Fireside chat with Vitalik
No, I don’t think this one will go public, but you can see my earlier 2018 CWT with him. In any case, do you all have suggestions as to what I should ask? Note that the audience is (likely) by no means crypto specialists.
I thank you in advance for your usual wisdom and counsel.
Sunday assorted links
1. Economic development as reflected in the emotions expressed in paintings, as measured by AI.
2. The only thing keeping South Africa from collapse is its private sector (Bloomberg).
4. Good Anna Gát review of Oppenheimer. And good Henry Oliver review.
5. Sri Lanka update.
6. How well do some commonly-recognized happiness strategies work? Recommended, both the thread and the paper.
When is best in life to read or reread many of the greatest classic novels?
First of all, and most of all, read them when you are young (teens and 20s) so they can still influence the longer trajectory of your life!
But let’s say you are past that point. It seems to me an optimal amount of waiting is in order. You want at least one of your rereads to come at the near-peak of your knowledge, understanding, and emotional development. So age 60 might be better than age 47, if only to maximize appreciation?
I suspect that at age 80 you have lost a bit too much emotional energy to appreciate them as much as possible? But that is debatable, and perhaps for some people that point sets in before age 60.
Most generally, another reread is usually a good idea, no matter what your age.
Should you spread those rereads out over time, or is there a case for bunching at a single mini-era in your life?
In London and Siena I have been rereading Thomas Hardy’s 1878 Return of the Native, Hardy of course being one of the all-time greats.
More on Singapore and public sector talent development
From an anonymous correspondent, I will not indent:
“As a Singaporean, I appreciated your recent post on Singapore and the self-perpetuating nature of its establishment. I wanted to raise three points that may be of interest to you, which seem to also be under-discussed outside of Singapore.
The first is the Singaporean system of scholarships. You write in the post that “In Singapore, civil service jobs are extremely important. They are well paid and attract a very high quality of elite, and they are a major means of networking…” This is partly true, but the salary of civil servants at the entry level and most middle management positions is generally lower (by a small by noticeable amount) than that of comparative private sector employment, for the level of education etc. The real tool by which the government secures manpower for the civil service is a system of government scholarships. Singapore provides scholarships to high-school-equivalent students to fund their university education (either in Singapore or overseas), in exchange for which the student is bonded to work for the government for a period of 4 – 6 years after graduation. For talented low-income students, this is naturally an appealing option, and is win-win from the government’s point of view. What Singapore has successfully done, however, is create a set of social norms in which taking such a scholarship is seen as prestigious, and not something merely done out of need, such that many middle-class or even quite wealthy students take up the scholarship despite not needing it to fund their education. The incentive for them is the fast-tracking of scholars (relative to those employed through normal means) into higher positions within the civil service, a practice which is essentially an open secret. You could also think of this as a modern re-creation of the Chinese imperial exam system, without the bad parts, and I do think the cultural connection is not unimportant.
Singapore is often seen as a model for other developing countries for any number of the policies it adopts. But I think one truly underrated high impact policy is this scholarship system. It largely solves the problem governments in many countries face of keeping talent in the public sector, while redressing some degree of inequality (of course, the scale is limited). To a government, the cost of funding the higher education of a couple hundred students a year (Singapore’s birth cohort is small, after all) is relatively insignificant, even at the most expensive American colleges. I’ve always thought of this policy as one of the single lowest-cost, highest-impact things that other developing countries can borrow from Singapore: a marginal revolution, if you like.
The second point is on how the civil service is enmeshed with the elected government. The PAP often draws its candidates from the civil service, and because of its electoral dominance, it largely has the power to decide on the career pathways of its MPs and ministers. Unlike the UK, therefore, where ministerial promotions are largely dependent on political opportunity, the PAP does do quite a bit of planning about who its ministerial team a few years down the line is going to consist of, and often draws civil servants to fit into that system. If we look at the current Cabinet, for example:
- Lawrence Wong (deputy PM and heir presumptive)
- Heng Swee Keat (deputy PM)
- Ong Ye Kung (Minister for Health)
- Desmond Lee (Minister for National Development; probably closest to the US Department of the Interior in its scope)
- Josephine Teo (Minister for Communications and Information)
- S. Iswaran (previously Minster for Transport, though now under investigation for corruption)
- Chee Hong Tat (acting Minister for Transport)
- Gan Kim Yong (Minister for Trade and Industry)
[They] were all ex-civil servants before standing for election, and many more backbenchers and junior MPs could be added to that list. This contributes significantly to the links between the PAP and the establishment structure as a whole, because it means that MPs when coming into power have often been steeped in “the system” for many years before formally standing for election, and the process of selecting and promoting MPs is much more controlled than the relatively freer systems in liberal democracies.
