What should I ask Yasheng Huang?
I will be having a Conversation with him, the first but not last “China conversation” for the podcast. Here is part of his Wikipedia page:
Yasheng Huang (Chinese: 黄亚生) is an American professor in international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he founded and heads the China Lab and India Lab. His research areas include human capital formation in China and India.
He had previous appointments at the University of Michigan and Harvard Business School.
Huang is the author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, a history of economic reforms in China.
I am a fan of his forthcoming book The Rise and the Fall of the EAST: Examination, Autocracy, Stability and Technology, reviewed by me here.
Here is Yasheng Huang on Twitter. So what should I ask him?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Stephen Carter best non-fiction of the year list.
2. Bahamas views on SBF (NYT).
3. Contemporary opera is now outselling classic opera at the Met (NYT).
4. You people are crazy those new service sector jobs $480 an hour.
5. Paul McCartney stops into New Jersey cafe.
6. Central Paris will ban non-essential car traffic for 2024 (Bloomberg).
7. The year in AI.
8. Why don’t people click on links? One hypothesis of mine is that people like scanning link titles (and not clicking), but from a credible source, simply so they can feel they didn’t miss anything big.
Top MR Posts of 2022
Here are the top MR posts by views from 2022. Biggest post was Tyler’s
1. Classical liberalism vs. The New Right
followed up by two posts by me on Biden’s student loan plan
2. The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think
3. Taxing Mechanical Engineers and Subsidizing Drama Majors
and further posts by me on FTX and the probability of a nuclear war.
5. What is the Probability of a Nuclear War, Redux
I said ProPublica was putting their reputation on the line with the lab-leak report but nevertheless I was too credulous. Much of the factual reporting remains correct, however. Lab leak is very much in play.
6. A “Safety Emergency” Happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019
Tyler comes in next with a post on criticizing other people in private.
7. How much should you criticize other people?
and two posts on the Russian-Ukraine conflict.
9. How did the IR community get Russia/Ukraine so wrong?
Finally Tyler offers some advice:
Rounding out the top were Best Books of 2022, What Caused the 2020 Spike in Murders and How to Elect Republicans.
What were your favorite MR posts of 2022. What should we revisit?
How happy are Americans (and Danes) anyway?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Two economists, David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Alex Bryson of University College London, have come up with a new and more intuitive way to measure well-being. The results are striking. If you consider US states as comparable to countries, 16 of the top 20 political units in the world for well-being are in the US — including the top seven.
Many happiness surveys ask individuals how satisfied they are with their lives. That is one way of phrasing the happiness question, but it has its biases. It tends to favor nations where people have a strong sense of self-satisfaction — or, if you want to put a more negative gloss on it, where the people are somewhat smug. Those are some of the studies in which Finland and Denmark come in first.
The genius of this most recent study is that it considers both positive and negative affect, and gives countries (and US states) separate ratings for the two. In other words, it recognizes there is more than one dimension to well-being. It lists four variables as part of negative affect: pain, sadness, anger and worry. Positive affect consists of four measures: life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested. So life satisfaction is only one part of the measure.
One interesting result is that nations that avoid negative affect are not necessarily the same as those which enjoy the highest positive affect. Some countries — including the US — have a lot of extremes. Americans tend to go to the limit on both the upside and the downside.
Bhutan is an extreme contrast along these same lines. Measured only by positive affect, the Bhutanese are No. 9 in the world, an impressive showing. But for negative affect they rank No. 149 — in other words, they experience a great deal of negative emotion, perhaps due to the extreme hardships in their lives. Considering both positive and negative affect, they come in at No. 99, not a bad showing for such a poor country (better, in fact, than the UK’s 111.)
Denmark’s positive affect puts it only at No. 71, befitting the popular image of a country where not everyone is jumping for joy. Arkansas has a better positive affect, coming in at No. 67. But Denmark rates higher overall (38, to Arkansas’s 72) because Arkansas shows higher negative affect (87, to Denmark’s 66).
Measuring both positive and negative affect, the 10 happiest political units in the world are, in order: Hawaii, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Taiwan, Alaska and Wisconsin. Of the top 50 places, 36 are US states (I include the District of Columbia, No. 16). China is No. 30.
