“Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?”
Friday assorted links
1. Why is nuclear power plant construction so expensive? Oops, correct link here.
3. The world of blind mathematicians (2002).
4. Putin speaks his truth, yet again. How is it that so many have missed this for so long? Niall Ferguson (Bloomberg) laid out the case on January 2.
5. Has SCOTUS trust fallen apart?
6. Which professions think centuries ahead? And which professions think mainly in the moment?
What should I ask Matthew Ball?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is some background:
Metaverse, metaverse, metaverse! You hear it everywhere. It’s mainstream, it’s a trendy buzzword, it’s even corporate strategy du jour.
But that wasn’t the case in early 2018. And this is when Matthew Ball, a former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, began writing a series of metaverse-themed essays – long, lucid, influential essays – that are almost uncanny in their prescience.
Matthew is now a venture capitalist as well and he has a forthcoming and already much-discussed book The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. Here is his home page and here is Matthew on Twitter. So what should I ask him?
Stop school shooting drills
…this article applies machine learning and interrupted time series analysis to 54 million social media posts, both pre- and post-drills in 114 schools spanning 33 states. Drill dates and locations were identified via a survey, then posts were captured by geo-location, school social media following, and/or school social media group membership. Results indicate that anxiety, stress, and depression increased by 39–42% following the drills, but this was accompanied by increases in civic engagement (10–106%). This research, paired with the lack of strong evidence that drills save lives, suggests that proactive school safety strategies may be both more effective, and less detrimental to mental health, than drills.
That is from Mai ElSherief, et.al., published in 2021. Via Gabriel Demombynes.
Logan Ury, dating coach
Ms. Ury constantly speaks as if she’s at a podium. She is a generous interview subject, sometimes taking 25 minutes to answer a single question about her work. She uses data often, quotes Adam Grant and refers to behavioral economics experiments casually.
Her language makes a subset of her clients — especially men from Silicon Valley — “feel safe,” she said. “If it’s an engineering-focused guy, I’ll say ‘loss aversion,’ ‘sunk cost fallacy.’ I know, with certain people, that makes them want to work with me.”
Here is the full NYT story by Dani Blum.
Dale Jorgenson has passed away
He was able to teach intro to Econometrics, at the Ph.D level, straight out of his head without making any misstatements or having to slow down his exposition. He was also a noted theorist of productivity. RIP.
Shopping in Russia
Finally, I offer a comment on the shuttered street level shops and mall tenants that have been gleefully reported by Western journalists: yes, major Western branded stores have closed down, not all, but a great many. Their loss is felt on the most prestigious shopping streets and malls, where they bought market share for their products by lavish spending on promotion, including prestige premises. However, outside these limited addresses, one does not see gaps in the street level stores in Petersburg. I see more empty store fronts in shopping streets in Brussels than here.
And more specifically:
This store chain [Azbuka Vkusa] puts the previous tenant to shame. The sheer variety and luxury of the present offering in fresh produce, cheeses, meats, fish, tinned conserves of all varieties is stunning. The fresh fish section offers swordfish from Sri Lanka, wild salmon from the Faroe Islands (presumably Russian caught), some unidentified white sea fish from Egypt, and dorade from Turkey. In a tank, there is a two kilogram live Kamchatka King Crab waiting for a buyer at 200 euros. Live oysters in another tank are brought from both Crimea (large) and from the Far East (very large). Farmed mussels are brought in from Crimea.
Here is the full story from Gilbert Doctorow, via Anecdotal.
Thursday assorted links
1. Wartime markets in everything.
2. Countries which like and hate Russia the most.
3. Shruti interviews Lant Pritchett, part II.
5. “While traditional creative occupations were associated with elevated genetic risk for a range of psychiatric disorders, this association was not unique, as similar, or greater elevations were seen for religious, helping and teaching professions…” Link here.
Ayn Rand on the Tonight Show
An excellent interview with Ayn Rand on the Tonight show. Newly discovered. Good questions from Johnny and Ed. Even aside from the content, much to learn, a quiet audience, respectful 26 minute discussion, genuine intelligence all round.
Unmeasured inflation from higher tip demands?
