The Jeff Holmes Conversation with Tyler Cowen
Jeff is the CWT producer, and it has become our custom to do a year-end round-up and summary. Here is the transcript and audio and video. Here is one excerpt:
HOLMES: …Okay, let’s go through your 2011 list really quickly.
COWEN: Sure.
HOLMES: All right, number one — in no particular order, I think — but number one was Incendies. Do you remember what that’s about?
COWEN: That is by the same director of Dune.
HOLMES: Oh, is that Denis Villeneuve?
COWEN: Yes, that’s his breakthrough movie. It’s incredible.
HOLMES: I didn’t know that. I’d never heard of it. French Canadian movie, mostly set in Lebanon.
COWEN: Highly recommended, whether or not you like Dune. That was a good pick. It’s held up very well. The director has proven his merits repeatedly, and the market agrees.
HOLMES: I’m a fan of Denis Villeneuve. Obviously, Arrival was great. I can’t think of the Mexican drug movie off the top of my head.
COWEN: Is it Sicario?
HOLMES: Sicario — awesome.
COWEN: It was interesting, yes.
HOLMES: He is one of the only directors today where, when he now makes something, I know I will go and see it.
COWEN: Well, you must see Incendies. So far, I’m on a roll. What’s next?
HOLMES: All right, number two: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
COWEN: Possibly the best movie of the last 20 years. I’m impressed by myself. It’s a Thai movie. It’s very hard to explain. I’ve seen it three times since. A lot of other people have it as either their favorite movie ever or in a top-10 status, but a large screen is a benefit. If you’re seeing the movie, pay very close attention to its sounds and to the sonic world it creates, not just the images.
There are numerous interesting observations in the dialogue, including about some of the guests and episodes.
Self-recommended!
Watching economics on TikTok
For my latest Bloomberg column, I ran the experiment of typing “economics” into the TikTok search function, and here is what came up:
The first video I saw was about the high pay of economics majors in the job market, relative to softer majors. The speaker has a strange British accent, and it is possible that he was deliberately trying to look and sound stupid. It has been liked more than 32,000 times. The next was a rant about the outrageous price of beer at sporting events. There is no obvious intelligence or analysis in the video. It has been liked almost 32,000 times.
I also saw a video called “Why I left economics,” in which a student who took an economics class at Brown explains how his professor taught about inequality but lived in a mansion with servants. He argues that economics as a subject distracts our attention from “what the **** we’re supposed to do.” The number of likes exceeds 258,000.
I watched a video of a woman loudly sighing in relief as a caption explains she has just dropped her economics class. Likes: more than 22,000. Then there was one mocking the idea of being an economics major, calling it another religion and suggesting the demand for economist friends is quite low. It had more than 34,000 likes.
But I am not upset at TikTok:
I think of TikTok as a useful wake-up call for economists.
First, TikTok is one of the dominant modes of presenting and debating issues and ideas, including economics, yet it is hardly used or even discussed by professional economists. (University of Houston Professor Chris Clarke is a notable exception.) Economists are ignoring the market signals — to our own detriment.
Second, TikTok’s preoccupation with the status and morality of economics exists beyond TikTok. TikTok offers economists a view of ourselves as much of the world sees us. We are judged not for our analytics, but rather by how we fit into various moral codes. Like it or not, that is something we economists have to come to terms with. Maybe we should thank TikTok for making this so clear.
Recommended. And whether or not you like TikTok, you all should be spending a non-zero amount of time with it.
Wednesday assorted links
2. Composers fit “the small group theory.”
3. Mayda, Peri, and Steingress (AEA gate): “Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it.”
4. Paul Krugman on credibility, deficits, and inflation.
5. Half of the unvaccinated claim they wouldn’t take the Pfizer pill.
*Don’t Look Up*
You won’t find many accurate reviews of this one, in part because it is so brutal about media, not to mention American politics. The core message, however, is that everything is downstream of culture. And that we are incapable of taking our own decline seriously. Think of it as an update of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. And Trump and Hillary blend into one character, played by Meryl Streep.
At 2.5 hours, the movie is overly long but about 2/3 of it hits the target head on. These days it is rare to see a Hollywood movie of actual social import and insight. Science/politics is but one of the significant themes, another is Bruno M.’s claim that America has become a “virtual society.”
The ending also shows the film has the courage of its convictions.
Elsewhere, it is hard to know what to make of the utterly failed Bergman Island. Under what theory of the world does this cinematic outing make any sense whatsoever? Perhaps it is best interpreted as a self-referential punishment for those who, circa 2021, still think they ought to be watching movies titled Bergman Island. In that regard it succeeds beautifully.
Most Popular MR Posts of the Year!
As measured by page views here are the most popular MR posts of 2021. Coming in at number 10 was Tyler’s post:
10. Best non-fiction books of 2021
Lots of good material there and well worth revisiting. Number 9 was by myself:
9. Revisionism on Deborah Birx, Trump, and the CDC
TDS infected many people but as the Biden administration quickly discovered the problems were much deeper than the president, leading to revisionism especially on the failures of the CDC and the FDA. Much more could be written here but this was a good start.