The last point is about the army. It is not uncommon for ex-soldiers to serve in government in other countries, the US being a prime example, but while in the US this is largely a random process of ex-soldiers themselves choosing to run, in Singapore it’s a much more deliberate effort. First, the SAF (Singapore Armed Forces) awards scholarships too, in a manner similar to the general civil service. In a classically Singaporean way, the scholarships are aggressively tiered, ranging from the most prestigious SAF Scholarship (only around 5 of which are awarded each year) to the SAF Academic Award which funds only local university studies. The degree of scholarship one receives in the army thus determines one’s career progression. The Chiefs of Defence Force (in charge of the SAF as a whole) have all been SAF scholarship recipients, as have almost all of the Chiefs of Army, Navy & Air Force. The relevance of this to your post is the fact that recipients of the more prestigious scholarships are often then cycled out of the army into either the civil service or politics. In Cabinet:
- Chan Chun Sing (Minister for Education)
- Teo Chee Hean (Coordinating Minister for National Security)
- Lee Hsien Loong (PM)
[They] all started their careers in the SAF, and this list could likewise be extended by considering junior MPs. Likewise, many of the heads of the civil service in the various ministries are ex-SAF soldiers, as are the heads of many government agencies like the Public Utilities Board (managing water and electricity) and Singapore Press Holdings, which publishes the establishment newspapers.
Taken together, these three features are I think what contribute to the sense of the “establishment” being a kind of self-contained system that you allude to in your post. In general, young people are attracted to either the civil service or military after leaving high school, and are bonded to the government in exchange for university funding. Although some leave after the bond period, many stay on due to the promise of career progression in both organisations. Eventually, some then become cycled out into the elected government, and the process repeats. This process has, I think, become very attractive to the government because it allows them to exert much more control over the selecting and nurturing of talent, than the more freewheeling British or American systems.”
TC again: Bravo!
Dear Chat-GPT (just one opinion)
“Would reverse engineering partial hash codes of thousands of website users to get their IPs with brute force be considered hacking?”
Yes, attempting to reverse engineer hash codes to obtain user IP addresses or any other sensitive information would certainly be considered hacking. This is an unauthorized attempt to access, manipulate, or use another person’s data, which is a breach of privacy. It is both unethical and illegal, as it infringes on various privacy and computer misuse laws. If caught and prosecuted, the consequences can range from fines to imprisonment. Always respect digital privacy and follow the law when dealing with data and sensitive information.
“Can it be said that “do not harm the individuals you are studying” is a fundamental principle of scientific and research ethics?”
Yes, the principle of “do no harm” is a fundamental tenet of scientific and research ethics. This means researchers have a duty to avoid causing any physical, psychological, social, or cultural harm to their subjects. This applies to all fields of study including medical, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and so on. Moreover, researchers have an obligation to anticipate and manage any potential risks that their studies may pose to both individuals and communities. Ensuring informed consent, maintaining confidentiality, and avoiding deceptive practices are also key aspects of ethical research conduct.
“What if those individuals deserve to be harmed, because of bad things they have done in the past? Say they are convicted murderers. Would that change the above-mentioned principle of scientific and research ethics, namely do not harm the subjects you are studying?”
No, the principle of “do no harm” in scientific and research ethics does not change based on the past actions or characteristics of the individual. Even if the individuals are convicted murderers or have done bad things in the past, researchers are obliged to treat them ethically. All human subjects have the right to be free from physical and psychological harm during research. This is crucial for maintaining the integrity of research and the researchers themselves. This principle has been established and maintained to ensure that scientific and research pursuits do not become a justification for harm or maltreatment.
Thank you Chat-GPT!
*Barbie*
You can object to the lack of plot impetus in this work, or cite several other objections, not entirely without reason. Yet the film is fresh, interesting, and creative throughout. It is full of ideas, starting with an investigation of how lookism oppresses women, and then it continues to deepen. By the end, the surface-level and Straussian readings dovetail nicely and converge. The song “Closer to Fine” is used well. By no means fully satisfying, but insightful throughout.
