Sales of Bibles are booming
Worries about the economy, conflicts abroad and uncertainty over the election pushed readers toward the publication in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of October, compared with the same period last year, according to book tracker Circana BookScan. By contrast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that period.
“People are experiencing anxiety themselves, or they’re worried for their children and grandchildren,” said Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. “It’s related to artificial intelligence, election cycles…and all of that feeds a desire for assurance that we’re going to be OK.”
Here is more from the WSJ, via Anecdotal. And what is up with Netflix Mary?
A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History
Zeynep Tufekci writing in the NYTimes hits the nail on the head:
The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not yet acquired the genetic tools to spread among humans. But seasonal flu will vastly increase the chances of that outcome. As the colder weather drives us all indoors to our poorly ventilated houses and workplaces, we will be undertaking an extraordinary gamble that the nation is in no way prepared for.
All that would be more than bad enough, but we face these threats gravely hobbled by the Biden administration’s failure — one might even say refusal — to respond adequately to this disease or to prepare us for viral outbreaks that may follow.
…Devastating influenza pandemics arise throughout the ages because the virus is always looking for a way in, shape shifting to jump among species in ever novel forms. Flu viruses have a special trick: If two different types infect the same host — a farmworker with regular flu who also gets H5N1 from a cow — they can swap whole segments of their RNA, potentially creating an entirely new and deadly virus that has the ability to spread among humans. It’s likely that the 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, started as a flu virus of avian origin that passed through a pig in eastern Kansas. From there it likely infected its first human victim before circling the globe on a deadly journey that killed more people than World War I.
And that’s why it’s such a tragedy that the Biden administration didn’t — or couldn’t — do everything necessary to snuff out the U.S. dairy cattle infection when the outbreak was smaller and easier to address.
Will there be a large outbreak among humans? Probably not. But a 9% probabability of a bad event warrants more than a shrug. Bad doesn’t have to be on the scale of COVID-bad to warrant precaution. The 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, while relatively mild, infected about 61 million people in the U.S., leading to 274,000 hospitalizations, 12,400 deaths, and billions of dollars in economic costs.
H5N1 will likely pass us over—but only the weak rely on luck. Strong civilizations don’t pray for mercy from microbes; they crush them. Each new outbreak should leave us not relieved, but better armed, better trained and better prepared for nature’s next assault.
Assisted dying in the UK
I would say that overall I am more suspicious of “assisted dying” policies than are many of my libertarian friends. I am fine with legalizing suicide, but I get nervous when a state — especially a less than fully competent, fiscally strapped state — enters the picture with so much influence over the proceedings. In the longer term, no matter how the legislation is initially written, what will be the incentives of that state? What will be the incentives of family members and legal guardians?
That said, I do recognize that as medical technology and life-saving techniques advance, something has to give. We can’t just keep tens of millions of people hooked up to life support for decades.
I do not have any “top down” way of resolving all of the difficult moral and practical issues here. I will simply note that the returns to federalism have risen. Different American states can try out different policies, as indeed they do, and we can see what is happening and judge accordingly.
I believe this point remains underrated. As technology advances, and the world changes more rapidly, the returns to federalism rise. We are coming off a long period when the returns to federalism were relatively low.
I am more optimistic about England than many people, but this is one of my worries. Devolution doesn’t quite do the same, but rather means that for anything England does, two other polities are likely to choose something even worse.
Debankings
For reasons you can guess at, debanking has been the topic du jour in my Twitter feed.
I will only report the following. On this last Friday, both Alex and I (coincidentally) each wanted to send money through the U.S. banking system. For each of us it was a major pain, and for no good substantive reason. I do understand why the relevant constraints are there, but at some point “justification” is no longer enough. People have to actually want to use the system. And the U.S. banking system — referring to that notion narrowly — is increasingly unattractive. It is also failing various market tests, if you look at its relative import over time.
How innovative is it? How good is it with software? How international is it in scope and potential usage? How necessary is it for lending? Can it integrate with crypto? Why does service quality at my local bank continue to decline? Relative performance is sliding, there is no other way to put it.
Yonas is in fact not a terrorist, and he did eventually get his money, after considerable frustration on my part and probably on his as well.
