My podcast with Bari Weiss
Here goes. It starts with inflation, but moves on to religion, the recent Florida law, and my favorite character in the Bible and why, among much more…
Additive Growth
That is a new and quite interesting paper by Thomas Philippon. Here is the abstract:
Growth theory is based on the assumption of exponential total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Across countries and time periods I find that TFP growth is actually linear. Unlike the exponential model, the additive growth model provides useful medium-term forecasts of TFP. It also explains the TFP slowdown and the volatility puzzle, and predicts falling real interest rates. For the distant future the model predicts ever increasing increments in standards of living but with growth rates that converge to zero. For the distant past the model suggests that the size of TFP increments has changed in the late 1600’s, the early 1800’s, and around 1930.
Or consider this presentation:
Initial trend growth is around 2.5%. After 40 years, TFP doubles, and since increments are constant, the trend growth rate is half of what it used to be. After 60 years later, it is only one percent.
And:
…the process of US TFP increments has only one break over the past 130 years, around 1930, following the large-scale implementation of the electricity revolution…For the UK, I find two breaks between 1600 and 1914. The first is between 1650 and 1700, when growth becomes positive. The second is around 1830. These breaks are consistent with historical research on the first and second industrial revolutions…
The author argues that linear TFP growth holds for Thailand, Taiwan, and Korea as well, and indeed for all recent countries with data for TFP.
As Philippon puts it informally “New ideas add to our stock of knowledge; they do not multiply it.”
As stated above a very interesting paper, but I do have some worries. First, his model fits “TFP” better than gdp growth per se, which (at least until recently) does appear to be exponential in advanced economies. If I read the author’s pp.21-22 correctly, he is suggesting (speculatively) that 20th century gdp growth received an artificial inflation from improvements in educational achievement that perhaps are unlikely to be replicated. Maybe, but the broader predictions of the theory — including on gdp growth — require further consideration.
Second, is TFP even “a real thing”? Or is it a meaning-poor residual, based on arbitrary distinctions between “innovation” and “investment”? Maybe the ongoing trend is simply that more innovation is embodied in concrete investments, thus causing TFP to measure lower? Too much of the paper takes the TFP concept for granted.
Nonetheless worth a real ponder.
Solve for the equilibrium
Google Docs could soon suggest ways to improve the quality of your writing in addition to fixing straightforward grammar and spelling errors, the company has announced. A purple squiggly line will appear under suggestions to help make your writing more concise, inclusive, active, or to warn you away from inappropriate words.
Here is the full story. Just as Google and Amazon search have become worse, the more general point is that franchise values tend to be cashed in at some point.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Peter Greenaway movie coming this year.
2. How the Demand for Dignity Can Create Slack for Poor Governance.
3. One proposal for reforming the NSF.
4. The curious afterlife of pop stars.
5. The great Radu Lupu has passed away, RIP.
6. Are social media making us stupider?
7. Translation of the Brodsky poem (and the whole thread is interesting, sorry Arnold but you won’t easily get this stuff anywhere else).
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs
You have heard my scream in Free Guy, Paranormal Activity and Scream (2022). My work often comes in at the post-production stage (after filming has taken place). I pick up additional screams and voice acting for the on-camera actors. Sometimes they don’t have the time to achieve the sound the director wants, or I can offer a different vocal quality to the performance.
As a scream artist you have to know the subtle differences between screams and determine whether they should peak at certain points, or remain steady for a very long time. I have to think: ‘OK, the character is scared here, but are they scared because their life is in danger or are they just startled?’ Those screams will sound very different. Ghost stories, for example, will often use a shrill, harsh scream because we need the audience to also experience fear.
Here is more from Ashley Peldon, via the excellent The Browser, do subscribe.
