Results for “brexit” 205 found
Monday assorted links
2. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, movements in the outflow rate account for most of the variation of the labor force participation rate: the LFPR increases in tight labor markets because fewer workers leave the labor force, not because more nonparticipants enter.” Link here.
3. “Yes, and the best part of it is that most of my studies were actually in philosophy, and I never put that on my CV—that I have a degree in philosophy—at all.” Norway’s sovereign wealth fund manager.
4. How Steph Curry learned how to shoot. An excellent look at how many dimensions of training are required for excellence. And pulling data from Reddit threads about NBA players, including about discrimination.
5. Only male movie stars matter for box office.
6. Economist Donald Harris is upset and the Jamaican media is all over it.
Friday assorted links
Eric Kaufmann’s *Whiteshift*
The subtitle is Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, and might this be the must-read book of the year? It is “to the right” of my views on immigration policy, but still I found it informative, fascinating, and relevant on just about every page. Here is the author’s opening framing:
First, why are right-wing populists doing better than left-wing ones? Second, why did the migration crisis boost populist-right numbers sharply while the economic crisis had no overall effect? If we stick to data, the answer is crystal clear. Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to understanding the populist moment.
Kaufmann, by the way, is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck in London, but hails from Canada. As for the basics, there is this in addition:
Much of this book is concerned with the clash between a rising white tribalism and an ideology I term ‘left-modernism.’
If you wish to understand “all the stuff that is going on today,” maybe Whiteshift is the best place to start? Kaufmann, by the way, is not a mega-pessimist and he seems to think that “broadening the category of white” will lead to a “good enough” solution for many of the Western democracies. Still, much of this book is disturbing, especially for readers who might consider themselves to be on the left. Most of all, he sees “whiteness” as a legitimate cultural interest, and one which, if we deny, will lead to more overt racism rather than less.
Here is Kaufmann on Brexit, brutal but I think largely correct:
…many analysts bring a political lens to their analysis which inclines them to want to tell a story about wealth and power. Over half the country voted Leave and we can’t condemn such a large group. So we pretend populist voters are motivated by the same things we are: economic stagnation (for fiscal conservatives) or, for left-liberals, inequality and resentment of the establishment.
Kaufmann also has strong evidence for the “immigration backlash” hypothesis, for instance:
…a higher immigrant share is a consistent predictor of higher opposition to immigration over time…in Western Europe there is a .63 correlation between projected 2030 Muslim share and the highest poll or vote share a populist-right party has achieved.
On top of all of its other virtues, Whiteshift provides the best intellectual history of the immigration debates I have seen. It also has the best discussion of why Canada seems to be different when it comes to immigration, and I may cover that in another blog post.
Kaufmann does very much argue that the left-wing values of diversity and solidarity stand very much in conflict. How is this for an “ouch” sentence?:
Casual observation would suggest that being black in diverse San Francisco is not necessarily better than being black in white-majority Fargo [North Dakota].
By no means am I convinced by everything in this book. I don’t think European politics can handle systematized refugee camps in Europe itself (rather than Turkey and Lebanon), and most of all I am not sure that recognizing whiteness as a legitimate cultural concern will diminish rather than boost racism. I wish he had said much more about gender, and how immigration and gender issues interact.
Nonetheless this book has more points of interest yet, including an original and persuasive take on residential clustering, a good analysis of racial intermarriage, and a sustained argument that avoiding the “no dominant ethnic group” approach of Guyana and Mauritius is imperative.
Strongly recommended, it is out next week, you can pre-order here.
Sunday assorted links
U.S.A. fact of the day
As recently as 2013, New York had more people than Florida. Now Florida has 1.75 million more than New York. Indeed 35% of US population growth now occurs in Florida and Texas.
That is from Scott Sumner. And here is Scott’s post on how the United States is becoming more like Europe:
The US population has gone from growing about one percentage point faster than the EU in the 1990s, to perhaps a third of a point faster today.
So what other ways is the US becoming more like Europe?
1. The percentage of Americans who are not religious has been rising dramatically.
2. Our health care system is increasingly socialized.
3. Our politics increasingly resembles the populism of places like Hungary and Italy. The political polarization resembles the Brexit split in the UK. Anti-immigration nationalism came on the scene in Europe before it hit the US.
