Results for “coup” 640 found
Markets in everything Alaska regulatory arbitrage edition, tribal qualifier added
The shrinking village of Karluk, on the western shore of Kodiak Island, is trying to keep its school viable. So it’s willing to pay a couple of families with three or four children apiece to move there of a year, so that it can draw down state education funds.
Public schools in Alaska need to maintain an enrollment of 10 students to get state funding. Karluk, which had a population of 37 during the 2010 U.S. Census, is now down to about 21 people. The demographics are Native American: 82.14%; two or more races: 17.86%; White: 0%; Black or African American: 0%.
Karluk Tribal Council’s ad says that it will pay a couple of families with enough kids — three or four — to move to the village, all expenses paid, for a year, and will even provide jobs. That money, without question, is passed through from the U.S. and State taxpayer, to pay families so that the village can draw down more government money and open its school.
If this were any other kind of enterprise other than a tribe, these definitions for acceptable applicants would be considered a federal equal opportunity violation. But this is a tribe.
Here is the full story, including means for contacting the village. Via Martin Kennedy.
People Hire Phone Bots to Torture Telemarketers
Whitebeard has a bad habit of talking in circles. That is by design. Whitebeard is a digital contraption that only sounds human. He is the creation of Roger Anderson, a real-life 54-year-old in Monrovia, Calif., who employs chatbots and AI to frustrate and waste the time of telemarketers and scammers.
“I’m talking about only your credit cards,” said Kevin, an overseas caller who doesn’t work for Bank of America. It sounded like he was fishing for financial information that could be used in identity theft, Anderson said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name,” said Whitebeard, who speaks in the cloned voice of Sid Berkson, a Vermont dairy farmer and a friend of Anderson’s. “What’s your name, buddy?”
Whitebeard stalls for time at the start of phone calls, using chatbot inanities about TV remotes and the like to give a couple of minutes for GPT-4, the OpenAI software, to process the telemarketer’s spiel and generate responses. Once ready, the AI text is fed into a voice cloner, which carries on the conversation.
Here is the full WSJ article.
Air Pollution Redux
New York City today has the worst air quality in the world, so now seems like a good time for a quick redux on air pollution. Essentially, everything we have learned in the last couple of decades points to the conclusion that air pollution is worse than we thought. Air pollution increases cancer and heart disease and those are just the more obvious effects. We now also now know that it reduces IQ and impedes physical and cognitive performance on a wide variety of tasks. Air pollution is especially bad for infants, who may have life-long impacts as well as the young and the elderly. I’m not especially worried about the wildfires but the orange skies ought to make the costs of pollution more salient. As Tyler noted, one reason air pollution doesn’t get the attention that it deserves is that it’s invisible and the costs are cumulative:
Air pollution causes many deaths. But it is rare to see or read about a person dying directly from air pollution. Lung cancer and cardiac disease are frequently cited as causes of death, even though they may stem from air pollution.
That’s the bad news. The good news, hidden inside the bad news, is that the costs of air pollution on productivity are so high that there are plausible ways of reducing some air pollution and increasing health and wealth, especially in high pollution countries but likely also in the United States with well-targeted policies.
For evidence on the above, you can see some of the posts below. Tyler and I have been posting about air pollution for a long time. Tyler first said air pollution was an underrated problem in 2005 and it was still underrated in 2021!
- Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible
- Air Pollution Reduces IQ, A Lot
- Air Pollution Kills
- David Wallace-Wells with a good overview.
- A good overview of the non-health impacts of pollution.
