Results for “culture that is germany” 105 found
My Conversation with Brad DeLong
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the summary:
Tyler and Brad discuss what can really be gleaned from the fragmentary economics statistics of the late 19th century, the remarkable changes that occurred from 1870–1920, the astonishing flourishing of German universities in the 19th century, why investment banking allowed America and Germany to pull ahead of Britain economically, what enabled the Royal Society to become a force for progress, what Keynes got wrong, what Hayek got right, whether the middle-income trap persists, his favorite movie and novel, blogging vs. Substack, the Slouching Towards Utopia director’s cut, and much more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What do you take to be the best understanding of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, if indeed you view it as a 17th-century revolution?
DELONG: I always think Joel Mokyr is absolutely magnificent on this. I think he understates the role that having printing by movable type played in creating the community of scientific practice and knowledge seeking.
There’s one thing that happens that is extremely unusual. Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough. Which means that, principally, politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way, and then finding a way to run a force-and-fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society so that they at least can have enough. When Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft, it was not metaphor. It was really fact.
What does this elite consist of? Well, it’s a bunch of thugs with spears, the people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they’re their bosses, and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. Which means, most of the time, when you have a powerfully-moving-forward set of people thinking about ideas, whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.
This is a point I’ve stolen from Ernest Gellner, and I think it is very true. Yet, somehow, the Royal Society decides, no. The Royal Society decides nothing except through experiment — what we are going to demand that nature tell us, or tell one of us, or at least someone writes us a letter saying they’ve done the experiment about what is true. That is a miraculous and completely unexpected transformation, and one to which I think we owe a huge amount.
Many interesting points are discussed.
What I’ve been reading
1. Owen Hopkins, Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain. Covers the “great” British brutalist buildings of the postwar era, the debates surrounding their demolition, and their eventual demolition. Photos too, excellent to dip into.
2. Anna Grzymala-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State. A good and original book about how European state-building grew out of earlier church traditions. For instance, by the time of the Reformation about half the land in Germany was in the hands of the church. “Church-building” often came first, and then state-building copied and improved on some of the methods.
3. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What it Means for Our Country is a good look at what it promises. Most of all, I like how it stresses that these individuals are more apolitical than often is realized.
4. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th Century Europe. The best book on the Normans? And what an opening set of sentences: “In the eleventh century the climate was improving, population was growing, and people were on the move, west from central Asia, and south from north-western Europe. In 1054 the unity of Christianity between east and west was broken, a rift which lasted for centuries. In 1096 the idea of recovering Jerusalem from Muslims was translated into action. Existing empires and principalities were challenged and new polities were founded. War was at the centre of these events, waged by small armies led by men who achieved lasting fame, men such as William the Conqueror, Robert Guiscard, and Bohemond. That these men were of Norman extraction seemed to their chroniclers to be no coincidence.”
And just arrived in my pile is Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, Campus Economics: How Economic Thinking Can Help Improve College and University Decisions.
I’ve also started (and put down) a bunch of books somewhere between GPT 3.3 and 3.8…and read a bunch of books on Pauline political theology (reading in clusters!), and Jonathan Swift on church-state relations and on religious politics more generally. And yes, Spare is in my reading pile.
Best non-fiction books of 2022
Behind the links are sometimes but not always my longer reviews. The list is (mostly) in the order I read them. Here goes:
Markus Friedrich, The Jesuits: A History.
Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer: A Biography.
Anna Keay, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown.
Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire.
Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945.
Mark Bergen, Like, Comment, Subscribe: How YouTube Conquered the World.
Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem.
Mancur Olson, reprinted new edition of The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities.
The Malcolm Gladwell audiobook Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon.
Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creators, and Winners Around the World.
Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth.
Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.
Anthony Beevor, Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921.
William C. Kirby, Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China.
Peter Loftus, The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World.
Kevin Kelly, Vanishing Asia, three volumes, expensive, mostly photos, worth it.
Richard R. Reeves, Of Boys and Men. One of America’s biggest problems.
Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. A+ academic gossip, so to speak.
Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America.
Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe. The new translation, much better than the old.
Julia Voss, Hilma af Klint: A Biography.
Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950, by Bruce Caldwell & Hansjoerg Klausinger.
John Higgs, Love and Let Die: Bond, the Beatles, and the British Psyche.
Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left.