Saturday assorted links
1. What a corruption scandal in Singapore looks like.
2. Vargas Llosa uh-oh? (New Yorker)
3. Astral Codex Ten: comments on British economic decline.
4. FedNow will enable speedier payments.
5. One take on the current Chinese economic slowness. A good, non-hysterical piece.
6. Stupid bluster about Suwalki. But don’t think this is not a major issue in the longer term.
Victory City
In the upper deccan of India lies Hampi, today just a village and ancient ruins but once the seat of the Vijayanagara Empire which ruled most of South India from 1336 to 1565. The Vijayanagara Empire was the last big Hindu empire in India before the Mughals and then the British took over, so it holds a special place of admiration and wistful longing among many Indians. The glory of the empire is attested to by foreign visitors. Will Durant writes:
The capital, founded in 1336, was probably the richest city that India had yet known. Nicolo Conti, visiting it about 1420, estimated its circumference at sixty miles; Paes pronounced it “as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight.” There were, he added, “many groves of trees within it, and many conduits of water”; for its engineers had constructed a huge dam in the Tungabadra River, and had formed a reservoir from which water was conveyed to the city by an aqueduct fifteen miles long, cut for several miles out of the solid rock. Abdu-r Razzak, who saw the city in 1443, reported it as “such that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, of any place resembling it upon the whole earth.” Paes considered it “the best-provided city in the world, ‘ .. for in this one everything abounds.” The houses, he tells us, numbered over a hundred thousand-implying a population of half a million souls. He marvels at a palace in which one room was built entirely of ivory; “it is so rich and beautiful that you would hardly find anywhere another such.”
The Vijayanagara Empire and its capitol are the subject of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City. The conceit of Victory City is that it’s told through the life of a demi-god, Pampa Kampana, who literally breathes life into the city and lives through its 229 year history. It’s a fine story, although not one of Rushdie’s best. Wordplay is kept to a minimum which makes it more accessible but less challenging. As the subject is the city, the characters fade somewhat into the background leaving less at stake. Vijayanagara was a commercial city, open to people of all faiths, but Rushdie also feels the need to insert into the narrative 21st century notions of gender equality which stick out like a sore thumb.
Still, if you were planning to visit Hampi (a short flight from Bangalore), Victory City would be a fun primer. Let’s turn back again to Will Durant;
We may judge of its power and resources by considering that King Krishna Raya led forth to battle at Talikota 703,000 foot, 32,600 horse, 551 elephants, and some hundred thousand merchants, prostitutes and other camp followers such as were then wont to accompany an army in its campaigns…Under the Rayas or Kings of Vijayanagar literature prospered, both in classical Sanskrit and in the Telugu dialect of the south. Krishna Raya was himself a poet, as well as a liberal patron of letters; and his poet laureate, Alasani-Peddana, is ranked among the highest of India’s singers. Painting and architecture flourished; enormous temples were built, and almost every foot of their surface was carved into statuary or bas-relief.
…In one day all this power and luxury were destroyed. Slowly the conquering Moslems had made their way south; now the sultans of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golkonda and Bidar united their forces to reduce this last stronghold of the native Hindu kings. Their combined armies met Rama Raja’s half-million men at Talikota; the superior numbers of the attackers prevailed; Rama Raja was captured and beheaded in the sight of his followers, and these, losing courage, fled. Nearly a hundred thousand of them were slain in the retreat, until all the streams were colored with their blood. The conquering troops plundered the wealthy capital, and found the booty so abundant “that every private man in the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses and slaves.” For five months the plunder continued: the victors slaughtered the helpless inhabitants in indiscriminate butchery, emptied the stores and shops, smashed the temples and palaces, and labored at great pains to destroy all the statuary and painting in the city; then they went through the streets with flaming torches, and set fire to all that would burn. When at last they retired, Vijayanagar was as completely ruined as if an earthquake had visited it and had left not a stone upon a stone. It was a destruction ferocious and absolute, typifying that terrible Moslem conquest of India which had begun a thousand years before, and was now complete.
…It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.
Why I do not use psychedelics
I am not sure how many people should use psychedelics, and I do not wish anything in this post to be construed as advice. It does seem obvious to me, however, that 1960s popular music was more creative because some individuals used psychedelics. I’ve also seen evidence that psychedelics can help (only some) individuals with depression.
So why don’t I use psychedelics?
For one thing, I am not depressed.