Picture books are very good
Not just good, they are very good. I picked up two new ones yesterday at the Arlington Library, and I am excited to spend time with both. The first is Doris Behrens-Abouseif Metalwork from the Arab World and the Mediterranean, and the second is Salma Samar Damluji The Architecture of Yemen and its Reconstruction, only $17.97 for that one! Here are some summary reasons why picture books are so underrated:
1. No one reads them. Or at least no paying customer reads them (see #2). So the writers do not have to seek to please the reader so much. Rather the text has to look “serious enough” to a library buyer, or to a “coffee table buyer. The writers, on their side, tend to be of high knowledge, intelligence, and conscientiousness. How is this for a stunning review of the Yemen book?: “In what can be described as a written expedition through Yemen, Salma Samar Damluji’s meticulous cataloguing of typologies and individual structures is a work of clarity and dedication…Damluji does due justice to their memory and ensures the intent and purpose behind their construction is not lost in translation.”
2. Picture books are de facto free. I get almost all of my picture books from the local public libraries, which buy quite a few of them.
2b. When sitting on a public library shelf, you can spot a picture book from the other side of the room. Thus picture books are not difficult to find.
3. The basic style is Wikipedia-like in the sense of aiming at relative objectivity. Yet the style is better than most on-line writing, Wikipedia included. Few picture books are highly partisan or pushing some wacko thesis.
4. They don’t go viral and they are not read by groups of people at the same time. That in turn feeds back into how they are written. Your friends are never reading the same picture book as you are. Thus your picture book is never The Current Thing. Bravo. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had someone ask me about a particular picture book. Ever. Could you name even three authors of picture books? One? Bravo all the more.
5. Pictures, photographs, and maps are excellent in their own right.
6. What makes for good pictures in a picture book? Historical sites, the arts and design, topography, animals, birds, and dinosaurs (almost the same thing). Most of those topics involve a minimum of b.s.
Q.E.D.
It isn’t just Putin — Russia vs. Ukraine
From Wikipedia, here is a description of the views of Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky on Ukraine:
According to many historians, despite the fact that Brodsky had anti-Soviet views, for which he was eventually forced to leave Soviet Russia and emigrate to the United States, he, with all that, had pronounced Russian-imperial views, which resulted in his rejection of the existence of Ukrainians as a nation separate from Russians. According to Russian literary critic and biographer and friend of Brodsky Lev Losev, Brodsky considered Ukraine “the only cultural space with Great Russia”, and the Polish historian Irena Grudzinska-Gross [pl] in her book “Milosz and Brodsky” (2007) Brodsky firmly believed that Ukraine and has always been “an integral part of Great Russia”. According to Grudzinskaya-Gross, “Brodsky’s Russian patriotism is also evidenced by … the poem “The People” and another poem “On the Independence of Ukraine”, attacking Ukraine from imperial and Great Russian positions.”
In 1985, even before writing the scandalous Ukrainian-phobic poem “On the Independence of Ukraine“, he entered into a debate with the Czech-French poet Milan Kundera, in which he showed his Russian-imperial views.
The most famous public manifestation of Brodsky’s Ukrainophobia was the poem “On the Independence of Ukraine”, written, tentatively, in 1992. In this poem, Brodsky sarcastically described Ukraine’s independence in 1991 and scolded Ukrainian independence fighters for abandoning the Russian language. Brodsky did not publish this poem in any of his lifetime collections, and, until his death in 1996, he managed to read only a few times at various Muscovite and Judeophile meetings in America. In particular, there is documentary evidence that Brodsky read this poem on October 30, 1992 at a solo evening in the hall of the Palo Alto Jewish Center and on February 28, 1994 in front of a group of the Russian diaspora at New York University’s Quincy College. Through this poem, critics saw in Brodsky manifestations of Russian chauvinism and accused him of Anti-Ukrainian sentiment and racism.
These views are deeply rooted in Russian culture and history. Here Brodsky reads the poem in Russian. He is excited. Here is a 2011 Keith Gessen New Yorker piece on the poem. Again, ideas really matter! And not always for the better.
My EconTalk podcast with Russ Roberts about books and reading
Intellectual omnivore Tyler Cowen of George Mason University and EconTalk host Russ Roberts talk about their reading habits, their favorite books, and the pile of books on their nightstands right now.
And a transcription is offered for the first half hour. Here is one early excerpt:
Russ Roberts: Yeah, yeah. You don’t give away–do you lend books out?