Ths status quo, relative to alternatives, likely will get worse as the pace of innovation increases. So rather than defend debankings, a better tack is to tell us how you will fix the problems you have created with the status quo. Debankings are simply the canary in the coal mine, no matter what percentage of them you may think are justified, or not.
John Arnold has some good tweets on the topic, start here. Here is Dennis Porter.
What should I ask Scott Sumner?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. So what should I ask?
Saturday assorted links
1. Hypotheses as to why fentanyl deaths are declining (FT). Interestingly, the decline is spreading from east to west.
2. How to convince a bot to send you 47k.
3. An early warning system to detect geoengineering (NYT).
4. Using LLMs to learn Indian classical music.
5. The new Notre Dame what do you think?
Literacy Rates and Simpson’s Paradox
Max T. at Maximum Progress shows that between 1992 and 2003 US literacy rates fell dramatically within every single educational category but the aggregate literacy rate didn’t budge. A great example of Simpson’s Paradox! The easiest way to see how this is possible is just to imagine that no one’s literacy level changes but everyone moves up an educational category. The result is zero increase in literacy but falling literacy rates in each category.
Two interesting things follow. First, this is very suggestive of credentialing and the signaling theory of education. Second, and more originally, Max suggests that total factor productivity is likely to have been mismeasured. Total factor productivity tells us how much more output can we get from the same inputs. If inputs increase, we expect output to increase so to measure TFP we must subtract any increase in output due to greater inputs. It’s common practice, however, to use educational attainment as a (partial) measure of skill or labor quality. If educational attainment is just rising credentialism, however, then this overestimates the increase in output due to labor skill and underestimates the gain to TFP.
This does not imply that we are richer than we actually are–output is what it is–but it does imply that if we want to know why we haven’t grown richer as quickly as we did in the past we should direct less attention to ideas and TFP and more attention to the failure to truly increase human capital.
Massachusetts has occupational licensing for fortune tellers
Here is the link, “Prohibits fraudulently taking money by “pretended fortune telling.””
Seen referenced somewhere on Twitter.
Unauthorized Immigration and Local Government Finances
This paper examines how unauthorized immigration affects the fiscal health of local governments in the United States. Using detailed data on unauthorized immigrants’ countries of origin and arrival dates from the Syracuse TRAC database, we isolate immigration flows driven by social, economic, and political conditions in source countries. We predict local immigration patterns using a shift-share instrument based on pre-existing foreign-born population distributions. We find that the economic effects of unauthorized immigration depend crucially on local labor market conditions. In areas with structurally tight labor markets—characterized by low unemployment and low labor force participation—unauthorized immigration correlates with lower municipal bond yields. However, areas with typical labor market conditions experience higher yields. Areas with “sanctuary” status also experience higher yields when exposed to unauthorized immigration. These yield effects reflect underlying economic mechanisms: unauthorized immigration predicts loosening of labor markets in areas where they were previously tight, whereas in sanctuary areas, unemployment rates increase by more than twice as much. We find unauthorized immigration explains higher expenditures on local public amenities, including welfare assistance, construction, education, and law enforcement, but these expenditures are not offset by higher tax revenues. Overall, our results provide novel insights into the local economic effects of unauthorized immigration.
That is from a new paper by Jess Cornaggia, Kimberly Cornaggia, and Ryan D. Israelsen. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
China (Japan) fact of the day
China’s long-term bond yields have fallen below Japan’s for the first time, as investors bet that the world’s second-biggest economy will become bogged down by the deflation that has long afflicted its neighbour.
A rally in 30-year Chinese government bonds has pushed their yield down from 4 per cent in late 2020 to 2.21 per cent on Friday, as Beijing cuts interest rates to boost its flagging economy and Chinese investors pile into haven assets.
Japan’s long-term bond yields, which for years were stuck below 1 per cent, have risen above China’s to 2.27 per cent, as Tokyo normalises monetary policy after decades of deflation.
Here is more from the FT.
Friday assorted links
1. Norway Shrugged (note also that Magnus is moving to Spain).
2. Megan McArdle podcast on food and other matters, with Razib Khan.
3. A funny kind of futarchy (this is in jest and is not true): “Mr. Putin just declared a new Red Line. If the Russian Ruble falls to 115.00 is considered escalation and something something nuclear weapon WW3.”
