Results for “cuba” 191 found
Wednesday assorted links
*The Rise and Fall of the EAST*
The author is Yasheng Huang of MIT and the subtitle is Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today. Forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. Excerpt:
For many years, I struggled to come up with a coherent explanation for the power, the reach, and the policy discretion of the Chinese state. There is coercion, ideological indoctrination, and probably a fair amount of societal consent as well.
Keju [the civil service exam system] had a deep penetration both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history. It was all encompassing, laying claims to time, efforts and cognitive investments of a significant swath of Chinese population. It was incubatory of values, norms, and cognitions, therefore impacting ideology and epistemology of Chinese minds. It was a state institution designed to augment the power and the capabilities of the state. Directly, the state monopolized the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society access to talent and preempted organized religion, commerce, and intelligentsia. The Chinese state in history and today is an imprinted version of this Keju system.
Chinese state is strong because it reigns without a society.
Among the other interesting features of this book, including many, are:
There is a very useful discussion of Sui Wendi, the man who reunified China (and is barely known in the West).
Just how much the exam system expanded in the 17th century, to support a larger and growing Chinese state.
Why Chinese bureaucrats in the provinces tend to be generalists and the ministerial officials tend to be specialists.
Oliver Williamson is applied and cited throughout.
“A state without society is a vertically integrated organization…Keju’s powerful platform effect crowded and stymied alternative mobility channels…the Keju was an anti-mobility mobility channel.”
“In the 1890s, China’s population literacy was only 18 percent, way below 95 percent of England and the Netherlands.”
Exam competition takes up so much of individual mind space. Furthermore the competition atomizes society and makes it harder to form the kinds of collective movements that might lead to democracy.
The author sees the 1980s as the truly revolutionary time in Chinese history.
“Throughout Chinese history very few emperors were toppled by their generals or senior functionaries, a sharp contrast with the Roman Empire.”
I could say much more. This is by far the best book on Chinese bureaucracy I have read, and probably one of the best books on China period. I am sure many of the claims will be contested, but the author tries in a very serious way to be explanatory and to actually answer the questions about China you care about. So few books even attempt that!
Addendum: Note that the author also wrote Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, another of my favorite books about China.
Get the Lead Out of Turmeric!
Exposure to lead especially in childhood can have a lifetime of negative consequences:
According to the WHO, there is no known safe level of lead exposure. Relatively low levels of lead exposure that were previously considered ‘safe’ have been shown to damage children’s health and impair their cognitive development. Lead is a potent neurotoxin that, with even low-level exposure, is associated with a reduction in IQ scores, shortened attention spans and potentially violent and even criminal behaviour later in life. Children under the age of 5 years are at the greatest risk of suffering lifelong neurological, cognitive and physical damage and even death from lead poisoning.
In recent decades, some countries have begun to address the problem by removing lead from gasoline, paint, and pipes. Lead poisoning, however, remains a serious problem in South Asian countries such as Bangladesh. But where is the lead coming from?
Incredibly, one small study that examined the blood of pregnant women in Bangladesh for lead isotopes concluded that a major source of lead exposure is from turmeric consumption. Turmeric is a spice used in India and Bangladesh and other South East Asian both in cooking and for health. Lead from the soil could enter turmeric but the major cause seems to be lead pigments that are illegally added to turmeric to give it a pleasing looking yellow color. Lead in spices can exceed national limits by hundreds of times.
