Friday assorted links
1. “Still, “I’m worried that with all this newfound fame, this was Creepy Chloe’s plan all along for world domination,” Beard joked. “She’s just using Briar and her power of cuteness to get a foothold.”” Link here.
2. The titled culture that is German. And here is the UK.
3. How well do behavioral scientists predict?
4. History of Gander airport in Newfoundland.
5. New Lawrence H, White book coming on monetary economics.
6. Arbitrage: ‘All fun and games until the health inspector shows up.‘
The true long-termist has passed from the scene
RIP…
AEA Hypocrisy
Here’s the AEA’s official statement on inclusion:
The AEA seeks to create a professional environment with equal opportunity and fair treatment for all economists, regardless of age, sex, gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, health condition, marital status, parental status, genetic information, political affiliation, professional status, or personal connections.
Yet the AEA is requiring any attendees at the annual meeting to be vaccinated and boosted, a standard which excludes half of the US population! How is that equal opportunity and fair treatment? I suppose some people will want to say “health condition” doesn’t include vaccinated or not…dubious legerdemain…but there’s no question the AEA vaccination policy is a huge violation of the spirit of inclusion.
*The Rise and Fall of the EAST*
The author is Yasheng Huang of MIT and the subtitle is Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today. Forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. Excerpt:
For many years, I struggled to come up with a coherent explanation for the power, the reach, and the policy discretion of the Chinese state. There is coercion, ideological indoctrination, and probably a fair amount of societal consent as well.
Keju [the civil service exam system] had a deep penetration both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history. It was all encompassing, laying claims to time, efforts and cognitive investments of a significant swath of Chinese population. It was incubatory of values, norms, and cognitions, therefore impacting ideology and epistemology of Chinese minds. It was a state institution designed to augment the power and the capabilities of the state. Directly, the state monopolized the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society access to talent and preempted organized religion, commerce, and intelligentsia. The Chinese state in history and today is an imprinted version of this Keju system.
Chinese state is strong because it reigns without a society.
Among the other interesting features of this book, including many, are:
There is a very useful discussion of Sui Wendi, the man who reunified China (and is barely known in the West).
Just how much the exam system expanded in the 17th century, to support a larger and growing Chinese state.
Why Chinese bureaucrats in the provinces tend to be generalists and the ministerial officials tend to be specialists.
Oliver Williamson is applied and cited throughout.
“A state without society is a vertically integrated organization…Keju’s powerful platform effect crowded and stymied alternative mobility channels…the Keju was an anti-mobility mobility channel.”
“In the 1890s, China’s population literacy was only 18 percent, way below 95 percent of England and the Netherlands.”
Exam competition takes up so much of individual mind space. Furthermore the competition atomizes society and makes it harder to form the kinds of collective movements that might lead to democracy.
The author sees the 1980s as the truly revolutionary time in Chinese history.
“Throughout Chinese history very few emperors were toppled by their generals or senior functionaries, a sharp contrast with the Roman Empire.”
I could say much more. This is by far the best book on Chinese bureaucracy I have read, and probably one of the best books on China period. I am sure many of the claims will be contested, but the author tries in a very serious way to be explanatory and to actually answer the questions about China you care about. So few books even attempt that!
Addendum: Note that the author also wrote Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, another of my favorite books about China.
The Impact of Female Teachers on Female Students
It is widely believed that female students benefit from being taught by female teachers, particularly when those teachers serve as counter-stereotypical role models. We study education in rural areas of the US circa 1940–a setting in which there were few professional female exemplars other than teachers–and find that female students were more successful when their primary-school teachers were disproportionately female. Impacts are lifelong: female students taught by female teachers were more likely to move up the educational ladder by completing high school and attending college, and had higher lifetime family income and increased longevity.
That is from a new paper by David Card, Ciprian Domnisoru, Seth G. Sanders, Lowell Taylor, and Victoria Udalova. As I have been saying now for some number of years, role model effects are more important than many people believe.
