Results for “YouTube” 1354 found
My pick for the best movie of the year, in which I share a bill with Kevin Spacey
Tyler Cowen, economist and author of Marginal Revolutions
May December
I found May December to be the most interesting movie of the year. It examines deep questions about who envies whom, what a meaningful life consists of, what about possession is satisfying, art versus artifice, the nature of celebrity, and how hard it is to live without worrying about what other people think. The stars are Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and the director is Todd Haynes. The plotline (these are not spoilers) is that a grown woman had sex with a male seventh-grader, was sent to prison, and later ends up marrying him and having his children. Natalie Portman plays the role of a well-known actress who comes by to learn their story, so that she may better play the woman in a movie. The biggest cinematic influence is perhaps Bergman’s Persona, as we increasingly see different ways in which the two women are parallel or “twinned” in their stories. The movie poster reflects this. The highlight is when Natalie Portman explains to a group of teenagers what it is like to do a sex scene in a movie. In an era where Hollywood is supposed to be stale, this one resets the clock.
From The Spectator, there are many other (lesser) picks as well.
Micah Siegel interviews me about animal welfare and policy
Mark Skousen reviews *GOAT*
An excellent review, here is one excerpt:
Oddly enough he leaves out several economists who many consider possible GOATs: From the British school, David Ricardo (Milton Friedman’s favorite); from the Monetarists, Irving Fisher (whom James Tobin ranked “the greatest economist America has produced”); from the Austrians, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard (which the Mises Institute would consider leaving out unforgiveable); from the Institutionalists, Thorstein Veblen (who Max Lerner called “the most creative American social thought has produced”) and Max Weber (the “one man” that Frank Knight admired); and from the Marxists, Karl Marx (which they would consider his omission a cardinal sin). Cowen tells me he may write a short monograph on Marx (email dated November 22, 2023).
He also excluded the big three of the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s: Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras.
Do read the whole thing, and note I may write more on the Marginal Revolution as well, the revolution that is not the blog!
And here is Mark’s daughter, doing a skating back flip on ice.
Why is the quality of recorded classical music so rising? (from my email)
…hypotheses as to why we are blessed with the avalanche of fine new young musicians:
1. (I feel the evidence for this one is conclusive) Technology (e.g. YouTube) allows young musicians anywhere in the world to see what the world standard is. If you see someone performing at skill level X, which years ago you would have dismissed as out of reach, you know you, too, may be able to do it. The bar has been raised. Members of the LA Phil famously declared Boulez’s music “unplayable” a few decades back. Now it is standard repertoire. The global standard is now local, and musicians rise to the challenge.
2. (I feel the evidence for this one is less conclusive, but still strong.) The increasing pervasiveness of pedagogy. Decades ago, one assumed that the best teacher of violin playing (e.g.) was a great violinist. This is like assuming the best coach of running backs is a great running back. Over time, while the “exposure to a great player” tradition is still strong, a parallel tradition of “exposure to a great teacher” has emerged. These teachers understand biomechanics, clarity of terms in instruction, technical developments, etc. See e.g. Paul Rolland (RIP), another one of the Hungarian exiles, whose string teaching method is superb but who personally was not a major performer.
From anonymous, someone in the world of classical music…
Number Go Up
Number Go Up, Zeke Faux’s account of the wildest excesses of the crypto boom (2020-2022), is highly entertaining from page one:
“I am not going to lie,” Sam Bankman-Fried told me.
This was a lie.
Faux describes the scene on a yacht off the Bahamas owned or rented by Brock Pierce, the child actor who starred in the Mighty Ducks and who co-founded Tether, a stablecoin that Faux is on the hunt to uncover its origins and backing:
A crypto venture capital fund manager–wearing a mock souvenir T-shirt from convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island–joked about a scam that another yacht guest was running. A crypto public relations man offered what he called “Colombian marching powder” to a young woman. A small group of people dancing told me that they were philosophy students who’d come to the Bahamas to intern for FTX’s Bankman-Fried.
On Razzlekhan, the rapper, entrepreneur, and former World Bank economist-intern, who with her husband managed to pull off the largest heist in world history, some US $4.5 billion! (well, technically they stole ~$69 million worth of bitcoin in 2016 but they couldn’t sell it very easily and by the time they were caught in 2022 it was worth $4.5 billion):
As a performer, Razzlekhan was both hypersexual and aggressively unappealing. She alternated jokes about diarrhea and sex with boasts about her edgy business practices. Her signature move, if you can call it that, was to throw up her hand with her fingers split into a “V” stick out her tongue, and say “Razzle Dazzle!” Then she would make a loud phlegmy cough.