Our results indicate that turmeric Pb concentrations were as high as 1151 μg/g (Table 2). Eight of 28 market turmeric samples contained Pb above the 2.5 μg/g Government of Bangladesh limit for Pb in turmeric (Table S6). Using the simplified bioaccessibility extraction test, prior studies reported that the bioaccessible fraction of Pb in turmeric varied from 42.9 to 70% of total Pb. (12,39) Given that turmeric is used in dishes containing tamarind and other acidic ingredients, cooking could further increase the bioaccessibility of the Pb. (40) Other researchers hypothesized that PbCrO4 is added to turmeric to enhance its color or weight, but they did not test any turmeric processing powders to assess molar Pb/Cr ratios or Pb speciation. (12) We found that the yellow pigment powders used in turmeric processing contained 6–10% Pb by weight (61 870–101 300 μg/g Pb). Both pigment and turmeric samples also contained elevated chromium (Cr) concentrations, with average Pb/Cr molar ratios of 1.3 ± 0.06 (2 SD) and 1.1 ± 0.8 (2 SD), respectively. X-ray diffraction analyses indicated that all three pigment samples contained lead chromate (PbCrO4, 10–15%), that two of the pigments also contained lead carbonate (PbCO3, 2–3%), and that one also contained lead sulfate (PbSO4, 3%). Because PbCO3 and PbSO4 have a greater bioaccessibility than PbCrO4, our results support the parallel findings of high turmeric bioaccessibility reported in other studies. (12,39,41)
Respondents described turmeric, primarily purchased as a loose powder, as one of three essential spices consumed daily, alongside chili powder and cumin. Women reported adding turmeric in heaping spoonfuls to curries and other dishes for at least one meal per day.
I’d also worry about lead adulteration of safron, another yellow spice. The problem is not limited to Bangladesh, significant amounts of lead have been found in spices sold in in New York.
Addendum: Givewell has a good rundown on Pure Earth a charity working to address this problem.
Hat tip: Alexander Berger.
Photo Credit: MaxPixel.
What I’ve been reading
1. Andrea G. McDowell, We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush. An important law and economics study of an “anarchistic” episode, going much deeper than some earlier accounts on matters involving Native Americans, fairness of trials, dispute resolution, miner-mining company interactions, and more.
2. Chris Blackwell, with Paul Morley, The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond. Obviously an interesting story in its own right, and well-written as well. I also found this a good take on talent search. First, if you come across a very talented cluster (in this case Jamaican reggae), never stop supporting it and working with it! Sounds trivial, but it runs against the spirit of our age. Second, if you ever have a chance to work with a very talented person (people), just do it. Yes, try to get the arrangements right but in the final analysis just do it. Chris understands and articulates that principle very well. One of my favorite parts of the book was his account of his decision to simply advance 4k to Bob Marley and the Wailers with no agreement whatsoever.
3. Lane Kenworthy, Would Democratic Socialism be Better? No. “My conclusion is that capitalism, and particularly social democratic capitalism, is better than many democratic socialists seem to think.” The notion of writing a book that argues clearly and directly for a correct conclusion remains vastly underrated! That said, I worry a bit this book is ignoring what is upstream and what is downstream. If a socialist claimed “Cuba is better than Haiti,” would it really work to shoot back “The Nordics are better than either!” How about the Dominican Republic? What exactly is on the menu here?
4. Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789-1797, edited by Daniel B. Klein and Dominic Pino. It is sometimes forgotten that the great Irish thinkers of the 18th century (Swift, Berkeley, Burke, Sterne, etc., and don’t forget Shaftesbury wrote there) are really not so far behind the Scots. Yet when do you hear talk of an Irish Enlightenment? This much-needed book assembles excellent quotations from the wisdom of Burke.
Jorge Almazán Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing The Spontaneous City, very good for those who care. The book also provides excellent visuals on how the city actually is laid out. Do note that much of the Tokyo of the 1980s and 90s is disappearing, due to high-rise towers. Visit while you can!
Sunday assorted links
1. Is the gene-sequencing company Illumina a monopoly? (NYT)
2. “In short: the more one’s intellectual contributions are defined by strengths, where those strengths also essentially depend on a broad base, the more your regional background is likely to shape your intellectual contributions.” More Nate Meyvis. And Nate on the value of T-shaped reading plans.
4. People on Twitter are using more political identifiers than before. And more yet if you count pronouns.
Best non-fiction books of 2021
What an incredible year for non-fiction books! But let me first start with two picks from 2020, buried under the avalanche of Covid news then, and missed because I was less mobile than usual. These books are not only good enough to make this list, but in just about any year they are good enough to be the very best book of that year:
Edward Nelson, Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States, 1932–1972, volumes one and two.