Population Dynamics and Economic Inequality
Broad movements in American earnings inequality since the mid-20th century show a correlation with the working-age share of the population, evoking concerns dating to the 18th century that as more individuals in a population seek work the returns to labor diminish. The possibility that demographic trends, including the baby boom and post-1965 immigration, contributed to the rise in inequality was referenced in literature before the early 1990s but largely discarded thereafter. This paper reconsiders the impact of supply-side dynamics on inequality, in the context of a literature that has favored demand-side explanations for at least 30 years, and a recent movement toward equality that coincides with the retirement of the baby boom generation, reduced immigration, and a long trend toward reduced fertility. Evidence suggests an important role for the population age distribution in economic inequality, and coupled with demographic projections of an aging population and continued low fertility portends a broad trend toward greater equality over at least the next two decades.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Jacob L. Vigdor. It was part of a recent NBER conference on fertility and demographics, kudos to Melissa Kearney (still underrated as a social force for good) and Philip B. Levine for putting it on.
Orwell Against Progress
Orwell was deeply suspicious of technology and not simply because of the dangers of totalitarianism as expounded in 1984. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell argues that technology saps vigor and will. He quotes disparagingly, World Without Faith, a pro-progress book written by John Beever, a proto Steven Pinker in this respect.
It is so damn silly to cry out about the civilizing effects of work in the fields and farmyards as against that done in a big locomotive works or an automobile factory. Work is a nuisance. We work because we have to and all work is done to provide us with leisure and the means of spending that leisure as enjoyably as possible.
Orwell’s response?
…an exhibition of machine-worship in its most completely vulgar, ignorant, and half-baked form….How often have we not heard it, that glutinously uplifting stuff about ’the machines, our new race of slaves, which will set humanity free’, etc., etc., etc. To these people, apparently, the only danger of the machine is its possible use for destructive purposes; as, for instance, aero-planes are used in war. Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines–until finally you land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men.
What’s Orwell’s problem with progress? He is a traditionalist. Orwell thinks that men need struggle, pain and opposition to be truly great.
…in a world from which physical danger had been banished–and obviously mechanical progress tends to eliminate danger–would physical courage be likely to survive? Could it survive? And why should physical strength survive in a world where there was never the need for physical labour? As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain, and difficulty.
..The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard.
I will give Orwell his due, he got this right:
Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use.
Orwell’s distaste for technology and love of the manly virtues of sacrifice and endurance to pain naturally push him towards zero-sum thinking. Wealth from machines is for softies but wealth from conquest, at least that makes you brave and hard! (See my earlier post, Orwell’s Falsified Prediction on Empire). Orwell didn’t favor conquest but it’s part of his pessimism that he sees the attraction.
Another of Orwell’s tragic dilemmas is that he doesn’t like progress but he does favor socialism and thus finds it unfortunate that socialism is perceived as being favorable to progress:
…the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress…The kind of person who most readily accepts Socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress, as such, with enthusiasm.
Orwell admired the tough and masculine miners he spent time with in the first part of Wigan Pier. In the second part he mostly decries the namby-pamby feminized socialists with their hippy-bourgeoise values, love of progress, and vegetarianism. I find it very amusing how much Orwell hated a lot of socialists for cultural reasons.
Socialism is too often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of ’progress’ which revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of
an aesthetic sense.…One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
…If only the sandals and the pistachio coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!
What Orwell wanted was to strip socialism from liberalism and to pair it instead with conservatism and traditionalism. (I am speaking here of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier).
It’s still easy today to identify the sandal wearing, socialist hippies at the yoga studio but socialism no longer brings to mind visions of progress. Today, fans of progress are more likely to be capitalists than socialists. Indeed, socialism is more often allied with critiques of progress–progress destroys the environment, ruins indigenous ways of life and so forth. A traditionalist socialism along Orwell’s lines would add to this critique that progress destroys jobs, feminizes men, and saps vitality and courage. Thus, Orwell’s goal of pairing socialism with conservatism seems logically closer at hand than in his own time.
Diamond arbitrage!
That diamond ring your newly engaged friend is showing off? It may not be a traditional diamond.
More than a third of all engagement rings with center stones purchased last year were created in a lab, according to an online survey of nearly 12,000 U.S. couples by wedding-planning website The Knot. That’s double the number from 2020.
