*Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries*
That is the new and excellent book out by David Sorkin. I feel I have read many good books on Jewish history, and I don’t always see the marginal value of adding to that pile, but this one really delivered. Plenty more detail without losing any conceptual overview. Ever wonder what exactly happened to Jewish emancipation, and why, as the Napoleonic conquest of Europe was reversed? This is the place to go. By the way, in the middle of the eighteenth century there were more Jews in Curacao, Suriname and Jamaica than in all of the North American colonies combined.
You can order it here, worthy of my year-end “best non-fiction of the year” list.
Karachi, Pakistan bleg
Guidebooks on Karachi, at least in English, are rather hard to come by. So what should I see and do, and where should I eat? I thank you all in advice for your usual sage counsel.
(Expensive) markets in everything
Department store Neiman Marcus is helping people with their indecisiveness by selling asymmetrical jeans.
The $462 high-waisted jeans feature one skinny leg and one wide leg.
They can be bought in a medium blue color, ranging from sizes x-small to large.
Who again is the protector of your privacy?
Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country are taking drivers’ personal information and selling it to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit, Motherboard has learned. DMVs sell the data for an array of approved purposes, such as to insurance or tow companies, but some of them have sold to more nefarious businesses as well. Multiple states have made tens of millions of dollars a year selling data.
…The Virginia DMV has sold data to 109 private investigator firms, according to a spreadsheet obtained by Motherboard.
That is from Vice, via Jake Seliger, with much more at the link.
On the topic of privacy, increasingly I am starting to believe that the practice of the obituary is unethical. The dead person is already gone, and usually (not always) there is little at stake, other than satisfying reader curiosity. The newspaper collects information on you for years, and without any consent from you whatsoever. Then, right after what is the saddest day in the history of your family (you hope), they publish it all and distribute it to as many readers as possible. That is also when you have no opportunity to present a rebuttal or alternative perspective, and furthermore corrections to obituaries are not exactly widely read.
Surely all of those worried about Facebook and privacy will agree with me on this one, right? And I bet the newspapers will pick up on this crusade as well.
Monday assorted links
Active Learning Works But Students Don’t Like It
A carefully done study that held students and teachers constant shows that students learn more in active learning classes but they dislike this style of class and think they learn less. It’s no big surprise–active learning is hard and makes the students feel stupid. It’s much easier to sit back and be entertained by a great lecturer who makes everything seem simple.
Despite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods. This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning. Faculty who adopt active learning are encouraged to intervene and address this misperception, and we describe a successful example of such an intervention.
The authors say that it can help to tell students in advance that they should expect to feel flustered but it will all work out in the end.
The success of active learning will be greatly enhanced if students accept that it leads to deeper learning—and acknowledge that it may sometimes feel like exactly the opposite is true.
I am dubious that this will bring students around. An alternative that might help is to discount student evaluations so that teachers don’t feel that they must entertain in order to do well on evaluations. As Brennan and Magness point out in their excellent Cracks in the Ivory Tower:
Using student evaluations to hire, promote, tenure, or determine raises for faculty is roughly on a par with reading entrails or tea leaves to make such decisions. (Actually, reading tea leaves would be better; it’s equally bullshit but faster and cheaper.)… the most comprehensive research shows that whatever student evaluations (SETs) measure, it isn’t learning caused by the professor.
Indeed, the correlation between student evaluations and student learning is at best close to zero and at worst negative. Student evaluations measure how well liked the teacher is. Students like to be entertained. Thus, to the extent that they rely on student evaluations, universities are incentivizing teachers to teach in ways that the students like rather than in ways that promote learning.
It’s remarkable that student evaluations haven’t already been lawsuited into oblivion given that student evaluations are both useless and biased.
*Never Enough: the neuroscience and experience of addiction*
That is the new and fascinating book by Judith Grisel, unlike most neuroscientists on these topics she has been addicted to many of the drugs she writes about, or at least has tried them “for real,” furthermore her book integrates her personal and scientific knowledge in a consistently interesting manner.
Here is one bit from early on:
The very definition of an addictive drug is one that stimulates the mesolimbic pathway, but there are three general axioms in psychopharmacology that also apply to all drugs:
1. All drugs act by changing the rate of what is already going on.
2. All drugs have side effects.
3. The brain adapts to all drugs that affect it by counteracting the drug’s effects.
And a tiny bit from the middle:
Excessive use of alcohol now results in about 3.3 million deaths around the world each year. In Russia and its former satellite states, one in five male deaths is caused by drinking. And in the United States during the period 2006 and 2010, excessive alcohol use was responsible for close to 90,000 deaths a year…
And finally:
…primates given ecstasy twice a day for four days (eight total doses) show reduction in the number of serotonergic neurons seven years later.
Definitely recommended, this will make my list for the year’s best non-fiction.
*A Beginner’s Guide to Japan*
“My colleague spends two hours a day making herself up,” my wife says, on her way to the department store where she works.
“She wants everyone to look at her?”
“No. She wants everyone not to.”
