Results for “coup” 640 found
Ireland fact of the day
It appears that, in 2020, Ireland overtook South Africa as having the latest marrying couples worldwide.
The average age for a groom is 37.8 and for a bride is 35.7, for opposite-sex couples. This is the fairer comparison because same-sex marriages obviously aren’t allowed everywhere and are less relevant to reproduction.
37.8!
If you consider first-time marriages only, the average age of grooms marrying for the first time was 35.7 years and for brides the average age was 34.2 years. By comparison, for first-time marriages the United States is 30.5 for males and 28.6 for females.
That is from Sam Enright, with an assist from Fergus McCullough.
Saturday assorted links
1. More on the rise and fall of mobile home manufacturing.
3. “Sun-drenched Texas — not exactly known for its bleeding-heart liberals — has nearly triple the solar capacity this summer than it had last summer.” Link here.
4. Billionaire wealth as a percentage of gdp, across countries.
Those new Chinese service sector pandemic jobs
Xie Yuke has attended over 40 weddings in the past two years and is now making a living from it.
The 22-year-old has flown more than 140,000 kilometers and traveled around China working as a professional bridesmaid.
It’s a fast-growing industry in China and is “expected to grow by 25% to 30% a year,” Cao Zhonghua, an expert at the Chinese Traditional Culture Promotion Council, told state broadcaster CCTV Wednesday.
COVID-19 travel restrictions have made it hard to find friends able to travel to weddings, while some couples complain they can’t find friends that are up to the standard.
A bridesmaid needs to be unmarried, Xie told Sixth Tone on Monday, and it’s important not to be taller than the bride. For aspiring professionals, 155 cm-173 cm is a good height, she said.
Here is the full story, via Britta.
Rubin and Koyama on the Industrial Revolution
From Dylan Matthews:
The big question is what drove this transformation. Historians, economists, and anthropologists have proposed a long list of explanations for why human life suddenly changed starting in 18th-century England, from geographic effects to forms of government to intellectual property rules to fluctuations in average wages.
For a long time, there was no one book that could explain, compare, and evaluate these theories for non-experts. That’s changed: How the World Became Rich, by Chapman University’s Jared Rubin and George Mason University’s Mark Koyama, provides a comprehensive look at what, exactly, changed when sustained economic growth began, what factors help explain its beginning, and which theories do the best job of making sense of the new stage of life that humans have been experiencing for a couple brief centuries.
Here is the full coverage with interview. And you can order the book here from Amazon. I haven’t read it yet, but this is surely self-recommending…
The new Covid equilibrium
Many people have stopped keeping track of where Covid is headed, if only because it is such a stressful and unpleasant topic. To be clear, under current circumstances I favor complete “Covid laissez-faire,” though with subsidies for new and better vaccines. Overall, things are not so peachy keen (NYT):
The central problem is that the coronavirus has become more adept at reinfecting people. Already, those infected with the first Omicron variant are reporting second infections with the newer versions of the variant — BA.2 or BA2.12.1 in the United States, or BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa.
Those people may go on to have third or fourth infections, even within this year, researchers said in interviews. And some small fraction may have symptoms that persist for months or years, a condition known as long Covid.
“It seems likely to me that that’s going to sort of be a long-term pattern,” said Juliet Pulliam, an epidemiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa…
“If we manage it the way that we manage it now, then most people will get infected with it at least a couple of times a year,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. “I would be very surprised if that’s not how it’s going to play out.”
I know many of you like to say “No worse than the common cold!” Well, the thing is…the common cold imposes considerable costs on the world. Imagine a new common cold, which you catch a few times a year, with some sliver of the population getting some form of Long Covid. One 2003 estimate suggested that the common cold costs us $40 billion a year, and in a typical year I don’t get a cold even once. That 2003 estimate also does not include the sheer discomfort of having a cold.
With a pinch of Long Covid in the distribution surely the current virus is a wee bit worse than that? While many cases of Long Covid are malingerers and hypochondriacs, at this point it is clear that not all of them are. Toss in some number of immunocompromised individuals (how many?).
