Results for “writing” 1385 found
History of economic thought paper ideas
These topics seem underexplored to me:
Montesquieu
Economics in the Talmud
Rise of econometrics in the 19th century
The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield
The last 50 years of economics are in general very poorly covered
Works in any foreign language you might read
Chinese economic thought
Economic thought in India
The funding of economics, and economists, through the ages (very underdone)
The institutionalization of economics
History of women in economics, especially recently
History of prizes and awards in economics
Economic ideas and fascism, in various eras
Economic thoughts on the arts, starting with Hume
History of finance and financial economics, considerably understudied
Economics and demographic thought, throughout the ages, for instance the 1920s
The very early history of law and economics
Economic thought in various religions
Economics and 19th century psychology
History of experimental economics
History of RCTs
History of economics and education, as a topic
History of what has been taught in economics classes, over the generations
History of textbooks
History of economists in government
History of economists in multi-lateral institutions
History of economists working in central banks
History of how various economic databases have been built
History of economists doing journalism (both Menger and Walras were first journalists)
Early history of “environmental economics”
Early history of economics/water supply issues
Earlier writings on the economics of slavery
History of economists holding public office, J.S. Mill, Einaudi, many others, or as central bankers
The Henry Geoge movement over the generations
Economic “dissidents” of various kinds
History of economists working with the military and national security
Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT*
An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular:
Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral of prices and wages, monetary and exchange rate policies were out of whack, multipliers operate, the quest for savings could lower incomes overall, and the influence of liquidity factors on money demand and interest rates was especially high. All at once” (p. 72, emphasis in the original). In other words, Cowen drives home the point that this “general theory” isn’t actually general, it’s about very special, very unusual circumstances.
He considers Lord Keynes the GOAT contender whom he would most “want to hang around with” (p. 54). I had exactly the opposite reaction. The Keynes he portrays is virtually an egotistical monster. One who, for example, “kept an extended spreadsheet of his lovers and sexual encounters … each one rated by number” (p. 58). Anyone who treats other human beings this way—let alone writing it down—isn’t the kind of person I want to hang around with.
Recommended.
Generative AI for economists
From Anton Korinek here is a recent paper:
Generative AI, in particular large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, has the potential to revolutionize research. I describe dozens of use cases along six domains in which LLMs are starting to become useful as both research assistants and tutors: ideation and feedback, writing, background research, data analysis, coding, and mathematical derivations. I provide general instructions and demonstrate specific examples of how to take advantage of each of these, classifying the LLM capabilities from experimental to highly useful. I argue that economists can reap significant productivity gains by taking advantage of generative AI to automate micro tasks. Moreover, these gains will grow as the performance of AI systems across all of these domains will continue to improve. I also speculate on the longer-term implications of AI-powered cognitive automation for economic research. The online resources associated with this paper offer instructions for how to get started and will provide regular updates on the latest capabilities of generative AI that are useful for economists.
Here is the home page for Korinek. Here is related applied work from Benjamin Manning. Economic research methods are changing right before our eyes, and most of the profession is asleep on this one.
Emergent Ventures, 33rd cohort
Alex Bartik and Arpit Gupta, Chicago and NYU, to work on zoning codes, machine learning, and LLMs.
Sasha Przyblski, 16, Ontario, building more durable batteries.
Egzona Marina, Kosovo and MIT, to promote science and neuroscience education in Kovoso.
Aldrich Heinz Alvarez, Manila, travel grant to San Francisco and Singapore, wearables that harness multi-modal AI.
Molly Cantillon, Stanford, for a hacker house at Stanford.
Ayush Tambde, Dublin (Mumbai), physics and wormholes, and to finance a trip to San Francisco.
Candela Francisco, 17, Buenos Aires, to become the world’s greatest woman chess player.
Aabhas Senapati, Harvey Mudd, from Ahmedabad, general career support, and for work on ecosystems.
Erick Li, Mexicali, to visit a social science conference at Harvard.
Lorcan Geraghty, Country Wicklow, Dublin, EirSpace, aerospace for Ireland.
Regan Arntz-Gray, Brooklyn, writing on feminism.
Steven Gong, Waterloo, to make videos on topics related to physics and math.
Dominic Sobhani, Midwest, Columbia University and now Tokyo, Progress Studies-related meet-ups and also personal travel.
Tomas Markey, 17, Ballineen, Cork area, Direct Air Capture Engineering.
Alexander Koch, Germany, Bay Area, robotics and robot learning.
Dylan Iskandar, Stanford, computer science, music, general career support.