Here is the original study. The Danes are #111 for smiling!
They deserve at least a “pass” for this one
In Fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a regression-discontinuity-in-time design. Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23% of a standard deviation. We evaluate causal channels of the grade effect—including sorting into lower-grading STEM courses and declining instructional quality—and conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Kristin Butcher, Patrick McEwan, and Akila Weerapana.
Monday assorted links
1. “With this shirt you are allowed to get 1 Everyday Value Slam everyday [at Denny’s] for until 12/31/23.” What should such a shirt cost?
3. Those new service sector jobs.
4. Jolly Swagman podcast with Andy Matuschak.
6. Crypto wash trading (lots of it).
That was then, this is now
Barnes & Noble has a plan to open 30 stores in 2023, making the bookseller the leader in what’s being called a big-box revival. This expansion comes after more than a decade of shrinking its numbers in response to competition from Amazon. There are even a couple of the new stores being opened in the Boston area that are, perhaps fittingly, going to be in locations previously occupied by Amazon Books.
Here is the full story.
Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms – i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.
That is from a new paper by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva. The paper has many interesting particular results, here is one:
Respondents living in Utah exhibit the least zero-sum thinking, on average, and respondents living in Montana, Oklahoma and Mississippi exhibit the most. Importantly, there is no significant geographic clustering and the geographic distribution of zero-sum beliefs is not obviously correlated with that of political leanings.
And this:
If a respondent was born outside the U.S., then they tend to have a less zero-sum view of the world.
African-Americans have more zero-sum thinking than average, and also this:
Zero-sum thinking is also associated with more liberal [TC: the wrong word, right here the misuse is especially glaring!] economic policies and a political alignment with the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.
Recommended.
Sunday assorted links
Why did China do such a flip-flop on Covid?
After the so-called “Zero Covid” experiment, China now reports that 37 million people are being infected each day. What ever happened to the Golden Mean? Why not move smoothly along a curve? Even after three years’ time, it seems they did little to prep their hospitals. What are some hypotheses for this sudden leap from one corner of the distribution to the other?
1. The Chinese people already were so scared of Covid, the extreme “no big deal” message was needed to bring them around to a sensible middle point. After all, plenty of parts of China still are seeing voluntary social distancing.
2. For Chinese social order, “agreement” is more important than “agreement on what.” And agreement is easiest to reach on extreme, easily stated and explained policies. Zero Covid is one such policy, “let it rip” is another. In the interests of social stability China, having realized its first extreme message was no longer tenable, has decided to move to the other available simple, extreme message. And so they are letting it rip.
3. The Chinese elite ceased to believe in the Zero Covid policy even before the protests spread to such an extreme. But it was not possible to make advance preparations for any alternative policy. Thus when Zero Covid fell away, there was a vacuum of sorts and that meant a very loose policy of “let it rip.”
4. After three years of Zero Covid hardship, the Chinese leadership feels the need to “get the whole thing over with” as quickly as possible.
To which extent might any of these be true? What else?
The best dialogue or podcast I’ve heard this year
Martin Shkreli on how the criminal justice system will treat SBF….interviewer Laura Shin…
Merry Christmas!
From the Thomas Jefferson room at the Library of Congress.
Merry Christmas!
We thank you all for reading!
Saturday assorted links
1. Using ChatGPT to scrape websites. And publicly announced ChatGPT variants and alternatives. And Alpa.
2. The culture that is Finland? Just don’t be proud of it!
3. Claims about Russia (speculative).
4. Under current U.S. patent law, including some 2022 cases, AI cannot count as an “inventor” and receive IP protection.
5. Ali Ahmed Aslam RIP, credited with inventing chicken tikka masala (NYT).
Open Sesame!
The excellent Alec Stapp points us to an absolute classic in the law of unintended consequences:
APNews: A new federal law requiring that sesame be listed as an allergen on food labels is having unintended consequences — increasing the number of products with the ingredient.
Food industry experts said the requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.
As a result, several companies — including national restaurant chains like Olive Garden, Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A and bread makers that stock grocery shelves and serve schools — are adding sesame to products that didn’t have it before. While the practice is legal, consumers and advocates say it violates the spirit of the law aimed at making foods safer for people with allergies.