Tyler Cowen: Not very often. I don’t own many books. So, I collected books in great numbers when I was an undergraduate, mostly history of economic thought. I thought I would build up this incredible collection of the great economics masterworks. But then I started moving around, and then I moved to Germany for a year and I’m, like, ‘This is not going to work.’ So, what I will do–there’s some economic historians in my department. If I get a history book, I will give it to them because I know they won’t necessarily read it. They’ll use it or not use it for reference. And I don’t feel I’m tricking them into reading a book. But I would be very reluctant to give you a book, Russ. Not that I don’t love you or like you, or both, but I would feel that you would feel obliged to read the book. Correct?
It is immoral to give away books unless you truly feel the recipient should read them!
I enjoyed this segment too:
Russ Roberts: You’re a lunatic.
Recommended.
Monday assorted links
1. MIE: “Dunkin Donuts sells a $65 adult onesie.”
3. New Economistts for Ukraine group.
4. Claims about Moskva, the ship.
5. Steven Johnson at NYT covers Large Language Models.
6. Mark Lilla reviews the new Jerry Muller book on Jacob Taubes (NYT).
7. The value of “individualism” best predicts support for market-oriented policies.
Small Isn’t Beautiful
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss India’s small scale reservation laws which for decades made it illegal for large firms to produce many manufactured goods:
…traditionally most Indian shirts were made by hand in small shops of three or four tailors who designed, measured, sewed, and sold, all on the same premises. It sounds elegant but this was not London’s Savile Row, where the finest tailors in the world create custom suits for the rich and powerful. India’s shirts would have been cheaper and of higher quality if they were mass-manufactured in factories—the way shirts for Americans are produced. Why didn’t this happen in India? Shirts in India were produced inefficiently because large-scale production was illegal.
India prohibited investment in plant and machinery in shirt factories from exceeding about $200,000 – this meant that Indian shirt manufacturers could not take advantage of economies of scale, the decrease in the average cost of production which often occurs as the total quantity of production increases.
Do India’s small scale reservation laws seem somewhat quaint and foolish? Now consider, California.
A bill moving through the Legislature would shorten California’s normal workweek to 32 hours from 40 for companies with more than 500 employees. Workers who put in more than 32 hours in a week would have to be paid time-and-a-half. And get this: Employers would be prohibited from reducing workers’ current pay rate, so they would be paid the same for working 20% less.
The work week evolves with time. As productivity and wage rates increase, workers spend some of their wages buying more clothing and some of their wages buying more leisure (workers buy leisure by offering to work fewer hours at lower wages). There are no strong reasons to legislate the work week. What strikes me, however, is the absurdity of legislating a shorter work week for larger firms. Larger firms tend to be more productive–that is one reason they are larger! Thus, California wants to legislate a shorter work week for more productive firms. As in Harrison Bergeron the handicappers ensure equality by cutting down the productive.
Regulating the work week is a poor idea but if we are going to regulate I’d prefer a “Singapore style” plan where they limited small firms to 32 hours a week, thus encouraging production and employment in larger, more productive firms!
By the way, India has mostly eliminated it’s small scale reservation laws so you can see which countries are heading up and which down.
Addendum: Such a law would be “Singapore style” I am not saying they do this.
Larry Temkin takes half a red pill
His new book is Being Good in a World of Need, and most of all I am delighted to see someone take Effective Altruism seriously enough to evaluate it at a very high intellectual level. Larry is mostly pro-EA, though he stresses that he believes in pluralist, non-additive theories of value, rather than expected utility theory, and furthermore that can make a big difference (for instance I don’t think Larry would play 51-49 “double or nothing” with the world’s population, as SBF seems to want to).
So where does the red pill come in? Well, after decades of his (self-described) intellectual complacency, Larry now wonders whether foreign aid is as good as it has been cracked up to be:
In this chapter, I have presented some new disanalogies between Singer’s original Pond Example, and real-world instances of people in need. I have noted that in some cases people in need may not be “innocent” or they may be responsible for their plight. I have also noted that often people in need are the victims of social injustice or human atrocities. Most importantly, I have shown that often efforts to aid the needy can, via various different paths, increase the wealth, status, and power of the very people who may be responsible for human suffering that the aid is intended to alleviate. This can incentivize such people to continue their heinous practices against their original victims, or against other people in the region. this can also incentivize other malevolent people in positions of power to perpetrate similar social injustices or atrocities.