4. Soumaya Keynes interviews Sam Bowman on the UK economy (FT).
5. Measuring the erosion of the rule of law in Hong Kong.
7. Excellent David Brooks column on the anti-institutionalists (NYT).
8. How the crypto guys signal with their art purchases. And the follow-up (NYT).
Does Money Affect Creativity in the History of Western Classical Music?
That is the subtitle of a new paper by Karol J. Borowiecki, Yichu Wang, and Marc T. Law. Here is the abstract:
How do financial constraints affect individual innovation and creativity? Understanding this relationship is essential, especially when innovation and creativity rely on the capacity to take risks. To investigate this, we focus on Western classical composers, a unique group of innovators whose lives offer a rich historical case study. Drawing on biographical data from a large sample of composers who lived between 1750 and 2005, we conduct the first systematic empirical exploration of how composers’ annual incomes correlate with measures of the popularity (as viewed from posterity), significance, and stylistic originality of their music. A key contribution is the development of novel measures of composers’ financial circumstances, derived from their entries within Grove Music Online, a widely used music encyclopedia. We find that financial insecurity is associated with reduced creativity: relative to the sample mean, in low income years, composers’ output is 15.7 percent lower, 50 percent less popular (based on Spotify’s index), and generates 13.9 percent fewer Google search results. These correlations are robust to controlling for factors influencing both income and creativity, with no evidence of pre-trends in creativity prior to low-income years, suggesting that reverse causality is unlikely. Case studies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt show that low income periods coincide with declines in stylistic originality. Notably, the negative impact of low income is concentrated among composers from less privileged backgrounds, implying that financial support is crucial for fostering creativity and innovation. While we cannot make definitive causal claims, the consistency of our findings underscores the importance of financial stability for fostering innovation and risk-taking in creative fields.
Of course those results remind me of my own earlier book In Praise of Commercial Culture. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Classical music listening for the year
Overall it has been a very good listening year for me. I spent a good bit of time relearning the Shostakovich String Quartets in various recordings, most of all the Fitzwilliam String Quartet. I made more of a concerted attempt to learn the musics of Carl Nielsen and Kalevi Aho and Kurt Weill. Here are some particular recordings that got more than their share of listening time, most but not all of them new releases:
Johann Sebastian Bach, complete cantatas, Masaaki Suzuki.
Beethoven, Complete Trios for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Weiss Kaplan Stumpf Trio. Another example of “the best set of these pieces I ever have heard, and who the heck are these people?” And the same works by the van Baerle Trio.
Mishka Rushdie Momen, Reformation, keyboard works by Byrd, Gibbons, Bull, and Sweelinck.
Debussy Images, by Saskia Giorgini.
Galina Grigorjeva, Nature Morte, by Paul Hillier and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.
Georg Friedrich Handel, Eternal Heaven, music director Thomas Dunford.
Handel, 8 Great Suites for Harpischord, by Asako Ogawa.
Bruce Liu, Waves, music by Rameau, Ravel, and Alkan.
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, Symphonic Poems, Le Carnaval des Animaux, other works. That I actually like this music is one of the year’s bigger surprises for me.
Schubert piano trios and assorted works, by Tetzlaff, Tetzlaff, and the now departed Lars Vogt.
Stravinsky, The Soldier’s Tale, with Isabelle Faust and Dominique Horwitz.
Tchaikovsky, symphonies four and six, and orchestral music, conducted by Carlos Paita.
The best recordings of classical music — ever — are being created now. That is not what I would have expected, and it is a good counter to excessively negative cultural generalizations.
Addendum: Here is a Spotify playlist for many of those selections.
Germany chart of the day
Here is the link.
Thursday assorted links
1. The Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi has a Cinnabon on its ground floor.
4. Can architecture reveal the spread of purdah?
5. Drones to map and follow buses?
6. How much should we trust developing country gdp?
7. David Wallace-Wells on the Covid contrarians (NYT). And from Zeynep (NYT).
8. “Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results.”
9. The drone intrusions are probably Russia?
10. Hurdles to DOGE (NYT).