Even under mild conceptions of current Covid, it is entirely plausible to believe that the costs of Covid will run into the trillions over the next ten years.
Death rates are not up, but more of the unvaccinated will die off with time and the rest of us will face this steady risk and planning annoyance for — how long? Plus we’ll get lots of “colds,” some of them considerably worse than a cold. And with what risk that it might mutate again and get worse? The next generation of vaccines probably will not be directly subsidized. Which will mean much lower rates of uptake. The point of maximum Covid immunity may well be behind us. And you won’t be able to blame it all on lockdowns.
Please keep in mind that when it comes to your reactions I will read many of them as not much better than “I just don’t want to think about this, I am still in denial.”
The State of Public Transit in the Nation’s Capital
The mismanagement of the metro system in the nation’s capitol is astounding.
WashPost: Metro’s train delays are projected to worsen as the agency abruptly yanks from service more than 70 operators who have been working without undergoing a mandatory retraining process for at least a year, officials announced Sunday.
The agency pledged corrective action in a release acknowledging that nearly half of the agency’s 500 train operators lack required recertification testing and training, while warning that staffing issues would lengthen wait times on the Green and Yellow lines from 15 to 20 minutes until the end of the month.
…Metro’s latest predicament coincides with a train shortage that has forced the agency to operate at reduced service with longer-than-normal wait times since mid-October. The safety commission ordered about 60 percent of its fleet out of service after a federal investigation into a Blue Line derailment found a defect affecting the wheels of the 7000 series, Metro’s latest and most advanced model of trains and rail cars.
Without the series’ 748 cars, Metro has been forced to rely on older models, some 40 years old and nearing retirement. The smaller, older cars, coupled with lower frequencies, have driven many passengers away because of crowding and social distancing concerns as coronavirus case numbers continue to fluctuate. Those concerns will only grow with longer wait times and fewer trains in service.
You may recall that in 2015 there was a deadly fire on the Metro which I wrote about in 2016. (post repeated below).
WTOP: A Metro worker blamed for falsifying records about the tunnel fans that failed during last year’s deadly smoke incident near L’Enfant Plaza has been granted his job back by an arbitration panel — and Metro’s largest union has just filed a lawsuit against Metro because the worker hasn’t been reinstated yet.
The union’s defense is that everyone was doing it so no one is to blame. The Union is probably right that the WMTA suffers from a culture of poor safety and responsibility but you can’t fix that culture without clear signals that the incentives have changed.
I had to take the Metro to DC earlier this week and due to track closings for safety improvements it was miserable, at least 45 minutes of delays for the roundtrip. Some 700,000 people ride the metro every day and if each is delayed by just 15 minutes total (7.5 minutes each way) then at $15 an hour that’s 2.6 million dollars worth of delay every day.
Before traveling on the DC Metro I recommend checking the twitter account @IsMetroOnFire.
Addendum: At least this time heads are rolling.
My YouTube viewing habits
Abe emails me:
Tyler, I really enjoyed your recent podcast with Russ Roberts talking about favorite books and reading strategies. On the podcast, you mentioned YouTube a couple of times. I was hoping Russ would ask you about your YouTube habits, but he didn’t, so I thought I’d email to ask. What type of things do you watch on YouTube? Do you have any favorite channels or strategies for finding good content? I think it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the subject.
My habits here are primitive, and not recommended for most of you sophisticates, but here goes:
1. I don’t subscribe to YouTube channels.
2. I watch some reasonable percentage, at least in part, of what people send me.
3. I watch prospective guests for CWT, to experience their conversational rhythms and mannerisms and “tics.”
4. I listen to music, especially when I am traveling, mostly classical music recitals or “world music,” to use a much-abused phrase. For many “world musics,” the visual element is all-important. I love Led Zeppelin, but I don’t click on them in this medium. Piano and guitar recitals I enjoy much more than orchestral music, at least on YouTube.
5. Sometimes I watch videos on science, or occasionally econometrics. It is often the best way to learn new concepts in these areas.