I don’t think I can pick a favorite this year! But maybe the Kevin Kelly and the Catherine Rundell books, if I had to say? And please keep in mind this is a meritocratic list, not based on any quotas or any attempt at “balance.” These were the best books!
I will be issuing an addendum at the very end of the year, since I will be reading more between now and 2023.
My Conversation with Jamal Greene
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Jamal and Tyler discuss what he’d change about America’s legal education system, the utility of having non-judges or even non-lawyers on the Supreme Court, how America’s racial history influences our conception of rights, the potential unintended consequences of implementing his vision of rights for America, how the law should view economic liberty, the ideal moral framework for adjudicating conflicts, whether social media companies should consider interdependencies when moderating content on their platforms, how growing up in different parts of New York City shaped his views on pluralism, the qualities that make some law students stand out, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: There is a crude view in popular American society — even possibly correct — that, simply, American society is too legalistic. There’s that book, Three Felonies a Day. If you have expired prescription medicine in your cabinet, you’re committing a felony. People who are very smart will just tell me, “Never talk to a cop. Never talk to an FBI agent.” I’m an upper-class White guy who’s literally never smoked marijuana once, and they’re telling me, “Don’t ever speak with the law.”
Isn’t something wrong there? Is the common intuition that we’re too legalistic correct?
GREENE: I think that we are too apt to submit political disputes to legal resolution. I think that for sure. What your friends are telling you about police officers is slightly different, insofar as one can have a deeply non-legalistic culture in which the correct advice is to not talk to police officers if those people are corrupt, if those people are abusive.
When I hear that advice — and I might be differently situated than you — that’s what people are saying is, someone might be out to trick you. And that might be a mistrust of state power, as you mentioned before. Maybe it’s a rational mistrust of state power, but I don’t know that that’s about legalism, which again, is a separate potential problem.
We tend to formulate our problems in legal terms, as if the right way to solve them is to decide how they are to be resolved by a court, or how they are to be resolved by some adjudicative official, as opposed to thinking about our problems in terms of just inherent in, again, pluralism, which has to be solved through politics, has to be solved through conversation.
COWEN: But we still have whatever is upstream of the American law, the steep historical and cultural background, so anything we do is going to be flavored by that. We’re not ever going to get to a system where the policemen are like the policemen in Germany, for instance, or that the courts are like the courts in Germany.
Given that cultural upstream, again, isn’t the intuition basically correct? Just be suspicious of the law. We should have fewer laws, rely less on the legal process, in essence, deregulate as many different things as we can. Why isn’t that the correct conclusion, rather than building in more rights?
Interesting throughout.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Is Germany really with the program? (NYT) I liked this sentence: ““The government has made some courageous decisions, but it can seem afraid of its own courage.”
2. New Yorker profile of Nakamura.
3. Did Yves Klein sell the very first NFT?
4. Jason Furman on “running labor markets hot” — don’t expect higher real wages! (WSJ), #Thegreatforgetting
5. Complete works of Voltaire now available in 205 volumes.
6. The neurodiverse, work from home, and cybersecurity (WSJ).
My Conversation with Chuck Klosterman
Excellent stuff, we had so much fun we kept on going for an extra half hour, as he decided to ask me a bunch of questions about economics and personal finance. Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the CWT summary:
Chuck joined Tyler to discuss the challenges of writing about recent history, the “slow cancellation of the future” that began in the aughts, how the internet widened cultural knowledge but removed its depth, why the context of Seinfeld was in some ways more important than its content, what Jurassic Park illustrates about public feelings around scientific progress in the ’90s, why the ’90s was the last era of physical mass subcultures, why it’s uncommon to be shocked by modern music, how his limited access to art when growing up made him a better critic, why Spin Magazine became irrelevant with the advent of online streaming, what made Grantland so special, what he learned from teaching in East Germany, the impact of politics on the legacies of Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, how sports often rewards obnoxious personalities, why Wilt Chamberlain is still underrated, how the self-awareness of the Portland Trail Blazers undermined them, how the design of the NFL makes sports rivalries nearly impossible, how pro-level compensation prevents sports gambling from corrupting players, why so many people are interested in e-sports, the unteachable element of writing, why he didn’t make a great editor on his school paper, what he’d say to a room filled with ex-lovers, the question he’d most like to ask his parents, his impressions of cryptocurrency, why he’s trying to focus on what he has in the current moment rather than think too much about future plans, the power of charisma, and more.