For another, as this stage in my life I am not looking for “Notorious Byrd Brothers” kinds of creativity. I would rather get execution right, and remain on the same mental track I have been on. I also don’t want my priorities re-ordered, or suddenly to feel that now I have grasped the true nature of the universe, and that x, y, and z are in fact meaningless. Let’s stick with the process, people! I feel the real world is sending enough new ideas my way.
I also observe that “the doors of perception open only once.” That is, you can’t just keep on using psychedelics to maintain a steady stream of creativity. Circa 1974, neither John nor Paul were doing another “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Instead, both retreated into (varying) forms of domesticity. McGuinn goes Christian and records sea shanties (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Many others burn themselves out.
So I don’t know that psychedelics are an optimal cognitive strategy for “staying in the game.”
Most of all, I don’t want my priorities re-ordered. And that is why I don’t use psychedelics.
German deindustrialization crisis of the day
New orders at the country’s engineering companies, long a bellwether for the health of Germany Inc., have been dropping like a stone, falling 10 percent in May alone, the eighth consecutive decline. Similar weakness is apparent across the German economy, from construction to chemicals.
Foreign interest in Germany as a place to invest is also receding. The number of new foreign investments in Germany fell in 2022 for the fifth year in a row, hitting the lowest point since 2013.
“One sometimes hears about ‘creeping deindustrialization — well, it’s not just creeping anymore,” said Hans-Jürgen Völz, chief economist at BVMW, an association that lobbies for Germany’s Mittelstand, the thousands of small- and medium-sized firms that form the backbone of the country’s economy.
And this:
Only four of the 100 most-cited scientific papers on AI in 2022 were German. That compares with 68 for the U.S. and 27 for China.
“Germany has nothing to offer in any of the most important future-oriented sectors,” said Marcel Fratzscher, the head of Germany’s DIW economic institute. “What exists is old industry.”
The power of technology to transform an economy — or leave it behind — is apparent when comparing the trajectories of Germany and the U.S. over the past 15 years. During that period, the U.S. economy, driven by a boom in Silicon Valley, expanded by 76 percent to $25.5 trillion. Germany’s economy grew by 19 percent to $4.1 trillion. In dollar terms, the U.S. added the equivalent of nearly three Germanys to its economy over that period.
*Oppenheimer*, the movie
Well, you know how the story ends so there are no real spoilers. I will say I found about thirty minutes of excellent movie in a three hour experience. The best material starts when the test bomb goes off. There is remarkably little about the social, intellectual, or scientific excitement at Los Alamos — a serial Netflix installment would have done a better job with that. The dialogue is choppy and poor throughout. Most of all, the movie spends about two hours fleshing out McCarthyite themes in what I found to be a very repetitive and uninsightful manner. I have seen what — five?? — movies that do the same. Even Woody Allen did a better job of this in his The Front. The various male-female relations all seem so hurried. There was too much music.
So I give this one a thumbs down. I do like that it forces the viewer to think more about nuclear weapons, and I am sure many people will learn some history from it. The movie definitely has its uses, but overall I enjoyed Mission Impossible 7 more.
Friday assorted links
1. Oregon drug decriminalization is not going as well as expected (Atlantic).
2. The future of Eden Center in Falls Church.
4. Why are so many kosher restaurants so bad?
5. “…a pre-registered experiment randomizing Pennsylvania residents (n=5,059) to staggered interventions encouraging news consumption from leading state newspapers. 2,529 individuals were offered free online subscriptions, but only 44 subscribed…” Link here.
6. Rasheed Griffith podcast with Craig Palsson on Haitian economic history.
7. Shruti interviews Peter Boettke on Austrian economics and the knowledge problem.
Afghanistan potential supply elasticity fact of the day
A decade earlier, the U.S. Defense Department, guided by the surveys of American government geologists, concluded that the vast wealth of lithium and other minerals buried in Afghanistan might be worth $1 trillion, more than enough to prop up the country’s fragile government. In a 2010 memo, the Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which examined Afghanistan’s development potential, dubbed the country the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” A year later, the U.S. Geological Survey published a map showing the location of major deposits and highlighted the magnitude of the underground wealth, saying Afghanistan “could be considered as the world’s recognized future principal source of lithium.”
Here is more from The Washington Post.