Thursday assorted links
1. Agglomeration is good for research scientists, even taking costs into account.
2. The demand for secession is more about identity than income.
3. Will Germany succeed in building a new LNG terminal swiftly?
4. Publishing statistics, and how many copies a book actually sells.
5. Single-use plastic grocery bags are pretty environmentally friendly.
6. Health insurers just published nearly a trillion pieces of health care price information.
Firearms and Lynching
I love this paper by Mike Makowsky and Patrick Warren because it pokes so many bears. Makowsky and Warren find that greater access to firearms in the Black community reduced the rate of lynching in the Jim Crow South.
We assess firearms as a means of Black self-defense in the Jim Crow South. We infer firearm access by race and place by measuring the fraction of suicides committed with a firearm. Corroborating anecdotal accounts and historical claims, state bans on pistols and increases in White law enforcement personnel served as mechanisms to disarm the Black community, while having no comparable effect on White firearms. The interaction of these mechanisms with changing national market prices for firearms provides us with a credible identification strategy for Black firearm access. Rates of Black lynching decreased with greater Black firearm access.
Lots of black civil rights leaders were heavily armed but this is rarely mentioned let alone emphasized.
My Conversation with the excellent Vaughn Smith, hyperpolyglot
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. In case you don’t know, Vaughn is arguably the world’s leading polyglot. Here is part of the summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss how he began learning languages, the best languages for expressing humor, why he curses in Slovak, why he considers Finnish more romantic than Portugese, what makes Hungarian so difficult to learn, the best way to teach people new languages, how to combat language loss, why he’d like rural Mexicans to have more pride in their culture and way of life, his time as a roadie for a punk rock van, the most rewarding job he’s had, why he wants to visit Finland, how enjoying films from different eras is similar to learning new languages, the future of English, and more.
And an excerpt:
SMITH: When I study a language, the grammar is super important to me. I don’t have a problem with pronunciation. I can learn different writing scripts — that’s fine. I think the two biggest challenges here for me would be something that’s a very complicated grammar. For example, Estonian or Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, to me, are grammatically very challenging.
As far as orthography and writing systems, certainly kanji or Chinese characters, Mandarin characters would prove difficult because there’s a lot more to memorize.
COWEN: What do you think has been, for you, the hardest language to learn?
SMITH: The hardest language for me to learn — I would say Hungarian.
COWEN: What makes Hungarian so hard?
SMITH: Several noun cases and a very rich vocabulary, very large vocabulary. A lot more words are in regular use to say specific things, more so than, say, any of the Germanic languages.
An opposite of that would be, for example, Norwegian, which is super easy. You just have one little word. It doesn’t change, it doesn’t inflect the verb. Let’s see, the person or the verb is the same, no matter who is it that does it. There’s simply the infinitive form. There’s the past participle, and then there’s the present, which you just put the letter r after the vowel of the infinitive. That’s grammatically, just giving an example of how easy it is for me to learn Norwegian grammar.
Everything is difficult about Hungarian, as the case is knowing what case — the singular, the plural form. The verb changes with the recipient of the verb. If it’s in the first person verb, it changes when the recipient is in second person singular. Szeretnélek instead of Szeretnék, for example. Szeretnélek: “I like you.” Or Szeretnék: “I like.” These little nuances and all these exceptions to rules and irregularities make the language grammar very difficult.
Excellent throughout. Vaughn, although he is a rug cleaner by profession, is a first-rate podcast guest. Every answer substantive and to the point. And this was his first podcast appearance, ever. He should be a lesson to you all.
Mark Skousen on AEA masking
I called the Hilton Riverside, headquarters hotel for the AEA meetings, and asked if they have any mask or vaccine mandates. They said “none.” I’ll speak at the New Orleans Investment Conference at the same hotel in October, and the organizers aren’t mandating masks or vaccines. Overseas it’s the same. I’m speaking at the World Knowledge Forum in September in Seoul and attending the Mont Pelerin Society meetings in October in Oslo. No masks or shots required.
Here is more from the WSJ. I’ll be speaking in Canada soon — Canada!…risk-averse, locking down for longer, many fewer people died there Canada. No masks or boosters required.
FIRE ranks GMU #17 for free speech
Great to see, here are the ratings. University of Chicago is number one, and overall the public universities do better than the private universities. Dead last is Columbia.