The book also presents some remarkable examples of how some leading philosophers, including Derek Parfit, simply refused to believe that such arguments might possibly be true, even when Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton endorsed one version of them (not exactly Larry’s claims, to be clear).
Another striking feature of this book is how readily Larry accepts the rising (but still dissident) view that the sexual abuse of children has been a grossly underrated social problem.
What is still missing is a much greater focus on innovation and economic growth.
I am very glad I bought this book, and I look forward to seeing which pill or half-pill Larry swallows next. Here is my post on Larry’s previous book Rethinking the Good. Everyone involved in EA should be thinking about Larry and his work, and not just this latest book either.
Easter assorted links
1. Blockchain Basketball Training. No there there, just a marketing gimmick!
2. More on the Israeli laser weapon.
3. MIE: Fairfax house, but with an unleased, difficult to evict person living in the basement. There are already some offers for the home.
4. Chris Blattman advice on managing the academic job market.
5. On the new Houellbecq novel.
6. GRE and SAT scores by various majors.
7. “Bringing consent to ballet” (NYT, new service sector jobs).
What should I ask Cynthia Haven?
She is Rene Girard’s biographer, and has other interesting books as well, including on Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, and she is an expert in poetry and the humanities more broadly. Here is one biography (how can she not have her own Wikipedia page?). Here is her blog. Here is Cynthia on Twitter. To her credit, she has done all this without the benefit of a formal, tenured university post. She also runs her own “conversations,” and is working further on Girard. So what should I ask her?
What I’ve been reading
1. Susanne Schattenberg, Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman. Can you have an interesting biography of a life and man that was fundamentally so…boring? Maybe. He ruled the world’s number two power for eighteen critical years, so surely he deserves more attention than what he has received. “Nevertheless, Brezhnev had dentures and only stopped smoking in the mid-1970s because his doctors told him his false teeth would fall out at some point if he didn’t.” And “Analysis of why Brezhnev’s children made themselves known largely for their drinking and scandals would fill another book.” I’ll buy that one as well.
2. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics. One of the very best books on Ireland and Irish ideas, and more broadly I can recommend virtually anything by Kiberd. Do note, however, that much of this book requires you have read the cited Irish classics under consideration. Nonetheless there is insight on almost every page, recommended.
3. Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville. A self-recommending biography of one of the greatest social science thinkers. Easy to read, and good for both the generalist and specialist reader. Note that it is a complement to reading Tocqueville, in no way a substitute.
4. Kevin Lane, The Inca Lost Civilizations. Short and readable and with nice photos, maybe the best introduction to this still underrated topic?
Paul Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics considers the broader implications of Smith’s thought from a “freedom as non-domination” perspective.
John E. Bowit, Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age. The early twentieth century, basically. Beautiful plates, good exposition, and if nothing else a lesson in just how far aesthetic deterioration can run. A picture book!
Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism is interior to my current knowledge set, but clear and I suspect for many readers useful.
Rainer Zitelmann’s Hitler’s National Socialism is a very thorough, detailed look at Hitler’s actual views.
James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington also serves as a better than average general history of the city.
Why the innocent can’t get out of prison
The main title is Barred, and the author is Daniel S. Medwed. The book has many interesting points, here is one excerpt:
Alaska eliminated plea bargaining in 1975. The rationale was grounded in fairness, with the governor at the time proclaiming that the new policy was designed to counter “weakened public confidence in the administration of justice.” The conditions seemed ideal. Small population, small(ish) amount of criminal activity, creative attorney general, open-minded governor. The results were initially promising. Although the number of trials in the state rose by 37 percent in the year following the ban, the system appeared capable of absorbing the surge. But the experiment didn’t last. A new state attorney general relaxed plea policies in 1980, and bargaining was officially back in the 1990s. By the 2010s, nearly 97 percent of Alaska’s criminal cases resulted in pleas. Those who’ve studied the history of plea bargaining Alaska attribute the demise of the ban to a change in personnel in the AG’s office and a decline in state revenues. Trials don’t come cheap.
Recommended, for those who care.