Results for “brexit” 205 found
Saturday assorted links
1. Greenstone and Nath on cost-effective carbon abatement.
2. William Bolcom remembers Boulez.
3. Robin Hanson on pandemic spending and prevention; see also my comment #2 in the list.
4. Can the British turn moon dust into oxygen?
5. NHS to trial blood test to detect more than 50 forms of cancer. You know the scientific resurgence of the British (or should I say the English?) is a remarkable and much underreported story. Start with the Anglosphere and mix in a few top universities and the revenue-rich creative cluster of southeast England… There is much we can learn from this episode, and it is more important than say continuing to debate Brexit.
6. The Novavax vaccine. Nita Patel (guess where she is from? Try for the state) gets special praise and “Her all-female crew is an essential part of Novavax’s lab team.”
The first global election?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the closing bit:
What kind of bargain is it for the country for the U.S. election to be the object of such global interest? We Americans may be flattered by the attention, but it is not clear that it is such a good thing. For one thing, it gives foreigners a greater incentive to try to manipulate U.S. elections.
Another possible problem is that political coalitions will, over time, be defined globally rather than nationally and locally. Is your presidential candidate attracting support from the wrong factions in France, Germany or South Sudan? On one hand that could be useful information, but it could also prove misleading. Foreigners support U.S. presidential candidates for their own reasons, and it could be distorting to have so many outside parties involved. That’s what happened in the Brexit debates, in which a pro-Brexit position was (and remains) all too quickly identified with populism, anti-globalization and support for Trump. The Brexit debate might have been more sane if it had been more local.
What if, come the next U.S. presidential election, most of the social media debate is among non-Americans? What if much of the world ends up with a common, one-dimensional political spectrum, rather than each country having its own (mostly) independent politics? We may be about to find out.
I’ll say it again: American soft power is rising, not falling.
Which country has had the best response to the coronavirus?
I pick the United Kingdom, even though their public health response has been generally poor. Why? Their researchers have discovered the single-best mortality-reducing treatment, namely dexamethasone (the cheap steroid), and the Oxford vaccine is arguably the furthest along. In a world where ideas are global public goods, research matters more than the quality of your testing regime!
And the very recent results on interferon beta — still unconfirmed I should add — come from…the UK.
At the very least, the UK is a clear first in per capita terms. Here are the closing two paragraphs:
It is fine and even correct to lecture the British (and the Americans) for their poorly conceived messaging and public health measures. But it is interesting how few people lecture the Australians or the South Koreans for not having a better biomedical research establishment. It is yet another sign of how societies tend to undervalue innovation — which makes the U.K.’s contribution all the more important.
Critics of Brexit like to say that it will leave the U.K. as a small country of minor import. Maybe so. In the meantime, the Brits are on track to save the world.
Here is my full Bloomberg column on that topic. And if you wish to go a wee bit Straussian on this one, isn’t it better if the poor performers on public health measures — if there are going to be some — are (sometimes) the countries with the best and most dynamic biomedical establishments? Otherwise all the panic and resultant scurry amounts to nothing. When Mexico has a poor public health response to Covid-19, the world doesn’t get that much back in return. In this regard, I suspect that biomedical innovation in the United States is more sensitive to internal poor performance on Covid-19 than is the case for Oxford.
I’m so American, I can’t even tell if this British speech is parody
Here is the story, the speech appears in a box in the corner:
A Brexiteer Tory MP has urged the government to let his dogs keep their freedom of movement rights after Britain leaves the EU.
Bob Stewart, the MP for Beckenham, said his “French-speaking” hounds crossed the Channel regularly on their EU “pet passports”.
Millions of Britons are set to lose the ability to live and work freely on the continent at the end of the year as a result of the UK’s departure from the bloc.
I am an advocate of canine cosmopolitanism, rather than canine nationalism. Is everyone?
Speaking in French, Mr Gove added: “We always defend the rights of dogs.”
Is that true? Under the previous pre-Brexit regime, a pet passport was sufficient. But now:
Under the worst case-scenario of a no-deal Brexit, taking a pet to the EU will likely require a four-month advanced process that includes microchipping, a rabies vaccination, a blood test and a three-month wait to travel after the blood test.
Developing…
Cultural biases in equity analysis
Vesa Pursiainen covers this topic in a new paper. Most concretely:
My estimates suggest that a Norwegian analyst is 8.4 %-points more likely to assign a buy rating to a Danish firm than an Austrian analyst. Similarly, a Norwegian analyst is 6.7 %-points more likely to assign a buy-recommendation to a British firm than a French analyst.