Ironically, the US government now holds the recovered coin, making it one of the largest holders of bitcoin in the world.
On the collapse of Three Arrows
Court documents showed that the fund’s holdings included a portfolio of NFTs. Among them were a Bored Ape with a vaguely racist “sushi chef headband” and a pixelated image of a cartoon penis, called a CryptoDickButt, which, incredibly, was worth about $1,000 at the time.
It’s not all fun and games. Faux also travels to the Philippines to witness the bust of Axie Infinity game miners and to Cambodia to investigate what amounts to slave labor camps run by Chinese gangsters.
One doesn’t get a favorable impression of crypto from Number Go Up but in fact one doesn’t learn much about crypto at all. Indeed, Faux’s book isn’t really about crypto it’s about the rise and collapse of a bubble and the consequent madness of crowds. It’s an old and familiar story. Not that different from the tulip mania (see the picture below), the dot-com boom, or the house flippers and mortgage boom of 2006-2008 (see the Big Short for similar stories of excess). The madness of crowds is fascinating, fun, and good for a morality tale but it doesn’t really tell us much about the underling asset. Tulips never amounted to much, the internet did great, house prices are back up. Crypto? Jury is still out. Thus, I was entertained by Number Go Up, but didn’t learn much.
Still, I agree with Faux on this, don’t put your money in Tether.
Wikipedia: Allegory of the Tulip Mania. The goddess of flowers is riding along with three drinking and money weighing men and two women on a car. Weavers from Haarlem have thrown away their equipment and are following the car. The destiny of the car is shown in the background: it will disappear in the sea.
Sunday assorted links
1. Polysee: Irish YouTube videos about YIMBY, aesthetics, and economics.
2. Germany political map of the day.
3. Thwarted Wisconsin DEI markets in everything.
4. The EU AI regulatory statement (on first glance not as bad as many had expected?).
5. The NBA Play-In was in fact a big success. Is the implication that other sports do not experiment enough with producing more fame/suspense at various margins? Basketball games are simply a much better product when the players are trying their best.
6. Your grandfather’s ACLU is back…for one tweet at least.
7. New GiveDirectly results on lump sum transfers, from Kenya.
8. Ideas matter.
9. The Chinese are using water cannons at sea, against the Philippines.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The South Korean woman who adopted her best friend and thus created a family.
2. Who is the literary critic GOAT?
3. Are wealthier people returning to NYC or at least increasing in number?
4. Claims about the declining donor price of Ivy League admission.
5. What predicts risk-taking in research?
6. How many Koreans shoot basketball free throws, and NYT explanation.
Denny Laine, RIP
Overcoming Baumol
One way to overcome the Baumol effect is to replace labor with capital. AI and robots are making that possible. Here’s a clip of the Carmelite Monks of Wyoming who are building a monastery in the Gothic style using CNC machines:
CNC machines and robots have unlocked the ability to relatively quickly carve the intense details of a Gothic church. Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.
Bring back the beauty!
The single best introduction to LLMs?
From Andrej Karpathy of Open AI. What else would you recommend to learn more about LLMs?
Monday assorted links
1. Black athletes discuss Thomas Sowell.
2. GPT4V watches an NBA game (and roots for the Clippers).
3. No economic growth in South Africa for the last fifteen years.
4. Rasheed Griffith interviews the guy designated to lead the dollarization of Argentina.
5. Katherine Boyle speech on American dynamism.
6. Hart and Moore on property rights and the theory of the firm (1990, still relevant). And Aghion and Tirole.
The Indian Challenge to Blockchains: Digital Public Goods
In my post, Blockchains and the Opportunity of the Commons, I explored the potential of blockchains to create new commons:
Blockchains and tokenization are a way to incentivize the creation of a commons. A commons is an unowned place, platform, or protocol that helps people to meet, communicate and transact. Commons underlying modern life include TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, GPS and the English language. We don’t see these commons clearly because they are free, ubiquitous and, like air, taken for granted. What we do see are platforms like Airbnb, Uber and the NYSE and places to meet and communicate like OkCupid, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. What blockchain and tokenization offer is the possibility of creating commons to replace all of these services and much more.
For the most part, the potential has not been realized. But the core idea of substituting a protocol for a firm has been taken in a different direction in India. Instead of blockchains, India has been experimenting with digital public goods. A digital public good is open source software with open data and open standards–available for use or even modification and adaption by anyone. The blockchain community, for example, has long aspired to develop a blockchain-based Uber, connecting drivers and riders without a corporate intermediary. India has achieved this through digital public goods instead.