6. I watch Magnus Carlsen play BanterBlitz and engage in related chessboard antics in other forums, mostly while I am exercising on the Peloton. If you understand chess reasonably well, he is one of the greatest entertainers of our time, in addition to being the best chessplayer ever.
7. I don’t listen on speeds other than 1x. Doing so would disrupt the purposes mentioned above! If I am just trying to absorb information rapidly, typically I would prefer a book. The information from #5 usually is difficult enough for me to stick with 1x. If it is just someone blabbing, typically I care about the true human rhythms of speech, or I just won’t do it.
What else?
New developments in the economics of fertility
The economics of fertility has entered a new era because these stylized facts no longer universally hold. In high-income countries, the income-fertility relationship has flattened and in some cases reversed, and the cross-country relationship between women’s labor force participation and fertility is now positive. We summarize these new facts and describe new models that are designed to address them.
That is from a new NBER paper by Matthias Doepke, Anne Hannusch, Fabian Kindermann, and Michèle Tertilt . Another result is that quality vs. quantity tradeoff models for children no longer perform very well. And fertility-education relationships are greatly weakened, just as the income-fertility relationships are. The marketization of childcare is likely an important cause of this shift.
Italy and Spain are two countries where the income-fertility relationship is not being reversed.
Father contribution rates to child-raising are growing in importance for fertility. Fathers seem most interested in their children in Norway, and least interested in Russia, of the countries sampled.
If a couple disagrees on having another kid, the chance they do is relatively small.
In Denmark in 2015, six percent of all births occurred with some kind of medical help related to conception.
There are now positive correlations between public childcare provision, though I do not in this paper see any reliable causal estimate.
The paper has a section on social norms, but it oddly fails to consider religion.
There is some evidence for peer effects mattering for fertility, for instance in a workplace.
98 pp. of text, perhaps no huge revelations, but interesting throughout.
The Ukrainian economist who is fighting the Russians with logistics
This Bloomberg piece by Scott Duke Kominers is an interview with the heroic Tymofiy Mylovanov. He is an economist, also of the University of Pittsburgh, who is organizing many of the logistics in Ukraine and also running the Kyiv School of Economics. I am honored to know Tymofiy, here is one bit of a much broader story:
Mylovanov: Within the first couple of days, you see how people respond differently. Some people get traumatized; some become dysfunctional; others become almost super-efficient, like me and my team. But you have to figure out how to function in war or you die. Your loved ones will die. And we had a plan — war-time protocols at the university. We even had a war committee, and everyone was responsible for specific tasks, and they have to start executing them. Otherwise we collapse.
If someone doesn’t show up to a meeting, that doesn’t matter. Decisions are made without them. No wavering, no trembling hand. You either do it or you don’t do it and you accept the consequences. So we managed to shut down our facilities and put security in our buildings and the people there had food and water, and they’ve been staying there for two weeks.
There is much more detail in the article, which is interesting throughout. And:
Mylovanov: One specific thing: We need 307,000 medical kits. I have the specification. Let’s say Israel can only supply 30,000 and Canada probably can supply 20 or 30,000. But we have suppliers who can provide the medical kits. We give this specification to [Ukraine’s] Ministry of Health, and our charitable foundation will pay. So tag me or email me or ping me on Twitter — and then donate, please donate.
All the fundraising goes directly to logistics. I have a website at the university of the charitable foundation [Kyiv School of Economics Humanitarian Relief Fund], and there is a Twitter post at my account. If I get a hundred dollars on that charitable foundation, it goes towards medical kits and it’s likely going to save a life.
By the way, Tymofiy Mylovanov is widely published in economics journals, including Econometrica and JET. Here is Tymofiy on Twitter.
Kotkin on Russia and the West
A great interview with historian Stephen Kotkin. Kotkin has some some thoughts on the Kennan, Mearsheimer, Kissinger, Hill, Service et al. view that expanding NATO was a precipitating event in the Ukraine-Russia war which are well taken, albeit he fails to think on the margin. Much more important is his full throated defense of the West. Just a few months ago a defense like this would have been branded as right-wing agitprop and the author attacked for not being woke to the evils of capitalism. But Putin has reminded the West of its virtues.