Number 8 was Tyler’s post:
8. The tax on unrealized capital gains
which asked some good questions about a bad plan.
7. We Will Get to Herd Immunity in 2021…One Way or Another
Sadly this post, written by me in January of 2021, had everything exactly right–we bottomed out at the end of June/early July as predicted. But then Delta hit and things went to hell. Sooner or later the virus makes fools of us all.
6. Half Doses of Moderna Produce Neutralizing Antibodies
One of my earlier pieces (written in Feb. 21) on fractional dosing. See also my later post A Half Dose of Moderna is More Effective Than a Full Dose of AstraZeneca. We have been slow, slow, slow. I hope for new results in 2022.
5. A few observations on my latest podcast with Amia Srinivasan
Listener’s took umbrage, perhaps even on Tyler’s behalf, at Srinivasan but Tyler comes away from every conversation having learned something and that makes him happy.
4. The Most Impressive AI Demo I Have Ever Seen
Still true. Still jaw-dropping.
3. Patents are Not the Problem!
I let loose on the Biden administration’s silly attacks on vaccine patents. Also still true. Note also that as my view predicts, Pfizer has made many licensing deals on Paxalovid which has a much simpler and easier to duplicate production process (albeit raw materials are still a problem.)
2. A Nobel Prize for the Credibility Revolution
A very good post, if I don’t say so myself, on this year’s Nobel prize recipients, Card, Angrist and Imbens.
1. How do you ask good questions?
Who else but Tyler?
To round out the top ten I’d point to Tyler’s post John O. Brennan on UFOs which still seems underrated in importance even if p is very low.
Erza Klein’s profile of me still makes me laugh, “He’s become a thorn in the side of public health experts…more than one groaned when I mentioned his name.” Yet, even though published in April many of these same experts are now openly criticizing the FDA and the CDC in unprecedented ways.
UFOs going mainstream or Tabarrok’s view of the FDA going mainstream. I’m not sure which of these scenarios was more unlikely ex ante. Strange world.
Let us know your favorite MR posts in the comments.
Why has classical music declined?
In the comments, Rahul asked that question as follows:
In general perception, why are there no achievements in classical music that rival a Mozart, Bach, Beethoven etc. that were created in say the last 50 years?
Is it an exhaustion of what’s possible? Are all great motifs already discovered?
Or will we in another 50 or 100 years admire a 1900’s composer at the same level as a Mozart or Beethoven?
Or was it something unique in that era ( say 1800’s) which was conducive to the discovery of great compositions? Patronage? Lack of distraction?
I would offer a few hypotheses:
1. The advent of musical recording favored musical forms that allow for the direct communication of personality. Mozart is mediated by sheet music, but the Rolling Stones are on record and the radio and now streaming. You actually get “Mick Jagger,” and most listeners prefer this to a bunch of quarter notes. So a lot of energy left the forms of music that are communicated through more abstract means, such as musical notation, and leapt into personality-specific musics.
1b. Eras have aesthetic centers of gravity. So pushing a lot of talent in one direction does discourage some other directions from developing fully. Dylan didn’t just pull people into folk, he pulled them away from trying to be the next Pat Boone.
2. Electrification favored a variety of musical styles that are not “classical” or even “contemporary classical,” with apologies to Glenn Branca.
3. The two World Wars ripped out the birthplaces of so much wonderful European culture. It is not only classical music that suffered, but also European science, letters, entrepreneurship, and much more.
4. It is tough to top Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., so eventually creators struck out in new directions. And precisely because of the less abstract, more personality-laden nature of popular music, it is harder to have a very long career and attain the status of a true titan. The Rolling Stones ran out of steam forty (?) years ago, but Bach could have kept on writing fugues, had he lived longer. More recent musical times thus have many creators who are smaller in overall stature, even though the total of wonderful music has stayed very high.
5. Contemporary classical music (NB: not the best term, for one thing much of it is no longer contemporary) is much better than most people realize. Much of it is designed for peers, and intended to be experienced live. In the last decade I saw performances of Glass’s Satyagraha, Golijov’s St. Marc Passion, Boulez’s Le Marteau (at IRCAM), and Stockhausen’s Mantra, and it was all pretty amazing. I doubt if those same pieces are very effective on streaming. It may be unfortunate, but due to incentives emanating from peers, most non-peer listeners do not have the proper dimensionality of listening experience to proper appreciate those compositions. To be clear, for the most part I don’t either, not living down here in northern Virginia, but at times I can overcome this (mostly through travel) and in any case I am aware of the phenomenon. For these same reasons, it is wrong to think those works will have significantly higher reputations 50 or 100 years from now — some of them are already fairly old!
There are other reasons as well, what else would you suggest?