Namma Yatri is an open-source, open-data Uber-like protocol with 100% of the commission flowing directly from rider to driver. Namma Yatri is built on the Beckn Protocol, a product of the Beckn Foundation which is backed by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani (Tyler and I had the opportunity to talk with many people behind the project including Nandan on a recent trip to India). Namma Yatri has booked over 15 million trips in just one year of operation, mostly in one city, Bangalore. I expect it will expand rapidly.
Namma Yatri is only one example of a digital public good in the India Stack, a collection that includes identity (Aadhaar), payments (UPI) and digital data sharing (e.g. digital lockers). Since its launch in 2008, for example, India’s Aadhaar system has created a digital identity for over 1.2 billion people allowing them to open some 650 million bank accounts. This has enhanced financial inclusion and facilitated direct government payments of pensions and rations, reducing corruption. Likewise, the UPI system built modern payment rails which are then leveraged by banks and firms such as Google Pay and WhatsApp. The resulting payments system does some 10 billion transactions a month and is one of the fastest and lowest cost in the world.
Challenges remain. The development of digital public goods relies on funding from non-profits, governments, and private consortiums, raising questions about long-term sustainability. These goods need regular maintenance and updates, and some require backend support. Namma Yatri began as a completely free app for drivers and users but if there is a problem who do you call? To support the back-end office, and to pay for updated inputs (such as maps) the service has started to use a subscription fee. Nothing wrong with that but it’s a reminder that firms are not so easily dispensed with. Privacy is another concern. While blockchains offer privacy at the technology layer, privacy for digital public goods depend on legal and normative frameworks. For instance, India’s Aadhaar system is legally restricted from police use, a smart balance that needs to be maintained in changing times.
Despite these challenges, there is no denying that India has built digital public goods at scale in a way that demonstrates an alternative pathway for digital infrastructure and a challenge to blockchains.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Teacher-driven changes in ideas during the Scientific Revolution at Oxford and Cambridge (Julius Koschnick of LSE is on the job market).
2. ChatGPT grey markets in everything.
3. Kiwi family goes to Walmart for the first time (video).
4. Zero-sum thinking and political divides.
5. The course of Brazil’s trade surplus.
6. Why are Canadian remote workers right across the border paid less?
7. Ross on religion (NYT).
Zoning Deregulation Increases Affordable Housing
Geetika Nagpal and Sahil Gandhi study zoning deregulation in Mumbai, India. As I pointed out in my video, Skyscrapers and Slums: What’s Driving Mumbai’s Housing Crisis?, Mumbai has very restrictive floor area ratio regulations (also called Floor Space Index, FSI, regulations, see the video for an explanation) which means taller buildings require more unused land. In 2018, however, FAR was liberalized for some streets:
Mumbai’s stringent FAR limits, which are much lower than those of comparable megacities, are often criticized for causing housing unaffordability (Bertaud, 2004). Despite the criticism, establishing a causal effect has been challenging because of a lack of changes in FAR regulations. The relaxation in 2018 linked a parcel’s FAR to the width of its bordering road, providing incremental FAR relaxation for parcels on roads wider than 12 meters. Parcels on narrower roads remained ineligible for the relaxation. Our reduced-form specification uses a DID design to compare developments built between 2014 and 2022 on wider roads with FAR relaxation with those on narrower roads that remained ineligible.
…The FAR relaxation results in a significant supply response, driven by less expensive, smaller housing units. Developers fully utilize the FAR relaxation, increasing the average
number of apartments in each treated multifamily development by 28% relative to the control.…We develop a structural model of housing supply and demand that incorporates the provision of amenity floorspace and shows that average home buyer incomes are 3.18% lower post-relaxation.
GO YIMBY!
Geetika Nagpal is on the market from Brown.
Should I keep an eye on Spain? (from my email)
Keep an eye on Spain. What is happening politically is very serious and the tension is increasing.
Fernando Savater: Spain is formally a democracy, sure, but it is ceasing at a forced march from being a rule of law state.
https://theobjective.com/elsubjetivo/opinion/2023-11-05/resignados-sumisos-luchar-sanchez/
Felix de Azúa: The reactionary left will face the coup right with a predictable result: economic ruin and institutional chaos.
https://theobjective.com/elsubjetivo/opinion/2023-11-11/irse-preparando-sanchez/
…Felipe González is very worried, as well.
That is all from Mario Abbagliati.