Vesuvius Project, Bay Area.
Mark Koyama and Desiree Desierto, for British economic and political history, including in the 17th century.
Grant Getzelman, Bay area, computational wetware.
Naina Kumar, McLean, Virginia, 16, surgery + AR.
Ukraine:
Yanchuk Dmytro, Kyiv, repairing electric station short circuits.
And here is Nabeel’s AI-driven directory of previous EV winners.
Sunday assorted links
1. Brian Wilson thought this was the best Beach Boys album ever.
2. A new interview with Daniel Kahneman. His last?
3. Vitalik on the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline.
4. “The Beatles, Jones recalled, had named a song “All You Need Is Love.” Why not call the paper “Attention Is All You Need”?” Wired link here.
5. Travel notes for Thiruvananthapuram.
My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. You can tell he knows what an interview is! At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what’s stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what’s so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he’s become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he’s maintained a rich personal life, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why couldn’t you talk Singh out of his Nehruvian socialism? He was a great liberal. He loved free speech, very broad-minded, as you know much better than I do. But he, on economics, was weak. Or no?
ZAKARIA: Oh, no, you’re entirely right. By the way, I would say the same is true of my father, with whom I had many, many such conversations. You’d find this interesting, Tyler. My father was a young Indian nationalist who — as he once put it to me — made the most important decision in his life, politically, when he was 13 or 14 years old, which was, as a young Indian Muslim, he chose Nehru’s vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a nation rather than Jinnah’s view of religious nationalism. He chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim.
He was politically so interesting and forward-leaning, but he was a hopeless social — a sort of social democrat, but veering towards socialism. Both these guys were. Here’s why, I think. For that whole generation of people — by the way, my father got a scholarship to London University and went to study with Harold Laski, the great British socialist economist. Laski told him, “You are actually not an economist; you are a historian.” So, my father went on and got a PhD at London University in Indian history.
That whole generation of Indians who wanted independence were imbued with . . . There were two things going on. One, the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. All their allies were all socialists. There was a common cause and there was a symbiosis because these were your friends, these were your allies, these were the only people supporting you, the cause that mattered the most to you in your life.
The second part was, a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
My own view was, that was a big mistake, though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea than in India, but that really explains it.
My father was in Britain in ’45 as a student. As a British subject then, you got to vote in the election if you were in London, if you were in Britain. I said to him, “Who did you vote for in the 1945 election?” Remember, this is the famous election right after World War II, in which Churchill gets defeated, and he gets up the next morning and looks at the papers, and his wife says to him, “Darling, it’s a blessing in disguise.” He says, “Well, at the moment it seems very effectively disguised.”
My father voted in that election. I said to him, “You’re a huge fan of Churchill,” because I’d grown up around all the Churchill books, and my father could quote the speeches. I said, “Did you vote for Churchill?” He said, “Oh good lord, no.” I said, “Why? I thought you were a great admirer of his.” He said, “Look, on the issue that mattered most to me in life, he was an unreconstructed imperialist. A vote for Labour was a vote for Indian independence. A vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the empire.” That, again, is why their friends were all socialists.
Excellent throughout. And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.
Applying to Emergent Ventures, and how to get Britain moving again
From the TxP Progress Prize:
But then Tyler asked us, twice in a row, ‘what is your signature product?’ Being honest, we realised even if our pitch was strong at a high level, we’d essentially just submitted a laundry list of ideas for what we wanted to deliver, without much focus. We knew we had to go back to the drawing board.
Then:
The blog prize was designed to advocate solutions, amplify frontier tech, and offer a clear, tractable proposal. We particularly wanted punchy takes that pulled the debate outside the norm and we encouraged people to publish online to prompt discussion. We also rewarded good writing and pointed to pieces we’d been inspired by.
That is from Andrew Bennett and Tom Westgarth. The theme was “Britain is Stuck: How Can We Get It Moving Again?” The winners (EV had no role in this selection) were:
Winner (£5000)
Rian Whitton: Firm Power can reduce Britain’s electricity prices
Runner up (£1000)
Alec Thompson: Open Source the Law
Shortlisted (£750)
Ashna Ahmad: Chilean Telexes and the Allocation Problem
Ben Hopkinson: Britain’s Second Cities are Stuck: Let’s Get Them Moving Again
Daniel Timms: The Case for a New City
At the link you will find further commendable mentions.