How do you define “the West”?
The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is.
…And yet, as corrupt as China is, they’ve lifted tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty. Education levels are rising. The Chinese leaders credit themselves with enormous achievements.
Who did that? Did the Chinese regime do that? Or Chinese society? Let’s be careful not to allow the Chinese Communists to expropriate, as it were, the hard labor, the entrepreneurialism, the dynamism of millions and millions of people in that society.
On a kind of natural resource curse:
…in Russia, wealth comes right up out of the ground! The problem for authoritarian regimes is not economic growth. The problem is how to pay the patronage for their élites, how to keep the élites loyal, especially the security services and the upper levels of the officer corps. If money just gushes out of the ground in the form of hydrocarbons or diamonds or other minerals, the oppressors can emancipate themselves from the oppressed. The oppressors can say, we don’t need you. We don’t need your taxes. We don’t need you to vote. We don’t rely on you for anything, because we have oil and gas, palladium and titanium.
On why the stupid get on top:
You have to remember that these regimes practice something called “negative selection.” [In a democracy, AT] You’re going to promote people to be editors, and you’re going to hire writers, because they’re talented; you’re not afraid if they’re geniuses. But, in an authoritarian regime, that’s not what they do. They hire people who are a little bit, as they say in Russian, tupoi, not very bright. They hire them precisely because they won’t be too competent, too clever, to organize a coup against them. Putin surrounds himself with people who are maybe not the sharpest tools in the drawer on purpose.
That does two things. It enables him to feel more secure, through all his paranoia, that they’re not clever enough to take him down. But it also diminishes the power of the Russian state because you have a construction foreman who’s the defense minister [Sergei Shoigu], and he was feeding Putin all sorts of nonsense about what they were going to do in Ukraine. Negative selection does protect the leader, but it also undermines his regime.
On the importance of error correction:
…Finally, you’ve given credit to the Biden Administration for reading out its intelligence about the coming invasion, for sanctions, and for a kind of mature response to what’s happening. What have they gotten wrong?
They’ve done much better than we anticipated based upon what we saw in Afghanistan and the botched run-up on the deal to sell nuclear submarines to the Australians. They’ve learned from their mistakes. That’s the thing about the United States. We have corrective mechanisms. We can learn from our mistakes. We have a political system that punishes mistakes. We have strong institutions. We have a powerful society, a powerful and free media. Administrations that perform badly can learn and get better, which is not the case in Russia or in China. It’s an advantage that we can’t forget.
And most importantly, we need to blaze a path to de-escalation.
The problem now is not that the Biden Administration made mistakes; it’s that it’s hard to figure out how to de-escalate, how to get out of the spiral of mutual maximalism. We keep raising the stakes with more and more sanctions and cancellations. There is pressure on our side to “do something” because the Ukrainians are dying every day while we are sitting on the sidelines, militarily, in some ways. (Although, as I said, we’re supplying them with arms, and we’re doing a lot in cyber.) The pressure is on to be maximalist on our side, but, the more you corner them, the more there’s nothing to lose for Putin, the more he can raise the stakes, unfortunately. He has many tools that he hasn’t used that can hurt us. We need a de-escalation from the maximalist spiral, and we need a little bit of luck and good fortune, perhaps in Moscow, perhaps in Helsinki or Jerusalem, perhaps in Beijing, but certainly in Kyiv.
A great interview. Read the whole thing.
What does the Truckers Convoy want?
Freedom? Well, it depends what you mean by that concept. Here is one relevant bit from from The National Post, hardly a left-wing rag:
“Freedom convoy” supporters convinced that the Governor General can dissolve Parliament on a whim have “absolutely inundated” Rideau Hall with calls over the past week, National Post has learned…
The callers are participants and supporters of the so-called “freedom convoy” that has been occupying the streets around Parliament for a week, demanding that the Trudeau government put an end to all public heath measures (even though the majority of them are under the provincial government’s purview.)
Last week, organizers also published a manifesto billed a “memorandum of understanding” demanding that the Governor General and the Senate unite to force all levels of government to end any COVID-19 measures and vaccine passports, and re-instate all workers laid off due to vaccine requirements.
