In praise of Paul Farmer

by  Tyler Cowen in

From an email by John Quattrochi:

There are no mentions of Paul Farmer, who recently passed away, on MR. This is a shame, because he excelled in two areas of interest to you: talent identification and cross-cultural integration of ideas.

Paul did so much for so many people that it’s easy to lose sight of what set him apart. He was a leader in the social movement to improve health among the most vulnerable. He did so by building organizations and writing and speaking across multiple cultures.

He began by going to an important center in his industry and becoming an understudy to a master practitioner. Rural Haiti is to health vulnerability what Silicon Valley is to tech innovation. In his early 20s, Paul went there to work for Fritz Lafontant, a Wozniak-like Haitian priest pioneering a community-based approach to the social determinants of health.

Paul then identified the talent with whom he would co-found, in 1987, aged 28, the central organization for his work, Zanmi Lasante (“Partners in Health”). In 1983, he met and recruited the 18-year-old Ophelia Dahl. She has been in PIH leadership for 35 years. Around the same time, he met and recruited fellow medical student Jim Kim, who also led PIH, before stints as president of Dartmouth and the World Bank.  From his undergrad friends, he brought on Todd McCormack, son of the founder of one of the world’s leading talent management agencies, IMG. And finally, for startup capital, he successfully pitched Tom White, a 67-year-old Boston construction magnate.

To expand his movement, he adapted his ideas to the peculiar idioms of many cultures and subcultures: medicine, anthropology, Christianity, Washington DC, Haiti, Russia, Rwanda, and more. He lectured widely, and always lingered afterward, forging brief but powerful individual connections. His charisma included equal parts moral exhortation and dry humor. As a Harvard professor for over 30 years, he convinced many students to join his movement in lieu of (or in addition to) rent-seeking careers in finance or management consulting.

Paul is often called a hero. Yet, if a hero is someone who sacrifices much, Paul may not qualify. By all appearances he loved his work and was richly rewarded in status and attention. What’s not debatable is his genius. From boardrooms to bedsides, lecture halls to shanty stalls, he channeled the idea that every human life has equal moral worth in irreplicable ways. His legacy is immense.

RIP.

James Person’s Hawaii bleg

by  Tyler Cowen in

Could you please recommend or ask your readers’ recommendations for books about Hawaiian history and culture? I am visiting the state for the first time and like to approach my travels with a deeper understanding as you exemplify in your MR travel posts. Thank you for your time and help and especially for MR and Conversations!

Your assistance for James would be much appreciated!

Surrogates

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Surrogates is a 2009 science-fiction movie starring Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike and Ving Rhames. On Rotten Tomatoes it’s rated at a measly 37% (tomatometer) and 38% (audience). When I first saw it I thought it was underrated and a recent re-watch cemented that conclusion.

Surrogates is about a slightly future world in which people predominantly interact with one another through surrogates, i.e. humanoid robots controlled from home. The premise should be familiar today in the Zoom, Metaverse, avatar age in a way it wasn’t in 2009. Surrogates touches on trans issues (your surrogate can be a different gender), the meaning of identity, age, aging and youth, the advantages of surrogates for creating low crime and even eliminating infectious diseases (good prediction!) and the sense of anxiety and fear we feel when interacting in the real world after becoming comfortable with surrogates and the sense of unrealness of interacting with avatars.

The world of surrogates is threatened when for the first time ever a human operator is murdered by “killing” their surrogate. Willis and Mitchell are detectives trying to solve the mystery and track down the killer. The film noir aspect isn’t Chinatown but it follows the formula and follows it well. A luddite cult is involved.

Perhaps one of the reasons Surrogates didn’t do well is that it’s low-budget. At the same time as this world has advanced robotics the cars are purely circa 2009! The surrogates are played by the same actors as the operators with only makeup and hair pieces to indicate the differences but in fact the make-up and surrogate acting is very well done! The contrast between young, perfectly coiffed and flattened surrogate Bruce Willis and the old, bloody, beaten but expressive Bruce Willis is well done. The ending is excellent.