Whew! Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I see the world as follows. Every decade, to me, is super weird, but the 1980s and ’90s pretended they weren’t weird. The ’80s pretended to be good versus evil. The ’90s pretended that good won. But when crypto comes and persists, you have to drop all pretense that the age you’re living in isn’t totally weird.
You have internet crypto, and everyone admits, right now, everything’s weird. And that, to me, is the fundamental break with the 1990s because everyone pretended most things were normal and that Seinfeld was your dose of weird, right? Jason Alexander — that’s a very manageable weird.
KLOSTERMAN: Oh, absolutely.
COWEN: Some guy in an apartment in New York City cracking sarcastic jokes — like, whoop-de-do.
And:
KLOSTERMAN: …this guy, Mark Fisher, who’s dead now, had this idea about the slow cancellation of the future. I feel like that’s one of the most profound ideas that I’ve come across in the last 10 years of my life, and it seems so palpable that this is occurring.
An example I will often use is, if you take, say, 10 minutes from an obscure film in 1965 with no major actors, and then you take 10 minutes from an obscure film from 1980 where nobody became famous, and you show anyone these 10-minute clips, they will have no problem whatsoever figuring out which one came first. Even a little kid can look at a movie from 1965 and a movie from 1980 and instantly understand that one predates the other.
But if you do that with a film from 2005 and a film from 2020 — again, an obscure film where you don’t recognize the actors — you’re just looking at it aesthetically and trying to deduce which one came first and which one came second. It’s almost impossible.
This phenomenon just seems to almost be infiltrating every aspect of the culture…
And:
KLOSTERMAN: Before I did this podcast, I listened to your podcast with Žižek.
COWEN: Oh yeah, that was hilarious.
KLOSTERMAN: Are you friends with him? It sure seemed like it. And if you are, what is it like to be with him when he is not in a performative scenario?
Recommended. And again, here is Chuck’s new book The Nineties.
Sunday assorted links
1. The dating culture that is D.C.
2. I don’t usually trust such papers, and indeed I don’t trust this one, but this result is deserving of further investigation: “The current data suggest that both increased salience of reward/loss information and reduced discrimination between reward and loss feedback could be factors linking SES with the development of human capital and health outcomes.”
3. Biden administration opposes plan to strengthen WHO. Yet I am barely hearing a peep about this. The Biden people are also wanting to enforce Trump’s Phase I trade deal with China.
4. N.S. Lyons thinks Wokeness hasn’t peaked yet.
5. Nate Meyvis on how to talk better to think better.
6. Paul Krugman is coming very close to admitting a) “real estate bubble” was not the best formulation, and b) Kevin Erdmann was right.
7. More on Germany.
Thursday assorted links
1. Interferon treatments probably work against Covid-19. And NYT coverage. But a better system of clinical trials is needed.
2. “Taking your dog for walks twice a day for at least an hour in total could soon become the law in Germany.” And: “A spokeswoman for the agriculture ministry said it was very unlikely private dog owners would receive police visits to check whether they had taken their pooch for a walk.” And: “The French have the unfortunate distinction of being the European “champions” for abandoning pets that have become too cumbersome for their summer trips.”
3. Heckman curve update update.
5. Home field advantage seems to be gone in baseball, left with the crowds.
Communism still matters liberty still matters
Those who grew up in East Germany seem to have a harder time cottoning to the realities of capitalism:
We analyze the long-term effects of living under communism and its anticapitalist doctrine on households’ financial investment decisions and attitudes towards financial markets. Utilizing comprehensive German brokerage data and bank data, we show that, decades after Reunification, East Germans still invest significantly less in the stock market than West Germans. Consistent with communist friends-and-foes propaganda, East Germans are more likely to hold stocks of companies from communist countries (China, Russia, Vietnam) and of state-owned companies, and are unlikely to invest in American companies and the financial industry. Effects are stronger for individuals exposed to positive “emotional tagging,” e.g., those living in celebrated showcase cities. Effects reverse for individuals with negative experiences, e.g., environmental pollution, religious oppression, or lack of (Western) TV entertainment. Election years trigger further divergence of East and West Germans. We provide evidence of negative welfare consequences due to less diversified portfolios, higher-fee products, and lower risk-adjusted returns.
That is from a new NBER paper by Christine Laudenbach, Ulrike Malmendier, and Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi.