In Defense of Plagiarism
Google plagiarism and you will find definitions like “stealing someone else’s ideas” or “literary theft.” Here the emphasis is on the stealing–it’s the original author who is being harmed. I prefer the definition of plagiarism given by Wikipedia, plagiarism is the *fraudulent* use of other people’s words or ideas. Fraudulent emphasizes that it’s the reader who is being cheated, not the original creator. You can use someone else’s words without being fraudulent. We all do this. If you copy a definition or description of a technical procedure from a textbook or manual you are using someone else’s words but it’s not fraudulent because the reader doesn’t assume that you are trying to take credit for the ideas.
In contrast, a student who passes an essay off as their own when it was written by someone else is engaging in a kind of fraud but the “crime” has little to do with harming the original author. A student who uses AI to write an essay is engaging in fraud, for example, but the problem is obviously not theft from OpenAI. Indeed, in another context the same use of AI would not be fraudulent. If I use AI to help write this post, it’s not fraudulent because the primary purpose of this post is not, as it is with a student essay, to warrant the abilities of the author but rather to convey ideas to the reader. How those ideas came to be expressed in words is secondary and sometimes even irrelevant.
Indeed, using some else’s words and ideas is often how the world progresses. Plagiarism is a type of intellectual property law and I have long argued that IP law has grown too strong. Patents, for example, are often too broad and copyright is too long. Similarly, I was very much in support of Ed Sheeran in the ridiculous copyright case that ate of years of his life. Sheeran used ideas that had previously been used by many others but even if he had sampled, sampling is not a terrible crime. If I write, ‘he went on a wild goose chase’ or ‘it’s a brave new world’ need I credit the author? If an economics professor says ‘a price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive’, well a little credit to Cowen and Tabarrok would be nice, but sooner or later might this phrase not enter the vernacular? Crediting authors of unique wordplay should have a time limit, after which such wordplay becomes part of the common pool of expressions available for all. Crediting authors of boilerplate shouldn’t even be required.
The reason plagiarism has come to be defined more by “literary theft” than by the “fraudulent use of other’s people’s ideas and words” is that it’s much easier to prove when someone else’s words have been copied than it is to prove fraudulent use. A computer can scan the text of millions of documents to discover “plagiarism” but the computer has a harder time saying what is fraudulent. I argued earlier, that if I used AI to write this post it wouldn’t be fraudulent. But what if Marginal Revolution won a Pulitzer for twenty years of high quality writing and this post were give as an example? Well, its a judgement call.
In short, the focus of any charge of plagiarism should not be on whether someone else’s words have been used. The use of other’s people’s words is a necessary condition for plagiarism but it’s not sufficient. The focus should be on whether readers have been harmed by a fraudulent use of other people’s ideas and words. Focusing on the latter will dispense with many charges of plagiarism.
Friday assorted links
1. How to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists.
2. The Zvi with a bunch of things, including commentary on some recent economic models of AI.
3. Dean Ball on how to regulate AI. And Dean’s Substack on related issues.
4. Did Easter Island invent writing independently?
6. “I’m not sure I have a full model of how this works, but the situation where nearly 100% of credentialed experts are Democrats seems to me to have made both parties’ epistemics worse than they were 20 years ago.” — from Matt Yglesias.
My excellent Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s best and best-known novelists and essayists, whose award-winning works like Housekeeping and Gilead explore themes of faith, grace, and the intricacies of human nature. Beyond her writing, Robinson’s 25-year tenure at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop allowed her to shape and inspire the new generations of writers. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, displays her scholarly prowess, analyzing the biblical text not only through the lens of religious doctrine but also appreciating it as a literary masterpiece.
She joined Tyler to discuss betrayal and brotherhood in the Hebrew Bible, the relatable qualities of major biblical figures, how to contend with the Bible’s seeming contradictions, the true purpose of Levitical laws, whether we’ve transcended the need for ritual sacrifice, the role of the Antichrist, the level of biblical knowledge among students, her preferred Bible translation, whether The Winter’s Tale makes sense, the evolution of Calvin’s reputation and influence, why academics are overwhelmingly secular, the success of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, why she wrote a book on nuclear pollution, what she’ll do next, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: As a Calvinist, too, would not, in general, dismiss the Old Testament, what do you make of a book such as Leviticus? It’s highly legalistic, highly ritualistic. Some Christians read Leviticus and become a split Christian Jew almost. Other Christians more or less dismiss the book. How does it fit into your worldview?
ROBINSON: I think that when you read Herodotus, where he describes these little civilizations that are scattered over his world — he describes them in terms of what they eat or prohibit, or they paint themselves red, or they shave half their head. There are all these very arbitrary distinctions that people make in order to identify with one clan over against another.