Increasingly many point-of-sale terminals ask if you would like to tip – these days even occasionally at places like grocery stores. This (probably) has the effect of increasing the true average prices paid for a considerable fraction of consumer goods. If you buy that premise, then the addition of this feature to POS terminals has a (perhaps short-term or temporary, but perhaps significant) inflationary effect (no?). How interesting do you think it would be to see this quantified? From my perspective, it would be interesting if this seemingly-small UI feature measurably contributed non-negligibly to inflation. (I’m not an economist. I’d also be curious to know where one might start getting data, etc., to do this kind of analysis.)
That is from an email from Andrey Mishchenko.
How bad is the Ukraine war going to be?
The bottom 50 percent of wars have an average of about 2,900 battle deaths, while the top 50 percent have an average of 653,000, and it is effectively a coin-flip which half any given war will end up in. In Ukraine, after three months and with no end in sight, Western analysts estimate at least 20,000 fatalities, putting this war well into the top half of conflicts…
In the deadlier half of wars, 10 percent have over a million battle deaths — what is stopping the Ukraine conflict from reaching that number?
Here is more from WarontheRocks. And here is much from Paul Poast, starting with:
The…war could become one of the largest wars — measured in terms of fatalities — in history.
Here is a visualization of the war — who do you think is winning?
Via Edmund Levin.
USA fact of the day
The private sector has recovered 99% of all jobs lost, but public sector has regained just 58% — one illustration of the gaping hole that persists in certain areas of the economy.
Here is more on labor market changes, with their degree of permanence still up in the air. Via Mike Doherty.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Arnold Kling reviews Talent.
2. Prison consultants those new service sector jobs (NYT, interesting throughout).
3. Racialized dog names and time to adoption.
4. Saudis set up anti-aging fund.
5. Problems with Colombian infrastructure.
6. Those new service sector jobs: “Snoop Dogg employs a full-time blunt roller who makes between $40,000 and $50,000 a year”
What are the markers of spam emails?
And why can’t the senders avoid them? You don’t need top-tier GPT-3 to sidestep these errors:
“touch base with you”
“urgent”
“immediate reply requested”
They are all dead giveaways that I should delete the message without reading further. And why does the top of the email have to look so institutional in its formatting? And please note — these are not all scams. Many are actual marketing pitches directed at me.
Maybe worst of all is mentioning that I haven’t responded to the last email sent, as if that would make me feel guilty or something. Treat me like a rational Bayesian!
“still haven’t heard back from you”
“still awaiting a response”
And so on. You will continue to wait. This one I received is a lie, but at least based on a certain amount of cleverness:
“You’ve been responsive to press releases we’ve issued in the past around government and cybersecurity”
What else do you all take to be very clear predictors that an email is spam or just a marketing pitch? And what is your model for why spam emails are not more convincing than they are?
Should the U.S. have a monarchy?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, riffing on Curtis Yarvin and others. Here is one bit:
The engineer and entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin, who also has written under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, has called for a new American monarchy, more like Elizabeth I than Elizabeth II. The usual instant American reaction, of course, is to dismiss absolute monarchy as unjust, old-fashioned and unworkable. And in fact that remains the correct reaction — yet it’s worth thinking through what the desire for monarchy says about the current state of America’s intellectual right.
And in response:
Many monarchist critics focus on the anti-democratic nature of the proposal. They may not realize how much parts of the New Right see the status quo as promoting a stifling conformity in academia, the media and corporate America (Yarvin’s “Cathedral”), rather than a truly pluralistic discourse.
I see far more intellectual diversity in today’s America than Yarvin does. Still, I wish that the “Cathedral” (am I allowed to call it that too?) would be a little more self-aware of its own limitations rather than just shouting down the anti-democratic thinkers as fascists. It’s also possible to think of absolute monarchy as a desperate way to restore diversity of thought, by creating a post whose holder is not accountable to the Cathedral.
The most telling criticism of absolute monarchy is a historical one. In the UK above all, the so-called “absolute” monarchs faced severe fiscal demands, which they met only by granting increasing powers to Parliament or the local nobles. And that was the case when government was a very small percentage of GDP. How would things work today? Would a king have as much power as, say, Tim Cook does? If the executive branch and legislature were to renegotiate old bargains today, the results might be so messy that each would end up with less power and coherence than what Yarvin sees now.
There are other interesting points at the link.