And here is the abstract:
A more positive cultural trust bias by an equity analyst’s country of origin toward a firm’s headquarter country is associated with significantly more positive stock recommendations, controlling for analyst-month and firm-month fixed effects. The cultural bias effect is stronger for eponymous firms whose names mention their home country. The bias effect varies over time, increasing with negative sentiment. I find evidence of a negative North-South bias emerging during the European debt crisis, a UK-Europe divergence amid Brexit, and a Franco-British bias during the Iraq war. The share price reaction to buy recommendations by more positively biased analysts is weaker.
And from the conclusion:
This paper provides evidence that cultural biases have a significant effect on equity analysts’ stock recommendations. I further find that there is substantial time variation in the effect of such biases, and that the strength of the bias effect is highly correlated with the general sentiment. In other words, bad economic times, when the level of pessimism is high and con- sumer confidence low, are also the times when cultural biases have the largest effect. These findings are all the more significant since equity analysts are financial market professionals that are often supposed to be less susceptible to behavioral biases than non-professionals. To the extent that these results generalize to the rest of the population, they suggest a link between times of economic hardship and increased cultural biases. This might contribute to the rise of nationalism and populism during economic downturns.
My finding that the salience of the firm’s nationality affects the strength of analysts’ cultural biases is also novel in the finance literature. While there is a vast literature on priming effects in psychology literature and, to a lesser extent, in experimental economics, my results suggest that there might be interesting new applications in financial markets and in non-experimental settings that have not been fully explored.
Finally, I find evidence that significant political events can introduce new cultural biases that are strong enough to affect stock recommendations. The much-discussed North-South divide in Europe and the stereotypes of lazy Mediterraneans invoked during the European debt crisis created a clearly visible negative bias in the stock recommendations of North European analysts on South European companies. Similarly, the diplomatic rifts between the UK and the rest of Europe amid the Brexit process, as well as between France and the UK over the Iraq war can be seen in analyst stock recommendations.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Samir Varma.
My Conversation with Tim Harford
Here is the transcript and audio, here is part of the summary:
Tim joined Tyler to discuss the role of popular economics in a politicized world, the puzzling polarization behind Brexit, why good feedback is necessary (and rare), the limits of fact-checking, the “tremendously British” encouragement he received from Prince Charles, playing poker with Steve Levitt, messiness in music, the underrated aspect of formal debate, whether introverts are better at public speaking, the three things he can’t live without, and more.
Here is one bit near the opening:
COWEN: These are all easy questions. Let’s think about public speaking, which you’ve done quite a bit of. On average, do you think extroverts or introverts are better public speakers?
HARFORD: I am an introvert. I’ve never seen any research into this, so it should be something that one could test empirically. But as an introvert, I love public speaking because I like being alone, and you’re never more alone than when you’re on the stage. No one is going to bother you when you’re up there. I find it a great way to interact with people because they don’t talk back.
COWEN: What other non-obvious traits do you think predict being good at public speaking?
HARFORD: Hmmm. You need to be willing to rehearse and also willing to improvise and make stuff up as you go along. And I think it’s hard for somebody to be willing to do both. I think the people who like to rehearse end up rehearsing too much and being too stiff and not being willing to adapt to circumstances, whereas the people who are happy to improvise don’t rehearse enough, and so their comments are ill formed and ill considered. You need that capacity to do both.
And another segment:
HARFORD: …Brian Eno actually asked me a slightly different question, which I found interesting, which was, “If you were transported back in time to the year 700, what piece of technology would you take — or knowledge or whatever — what would you take with you from the present day that would lead people to think that you were useful, but would also not cause you to be burned as a witch?”
COWEN: A hat, perhaps.
HARFORD: A hat?
COWEN: If it’s the British Isles.
HARFORD: Well, a hat is useful. I suggested the Langstroth beehive. The Langstroth beehive was invented in about 1850. It’s an enormously important technology in the domestication of bees. It’s a vast improvement on pre-Langstroth beehives, vast improvement on medieval beehives. Yet, it’s fairly straightforward to make and to explain to people how it works and why it works. I think people would appreciate it, and everybody likes honey, and people have valued bees for a long time. So that would have been my answer.
And:
COWEN: I’ve read all of your books. I’ve read close to all of your columns, maybe all of them in fact, and I’m going to ask you a question I also asked Reid Hoffman. You know the truths of economics, plenty of empirical papers. Why aren’t you weirder? I’ve read things by you that I disagreed with, but I’ve never once read anything by you that I thought was outrageous. Why aren’t you weirder?
The conversation has many fine segments, definitely recommended, Tim was in top form. I very much enjoyed our “Brexit debate” as well, too long to reproduce here, but I made what I thought was the best case for Brexit possible and Tim responded.
10% *more* democracy?
John G. Matsusaka, in his new Princeton University Press book Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Populist Challenge, calls for the introduction of referenda at the national level in the United States. For instance he favors advisory referendums called by Congress, advisory referendums called by petition, advisory referendums required for specific issues, binding referendums for required issues, or called by petition, and constitutional amendments, proposed by petition (but not settled by a referendum itself). The United States in fact have never had a national referendum.