At the point of Leviticus, which of course, is an accumulation of many texts over a very long time, no doubt, but nevertheless, to think of it as being Moses — he is trying to create a defined, distinctive human community. By making arbitrary distinctions between people so that you’re not simply replicating notions of what is available or feasible or whatever, but actually asking them to adopt prohibitions of food — that’s a very common distinguishing thing in Herodotus and in contemporary life.
So, the arbitrariness of the laws is not a fault. It is a way of establishing identification of one group as separate from other groups.
COWEN: So, you read it as a narrative of how human communities are created, but you still would take a reading of, say, Sermon on the Mount that the Mosaic law has been lifted? Or it’s still in place?
ROBINSON: Oh, it’s not still in place. We’ve been given other means by which to create identity. Moses was doing something distinctive in a certain period of the evolution of Israel as a people. He didn’t want them to be Egyptians. He didn’t want them to subscribe to the prevailing culture, which was idolatrous, and so on. He’s doing Plato in The Republic. He’s saying, “This is how we develop the idea of a community.”
Having said that, then there are certain other things like “Thou shall not kill,” or whatever, that become characterizing laws. Jesus very often says, when someone says to him, “How can I be saved?” He says, “You know the commandments.” It’s not as if God is an alien figure from the point of view of Christ, whom we take to be his son.
Interesting throughout.
How good a song is Quarter to Three?
You know, the 1961 #1 hit by Gary U.S. Bonds? I’ve been thinking about this question for months. I feel a good amount is at stake. If songs such as Quarter to Three (or done live with dancers) are still great, our assessment of early times risesconsiderably. But if they are dispensable throw-aways, the history of popular music (and film) in the earlier twentieth century needs to be rewritten.
What makes the song such a classic? Claude praises “the upbeat rhythm, engaging call-and-response vocals, relatable lyrics, catchy melody, historical context, and instrumental breaks,” but none of those seem quite scarce or special enough to elevate the tune to classic status. With a bit of prodding Claude also cited “raw, unpolished energy,” a genuine sense of fun, and “chemistry amongst the performers.” To that you might add a creative use of repetition and small, stepwise changes, plenty of syncopation, and the hooks are iconic. The use of echo and phase shifting looks to the future, and the shuffle-like groove drew on calypso influences and also ska. Nonetheless the chord structure, while effective, is hardly revelatory.
So I’m still wondering — if a song has that ineffable “something” — how much is that the product of our collective imaginations? How much is it real and objectively there? Or does a Generation Z teen, with a very different ear, dismiss it as muddled and mediocre rather than memorable? After all, Gary’s career was not replete with enduring creations.
A critic could allege the dance lyrics are ordinary and the production sloppy. But was that all part of the calculation? Wikipedia relates:
The single was recorded with very rough sound quality (compared to other records at the time). Producer Frank Guida has been quoted on subsequent CD reissues that his production sound was exactly what he wanted it to sound like.
Bob Roman wrote:
The song opens with muffled crowd noise and a bandleader counting off the beginning of a song. It’s not a live recording, but it sounds like one — and not even like a good one. It sounds like an amazing party happening down the street — wild, frenzied, mysterious, its sound obscured by what might as well be a couple of sets of walls. In any era, it’s crazy that a record this lo-fi managed to hit #1. In the pre-Beatles era where labels were pushing cleaned-up teenage dreamboats, it seems especially strange.
So we’ve got amazing hooks, controlled chaos, and extreme innovation?
The song also has a lineage. Bill Wyman put it on one of his solo albums. It inspired Dion’s “Runaround Sue.” Bruce Springsteen played it regularly in his concerts, and later worked with Gary, writing songs for him and doing two albums together. Most importantly, Paul McCartney references it in his Sgt. Pepper classic “When I’m Sixty-Four“:
If I’d been out ’til quarter to three, would you lock the door?
In essence Paul is teasing us with the notion that the 64-year-old McCartney might someday still be out there, dancing, rather than knitting tea cozies on the Isle of Wight. And true to Straussian form, Paul released the dance song “Dance Tonight” when he was sixty-four, days before turning sixty-five.
In 1963, during a Beatles European tour, Gary U.S. Bonds was the headliner for them.
You will note that the lineage of the song runs mostly through white performers, though Gary U.S. Bonds was black (or possibly mixed race). Perhaps one special feature of Quarter to Three is how it spans black and also white R&B, a rare feature at the time but hearkening back to the much earlier years of the blues, when black and white musical styles could be hard to distinguish. In addition to the Caribbean vein, Gary could span Latino styles as well.