A natural diamond takes billions of years to form deep within the earth. The diamond industry, it seems, evolves almost as slowly. But a major shift seems to be under way.
As the technology to make lab-grown diamonds has improved, production has increased and retail prices are falling. Their growing popularity, especially among younger consumers, has caught the attention of jewelers and watchmakers — and is challenging traditional diamonds that are mined from the earth.
It’s not just engagement rings. Diamonds grown in a lab accounted for 13.6% of the $88.6 billion in diamond jewelry sold globally in 2022, up from less than 1% in 2015 where they had hovered since the early 2000s, according to Paul Zimnisky, a diamond industry analyst.
Here is more from the WSJ, and the article is interesting throughout. Here is my 2004 post on diamonds. Didn’t Alex once have a long post on this as well? (I can’t find it in the MR search function.)
Tuesday assorted links
1. More on Sudan (correct link).
2. Atlas Fellowship, for 19 and younger. Many very good winners.
3. Improving GPT models with self-reflection. And you can now interrogate your pdfs.
4. Ahem: “A proposal to strip Disney World of its ability to self-inspect its rides and monorails could also alter its participation in an agreement that allows major theme parks to self-report injuries on their attractions.
But the other big theme parks, including Universal and SeaWorld, would still retain those privileges, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday.” Link here. Not unrelated to a lot of other regulatory issues as well.
5. AI “photograph” wins prestigious photography award.
6. The Collinses.
Anarchy in South Africa
Public services such as police, fire, and traffic control in South Africa are breaking down. Private firms are stepping in to take some of the burden. Twenty two percent of Johannesburg’s fire engines are owned and operated by private firms.
Fire Ops employs more than 60 firefighters across seven fire stations in Johannesburg and owns two fire engines—including one now sporting the same shade of blue Discovery uses for its logo and much of its branding—as well as six smaller high-pressure-pump response vehicles.
Discovery says the blue firetruck responded to 172 building fires between Fire Force’s launch through the end of January.
Mr. Ossip said the Discovery-branded truck promotes the insurer’s brand and lowers damages, including to multimillion-dollar homes in some of Johannesburg’s toniest areas. “You need to just save one or two of those a year and it is substantial savings,” he said.
The service helps alleviate a shortage of operational fire engines in Johannesburg, a spread-out city of more than 5.5 million residents, in situations where minutes can make the difference between a blaze limited to a couple of rooms and one that destroys an entire house or spreads to neighboring homes.
Robert Mulaudzi, a spokesman for the City of Johannesburg Emergency Management Services, said the city currently has about seven operational fire engines across 30 fire stations.
…Fire Ops, which invoices buildings’ owners for fire services, says that while it responds to all calls, it will give priority to clients, including Discovery policyholders, when simultaneous fires break out. Other insurers usually pick up the bill when the company puts out a fire in a home not insured by Discovery, said De Wet Engelbrecht, Fire Ops’s chief executive.
In 19th century Great Britain prosecution assocations and insurance firms were responsible for much of the policing (see Stephen Davies in The Voluntary City.) In Lessons from Gurgaon, India’s Private City (working paper) Shruti Rajagopolan and I discuss private police and fire services in modern day Gurgaon. In general, the private firms provide excellent service relative to their public counterparts but, as in Gurgaon, there are limits to how much the private firms can do without large economies of scale:
…Fire Ops also has to navigate public infrastructure that doesn’t always work, including traffic lights, fire hydrants and municipal water supplies….In September, both Fire Ops and the city’s fire department responded to a blaze at Little Forest Centre, a private special-needs school in Johannesburg, but a water shortage in the area meant all fire hydrants were empty, said Kate More, the school’s owner and principal, who isn’t a Discovery policyholder.
Despite Fire Ops sourcing water from a neighbor’s pool, the school burned down.