But if you are looking for a contrary point of view, consider this new paper by Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, and Ludger Woessmann:
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, World War II and the subsequent occupying forces affected East and West differently. Third, a selective fifth of the population fled from East to West Germany before the building of the Wall in 1961. In light of our findings, we propose a more cautious interpretation of the extensive literature on the enduring effects of communist systems on economic outcomes, political preferences, cultural traits, and gender roles
That said, I still believe that communism really matters, and durably so, even if the longer history matters all the more so. And now there is yet another paper on East Germany and political path dependence, by Luis R. Martinez, Jonas Jessen, and Guo Xu:
This paper studies costly political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, 40% of the designated Soviet occupation zone was initially captured by the western Allied Expeditionary Force. This occupation was short-lived: Soviet forces took over after less than two months and installed an authoritarian regime in what became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We exploit the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within the GDR to show that areas briefly under Allied occupation had higher incidence of protests during the only major episode of political unrest in the GDR before its demise in 1989 – the East German Uprising of 1953. These areas also exhibited lower regime support during the last free elections in 1946. We argue that even a “glimpse of freedom” can foster civilian opposition to dictatorship.
I take the core overall lesson to be that the eastern parts of Germany will experience significant problems for some time to come.
And speaking of communist persistence, why is it again that Eastern Europe is doing so well against Covid-19? Belarus is an extreme case, with hardly any restrictions on activity, and about 14,000 cases and 89 deaths. You might think that is a cover-up, but the region as a whole has been quite robust and thus it is unlikely to be a complete illusion. And no, it doesn’t seem to be a BCG effect.
Does communism mean there is less of a culture of consumption and thus people find it easier to just stay at home voluntarily? Or have all those weird, old paranoid communist pandemic ministries persisted and helped with the planning? Or what?
Double credit on this one to both Kevin Lewis and Samir Varma, neither less excellent in his conjunction with the other.
Saturday assorted links
1. Economist Hans Stoll has passed away.
2. Who are the workers most needing support and how can we get cash to them?
3. Recommended occupational licensing reforms. And Certificate of Need and nurse practitioner laws. And the case for relaxing pharmacy regulations.
4. Why did U.S. testing get so held up? (quite good)
5. Covid-19 forecasting site from The Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford.
6. How slim are restaurant margins?
7. Mercatus “Way Forward” suggestions.
8. On why the German death rate is lower.
9. New Haven asks for coronavirus housing help, Yale says no.
10. Are Italian deaths being undercounted? And it seems Spanish deaths are being undercounted (in Spanish).
11. Japan now admits the situation there is much worse than had been recognized.
12. The self-isolation culture that is royal Thai.
14. “History will not absolve Bolsonaro.”
15. Rhode Island police go after New Yorkers seeking refuge (Bloomberg).
German Federalism
NPR: “We have a culture here in Germany that is actually not supporting a centralized diagnostic system,” said Drosten, “so Germany does not have a public health laboratory that would restrict other labs from doing the tests. So we had an open market from the beginning.”
In other words, Germany’s equivalent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the Robert Koch Institute — makes recommendations but does not call the shots on testing for the entire country. Germany’s 16 federal states make their own decisions on coronavirus testing because each of them is responsible for their own health care systems.
If only America had a federal system we might have had earlier and faster testing.
Saturday assorted links
2. Phasing out squat toilets in Tokyo (a few years ago they were 40% of the total). And has Germany moved to a de facto UBI?
3. “‘Parasite’ Backers Gain $100 Million on Film Tackling Inequality.”
4. New Yorker covers Bryan Caplan on Open Borders.
5. Types of highway interchanges and their efficiency ratings.
6. Seeking to abolish the family? Crazy and and maybe evil too, but interesting.
What libertarianism has become and will become — State Capacity Libertarianism
Having tracked the libertarian “movement” for much of my life, I believe it is now pretty much hollowed out, at least in terms of flow. One branch split off into Ron Paul-ism and less savory alt right directions, and another, more establishment branch remains out there in force but not really commanding new adherents. For one thing, it doesn’t seem that old-style libertarianism can solve or even very well address a number of major problems, most significantly climate change. For another, smart people are on the internet, and the internet seems to encourage synthetic and eclectic views, at least among the smart and curious. Unlike the mass culture of the 1970s, it does not tend to breed “capital L Libertarianism.” On top of all that, the out-migration from narrowly libertarian views has been severe, most of all from educated women.