Alexander Mikaberidze, The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History.
Also noteworthy is Reviel Netz, Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture, which I hope to write more about.
Per usual, there is typically a short review behind each, though not quite always. As for 2021 proper, here were my favorites, noting that I do not impose any quota system whatsoever. (And yet this list is somehow more cosmopolitan than most such tallies…hmm…) I don’t quite know how to put this, but this list is much better than the other “best books of the year” lists. These are truly my picks, ranked roughly in the order I read them:
Jin Xu, Empire of Silver: A New Monetary History of China.
Cat Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads.
Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad.
Ryan Bourne, Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning Through Covid-19.
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Amazon.
Ivan Gibbons, Partition: How and Why Ireland Was Divided.
Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Alan Taylor, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850.
William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, brief discussion of it here.
Roderick Matthews, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India.
Alejandro Ruiz, Carla Altesor, et.al., The Food of Oaxaca: Recipes and Stories from Mexico’s Culinary Capital.
Tomas Mandl, Modern Paraguay: South America’s Best Kept Secret.
Kara Walker, A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs To Be.
Tony Saich, From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party.
Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present.
Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography.
John B. Thompson, Book Wars: The Digital Revolution.
Scott Sumner, The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy.
Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism.
McCartney, Paul. The Lyrics. A remarkably high quality production, again showing McCartney’s skill as manager and entrepreneur. Perhaps the biggest revelation is when Paul insists that if not for the Beatles he would have been an English teacher. He also claims that he and not John was the big reader in The Beatles. It is also striking, but not surprising, when explaining his lyrics how many times he mentions his mother, who passed away when Paul was fourteen. There is a good David Hajdu NYT review here.
Bob Spitz, Led Zeppelin: The Biography. They always end up being better than you think they possibly could be, and this is the best and most serious book about them.
gestalten, Beauty and the East: New Chinese Architecture. Self-recommending…
Is there a “best book” of 2021? The categories are hard to compare. Maybe the seven volumes of Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa? But is it fair they get seven volumes in this competition? The McCartney? (He took two volumes.) The Pessoa biography? Roderick Matthews on India? So much to choose from! And apologies to all those I have forgotten or neglected…
Read more! And here is my favorite fiction of 2021 list. And I will write an addendum to this list as we approach the very end of 2021.
Sunday assorted links
1. Satirical short film about the Cuban peasantry and the Revolution.
2. There is no great New Zealand potato stagnation.
3. New edition of Ilya Somin’s Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.
4. Derek Lowe on the new Pfizer pills.
5. Should you value tokens like countries? And here is Tascha on DeFi.
6. Ethiopia update, better and more detailed story than most.
7. More on the discretionary DOT fund embedded in the new bill.
What to Watch
A few things I have watched recently:
The Courier–a taut, spy drama about the true story of Greville Wynne, an ordinary British businessman who was recruited by the British and American spy services to courier information in the 1960s from Russian agent Oleg Penkovsky–information that proved crucial to the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Rachel Brosnahan. On Amazon Prime.
The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard–I thought this action-comedy was hilarious (in the spirit of Deadpool). The plot makes no sense but who cares? It stars Ryan Reynolds, Samuel Jackson, Morgan Freeman, Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek all of whom are clearly having a good time. Salma Hayek’s over-the-top performance makes the film. It even has an attack on occupational licensing. Saw it on a plane.
Worth–who would have thought that debates about estimating the value of a life would make a good movie? Michael Keaton plays Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer who headed the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. How much for a waiter? How much for a Wall Street trader? This is the philosophical question that gets the movie going but more practical problems also intercede. What do you do when the wife and the mistress both file for compensation? In the end, the movie bails on the big questions but succeeds on the quality of the performance by Michael Keaton. The tort system is a very expensive way to compensate victims. The Victim Compensation fund was a successful application of no-fault rules. On Netflix.