Addendum: In unrelated news, just one year after its grand opening Whole Foods is closing its downtown San Francisco store because they can’t ensure the safety of their employees.
My Conversation with Jonathan GPT Swift
Here is the transcript and audio, I have heard that video (no joke) is on the way. Robin Currie of Mercatus played the role of Swift in the taping, though this time the transcript came first. Here is part of the summary:
GPT Swift discusses his support for the Church of Ireland, his shift from the Whigs to the Tories, and his opposition to William Wood’s copper coinage in Ireland. He also talks about his works, including Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, and his skepticism of moral and intellectual progress. Swift addresses rumors about his relationship with Esther Johnson and his fascination with scatological themes in his works. He also discusses his early life in England, his intellectual mentor Sir William Temple, and his jovial attitude towards death.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Queen Anne: overrated or underrated? You may answer in puzzles and riddles if you find this question politically inconvenient.
SWIFT: As Jonathan Swift, I shall offer my perspective on Queen Anne in a veiled manner, employing a metaphor to express my thoughts:
Imagine a vessel navigating through troubled waters, with strong currents representing the shifting political landscape. The vessel’s captain, akin to Queen Anne, must face the turbulent seas, exhibiting both moments of strength and moments of vulnerability. Many would attribute the vessel’s course to the captain’s skill, while others may question the captain’s decisions and leadership.
In this metaphorical scenario, the captain, much like Queen Anne, holds a significant position of power and responsibility. However, the captain’s competence may be a subject of debate. Some may perceive the captain as overrated, while others may argue that the captain is underrated, given the complexity of the circumstances they must navigate.
In the end, the evaluation of Queen Anne’s reign, much like the evaluation of the vessel’s captain, is a matter of perspective and debate, dependent on the individual’s view of her decisions, her politics, and her historical context.
How about this for humor:
COWEN: Can you tell us a joke from your time, Jonathan Swift, a short but funny one?
SWIFT: I shall share a short jest that was popular during my time:
Why do we never tell secrets on a farm?
Because the potatoes have eyes and the corn has ears.
COWEN: So, what is a joke from your time that *you* would find funny?
SWIFT: My humor often leaned towards satire and irony. A jest from my time that I might find more appealing would be a humorous couplet from my own work, On Poetry: A Rhapsody:
“So geese in compass, figures may express, And teach dull censors to be more or less.”
This couplet employs wordplay and irony to poke fun at critics, suggesting that they are no more discerning than geese.
Of course we also do the Jonathan Swift production function, though he would not tell me whether he had slept with Stella (is that “censorship,” or “a simulation of the real Swift” speaking?). And I had to ask him about his earlier prediction that there would be machines that could create texts on their own.
As for method, here is TC:
Now what you’re going to hear and what you’re going to read on the transcript is very close to the actual exchange but there were a few small differences and edits we’ve made. Very often the GPT would begin the answer with, “As Jonathan Swift.” We simply took that out. Some of the longer answers, there were resummaries at the end. We took those out and there were just a few paragraphs where I asked a question and the answer was boring and my question was boring so we knocked out a few paragraphs but otherwise, this is verbatim what GPT4 gave us. I did not keep on repeating prompts trying to get the answer I wanted. This is really awfully close to the dialogue.
Do read the whole thing. It is too “textbook-y” in parts, but overall I was extremely impressed.
What I’ve been reading
1. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest & Culture in 11th-Century Europe. A very clear and to the point book on a complex topic. This is a good one to read with GPT-4 accompaniment for your queries. In Sicily, near Palermo, the Normans produced one of my favorite sites in all of Europe.
2. John A. Mackenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire. “A vital characteristic of polo was that since it lacked immediate physical contact it could be jointly played by British and Indians, which of course meant elite Indians, inevitably associated with the princely states.” A very good book on both a) early globalization, and b) actually understanding the British empire. I hadn’t known that during the 1930s and 40s, maximum years of resistance to the British empire, cricket tournaments largely were abandoned.