That is from the new Pico Iyer book, pleasing throughout. Here is an FT interview with Ayer about the book, and more. Don’t forget:
Anime is the natural expression of an animist world.
Sunday assorted links
What I’ve been reading and browsing
Ethan Pollock, Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse. The title says it all, noting that without the banya I for one would not perish.
George Weigel, The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself & Challenged the Modern World to Reform. Always fascinating to see there is a whole ‘nother world of politics you hardly know (or care) about.
Eric D. Weitz, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States, is indeed a history of human rights in theory but most of all in practice.
Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy covers how liberalism took egalitarian and Rawlsian turns in the 20th century. The author makes this seem more natural than I would take it to be.
David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell & Universal Salvation, argues that from a Christian point of view all will be saved and none damned to eternal torment. Not my framework, but I am not going to push back against what I take to be a Pareto improvement.
I am an admirer of Yancey Strickler, of Kickstarter fame, he has a new book coming out This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World.
Has a more beautiful “Progress Studies” book introduction ever been written?
On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister Karl Friedrich von Eichorn received a request from a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. By the time their statutes were approved in March, they numbered forty-nine and were meeting biweekly to discuss the latest developments in the physical sciences and physiology. They were preparing to write critical reviews for a new journal, Die Fortschritte der Physik (Advances in physics), and from the beginning they set out to define what constituted progress and what did not. Their success in this rather aggressive endeavor has long fascinated historians of science. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small group established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of physical science populated by large institutes and laboratories of experiment and precision measurement.
How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings, without position or recognition, and possessed of little more than their outsized confidence and ambition, succeed in seizing the future? What were their resources?
That is the opening passage from M. Norton Wise, Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society.
The new generational divide
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
In a nutshell, younger people today are very comfortable with a small screen and older people are not. Both younger and older people can be found staring at their phones for texts or email or directions, but the big difference comes in cultural consumption. According to one study, the median age of an American television viewer is about 56, whereas for mobile and computer video viewers the median age is 40. Forty percent of those viewers are between 13 and 34…
Just as many older people don’t grasp the import of YouTube, most younger people have a weak sense of the power of cinema on a large screen. It’s not entirely their fault. It’s relatively easy to see older movies on a big screen in London or Paris, and maybe in New York City and Los Angeles (and Silver Spring, Maryland, home to the American Film Institute). In most other places in America, it’s much more difficult.
Sadly, the world is rapidly becoming a place where cinematic history, as it was created for larger screens, no longer exists. Netflix, for all its wonders and diverse contemporary selection, is notoriously bad about making older movies available for streaming, and at any rate the service does not provide a properly large screen for those films.
There is much more at the link, and the economically-minded reader will note this is an application of the Alchian-Allen Theorem.
Saturday assorted links
2. The White Horse of Uffington has been taken care of for 3000 years.
3. Interview with Enrico Moretti.
4. Do people speak faster in less efficient languages?
6. Tejas Subramaniam life update.
7. Ahem, people. Joi Ito is on the board of the NYT.
Maybe pet health care is not seeing as much cost inflation as we thought
Nationwide’s pet health insurance division has partnered with Purdue University researchers to track trends in pet insurance payouts. The researchers track a “basket” of the most commonly-utilized procedures to see how the typical veterinary visit has changed in price over time. According to their research, these ordinary expenses declined by 6 percent from January 2009 to December 2017 after adjusting for inflation.
This decrease is corroborated by less reliable sources, such as the American Pet Products Association (APPA) annual consumer spending surveys. For virtually every year tracked (accessible via web archive), cat and dog owners reported spending less money on average routine and surgical visits. The data is jumpier than the Nationwide and Purdue rigorous analysis of 30 million insurance claims but confirms an interesting – and counterintuitive – trend. In a system where consumers and patients’ “representatives” have enough skin in the game, healthcare prices behave like they would in most other markets.
That is from Ross Marchand, “Why cats pay a lower price for CAT scans.” Here is earlier work by Einav, Finkelstein, and Gupta about pet health care being about as inefficient as human health care. I don’t consider this a settled issue, but it is interesting to hear a revision on what had been the most common take.
Actual progress in exchange rate economics
In this paper, we show that there is substantial comovement between prices of primary commodities such as oil, aluminum, maize, or copper and real exchange rates between developed economies such as Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom against the US dollar. We therefore explicitly consider the production of commodities in a two-country model of trade with productivity shocks and shocks to the supplies of commodities. We calibrate the model so as to reproduce the volatility and persistence of primary commodity prices and show that it delivers equilibrium real exchange rates that are as volatile and persistent as in the data. The model rationalizes an empirical strategy to identify the fraction of the variance of real exchange rates that can be accounted for by the underlying shocks, even if those are not observable. We use this strategy to argue that shocks that move primary commodity prices account for a large fraction of the volatility of real exchange rates in the data. Our analysis implies that existing models used to analyze real exchange rates between large economies that mostly focus on trade between differentiated final goods could benefit, in terms of matching the behavior of real exchange rates, by also considering trade in primary commodities.
That is from Juan Pablo Nicolini, via Ilya Novak.