Billions–I will finish out the the fifth season but the plots are now repetitive and while I wouldn’t say it has jumped the shark it will never rise again to the heights of The Third Ortolan. I did appreciate the Neil Peart reference but it should never have been explained. Love Jason Isbell but it feels like the writers are reaching for relevance. On Showtime.
Only Murders in the Building–An old-time murder mystery starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. It’s fun but will they pull off a satisfying ending? I hope so. A show I can watch with my wife. On Hulu.
My Caribbean podcast with the excellent Rasheed Griffith
One hour, fifteen minutes, almost all of it about the history and culture and economic future of the Caribbean, here is the audio. It starts with Rasheed interviewing me, but later becomes more of a back-and-forth dialog, covering Cuba, Trinidad, Barbados, the best music from Jamaica, why Haiti has failed so badly, whether the Caribbean will be Latinized, and much more. This one is pretty much entirely fresh material and I enjoyed doing it very much.
Rasheed is from Barbados, he is a very recent Emergent Ventures winner, and more generally his podcast focuses on the role of China in the Caribbean. Newsletter and some prestigious podcast guests coming soon!
Here is Rasheed on Twitter.
The new world of digital art on the blockchain
In the 10 years since Chris Torres created Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, the meme has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times.
On Thursday, he put a one-of-a-kind version of it up for sale on Foundation, a website for buying and selling digital goods. In the final hour of the auction, there was a bidding war. Nyan Cat was sold to a user identified only by a cryptocurrency wallet number. The price? Roughly $580,000.
Mr. Torres was left breathless. “I feel like I’ve opened the floodgates,” he said in an interview on Friday.
The sale was a new high point in a fast-growing market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media called NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens.” The buyers are usually not acquiring copyrights, trademarks or even the sole ownership of whatever it is they purchase. They’re buying bragging rights and the knowledge that their copy is the “authentic” one.
Other digital tokens recently sold include a clip of LeBron James blocking a shot in a Lakers basketball game that went for $100,000 in January and a Twitter post by Mark Cuban, the investor and Dallas Mavericks owner, that went for $952. This month, the actress Lindsay Lohan sold an image of her face for over $17,000 and, in a nod to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, declared, “I believe in a world which is financially decentralized.” It was quickly resold for $57,000.
Blockchains of course are being used to designate which copy is the authentic one. Is it such a big step from photography to this? Here is more from Erin Griffith at the NYT.
Addendum: The next step presumably is to introduce some price discrimination. Yes, there can be a “most authentic” original copy. But after that, how about some intermediate categories? “Well, this is the almost-original copy, defined on the “brother blockchain” here is another, somewhat closed related copy, defined on the “cousin blockchain,”” just as Japanese prints had different editions, etc.
Sunday assorted links
1. The regulatory, status quo bias in public health commentary: “Do any of the experts arguing that it’s wrong for Americans to demand access to the AstraZeneca vaccine also advise residents of the UK, EU, and 15 other countries to delay taking it until our FDA grants authorization?”
3. People are fed up with broken vaccine appointment tools — so they’re building their own (Technology Review).
4. NASA prize to make food on the Moon, Mars.
5. The UK put a venture capitalist in charge of its vaccine procurement.
6. Cuba will allow more small business.
7. Ross Douthat on the Romney family plan (NYT).
8. It seems fear of kidnapping is severely limiting mobility in Haiti, even for the non-wealthy (NYT).
What I’ve been reading
1. Darmon Richter, Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide. This year’s best travel book? And do you get the joke in the subtitle? It has an unusual flair, excellent photos, and will make the updated “best of the year” list.
2. Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. a very well-done book about mankind’s biggest problem and risk — what more could you want? I didn’t find much shocking new in here, but a very good overview for most readers.
3. Stephen Baxter, Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time. Yes that is Baxter the excellent science fiction author and here is his excellent book on both the history of geology and the Scottish Enlightenment. What more could you ask for?
4. Diana Darke, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe. Among its other virtues, this book makes it clear just how much valuable architectural the world lost in Syria. I had not known that the Strasbourg Münster was the tallest medieval structure still standing in the world. Good photos too.