3. Carmela Ciuraru, Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages. I hadn’t even known Patricia Neal was married to Roald Dahl. Overall I enjoy intellectual/romance gossip books, and this is a good one. Full of actual facts about the writings, not just the affairs and the marriages and divorces. Moravia/Morante was my favorite chapter. Here is a Guardian review, superficially you might think there is no real message in this book, but then again…
4. Lucy Wooding, Tudor England: A History. A good book, but most of all a very good book to read with GPT-4 as your companion.
Jeanna Smialek, Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis, is a good, readable, non-technical introduction to the Fed, focusing on personalities and internal mechanics, rather than macroeconomic theories.
Rainer Zitelmann, In Defense of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths. A very good pro-capitalism book, broadly in the Milton Friedman tradition.
Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History. Long, full of information, and well written, but somehow lacks a central organizing thesis to hold it all together.
Murray Pittock, Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development 1660-1750 is an excellent book on how the built environment of Edinburgh, and its building reforms and improvements, shaped the Scottish Enlightenment. Gives a better sense of the Edinburgh of the time than any other book I know. I don’t mean the thinkers in the city, I mean the city itself.
Charles Dunst, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman. Full of true claims, common sense, and a needed dose of optimism.
I have not yet read Mark Calabria’s Shelter from the Storm: How a Covid Mortgage Meltdown was Averted, Cato Institute book.
Indonesia observations (from my email)
These are from Khalil Manaf Hagerty:
I’m half Indonesian by ethnicity (one-quarter Bugis, one-quarter Minangkabau, half bule, what we refer to as ‘blasteran’ or mixed race) and have worked on and off there for the past 15 years. Here are some observations:
The internal market is enormous. Unlike many SE Asian countries Indonesia really isn’t dependent upon exports. Domestic demand is massive and the middle class is growing. Combined with a cultural life social structure that allows for upward mobility (more than, say, India), many Indonesians have seen and experienced significant improvements in the quality of life over the past 25 years, post-Suharto. They have a lot of democracy and increasing wealth.
So, adding to this: There are 17,000 islands and if someone wants to ‘make it’, they can quite easily go to Jakarta, a city of around 15 million people, depending on whose estimate you are using. Even within the less urbanised islands, there have still been significant rural agricultural opportunities for smallholder farmers operating on 10ha or so to meet domestic demand for food. So these are big improvements for many people and the success or changes in wealth are all relative.
Think of the narrative of President Jokowi: born and raised in a slum, now President.
On emigration: I’m sorry, but the West still tends to treat Indonesians as though they are Muslim terrorists. The immigration and visa requirements for Indonesians entering Australia for example are (informally) tougher than those entering from Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore (obviously), e.g. there is no easy-to-obtain 30-day holiday visa for Indonesians.
With foreign education, Indonesians are likely to go to Australia for higher ed, it’s cheaper and closer, and the objective is generally an English-language education. There’s a small number of wealthy folks that can afford the US system. There’s a generation of folks who were educated in the US system under the Colombo Plan and its successors, but that has thinned out. You will occasionally meet a guy who went to Purdue for this Masters.
Following on from this, why do Indonesians go home after their degree? Most folks will have very, very strong ties to their community in Jakarta, rural Indonesia or both. This often expresses itself in Islam but is present in Javanese/Sumatran/Malay culture more broadly.
On the entrepreneurial spirit, it very much exists in the country, but as noted above the growth is higher and the cultural barriers to entry are lower domestically. The Chinese community is arguably the best at this, but they see bigger or as many opportunities across the region — particularly through informal Chinese diaspora networks across Asia. Ethnic Chinese are much less persecuted now across the region than they were 25 years ago.
Finally, Indonesia is a big country and the sense of national identity is getting bigger. The US-China thing is a good example; Indonesians believe they can carve their own path without having to choose between the West (and there is still a great deal of resentment towards Europe after 1945-1949) and China. The country’s population is expected to overtake the US within a couple of decades.