That has seemingly pushed protesters and their supporters to flood Rideau Hall’s phone and email lines demanding that Mary Simon act, going as far as demanding that she dissolve government and remove Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from power…
It’s useless for protesters to be “calling Rideau Hall or pressuring senators to do something, that’s not how things work,” he added. “It’s a democratic system, and neither the senate nor the Governor General are elected, so they don’t have the democratic legitimacy” to dissolve government.
Originally those memorandum demands came from a group called Canada Unity, a major force behind the Convoy. Canada Unity has since withdrawn their proposals for a non-democratic transfer of power. Good for them! Still, “we withdraw the demands for an anti-democratic coup d’etat that we were promoting a few days ago” is hardly a reason for enthusiastic affiliation.
By the way, here are the responsibilities of the Canadian Governor General.
I’m not suggesting that all of the Convoy members have this particular political vision (though 320,000 signatures on the memorandum were reported), or even that those promoting this idea necessarily “mean it.” Maybe for many of them it is just a way to stir up trouble. Still, you can take this as another sign of “incipient knuckleheadism” in the movement.
By the way, I am myself opposed to the idea of governmental mandates for Covid-19 vaccines. (In part because I feared exactly this kind of backlash, but for liberty reasons too.) But it is very far from the worst governmental mandate the Canadians have!
Do you know what those people in the trucks actually should do? Go get vaccinated.
A related group for a while shut down the Ambassador Bridge, which carries 30% of the U.S.-Canada trade. The Convoy and associated movements are doing a great deal to restrict the free movement of goods and of people, hardly my idea of freedom either.
So I am happy to double down on my previous post.
Advice on finding a talented spouse
From a reader:
Re your observation that most people don’t know what their strengths are and your interest in finding and fostering talent:
I haven’t done the two things I’ve recently come to think I’d have the greatest comparative advantage in – marry and stay married to a very talented male and raise very talented kids. As a 36-yr-old female with no potential mate at present, I’ve decided I need to be more intentional about this.
What are your thoughts on the best strategies to maximize my chances of success? How to approach dating sites- multiple with different types of profiles and levels of info; deep on just 1 or 2? Focus more on new sites/established sites/niche sites? Best questions/methods for weeding out and attracting potentials online- especially deeper cultural/moral/values questions? Seek out more in-person opportunities instead? What kind? Groups, orgs I should join? What should I be most/least picky about? Other considerations I’m likely over- or under- rating? I’m in the Dallas area, finishing up my PhD in [redacted], free to move most anywhere.
You haven’t set yourself up as an expert on this, but I know you’ll answer. Also open to suggestions of who else to ask for such advice.
This one is far outside my expertise, but I have a few comments:
1. Are you sure this is what you really want? I don’t know you at all, but surely you are smart and skilled and so far it hasn’t happened. (What is your theory of why not? Maybe you wanted it less before, but keep in mind part of what men want is women who have really wanted this all along.) That said, if you don’t really want this, I don’t see the harm in trying to make a match of the sort you indicate. Your own intuitions will save you in time, conditional on you not really wanting this.
2. Use on-line dating. I’ve seen a graph indicating a trend line marching straight upwards for how many matches, in percentage terms, come from on-line dating (might any of you know the link? Here it is.). That is very often how the trend line looks for a dominant trend that is still underrated. On-line dating simply seems better than any other method, for the same reason you are reading this blog.
2b. I have no idea which services you should use, but since network effects in this market are strong, plenty of your same-age friends should know the right answers without much hesitation.
3. If you are considering doing more “in person” things, such as joining clubs and associations, do things you would wish to do anyway. If you are doing those activities as part of your effort to be “intentional,” they are dominated by doing more on-line dating. So just do what you want in this regard.
Other people to ask might be clergy? Recently married same-age friends? All the other econ bloggers?