4. The recent criminal justice reform bill slightly (and I emphasize slightly) moves us in the European direction of lower rates of incarceration. We are also slightly softening the war on drugs.
5. Walkable shopping areas are increasingly popular. Some cities are moving to allow dense townhouses in areas previously reserved for single-family homes.
Trends and major issues to watch for in 2019
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the fourth of the four major issues I list:
How will India’s intellectual space evolve?
Many Western outsiders used to root for a particular Indian brand of Anglo liberalism to assume increasing importance in the political and intellectual life of India. While this has always been a minority viewpoint, it has had prominent representatives, including Ramachandra Guha, who just published a major biography of Gandhi. But these days, this perspective is dwindling in influence, as is old-style Bengali Marxism and other ideas from the left. It’s not just Hindu nationalism on the rise, rather India seems to be evolving intellectually in a multiplicityof directions, few of them familiar to most Americans. In India, history ain’t over, and further ideological fragmentation seems to be the safest prediction. Note that ideas are very often a leading indicator for where a nation ends up.
Since India may become the world’s most populous country and biggest economy by mid-century, this one is a dark horse candidate for the most important issue of the year.
I also consider China, Ethiopia, Trump, Brexit, and the NBA title.
Don’t arrest Chinese CFOs and CEOs
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is just one short excerpt:
In the longer run, bringing charges against Meng is likely to accelerate the division of the world into two competing systems of law, technology and commerce — namely those of China and the U.S. That will encourage international relations to develop along the dimension of power — what can you get away with? — rather than law or orderly cooperation. The West’s dirty little secret is that the rule of law works well only when tempered with a high degree of discretion.
And:
At the margin, the legal reach and police power of the U.S. can always be invoked to fight another crime or resolve another corruption problem. Don’t like how FIFA — the international soccer federation — is being run? Get the U.S. in on the act. There are in fact laws that gave the U.S. jurisdiction over bad FIFA practices (wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering), and the Department of Justice led a successful anti-corruption case starting in 2015.
That enforcement action seems to have gone fine, but where to stop? There a lot of wrongdoers who are connected, in one way or another, to the U.S. financial system. But America has more credibility as global policeman when it focuses on only the most pressing cases, such as when innocent victims are being killed.
Best yet, I offer remarks on Brexit as well.
Friday assorted links
1. New game from AlphaZero (video). Fantastic, miraculous, you will never think the same about chess again. Here is the associated article. Here is another game. And yet more here.
2. The ten-fastest growing cities are all projected to be in India.
3. New claims about black holes.
4. John Cochrane on Brexit and democracy.
Friday assorted links
1. Too big for Markets in Everything (Knickers). Check out the second photo. And here is an anti-revisionist update. And here is an even bigger one.
2. “We wanted to see whether fragile masculinity was associated with how Americans vote…” Wrong framing, but interesting nonetheless.
3. “I, Flannel Shirt” (NYT).
4. Clive Crook on why the Brits should reject the Brexit deal on offer.
5. “Can Artificial Intelligence Eliminate Your Bad Hair Days?” (NYT)
6. “If I had lost, it could have been my last world championship match.“
Saturday assorted links
1. The contact hypothesis is a mess.
2. Do large companies boost entrepreneurial entry? Evidence from the Amazon HQ2 search.
3. Rees-Mogg.
*The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium*
By Martin Gurri, due out November 13. I am reading this splendid book for the first time. It basically explains why Brexit and Trump won, and what will happen next. Due to social media, we are disillusioned with our elites, and that will prove hard to reverse.
Thursday assorted links
1. Given Brexit, the problematic state of Unionism.
2. Tech and the public/private pay gap.
3. An incorrect Straussian reading of the Queen song Bohemian Rhapsody. Yet here we are open to all sorts of views.
4. Review of Tesla Model Three.
5. Casting Crazy Rich Asians (NYT).
Wednesday assorted links
Theo asks, and I intersperse my answers
Dear Tyler,
Due to the asymmetry of fame I feel that I know you quite well so I am just going to bombard you with random questions and hope that you see fit to answer some of them.
You seem to value journalism very highly. Is it just out of necessity as a generalist, or does popular writing on a topic have important information that can’t be learned from the academic/scholarly side?