If I was to summarise: opportunities at home are big, real and probably easier.
Here was my initial query.
Steven Pinker on existential risk
He is harsh, but my view is not far from his:
The AI-existential-threat discussions are unmoored from evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, real AI, sociology, the history of technology and other sources of knowledge outside the theater of the imagination. I think this points to a meta-problem. The AI-ET community shares a bad epistemic habit (not to mention membership) with parts of the Rationality and EA communities, at least since they jumped the shark from preventing malaria in the developing world to seeding the galaxy with supercomputers hosting trillions of consciousnesses from uploaded connectomes. They start with a couple of assumptions, and lay out a chain of abstract reasoning, throwing in one dubious assumption after another, till they end up way beyond the land of experience or plausibility. The whole deduction exponentiates our ignorance with each link in the chain of hypotheticals, and depends on blowing off the countless messy and unanticipatable nuisances of the human and physical world. It’s an occupational hazard of belonging to a “community” that distinguishes itself by raw brainpower. OK, enough for today – hope you find some of it interesting.
That is by no means the only harsh paragraph. Here is the entire dialogue with Richard Hanania. And be careful what you write in the MR comments section, the AIs are reading you!
My Conversation with Yasheng Huang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, Yasheng is a China scholar and a professor at MIT. Here is part of the episode summary:
Yasheng joined Tyler to discuss China’s lackluster technological innovation, why declining foreign investment is more of a concern than a declining population, why Chinese literacy stagnated in the 19th century, how he believes the imperial exam system deprived China of a thriving civil society, why Chinese succession has been so stable, why the Six Dynasties is his favorite period in Chinese history, why there were so few female emperors, why Chinese and Chinese Americans have less well becoming top CEOs of American companies than Indians and Indian Americans, where he’d send someone on a two week trip to China, what he learned from János Kornai, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, in your book, you write of what you call Tullock’s curse— Gordon Tullock having been my former colleague — namely, embedded succession conflict in an autocracy. Why has Chinese succession been so stable up to now? And will we see Tullock’s curse whenever Xi steps down, passes on, whatever happens there?
HUANG: I do want to modify the word that you use, stable. There are two ways to use that term. One is to describe the succession process itself. If that’s the situation we’re trying to describe, it is not stable at all. If you look at the entire history of the PRC, there have been so many succession plans that failed, and at a catastrophic level. One potential successor was persecuted to death. Another fled and died in a plane crash. Others were unceremoniously dismissed, and one was put under house arrest for almost 15 years, and he died —
COWEN: But no civil war, right?
HUANG: Yes, that’s right.
COWEN: No civil war.
HUANG: That’s right. There’s another way to talk about stability, which is stability at the system level, and that, you are absolutely right. Despite all these problems with these successions, the system as a whole has remained stable. The CCP is in power. There’s no coup, and there were not even demonstrations on the street associated with the succession failures. So, we do need to distinguish between these two kinds of stability. By one criterion, it was not stable. By the other criterion, it is quite stable.
The reason for that is, I think — although it’s a little bit difficult to generalize because we don’t really have many data points — one reason is the charisma power of individual leaders, Mao and Xiaoping. These were founding fathers of the PRC, of the CCP, and they had the prestige and — using Max Weber’s term — charisma, that they could do whatever they wanted while being able to contain the spillover effects of their mistakes. The big uncertain issue now is whether Xi Jinping has that kind of charisma to contain future spillover effects of succession failure.
This is a remarkable statistic: Since 1976, there have been six leaders of the CCP. Of these six leaders, five of them were managed either by Mao or by Deng Xiaoping. Essentially, the vast majority of the successions were handled by these two giants who had oversized charisma, oversized prestige, and unshakeable political capital.
Now we have one leader who doesn’t really have that. He relies mostly on formal power, and that’s why he has accumulated so many titles, whereas he’s making similar succession errors as the previous two leaders.