5. John Darwin, Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam 1830-1930 (UK link only, I paid the shipping costs). I felt I knew a good bit of this material already, still this is a well-researched and very solid take on one of the most important factors behind the rise of globalization and international trade, namely the fast steamship and how it enabled so much urban growth for ports.
6. Charles Koch, with Brian Hooks. Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World. The best of the three Charles Koch books, interesting throughout, and much more personal and revealing than the generic title would imply. I read the whole thing.
There is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State, a book-length reply to Mariana Mazzucato. For me it was too polemical, though I agree many of Mazzucato’s claims are overstated.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Think, Write, Speak:Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor is an entertaining read. It is good to see him call out Pasternak’s Zhivago for being a crashing bore. And to call Lolita a poem, repeatedly.
Kevin Vallier, Trust in a Polarized Age, I agree with the argument, and it is a good example of a philosopher using social science empirical work.
And Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention. OK enough, but underargued relative to what I was expecting.
I have only browsed them, but two very good books on Roman history are:
Anthony A. Barrett, Rome is Burning: Nero and the Fire that Ended a Dynasty.
Michael Kulikowski, The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantinople to the Destruction of Roman Italy.
The durability of violent revolution
…regimes founded in violent social revolution are especially durable. Revolutionary regimes, such as those in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam, endured for more than half a century in the face of strong external pressure, poor economic performance, and large-scale policy failures. The authors develop and test a theory that accounts for such durability using a novel data set of revolutionary regimes since 1900. The authors contend that autocracies that emerge out of violent social revolution tend to confront extraordinary military threats, which lead to the development of cohesive ruling parties and powerful and loyal security apparatuses, as well as to the destruction of alternative power centers. These characteristics account for revolutionary regimes’ unusual longevity.
That is from a new paper by Jean Lachapelle, Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, and Adam E. Casey. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Sunday assorted links
1. New results on income inequality and the equity premium. The premium should fall with the rise of the super-wealthy, because those people care less about a given level of risk.
2. Those new service sector jobs.
3. Fox in Berlin assembles impressive shoe collection.
5. Cuban (!) paper, small n, but interferon seems to be working.
Ocean Grove, New Jersey travel notes
Having not visited the New Jersey shore since I was a kid (and then a very regular visitor), I realized you cannot actually swim there with any great facility. Nor is there much to do, nor should one look forward to the food.
Nonetheless Ocean Grove is one of America’s finest collections of Victorian homes, and the town style is remarkably consistent and intact. Most of all, it is an “only in America” kind of place:
Ocean Grove was founded in 1869 as an outgrowth of the camp meeting movement in the United States, when a group of Methodist clergymen, led by William B. Osborn and Ellwood H. Stokes, formed the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association to develop and operate a summer camp meeting site on the New Jersey seashore. By the early 20th century, the popular Christian meeting ground became known as the “Queen of Religious Resorts.” The community’s land is still owned by the camp meeting association and leased to individual homeowners and businesses. Ocean Grove remains the longest-active camp meeting site in the United States.
The pipe organ in the 19th century Auditorium is still one of the world’s twenty largest.
The Auditorium is closed at the moment, but they still sing gospel music on the boardwalk several times a night.
The police department building is merged together with a Methodist church, separate entrances but both under the same roof.
Ocean Grove remains a fully dry city, for the purpose of “keeping the riff-raff out,” as one waitress explained to me. To walk up the Ocean Grove boardwalk into nearby Asbury Park (Cuban and Puerto Rican and Haitian in addition to American black) remains a lesson in the economics of sudden segregation, deliberate and otherwise.
Based on my experience as a kid, I recall quite distinct “personae” for the adjacent beach towns of Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach, Seaside Heights, Lavalette, Belmar, Spring Lake, and Point Pleasant. This time around I did not see much cultural convergence. That said, Ocean Grove now seems less the province of the elderly and more of a quiet upscale haunt, including for gay couples. As an eight-year-old, it was my least favorite beach town on the strip. Fifty years later, it is now striking to me how much the United States is refusing to be all smoothed over and homogenized.