But do referenda defuse populist sentiment, or stoke it? Why is it that populism might be bad but referenda good? Don’t referenda give in to populism in some manner? Whether or not you favored Brexit as an outcome, was the process so smooth and wonderful? How much better could it have been? (the author does discuss this). Won’t money matter in politics more, and in the bad sense? Exactly which policy area would see superior concrete results through the use of national referenda? Won’t it mean we get madder at each other?
Switzerland aside, I am not convinced by the call for more referenda, but I am happy to see such fundamental questions raised anew.
The author lives in California.
My chat with Brendan Fitzgerald Wallace
He interviewed me, here is his description: “My conversation with economist, author & podcaster Tyler Cowen covering everything from: 1) Buying Land on Mars (for real) 2) Privatizing National Parks 3) Setting up aerial highways in the sky for drone delivery 4) Buying Greenland 5) London post Brexit 6) Universal Basic Income 7) Why Los Angeles is “probably the best city in North America” 8) How real estate can combat social isolation & loneliness 9) Cyber attacks on real estate assets and national security implications. 10) The impacts, positive and negative of Climate Change, on real estate in different geographies. 11) Other esoteric stuff…..”.
Here is the conversation, held in Marina del Rey at a Fifth Wall event.
Not quite the end of the global economic order
Rather it is kludgy free trade we are getting these days, as I argue in my latest Bloomberg column. Here are a few scattered excerpts:
When it comes to China, the WTO structures were already being jerry-rigged. If anything, you could say that the point of the new trade regime is to make the jerry-rigging more transparent.
In fact, it is hard to see how trade relations with China could be anything but jerry-rigged. The Chinese economy is simply too different, and far more statist, than those of the economically developed Western nations or Japan. And yet China is now the world’s No. 2 economy and largest exporter.
And:
The more important technology becomes to the U.S. and global economies, the more issues such as data storage and access will move to the forefront. Can the Chinese government demand that a technology company hand over user data? On whose servers do the data need to be stored? Can national storage be treated as a prerequisite for market entry? Again, the right answers cannot help but be complicated.
Most generally:
It is well-known in economics that exporting services is much more difficult than exporting resources or manufactured goods. It then follows that trade law for services will be messier and kludgier as well. Trade arrangements for services may feel ugly and excessively bureaucratic, but the underlying reality is that the principles of free trade are being extended, not repudiated.
And:
At a larger scale, what to think of the first phase of the U.S.-China trade agreement? It is still difficult to divine the entire agreement, or how much of it will be announced publicly. The real core of the deal may be an impossible demand on the Chinese to buy many additional billions of dollars of goods from the U.S., with the very impossibility of that demand serving as a cudgel for enforcing Chinese compliance with the less tangible, harder-to-measure aspects of trade relations.
To close:
In short, this new era of international trade certainly looks messier. But maybe that’s because the resources of simplicity have been all but exhausted. Free trade isn’t yet dead. It’s just not quite as free as it used to be.
Recommended.
Boris Johnson sentences to ponder
He has done what no other conservative leader in the West has done: He has co-opted and thereby neutered the far right. The reactionary Brexit Party has all but collapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immigration fervor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the economic and social center under Johnson’s leadership. And there is a strategy to this. What Cummings and Johnson believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for liberal progress, has, through its overreach and hubris, actually become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Continent. By forcing many very different countries into one increasingly powerful Eurocratic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nationalist reaction. From Germany and France to Hungary and Poland, the hardest right is gaining. Getting out of the E.U. is, Johnson and Cummings argue, a way to counter and disarm this nationalism and to transform it into a more benign patriotism. Only the Johnson Tories have grasped this, and the Johnson strategy is one every other major democracy should examine.
Here is more by Andrew Sullivan, interesting throughout.
A simple word in defense of David Cameron
I remain a supporter of Remain, for reasons I will not recap here, but I am also a realist and I recognize that a commitment to the European Union requires a substantial commitment from the population, more than a mere fifty percent and in the United Kingdom we do not see that close to that. You probably know that the Tories seem to have won a smashing victory in today’s election, and by campaigning on Brexit as their main issue. And you can’t just blame Corbyn — his ascendancy and leadership were endogenous to the broader process, and getting rid of him to reverse Brexit it turned out was not the priority.
So do you know who looks much better in retrospect? Yes, David Cameron. After the initial referendum I heard from the usual elites the notion that Cameron committed some kind of inexplicable, aberrant error by allowing the referendum in the first place. That notion is much harder to entertain after today. Even if you are pro-Remain, we should now see that either the referendum, or something like it, was indeed a necessary step in British politics. Cameron himself saw this, and thought that a later referendum, run by an EU-hostile Tory government, could in fact go much worse than what he chanced. So it seems with hindsight that Cameron was pretty prescient, even if he did not get what he wanted.