There is also the word “classical liberal,” but what is “classical” supposed to mean that is not question-begging? The classical liberalism of its time focused on 19th century problems — appropriate for the 19th century of course — but from WWII onwards it has been a very different ballgame.
Along the way, I believe the smart classical liberals and libertarians have, as if guided by an invisible hand, evolved into a view that I dub with the entirely non-sticky name of State Capacity Libertarianism. I define State Capacity Libertarianism in terms of a number of propositions:
1. Markets and capitalism are very powerful, give them their due.
2. Earlier in history, a strong state was necessary to back the formation of capitalism and also to protect individual rights (do read Koyama and Johnson on state capacity). Strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets. This includes keeping China at bay abroad and keeping elections free from foreign interference, as well as developing effective laws and regulations for intangible capital, intellectual property, and the new world of the internet. (If you’ve read my other works, you will know this is not a call for massive regulation of Big Tech.)
3. A strong state is distinct from a very large or tyrannical state. A good strong state should see the maintenance and extension of capitalism as one of its primary duties, in many cases its #1 duty.
4. Rapid increases in state capacity can be very dangerous (earlier Japan, Germany), but high levels of state capacity are not inherently tyrannical. Denmark should in fact have a smaller government, but it is still one of the freer and more secure places in the world, at least for Danish citizens albeit not for everybody.
5. Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity. Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality. I favor much more immigration, nonetheless I think our government needs clear standards for who cannot get in, who will be forced to leave, and a workable court system to back all that up and today we do not have that either.
Those problems require state capacity — albeit to boost markets — in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with. Furthermore, libertarianism is parasitic upon State Capacity Libertarianism to some degree. For instance, even if you favor education privatization, in the shorter run we still need to make the current system much better. That would even make privatization easier, if that is your goal.
6. I will cite again the philosophical framework of my book Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
7. The fundamental growth experience of recent decades has been the rise of capitalism, markets, and high living standards in East Asia, and State Capacity Libertarianism has no problem or embarrassment in endorsing those developments. It remains the case that such progress (or better) could have been made with more markets and less government. Still, state capacity had to grow in those countries and indeed it did. Public health improvements are another major success story of our time, and those have relied heavily on state capacity — let’s just admit it.
8. The major problem areas of our time have been Africa and South Asia. They are both lacking in markets and also in state capacity.
9. State Capacity Libertarians are more likely to have positive views of infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power (requires state support!), and space programs than are mainstream libertarians or modern Democrats. Modern Democrats often claim to favor those items, and sincerely in my view, but de facto they are very willing to sacrifice them for redistribution, egalitarian and fairness concerns, mood affiliation, and serving traditional Democratic interest groups. For instance, modern Democrats have run New York for some time now, and they’ve done a terrible job building and fixing things. Nor are Democrats doing much to boost nuclear power as a partial solution to climate change, if anything the contrary.
10. State Capacity Libertarianism has no problem endorsing higher quality government and governance, whereas traditional libertarianism is more likely to embrace or at least be wishy-washy toward small, corrupt regimes, due to some of the residual liberties they leave behind.
11. State Capacity Libertarianism is not non-interventionist in foreign policy, as it believes in strong alliances with other relatively free nations, when feasible. That said, the usual libertarian “problems of intervention because government makes a lot of mistakes” bar still should be applied to specific military actions. But the alliances can be hugely beneficial, as illustrated by much of 20th century foreign policy and today much of Asia — which still relies on Pax Americana.
It is interesting to contrast State Capacity Libertarianism to liberaltarianism, another offshoot of libertarianism. On most substantive issues, the liberaltarians might be very close to State Capacity Libertarians. But emphasis and focus really matter, and I would offer this (partial) list of differences:
a. The liberaltarian starts by assuring “the left” that they favor lots of government transfer programs. The State Capacity Libertarian recognizes that demands of mercy are never ending, that economic growth can benefit people more than transfers, and, within the governmental sphere, it is willing to emphasize an analytical, “cold-hearted” comparison between government discretionary spending and transfer spending. Discretionary spending might well win out at many margins.
b. The “polarizing Left” is explicitly opposed to a lot of capitalism, and de facto standing in opposition to state capacity, due to the polarization, which tends to thwart problem-solving. The polarizing Left is thus a bigger villain for State Capacity Libertarianism than it is for liberaltarianism. For the liberaltarians, temporary alliances with the polarizing Left are possible because both oppose Trump and other bad elements of the right wing. It is easy — maybe too easy — to market liberaltarianism to the Left as a critique and revision of libertarians and conservatives.