A masterpiece? No. But Surrogates is an underrated gem. It’s available now on HBO.

surrogates | Where to Stream and Watch | Decider

That was then, this is now, again Russia/Ukraine edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Circa 1919, with Ukraine under siege from the Bolshevik armies:

Things, however, did not soon improve.  Again to take the case of Odessa, by the end of April electricity was running out.  “Thus in one month they have brought chaos to everything,” Bunin snarled, “no factories, no railroads, no trams, no water, no bread, no clothes — no nothing!”  In fact the Bolsheviks had inherited the chaos and the crisis; they also inherited — and exacerbated — the free-wheeling brutality displayed on all sides and of which…they were the beneficiaries.  To this kind of panache they applied a new moral calculus.

That is from Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914-1921, which as noted yesterday is quite a good book, especially for viewing the Bolshevik Revolution through the eyes of what became the broader Soviet empire.

U.S.A. fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

But the 10 fastest growing counties last year accounted for nearly 80 percent of the national total, a testament not so much to the rapid pace of change in these places, but to the lack of significant growth in the rest of the nation.

Here is more from the New York Times, with useful maps as well.  And this:

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1506995138173837318

That was then, this is now: Russia/Ukraine edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

What became known as “the first Soviet conquest of the Ukraine” was achieved without much resistance. The Ukrainian soldiers who had pledged allegiance to the Rada in summer 1917, while still part of the Imperial Army, were now back in their villages.  Petliura had poorly trained men at his disposal, mostly the so-called Free Cossacks (Vilne kozatsvo), some of whom found the Bolshevik appeal more attractive and changed sides.  In abandoning the city, Petliura’s followers not surprisingly had executed as many of the renegades as they could get their hands on.  Once in possession of Kiev, Colonel Murav’ev introduced his own reign of terror.

That is from Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914-1921, which is in general a very useful book.

The virtues of seaweed collecting

by  Tyler Cowen in

Nineteenth-century seaweed albums have a baked-in melancholy. Despite the best intentions, they do not flatter seaweed. The samples are brittle where the plant was pliant, opaque when once translucent, flaccid where previously ballooned. The displacement from sea to paper steals a measure of the plants’ integrity, and time leaches away the rest. In every respect, the wonders of seaweed have fled the book. And yet, these albums still speak — not of seaweed exactly, but of the collector’s care and devotion. There is a particular kind of eros that thrums between a receptive human and the natural world; the contours and depth of this eros is the true subject of a seaweed album.

Here is much more, interesting throughout, via Jodi Ettenberg.

The cost of applying

by  Tyler Cowen in

These applications are hefty. Before you even start applying for an NSF grant, you should probably read the 79 pages of instructions. The NIH helpfully provides a 10-part instructional video series. Rhodes Scholarships require a mind-boggling eight letters of recommendation. I tell college seniors to expect fellowship applications to be a six-month part-time job.

All this applying doesn’t just burden applicants. Professors run themselves ragged writing recommendations. The NSF relies on volunteers to complete 240,000 reviews every year. Entire university offices exist just to manage the paperwork that grants generate; universities bill this back to funders in the form of “indirect costs,” which at Harvard go as high as 70% of incoming grant funding. Grant agencies seem not to realize that by making everything about their grants burdensome, they allow universities to spend much of the grant money managing the grant itself!

Here is more from Adam Mastroianni.  Via Anecdotal.