Martin Gurri on the current Age of Revolt
The question, for me, is whether these repeated crises of authority at the national level represent a systemic failure. After all, the disorders of 2019 are the latest installment in a familiar tale. Governments long ago yielded control of the information sphere to the public, and the political landscape, ever since, has been in a state of constant perturbation. From the euphoria and subsequent horrors of the Arab Spring in 2011, through the improbable electoral victories of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016, to last year’s violence by the Yellow Vests of France, we ought to have learned, by this late hour, to anticipate instability and uncertainty. We should expect to be surprised…
This would be a good time to bring up the pessimistic hypothesis. It holds that the loss of control over information must be fatal to modern government as a system: the universal spread of revolt can be explained as a failure cascade, driving that system inexorably toward disorganization and reconfiguration. Failure cascades can be thought of as negative virality. A local breakdown leads to the progressive loss of higher functions, until the system falls apart. This, in brief, is why airplanes crash and bridges collapse.
For systems that are dynamic and complex, like human societies, outcomes are a lot more mysterious. A failure cascade of revolts (the hypothesis) will knock the institutions of modern government ever further from equilibrium, until the entire structure topples into what Alicia Juarrero calls “phase change”: a “qualitative reconfiguration of the constraints” that gave the failed system its peculiar character. In plain language, the old regime is overthrown – but at this stage randomness takes charge, and what emerges on the far side is, in principle, impossible to predict. I can imagine a twenty-first century Congress of Vienna of the elites, in which Chinese methods of information control are adopted globally, and harsh punishment is meted out, for the best of reasons, to those who speak out of turn. But I can also envision a savage and chaotic Time of Troubles, caused by a public whose expectations have grown impossibly utopian. The way Juarrero tells it, “[T]here is no guarantee that any complex system will reorganize.”
Do read the whole thing.
Not a single child born in the U.K. in 2016 was named Nigel
When he heard that no babies born in Britain in 2016 were named Nigel, Nigel Smith began to fret that the people with whom he shared a first name were a “dying breed.”
“I thought that’s a bit of a worry, really, because most of us are over a certain age,” Smith told As It Happens host Carol Off.
Instead of going into mourning, however, he decided to have some fun with it. He owns the Fleece Inn, near Worcestershire, so he organized “Nigel Night” at the pub.
“We’re going to die out soon, so it’s important to sort of celebrate our Nigel-ness before we all pop off the planet.”
Smith says 434 Nigels — including himself — joined in the festivities on Saturday to enjoy some music, food and celebrating their mutual “Nigel-ness.”
It’s believed to be the biggest gathering of Nigels in the world — though it’s unclear who’s keeping track of this unusual statistic…
All attending Nigels, ranging in age from seven months to 80 years old, were verified with an ID check, and handed a badge with their name on it. Other attendees were issued badges that read “Not Nigel” on them.
According to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, no boys born in 2016 were named Nigel. The name enjoyed a slight uptick with 11 new Nigels in 2017, and eight in 2018.
That number pales in comparison to the most popular name, Oliver, which saw 5,390 new additions in 2018. Other top boys’ names over the last decade included George, Harry, Noah and Jack.
And:
Smith didn’t rule out the possibility that Farage’s role in the 2016 Brexit referendum may have even played a part in the dearth of newborn Nigels that year.
“Despite the man, we are fighting back.”
Here is the link, via Michelle Dawson.
Boris Johnson’s suspension of Parliament
The betting markets have stayed in the 48-55 range for Brexit by year’s end, even after the suspension announcement. That to me does not sound like “hard Brexit hell or high water.”
I would sooner think that Boris Johnson wishes to see through a relabeled version of the Teresa May deal, perhaps with an extra concession from the EU tacked on. His dramatic precommitment raises the costs to the Tories of not supporting such a deal, and it also may induce slight additional EU concessions. The narrower time window forces the recalcitrants who would not sign the May deal to get their act together and fall into line, more or less now.
Uncertainty is high, but the smart money says the Parliamentary suspension is more of a stage play, and a move toward an actual deal, than a leap to authoritarian government.
That said, I still do not like either Brexit or the suspension.
Tuesday assorted links
2. Pro-Brexit views are pulling more British voters into conservative views on redistribution.
4. “Our counterfactual analysis suggests that a persistent increase in average global temperature by 0.04°C per year, in the absence of mitigation policies, reduces world real GDP per capita by 7.22 percent by 2100. On the other hand, abiding by the Paris Agreement, thereby limiting the temperature increase to 0.01°C per annum, reduces the loss substantially to 1.07 percent. These effects vary significantly across countries.” Link here.