Just as we are finding it impossible to rebuild Notre Dame cathedral as it was, a mere sixty-three years later could any of us still make something akin to “Quarter to Three”? Or have we lost those “technologies”?
I, for one, have decided to vote in favor of masterpiece status for Quarter to Three. At least for now. And by the way Gary U.S. Bonds is still on tour.
How I listen to music
Ian Leslie writes to me:
I’m wondering, have you ever done a post about how you listen to music? Hours per week, times of day, technologies, degree of multi-tasking, etc…and how you choose what to listen to at any given moment. I’d be interested.
I go to plenty of concerts, but that is for another post. And I’ve already written about satellite radio. As for home, I like to listen to music most of the time, noting that if I am writing a) the music doesn’t bother me, and b) I don’t necessarily hear that much of the music. A few more specific points:
1. I don’t like to listen to “rock music” (broadly construed) in the morning.
2. I won’t listen to Mahler, Bruckner, or Brahms in the morning. They are evening music.
3. Renaissance music is best either in the morning or the evening.
4. I don’t listen to much jazz at home any more, though I am no less keen to see a good jazz concert live. Having already spent a lot of time with the great classics, at current margins I am disillusioned with most “jazz as recorded music.”
4b. The same is true of most “world music,” if you will excuse the poorly chosen label. I do subscribe to Songlines, a world music magazine. I buy some of the recommendations on CD, but try out many more on YouTube or Spotify. That is my primary use of those services, at least for music. That is one case where I am sampling to see if I run across new sounds.
5. I don’t like earbuds and never use them.
6. Bach gets the most listening time.
7. For a classical piece I really like, I might own five or more recorded versions, occasionally running up to a dozen. Listening to a poor or even so-so recording of a very good piece is to me painful and to be avoided.
8. Contemporary classical music — which many people hate — gets plenty of listening time. Though not when Natasha is home. Some of those recordings, such as Helmut Lachenmann string quartets, seem to create problems for Spinoza, noting that he is rarely not at home. Perhaps they will be shelved for a few years.
9. I buy new classical music releases recommended by Fanfare, and occasionally from the NYT or Gramophone or elsewhere. As for “popular music” (a bad term), mostly I wait until December and then buy CDs extensively from various “best of the year” lists. I do some Spotify sampling then too, again from those lists.
10. The main stock of recorded music is kept in the basement. There is a separate shelf upstairs for what I am listening to actively at the moment. That shelf might have 200 or so CDs, with some of them scattered on tables, and with some LPs nearby as well.
11. Periodically I go down into the basement and choose which discs will be “re-promoted” to the active shelf upstairs. And if I am done listening to a disc, it goes down to the basement, with some chance of being re-promoted back to upstairs later.
12. If I don’t like a disc, I throw it out, as space constraints have become too binding. (It is cruel to give it away, and no one wants it anyway.) As time passes, I am throwing out more discs. For instance, I love Cuban music but I don’t lilsten to it on disc any more.
Overall, I view this system as optimized for getting to know a core repertoire. It is not optimized for browsing or random discovery. I feel I have a lot of discovery in my musical life, but it comes from reading and information inflow — both extensive — not from listening per se.
And to be clear, I am not suggesting that these methods are optimal for anyone else.
Give Innovation a Chance
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writing in the NYTimes discusses her son’s muscular dystrophy and his treatment with the controversial gene-therapy Elevidys. Currid-Halkett, like many parents whose children have been treated with Elevidys, reports much better results than appear in the statistics.
On Aug. 29, [my son] finally received the one-time infusion. Three weeks later, he was marching upstairs and able to jump over and over. After four weeks, he could hop on one foot. Six weeks after treatment, Eliot’s neurologist decided to re-administer the North Star Ambulatory Assessment, used to test boys with D.M.D. on skills like balance, jumping and getting up off the floor unassisted. In June, Eliot’s score was a 22 out of 34. In the second week of October, it was a perfect 34 — that of a typically developing, healthy 4-year-old boy. Head in my hands, I wept with joy. This was science at its very best, close to a miracle.
…a narrow focus on numbers ignores the real quality-of-life benefits doctors, patients and their families see from these treatments. During the advisory committee meeting for Elevidys in May 2023, I listened to F.D.A. analysts express skepticism about the drug after they watched videos of boys treated with Elevidys swimming and riding bikes. These experts — given the highest responsibility to evaluate treatments on behalf of others’ lives — seemed unable to see the forest for the trees as they focused on statistics versus real-life examples.
