difficult that intelligence is completely irrelevant at any level. Let’s say your goal is “make Xi Jinping resign as the leader of China, move to America, and make it his dream to play cornerback for the Kansas City Chiefs.” The probability of this happening is literally zero, and no amount of intelligence, at least on the scales we’re used to, is going to change that.
I tend to think for most problems in the universe, there are massive diminishing returns to intelligence, either because they are too easy or too hard.
Recommended, and largely I agree. This is of course a Hayekian point as well. Here is the full discussion. From a “talent” perspective, I would add the following. The very top performers, such as Lebron, often are not tops at any single aspect of the game. Lebron has not been the best shooter, rebounder, passer, or whatever (well, he is almost the top passer), rather it is about how he integrates all of his abilities into a coherent whole. I think of AGI (which I don’t think will happen, either) as comparable to a basketball player who is the best in the league at free throws or rebounds.
My Conversation with Glenn Loury
Moving throughout, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury joined Tyler to discuss the soundtrack of Glenn’s life, Glenn’s early career in theoretical economics, his favorite Thomas Schelling story, the best place to raise a family in the US, the seeming worsening mental health issues among undergraduates, what he learned about himself while writing his memoir, what his right-wing fans most misunderstand about race, the key difference he has with John McWhorter, his evolving relationship with Christianity, the lasting influence of his late wife, his favorite novels and movies, how well he thinks he will face death, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s your favorite Thomas Schelling story?
LOURY: [laughs] This is a story about me as much as it is about Tom Schelling. The year is 1984. I’ve been at Harvard for two years. I’m appointed a professor of economics and of Afro-American studies, and I’m having a crisis of confidence, thinking I’m never going to write another paper worth reading again.
Tom is a friend. He helped to recruit me because he was on the committee that Henry Rosovsky, the famous and powerful dean of the college of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, who hired me — the committee that Rosovsky put together to try to find someone who could fill the position that I was hired into: professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies. They said Afro-American in those years.
Tom was my connection. He’s the guy who called me up when I was sitting at Michigan in Ann Arbor in early ’82, and said, “Do you think you might be interested in a job out here?” He had helped to recruit me.
So, I had this crisis of confidence. “Am I ever going to write another paper? I’m never going to write another paper.” I’m saying this to Tom, and he’s sitting, sober, listening, nodding, and suddenly starts laughing, and he can’t stop, and the laughing becomes uncontrollable. I am completely flummoxed by this. What the hell is he laughing at? What’s so funny? I just told him something I wouldn’t even tell my wife, which is, I was afraid I was a failure, that it was an imposter syndrome situation, that I could never measure up.
Everybody in the faculty meeting at Harvard’s economics department in 1982 was famous. Everybody. I was six years out of graduate school, and I didn’t know if I could fit in. He’s laughing, and I couldn’t get it. After a while, he regains his composure, and he says, “You think you’re the only one? This place is full of neurotics hiding behind their secretaries and their 10-foot oak doors, fearing the dreaded question, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Why don’t you just put your head down and do your work? Believe me, everything will be okay.” That was Tom Schelling.
COWEN: He was great. I still miss him.
And the final question:
COWEN: Very last question. Do you think you will do a good job facing death?
Interesting and revealing throughout.
Pegylated interferon lambda
A new drug quashes all coronavirus variants. But regulatory hurdles and a lack of funding make it unlikely to reach the U.S. market anytime soon.
So starts the NYT article. Have we learned nothing? As for the drug itself, the news is good:
…a new class of variant-proof treatments could help restock the country’s armory. Scientists on Wednesday reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that a single injection of a so-called interferon drug slashed by half a Covid patient’s odds of being hospitalized.
The results, demonstrated in a clinical trial of nearly 2,000 patients, rivaled those achieved by Paxlovid. And the interferon shots hold even bigger promise, scientists said. By fortifying the body’s own mechanisms for quashing an invading virus, they can potentially help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and other viruses with the potential to kindle future pandemics.
We will see if this has the opportunity to progress. Fast Grants, working in conjunction with Rainwater Foundation, was a key early funder here.
Oh, and do note this:
As it stands, Eiger executives said that they might seek authorization for the interferon shot outside of the United States. China, for example, has been looking for new treatment options.
And here is an Eric Topol thread on the results.
Russia fact of the day
Less than Nine Percent of Western Firms Have Divested from Russia
And here is part of the abstract:
We gathered extensive data on equity investments made by foreign companies headquartered in the European Union (EU) and G7 nations and checked whether following the outbreak of armed conflict divestment of their Russian subsidiaries could be confirmed. At the end of November 2022, our analysis shows that 8.5% of EU and G7 companies had divested at least one of their Russian subsidiaries. We performed extensive robustness checks that confirm our overall findings while also revealing some notable variation in divestment rates.
That is from a recent paper by EVenett and Pisani, via Charles Klingman.