c. Liberaltarian Will Wilkinson made the mistake of expressing enthusiasm for Elizabeth Warren. It is hard to imagine a State Capacity Libertarian making this same mistake, since so much of Warren’s energy is directed toward tearing down American business. Ban fracking? Really? Send money to Russia, Saudi Arabia, lose American jobs, and make climate change worse, all at the same time? Nope.
d. State Capacity Libertarianism is more likely to make a mistake of say endorsing high-speed rail from LA to Sf (if indeed that is a mistake), and decrying the ability of U.S. governments to get such a thing done. “Which mistakes they are most likely to commit” is an underrated way of assessing political philosophies.
You will note the influence of Peter Thiel on State Capacity Libertarianism, though I have never heard him frame the issues in this way.
Furthermore, “which ideas survive well in internet debate” has been an important filter on the evolution of the doctrine. That point is under-discussed, for all sorts of issues, and it may get a blog post of its own.
Here is my earlier essay on the paradox of libertarianism, relevant for background.
Happy New Year everyone!
Extreme Aging
Japan now has over 70,000 people who are more than 100 years old.
That stunning fact comes from Extreme Economies, an interesting new book by Richard Davies. Davies looks at extreme economies around the world such as extreme failure (Darien, Kinshasa, Glasgow), extreme resilience (Aceh, Angola Prison, LA), extreme inequality (Santiago) and in the case of Japan (Akita), extreme aging.
Japan’s aging is unprecedented and is having effects throughout the economy and society:
In 1975 social security and healthcare spending commanded 22 percent of the country’s tax revenues; by 2017 the figure, driven up by elderly care and pensions, had risen to 55 percent. By the early 2020s the figure is set to hit 60 percent. To look at it in another way, every other public service in Japan — education, transport, infrastructure, defense, the environment, the arts–could rely on almost 80 percent of tax revenue in 1975, but the increase in elderly-related spending means that only 40 percent is left for other national public expenditures. In budgetary terms, ageing is eating Japan.
As a country, Japan is aging not just because it’s people are getting older but because it’s birth rate is well below replacement. This year there will be fewer than 900,000 births in all of Japan–a number not seen since 1874 when Japan’s total population was much smaller. Overall, Japan’s population is declining.
Population decline may have some good effects but the combination of fewer young people and more elderly people is straining Japanese culture along with its finances. The young naturally resent the increasing burden put on them for supporting the elderly. As with all Ponzi schemes, pay-as-you-go social security schemes come under stress when the population is no longer growing.
…over the next 30 years or so, many countries’ pension systems will require young workers to fund a system that everyone knows will be far less generous by 2040. It is hardly a way to generate confidence in public policy.
And those 70,000 centenarians? Almost 90 percent are women so an aging society is a gender unbalanced society meaning old people lose caregivers or at least someone to share a household with.
Davies is interested in Japan as an example of where many countries are going,
Southern Europe, in particular, is following fast with Italy, Spain and Portugal already experiencing population decline. Germany will start to shrink in 2022, Korea in the early 2030s. Akita, Japan’s cutting edge of ageing economics,…offers a valuable window on the future.
Sunday assorted links
2. Beatles data from Spotify (“Here Comes the Sun” is the most popular song, and Abbey Road the most popular album, both by considerable margins). And how Strawberry Fields was made.
3. Does the United States or China have more bargaining power? “Beijing also failed in the demand it most wanted – for the US to relax the restrictions and bans imposed on Chinese technology, such as is blacklisting of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.” While I don’t agree with their economic analysis of the trade deficit, the above-linked piece is a very useful corrective to most of what you read from the Anglo press on the trade deal. I just don’t get Scott Sumner’s unwillingness — expressed here — to frame the trade deal in national security terms. That changes everything, and it is obviously true.
4. David Gerrold tech predictions from 1999.
5. The culture that is a German Santa shortage: “In the past, she says, the Santas under her watch didn’t ask for much. “But now, supply and demand regulate the market, and that’s a very dangerous development,” she says. “One agency has chosen to keep prices at 45 euros per Santa visit, but I’ve had to go up to 66. Others are asking for up to 120 euros.””