What should I ask Sam Bankman-Fried?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia, shorn of footnotes:
Samuel Bankman-Fried (born March 6, 1992), also known by his initials SBF, is an American businessman and effective altruist. He is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. He also manages assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm he founded in October 2017. He is ranked 32nd on the 2021 Forbes 400 list with a net worth of US$22.5 billion. In addition, Bankman-Fried a supporter of effective altruism and pursues earning to give as an altruistic career.
SBF is also well-known for his interests in veganism and utilitarianism and philanthropy. So what should I ask him?
Tuesday assorted links
3. Topol and Jetelina on a pan-coronavirus vaccine.
4. MIE: Edmund Spenser limited coins.
5. Nathan Nunn is moving from Harvard to UBC.
6. The most scathing book reviews of the year? The important point here is that many of these books are good.
Stuart sentences to ponder
To foreigners, seventeenth-century England was infuriating to observe — its political infrastructure weak, its inhabitants capricious and is intentions impossible to fathom.
That is from Clare Jackson’s new and noteworthy Devil-Land: England Under Siege 1588-1688. Note that it’s much cheaper to order this book through the UK.
What I’ve been reading
1. Richard Hanania, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy. Could this be the best public choice treatment of U.S. foreign policy? Gordon Tullock always was wishing for a book like this, and now it exists. I see Hanania’s views as more skeptical than my own (in East Asia in particular I think the American approach has brought huge benefits, Europe too), but nonetheless I am impressed by his careful analysis. This is a book that should revolutionize a field, though I doubt if it will.
2. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is one of the best written pieces of literary fiction this year. Very Irish, and it helps to have a one paragraph knowledge of Ireland’s earlier “Magdalen laundries” problem. It is not exciting for the action-oriented reader, but a perfect work within the terms of the world it creates.
3. Justin Gest, Majority Minority. The book considers racial transitions and how majorities may lose their ethnic or racial majority status. To see where America might be headed, the author considers histories from Bahrain, Hawaii, Mauritius, Singapore, trinidad and Tobago, and New York City.
4. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians: The Age of Great Kings. The Persian empire had the best infrastructure of any of the great ancient civilizations. The Royal Road for instance stretched 2,400 kilometers. Read more about the whole thing here.
Hannah Farber’s Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding is a good and economically literate treatment of the importance of maritime insurance during the time of America’s founding.
Gregory Zuckerman, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of The Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine is a good account of what it promises.
In the Douglass North tradition is Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili, Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan.
What are the interesting questions about “apocalypse”?
Comments are open, and I thank you in advance for your inspiration.
Monday assorted links
1. Is there a Groundhog Day effect in stock markets?
2. We acquire energy more rapidly than our ape cousins.
3. The wisdom of Larry Summers (antitrust and inflation). And more on student loans.
4. Brandon is finding it hard to get endorsements.
5. Wayne Thiebaud, RIP, passed away at 101 (NYT).
What should I ask Chuck Klosterman?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. If you do not already know, here is part of his Wikipedia entry:
Charles John Klosterman (born 1972) is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of eleven books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.
His forthcoming book is about the 90s, namely The Nineties: A Book. So what should I ask him? Including about the 90s of course.
Don’t F*ck with Big Sugar
In Modern Principles, Tyler and I analyze the economics and politics of the sugar quota which raises the US price of sugar to about twice the world level. Doug Irwin points us to a revealing passage in John Boehner’s memoir, On the House:
Sugar was never really my fight, but I always thought it was a little silly that the sugar industry has all this power in Washington. But I liked to spend my time on issues I might actually be able to change, and I knew the chances of winning a fight with Big Sugar was basically zero.
At one point in the mid-1990s, I got fed up and decided to yank their chains anyway. I was on the Agricultural Committee and were getting ready to put together the 1996 farm bill. I walked into my office while this was going on and found a sugar lobbyist hanging around, trying to stay close to the action. I felt like being a smart-ass so I made some wise-crack about the sugar industry raping the taxpayers. Without another word, I walked into my private office and shut the door. I had no real plan to go after the sugar people. I was just screwing with the guy.
My phone did not stop ringing for the next five weeks….I had no idea how many people in my district were connected to the sugar industry. People were calling all day, telling me they made pumps or plugs or boxes or some other such part used in sugar production and I was threatening their job. Mayors called to tell me about employers their towns depended on who would be hurt by a sugar downturn. It was the most organize effort I had ever seen.
And that’s why don’t fuck with sugar.
E.O. Wilson has passed away
Here is the New York Times obituary.
I remember in the “early times,” when there was “sociobiology,” this highly unusual, revolutionary, somewhat evil thing, as distinct from evolutionary biology more generally. It is a sign of Wilson’s eventual triumph that such a conceptual split largely has left the seen. Of course the discourse has in other ways also gone backwards.
His Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is not his best or most important book, but it has influenced me a good deal.