*Amongst Women*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of a 1990 Irish novel by John McGahern, well-known in Ireland but as of late not so frequently read outside of Ireland.  In addition to its excellent general quality, I found this book notable for two reasons.  First, it focuses on the feminization of Ireland, being set in the mid-century decades after independence.  An IRA veteran slowly realizes that the Ireland he fought for — a place for manly men — was a figment of his civil war imagination, and not an actual option for an independent, modernizing Ireland.  The latter will be run according to the standards and desires of women, and actually be far more pleasant, whether or not Moran likes it.  Second, the book is an excellent illustration of the importance of context for reading fiction.  The story reads quite differently, depending how quickly you realize the protagonist is an IRA veteran with his wartime service as a fundamental experience.  Few readers will know this from the very beginning, but I suspect many Irish readers — especially older ones — will figure this out well before they are told.  In general, the very best fiction is context-rich, and this is one reason why many people may not appreciate all of the literary classics.

I thought these people wanted lower trade deficits?

by  Tyler Cowen

…[Tom] Cotton argued that America “ought to ban US investment in strategic Chinese industries and encourage reshoring of US factories and jobs — and punish offshoring to China. Further, we need to scrutinise and regulate Chinese investment in America much more closely.” In a 2021 report he highlighted a wide range of “financial weapons”.

Republican senator Marco Rubio is another outspoken critic of globalisation. In December, he sent an open letter to his colleagues, declaring it a “strategic disaster” that “American financial investment is pouring into [China] at its highest rate ever” and seeking support for his “American Financial Markets Integrity and Security Act,” which would block investment in Chinese companies flagged by the Departments of Defense and Commerce.

Here is more from the FT, by Oren Cass.  Keep in mind that capital flows are the mirror image of the trade deficit!  Be careful not to slip into the language of causality here, because it is all mutually determined.  But a world of higher net American capital flows into China is also a world with a lower American trade deficit with China.  Which is it going to be?  There are legitimate national security reasons for restricting some U.S. investments into China.  But an analysis such as this should start by recognizing the relevant trade-offs.  How about calling it “the new Republican coalition for a higher trade deficit with China?”

My Conversation with the excellent Lydia Davis

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Lydia joined Tyler to discuss how the form of short stories shapes their content, how to persuade an ant to leave your house, the difference between poetry and very short stories, Proust’s underrated sense of humor, why she likes Proust despite being averse to long books, the appeal of Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, why Proust is funnier in French or German than in English, the hidden wit of Franz Kafka, the economics of poorly translated film subtitles, her love of Velázquez and early Flemish landscape paintings, how Bach and Schubert captured her early imagination, why she doesn’t like the Harry Potter novels — but appreciates their effects on young readers, whether she’ll ever publish her diaries, how her work has evolved over time, how to spot talent in a young writer, her method (or lack thereof) for teaching writing, what she learned about words that begin with “wr,” how her translations of Proust and Flaubert differ from others, what she’s most interested in translating now, what we can expect from her next, and more.

Lydia is hard to excerpt, as the flow is very important, but here is one bit:

COWEN: What do you think is your most unusual productivity habit?

DAVIS: Unusual.

COWEN: And successful, that is.

DAVIS: It’s hard to say because I imagine that a lot of writers share some of the things I do. So, unusual. I know that I have a more chaotic approach than some writers would want to have, and that’s always been true. It’s, in a way, very wasteful, like the books I don’t finish reading. There are also a number of very interesting projects — or very interesting to me — that I’ve done a lot of work on and then gone on to another project.

I have at least three or four or five big projects. These are not small stories. These are biographical projects or grammar projects or history projects — crossing genres — that I’ve done a lot of work on and then gotten distracted from. But then, when you say productive or successful, it does work very well with shorter things that you can actually finish.

The way I work on stories is to get busy immediately and write down what occurs to me, and write it until I’ve exhausted that vein for the moment. Then I usually have enough to come back to later. I’ll have 10, 15, 20, 30 unfinished stories, and every now and then, I’ll pick one up again. Sometimes I don’t even remember what it is. I’ll see a title and think, “I don’t know what that story was.” I’ll pick it up again and try to discern what it was that moved me, and what it was that made me want to write it, and get back into that and see if I could finish it. That’s a chaotic method that works pretty well.

Recommended.