Obviously, we don’t know — because he hasn’t chosen a successor — we don’t really know what will happen if he chooses a successor. But my bet is that the ability to contain the spillover effect is going to be less, rather than more, down the road, because Xi Jinping does not match, even in a remote sense, the charisma and the prestige of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. There’s no match there.
Recommended. And I am happy to recommend Yasheng Huang’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of the East.
Pre-order here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300266367?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_CXCHDSQB8JBKEXM4J5BE
Will remote work promote more family formation?
A new paper puts forth a fascinating theory: Maybe remote work is making it easier for couples to become parents—and for parents to have more children.
The economist Adam Ozimek and the demographer Lyman Stone looked at survey data of 3,000 American women from the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey. They concluded that female remote workers were more likely to intend to have a baby than all-office workers, especially if they were richer, older, and more educated. What’s more, remote workers in the survey were more likely to marry in the next year than their nonremote counterparts.
Remote work might promote family formation in a few ways. Remote workers can move more easily, because they don’t have to live within commuting distance of their job. This flexibility might result in more marriages by ending the “two-body problem,” where romantic partners find employment in different cities and must choose between their career and their relationship. What’s more, remote work reduces commutes, and those weekly hours can be shifted to family time, making it easier to start or grow a family.
Fertility is an awkward topic for journalists, because starting a family is such a complicated and intimate decision. But fertility rates aren’t declining simply because more people are choosing not to have children—American women report having fewer kids than they want, as Stone has documented in previous research. If remote work is subtly restructuring the contours of life to enable more women to have the families they want, that’s great news.
Hungary incentives of the day
Hungary passed a law in 2019 exempting women with four children from income taxes, for life. This is the first effort that at least sounds somewhat like actually trying.
Yet when considered in detail, this was a rather terrible implementation. There is a mismatch here between what women and families want and what this is pushing them towards.
Even with a large income tax break, asking women to have four children is rather ambitious. The one-time payments for the first three children are not that different from zero, the main effect only kicks in if you have four. Then there is no substantial further benefit to having five.
The benefit then comes in the form of not paying income tax rather than a direct payment. That means that to get the benefit, the mother of four has to be working.
There are exceptions, but presumably if you choose to have four children in order to get financial benefits, what you want to do with that funding is stay home with your children. That’s not allowed here. The income tax benefits don’t even seem to pass to the father or husband, so they can support a family on their own. I do get it, given how easy that would be to game, but it doesn’t seem great. It also creates a very strange and huge incentive to have stay-at-home fathers, and to encourage various forms of tax fraud, I am sad I have not yet watched any movies about this.
All the incentives here are twisted and highly inefficient. Another problem is that most of the benefits paid are going, for a while, to go to women whose children were already born under the old regime.
Then early this year they extended the policy to all mothers under 30. If you have one child by 30, you are exempt from income taxes for life.
This essentially wipes out the four-child policy, other than retroactively. The number of women who are going to have zero children before 30, then have four or more later, is very small.
The new rule seems much more interesting. Hungary’s tax rate on personal income is 15%. So this is a permanent 17% boost in take-home pay if you have your first child before 30. That seems like a very strong incentive to have your first child before 30, even if you weren’t sure if you wanted one or not. Not as strong as a similar-expected-value one-time payment or guaranteed income steam. Still warping the tax incentives in very strange ways. Still pretty great.
Long term I am very curious to see what this does to tax rates. If the majority of Hungarian women do not pay income tax, that is going to require a substantial tax hike. It also will be very interesting to see the impact on earnings, and on the gender pay gap, and on norms of child care. If a couple gets married in their 20s, and knows that the women is permanently immune from income taxes and the man is not, so the women’s pay is worth at least 17% more, what happens?
Here is more from Zvi Mowshowitz, most of it about fertility-boosting attempts in other nations.