Wednesday assorted links
1. South Korean child subsidy of $740 a month.
2. “Preliminary results from phase one of the study demonstrate that the mobility services substantially increased the share of families who chose to move to higher-opportunities. Fifty-four percent of families who received the mobility services chose to move to high-opportunity areas, compared to 14 percent of families who received standard services in the control group (a 286 percent increase).” Link here.
3. The Reddit thread (chess, St. Louis).
4. Sheep are the solar industry’s lawn mower of choice (WSJ).
Do economists need a “Head Start”?
The Biden administration has taken credit for a relative return to normalcy in schools over the last year of the coronavirus pandemic. But in one of the few education programs the federal government directly oversees — Head Start preschools and child care centers for low-income families — mandatory masking rules are still on the books for teachers and children as young as 2-years-old.
That requirement is out of line with current guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released last month, which recommend universal masking only if there is a high community transmission rate. The vast majority of schools and day care centers have made masks optional, even in the most virus-cautious regions on the country…
“Head Start programs have been short-circuited,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association, a trade group. “This mandate on masking and vaccines has hurt a lot of programs. It is more of a crisis that is now feeling like a looming catastrophe.”
The NYT subheader reads: “Some of the nation’s poorest pre-K students are the last still under mask mandates, affecting enrollment.”
File under “Sentences to ponder”!
What I’ve been reading
Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate. Coryate was an intrepid traveler from 17th century England. He walked along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, through Persia and Afghanistan, and into the heart of the Moghul empire. He was the first Englishman to visit India “for the heck of it,” and he walked. Quite possibly he introduced the table fork to England, and the word “umbrella” to the English language. Non-complacent from top to bottom, he died at age forty, of dystentery, while underway in Surat.
Johan Fourie, Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History. An unusual narrative take on the broad sweep of economic history, Africa-centered, original, unusual, broken up into different stories. The author is professor of economics and history at Stellenbosch, here is his home page.
Ronald H. Spector, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955. This book is an excellent way to pick up knowledge on a critical period that most Westerners do not know enough about. Most interesting to me were the sections on how many people thought the Indonesians would gladly return to Dutch colonial rule. Narrator: They didn’t.
S Encel, Equality and Authority: a Study of Class, Status and Power in Australia. Might this be the best explanatory book on Australia ever? Explains the odd mix of egalitarianism, individualism, plus bureaucratic authoritarianism that characterizes the Aussies. There should of course be many more books like this, books attempting to explain countries to us. From 1970 but still highly relevant.
W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. A very good book outlining status and signaling arguments for explaining how culture works and changes. My main gripe is that it doesn’t seem at all aware of Simler and Hanson, and Robin Hanson more generally and for that matter my own What Price Fame? (among other writings). So while I like the content, on the grounds of both scholarships and originality I have to give it a pretty big ding.
Arrived in my pile are:
Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming the American Housing Boom, and
Daniel B. Klein and Jason Briggeman, Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, d’Argenson.
Annie Duke, Quit. A defense of quitting, which is often necessary to reallocate resources properly.
Tuesday assorted links
1.”Bill,” one of my favorite Jerome Kern songs. Good lyrics too!
2. Chinese Coasean canine canoodling.
3. Washingtonian magazine on what is a stylish Washingtonian.
4. Flipping.
5. Mustard shortage in France.
An Update on Nasal Vaccines
Nasal vaccines are more likely to stop infection than vaccines injected into muscle because they stimulate mucosal immunity in the nose and respiratory system, the first line of attack, and they are likely to increase uptake especially among people with trypanophobia. Hence my longstanding call for an Operation Warp Speed for nasal vaccines. We haven’t got OWS 2.0 in the United States but nasal vaccines have recently been approved in China and India.
The Chinese vaccine is developed by CanSino and is the same as its injected vaccine but packaged in an aerosol taken with a nebulizer. It has been approved in China as a booster. Another advantage is that the Chinese nasal vaccine it’s one-fifth the dose of the injected version. India has also just approved a nasal vaccine on an emergency use basis. The Indian vaccine was developed by Bharat Biotech in a partnership with Washington University St. Louis.
Nasal vaccines as boosters seem like an especially promising approach as administration is much easier.