The EJMR doxxing issue
The only summary I have seen is from Karlstack, noting that he is siding against the doxxers and has defended EJMR in the past. Most of the people who care already know the details, so I won’t repeat them. I will however add a few observations:
1. I don’t read EJMR, so however bad it is, or however useful it sometimes may be, is a closed book to me. It is not the next marginal thing I might read if I had more time. And I have never posted there. So my comments should not be taken as reflecting any deep knowledge of the site itself. I would rather listen to Wings songs, if that is what it came down to.
2. The soon to be published paper supposedly reveals IP addresses of many EJMR posters. This seems wrong to me, noting that many posters (presumably) are making entirely innocent observations, or if not innocent remarks nonetheless remarks that should not be doxxed. They may wish to criticize a colleague or superior, or express a repugnant political opinion. Or whatever.
2b. What about posters from Turkey, China, Russia and elsewhere, who have expressed political opinions? Isn’t this point enough on its own to settle the matter?
2c. Two side notes — first, I am delighted to see that GMU does not appear in the list of top baddies — and yes we do have a large graduate program. I strongly suspect we have significantly better mental health. Perhaps the rest of you could learn something from us?
2d. All those “nice” real economists who write such terrible things — and people say I am the Straussian! Instead, I am the one who teaches you Straussian codes.
3. It is often possible to turn an IP address into an identity of a specific person. There is a raging debate about various statistical methods for doing this, presumably to be done by non-authors of the paper. It seems wrong to me to offer weakly coded information to the world on matters that were originally confidential, even if (let us say) ten percent of the posters were engaging in illegal libelous or harassing activities. The others were not.
There are always ways of identifying some IP addresses and tying them to specific humans, even if the above-mentioned statistical methods do not succeed. (No, I am not going to mention them, but they do not require rocket science.)
4. GPT-4 says it is hacking. (The answer I received included: “It is both unethical and illegal, as it infringes on various privacy and computer misuse laws.”) But what does it know? The fact that, through mistakes of the hosting site, some of the information was semi-public may change the legal status of the hacking claim, but I don’t think it alters the moral issues. What if Amazon, by mistake, left a bunch of credit card numbers out there to be scraped, and then you picked them up? That is still the wrong thing to do, even if those card numbers were used to order nasty books.
5. Some significant percentage of hostile on-line posters are mentally ill, or whatever other word you may wish to use. (There is plenty of good evidence for mental health problems being rampant in economics academia.) In other cases, these individuals may simply have a very different understanding of social reality, whether or not they would count as mentally ill. I believe in generosity of spirit and behavior toward the mentally ill, rather than taking their worst pronouncements and spreading them around and immortalizing them. I would not go running down the halls of Bellevue with a tape recorder, and then post the contents on-line, with possible voice identification, on the grounds that the shouted ravings were “toxic.” Not even if the ravings were accompanied by written posts.
6. It is striking to me how little regard cancel culture has for the mentally ill, for bipolar individuals, for schizophrenics, and also for many autistics. These individuals, at least at times, have very different standards for what they will say publicly. I don’t believe in punishing them per se for those different standards, though I do believe in trying to help or educate them when possible. I don’t believe in doxxing them.
7. If a platform is say 20 percent malicious libel and harassment (not making this claim about any specific place!), and that same platform is 20 percent the mentally ill (with who knows what degree of overlap?), I don’t believe in pulling down the entire curtain on the whole thing and exposing everybody, or exposing a significant share of those on the platform. That is deontologically wrong. Instead, you ought to find a way of dealing with the problems from the first twenty percent without so seriously harming the interests of the second twenty percent, the mentally ill ones. I don’t believe in promoting toxic behavior against the mentally ill, just to punish some earlier toxic behavior, much of which was done by the non-mentally ill.
So — and I do not say this lightly — I believe the authors of the paper under consideration are behaving unethically, and I hope they will retract their work and then destroy it.
The manufacturing delusion?
From an excellent feature article from The Economist:
It is far from clear such [manufacturing] jobs can be brought back—no matter how much governments spend. For a start, the manufacturing wage premium has fallen sharply. Production workers’ wages in America now lag behind those of similar service-sector workers by 5%. Moreover, the sort of high-tech factories that America and Europe are attempting to attract are highly automated, meaning they are no longer a significant source of employment for people with few qualifications…
According to the IMF, the gap between manufacturing and services productivity growth has shrunk in many countries since the turn of the millennium. In China and India its direction has flipped, with services productivity rising faster. Moreover, services are a broad church, ranging from teaching to tech. The latter boasts extremely fast productivity growth, which may soon be propelled further by artificial intelligence.
Recommended.