Journalists have to try to explain things that actually happened to other human beings, often educated ones but not specialists either. It is hard to overrate the importance of that process to developing one’s thoughts and self, no matter what you may think of particular journalists in today’s MSM.
Related: Which elite profession or slice of society is most opaque to journalists and “book-learning” in general? (Oddly some of the categories that come to mind are those which are some of the most written-about – food, sex, friends, law, politics. But it’s probably maths.)
Making things. Archaeology. These days, tech. Maths. Journalism.
How much less interesting would it be to read Shakespeare if no-one else ever had? Does the answer differ much across top-tier “great” artists?
It would not be less interesting at all, maybe more interesting, because the shock of discovery would be all the greater. Admittedly, many artists require lots of discussion with other people, maybe rock and roll most of all? But not Shakespeare.
Overrated vs underrated: The New Yorker. How about Samin Nosrat?
The New Yorker has had a consistent voice and remarkable brand for more decades than I can remember (I recall Patrick Collison making a similar point, perhaps in a podcast?). Since I am now above the median age for the United States, that makes them underrated. The literariness of the historical New York and Northeast and the integration of American and European culture also have become underrated topic areas, and The New Yorker still does them, so that too makes the magazine underrated.
And who is Samin Nosrat? She must therefore be underrated.
Does the world have too many writers, or not enough? What about comparative literature professors? How should we think about the future of literary culture when the written word is becoming so much more culturally dominant at the same time as books and journalism are falling apart?
What variable are we changing at the margin? If people watch less TV and write more, that is probably a plus. I also would favor fewer photographs and more writing. But I wouldn’t cut back on charity to increase the quantity of writing. If only comparative literature professors were people who simply loved books — at the margin a bit more like used book store owners and somewhat less like professors — and would compare them to each other…then I would want more of them. Until then, I don’t know how to keep the extra ones busy.
Why does the USA not have open borders with Canada?
I believe America should have open borders with any nation that has a more generous welfare state than we do. That covers Canada, even though Canadian insurance coverage for mental health and dentistry isn’t nearly as good as you might think. As to why we don’t have open borders with Canada, I don’t think American voters would see that as solving any concrete problem (can’t we get many of the best Canadians anyway?), and it would feel a bit like giving up control, so why do it?
To what extent are Trump, Brexit, Orban, Erdogan, rising murder rates and stalling trade growth worldwide part of the same phenomenon? If they aren’t completely separate, which way does the contagion run?
Yes, no, and maybe so, get back to me in a few years’ time.
Have a great day…
You too!
Trade War Costs in a Supply Chain World
When Americans buy a car from Mexico, half of what they buy was earlier imported from the United States (74% of foreign imports in the car are from US, foreign imports and labor account for 2/3 of value, .74*.66=48.44–corrected from earlier version). 
The firms exporting vehicles from Mexico to the U.S. have set up very deep supply chains between the two countries — much deeper than previously thought. About 74 percent of all the foreign parts used by vehicle assemblers in Mexico that export to the U.S. are imported from the U.S. itself. In contrast, only 18 percent of the imported parts used by Mexican firms exporting to Germany come from the U.S. (see chart). Because the parts that come from the U.S. also include inputs from other countries, it is important to account for international trade along all stages of the supply chain. I estimate that thirty-eight percent of the value of the average finished vehicle exported from Mexico to the U.S. is American value returning home, more than double the 17 percent figure that had been commonly considered.
That’s Alonso de Gortari writing at EconoFact.
In a world with deep supply chains a trade war will be much more expensive than in a conventional world. In a conventional world, a tariff only reduces efficiency at the margin as it relocates production from foreign to domestic firms who in the initial equilibrium have equal costs. But in a deep supply chain world a tariff isn’t just a tax on imports it also raises the costs of production of domestic firms. In a deep supply chain world, for example, a tariff on car imports from Mexico raises the cost of US auto production.
Paul Krugman recently argued that for an equal reduction in trade, Trump’s trade war would be less costly than Brexit because Trump’s tariffs will raise revenue and only distort production on the margin. In contrast, he argued that Brexit would raise costs on all units of production. In a deep supply chain world, however, the difference between Brexit and Trumpit are not so large. In such a world, tariffs increase the price of imports and make it more costly to produce goods domestically.