Frankly, I side with the statistics. We don’t hear from the parents in the placebo group whose children also spontaneously made improvements.
Even though I side the statistics, I side with approval. Innovation is a dynamic process. It’s not surprising that the first gene therapy for DMD offers only modest benefits; you don’t hit a home run the first time at bat. But if the therapy isn’t approved, the scientists don’t go back to the drawing board and keep going. If the therapy isn’t approved, it dies and you lose the money, experience and learning by doing that are needed to develop, refine and improve.
Approval is not the end of innovation but a stepping stone on the path of progress. Here’s an example I gave earlier of the same principle. When we banned supersonic aircraft, we lost the money, experience and learning by doing needed to develop quieter supersonic aircraft. A ban makes technological developments in the industry much slower and dependent upon exogeneous progress in other industries.
You must build to build better.
Addendum: Peter Marks is the best and perhaps the most important director CBER has ever had. CBER, the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, is responsible for biological products, including vaccines and gene therapies. Marks has repeatedly pushed and sometimes overruled his staff in approving products like Elevidys. Marks named and was the driving force at the FDA behind Operation Warp Speed, a tremendous FDA success and break with tradition. Marks has been challenging the FDA’s conservative culture. I hope his changes survive his tenure.
Revisiting the T-Mobile-Sprint Merger
T-Mobile’s takeover of Sprint was controversial among analysts. “If this merger is not anticompetitive,” Eleanor Fox, a trade regulation and antitrust law professor at New York University, told reporters in 2020, “it is hard to know what is.” Yale economist and antitrust scholar Fiona Scott Morton delivered her verdict on the deal in a co-authored 2021 article: “The era of aggressive price competition in wireless is over.” The authors predicted that the wireless industry, whittled down to a big three, would “nestle into a cozy triopoly.”
The prediction proved wrong. Average monthly mobile subscription fees dropped sharply. In the three years before the merger, according to government price data, mobile charges declined in real terms by about 8%. In the three years following the merger, the real price decline has been nearly 12%.
These trends were even more impressive given dramatically improving network performance. Before the merger, the top four U.S. carriers delivered data download speeds averaging about 26 megabits per second, nearly all via 3G or 4G. By early 2023, with 5G deployments spreading, Verizon and AT&T data flowed 24% to 39% faster, while T-Mobile was more than three times as fast as before. T-Mobile’s high-speed coverage had also expanded; half of its connections were via 5G by January 2023, against just 10% to 20% for its rivals.
…Further evidence that the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint was pro-competitive was seen with Verizon and AT&T share prices. From 2018 to 2023, Verizon and AT&T stock prices declined sharply, losing more than a third of their real value. The postmerger marketplace was a great victory for T-Mobile but a blow for its rivals. The cozy-cartel thesis collapsed.
That’s the excellent Tom Hazlett writing in the WSJ–useful facts to remember when thinking about the current rise of antitrust.
What should I ask Michael Nielsen?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. No description of Michael quite does him justice, but here is Wikipedia:
Michael Aaron Nielsen (born January 4, 1974) is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco.
In 1998, Nielsen received his PhD in physics from the University of New Mexico. In 2004, he was recognized as Australia’s “youngest academic” and was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland. During this fellowship, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Alongside Isaac Chuang, Nielsen co-authored a popular textbook on quantum computing, which has been cited more than 52,000 times as of July 2023.
In 2007, Nielsen shifted his focus from quantum information and computation to “the development of new tools for scientific collaboration and publication”, including the Polymath project with Timothy Gowers, which aims to facilitate “massively collaborative mathematics.” Besides writing books and essays, he has also given talks about open science. He was a member of the Working Group on Open Data in Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Nielsen is a strong advocate for open science and has written extensively on the subject, including in his book Reinventing Discovery, which was favorably reviewed in Nature and named one of the Financial Times’ best books of 2011.
In 2015 Nielsen published the online textbook Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and joined the Recurse Center as a Research Fellow. He has also been a Research Fellow at Y Combinator Research since 2017.
In 2019, Nielsen collaborated with Andy Matuschak to develop Quantum Computing for the Very Curious, a series of interactive essays explaining quantum computing and quantum mechanics. With Patrick Collison, he researched whether scientific progress is slowing down.
Here is Michael’s Notebook, well worth a browse and also a deeper read. Here is Michael on Twitter. So what should I ask him? (I’m going to ask him about Olaf Stapledon in any case, so no need to mention that.)