Noah Smith Substack interviews me
Here is the interview. Here is one excerpt:
N.S.: So how would you generally describe the zeitgeist of the moment, if you had to give a simple summary? What do you think are a couple of most important trends in culture and thought right now? My impression has been that we’re sort of in a replay of the 70s — a period of exhaustion after several years of intense social unrest, where people are looking around for new cultural and economic paradigms to replace the ones we just smashed. But maybe I’ve just been reading too many Rick Perlstein books?
T.C.: I view the 1970s as a materialistic time, sexually highly charged, and America running into some significant real resource constraints, at least initially stemming from high oil prices. Mainstream culture was often fairly crass — just look at disco, or the ascendancy of mainstream network television. The current time I see as quite different. Sexually, we are withdrawing. Society is more feminized. America has far more immigrants. And we are obsessed with the virtual and with make-believe, to a degree the 1970s could not have imagined. Bruno Macaes is one author who is really on the right track here, with his emphasis on how America is building virtual and indeed often “unreal” fantasies.
I think today the variance of weirdness is increasing. Conformists can conform like never before, due say to social media and the Girardian desire to mimic others. But unusual people can connect with other unusual people, and make each other much weirder and more “niche.” For instance, every possible variant of political views seems to be “out there” these days, and perhaps that is not entirely reassuring. A higher variance for weirdness probably encourages creativity. But is it a positive development on net? We are going to find out.
Recommended throughout, and of course do subscribe to Noah’s Substack.
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs
Brainstorming a wedding hashtag? Good luck finding one that hasn’t #beendone.
More than a decade of wedding hashtags have flooded social-media sites to help couples curate guests’ photos on their special day. But soon-to-be-newlyweds are finding it harder to identify a clever, distinctive phrase…
Wedding hashtags have historically often combined a couple’s names and wedding year or date, says Marielle Wakim, Ms. Wakim, founder of hashtag-writing service Happily Ever #Hashtagged.
“It’s so beyond #JimandPamWedding2016 at this point,” she says.
Ms. Wakim launched her Los Angeles-based business in 2016 as the wedding-hashtag trend was booming. Her prices range from one hashtag for $50 to five for $125. Some couples prefer having options or multiple hashtags for different events, such as a bachelorette party and wedding ceremony.
Clients want personalized, tailored, creative hashtags, she says. Some have had specific requests, like Disney -themed hashtags or ones that incorporate specific Chance the Rapper lyrics.
Here is the full WSJ story, via Daniel Lippman.
The Slow Rollout of Rapid Tests
I thought the Biden administration would at least make original pandemic errors. But no, its been making all the same errors. Slow on vaccines, slow on rapid testing and slow on new drugs, and far too little investment. Still after a year and half of shouting it from the rooftops we are getting some rapid tests. Josh Gans has an interesting reminder focusing on Canada that this has been an example of expert failure not just US failure.
Rapid test advocates such as myself have suddenly moved from fringe crazies who were told they didn’t understand the science to we need them and we need them now.
Several cases in point:
- The CDC now says that unvaccinated students exposed to Covid can “test to stay.” That is, rather than sending all the students in a class (or a school!) home when one tests positive for Covid, they test the students instead and so long as they are negative, they stay.
- The US Government is going to order 500 million rapid tests and distribute them free to the public … by mail!
It is hard to appreciate what a sea change this is in terms of attitude. A year ago, when we tried to roll out rapid tests — that had already been purchased and were sitting in their millions in warehouses in Canada — to Canadian workplaces, we were told that those tests had to be administered by health care professionals in PPE in secure and sanitised environments with all manner of precautions taken that really took the “rapid” out of rapid testing let alone exploding the costs to businesses who wanted to keep their workers safe. This was because they required those long-swabs etc. Eventually, short swabs were permitted. Then self-swabbing supervised in the workplace. Then swabbing at home while on a virtual call with a professional for that supervision with the swabs being picked up and then taken for safe disposal. Finally, we got to self-administered, at-home screening without supervision and you could pop your negative swan in the bin. A year after we had been told that you needed a full-court medical professional press to do this, our kids in Ontario were sent home with 5 rapid tests to use over the holidays. Only a couple of weeks ago, the Ontario government’s advisory board, the Ontario Science Table, finally endorsed the use of rapid tests in this way.