Seven out of every ten emigrants entering the United States between 1900 and 1909 were men. The female minority, moreover, came mainly as members of family groups. Emigration from Ireland initially followed much the same pattern. After 1850, however, Ireland became the only European country to send almost as many women as men across the Atlantic, the great majority as single women rather than as wives or daughters. This pattern of independent female migration was of central importance, giving Irish diasporic communities a stability they would not otherwise have had. In particular it helps to explain why Irish rates of return migration were so low: there was no need to return home to find a bride form one’s own ethnic background.
And from a bit later in the text:
There were good economic reasons why Irish women were more ready than others to take to the migrant ship. the replacement of the cottage spinning wheel by the giant water-and-steam-driven machinery of Belfast and the surrounding area, and the failure of factory-based manufacturing to thrive in other parts of the country, sharply reduced the opportunity for women to find employment, and with it their prospect of marriage.
Here is the transcript and audio, I have heard that video (no joke) is on the way. Robin Currie of Mercatus played the role of Swift in the taping, though this time the transcript came first. Here is part of the summary:
GPT Swift discusses his support for the Church of Ireland, his shift from the Whigs to the Tories, and his opposition to William Wood’s copper coinage in Ireland. He also talks about his works, including Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, and his skepticism of moral and intellectual progress. Swift addresses rumors about his relationship with Esther Johnson and his fascination with scatological themes in his works. He also discusses his early life in England, his intellectual mentor Sir William Temple, and his jovial attitude towards death.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Queen Anne: overrated or underrated? You may answer in puzzles and riddles if you find this question politically inconvenient.
SWIFT: As Jonathan Swift, I shall offer my perspective on Queen Anne in a veiled manner, employing a metaphor to express my thoughts:
Imagine a vessel navigating through troubled waters, with strong currents representing the shifting political landscape. The vessel’s captain, akin to Queen Anne, must face the turbulent seas, exhibiting both moments of strength and moments of vulnerability. Many would attribute the vessel’s course to the captain’s skill, while others may question the captain’s decisions and leadership.
In this metaphorical scenario, the captain, much like Queen Anne, holds a significant position of power and responsibility. However, the captain’s competence may be a subject of debate. Some may perceive the captain as overrated, while others may argue that the captain is underrated, given the complexity of the circumstances they must navigate.
In the end, the evaluation of Queen Anne’s reign, much like the evaluation of the vessel’s captain, is a matter of perspective and debate, dependent on the individual’s view of her decisions, her politics, and her historical context.
How about this for humor:
COWEN: Can you tell us a joke from your time, Jonathan Swift, a short but funny one?
SWIFT: I shall share a short jest that was popular during my time:
Why do we never tell secrets on a farm?
Because the potatoes have eyes and the corn has ears.
COWEN: So, what is a joke from your time that *you* would find funny?
SWIFT: My humor often leaned towards satire and irony. A jest from my time that I might find more appealing would be a humorous couplet from my own work, On Poetry: A Rhapsody:
“So geese in compass, figures may express, And teach dull censors to be more or less.”
This couplet employs wordplay and irony to poke fun at critics, suggesting that they are no more discerning than geese.
Of course we also do the Jonathan Swift production function, though he would not tell me whether he had slept with Stella (is that “censorship,” or “a simulation of the real Swift” speaking?). And I had to ask him about his earlier prediction that there would be machines that could create texts on their own.
As for method, here is TC:
Now what you’re going to hear and what you’re going to read on the transcript is very close to the actual exchange but there were a few small differences and edits we’ve made. Very often the GPT would begin the answer with, “As Jonathan Swift.” We simply took that out. Some of the longer answers, there were resummaries at the end. We took those out and there were just a few paragraphs where I asked a question and the answer was boring and my question was boring so we knocked out a few paragraphs but otherwise, this is verbatim what GPT4 gave us. I did not keep on repeating prompts trying to get the answer I wanted. This is really awfully close to the dialogue.
Do read the whole thing. It is too “textbook-y” in parts, but overall I was extremely impressed.
Here is an Elon Musk-signed petition, with many other luminaries, calling for a pause in “Giant” AI experiments. Here is one excerpt:
In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability; provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.
Few people are against such developments, or at least most of them. Yet this passage, to my eye, shows how few realistic, practical alternatives the pausers have. Does regulation of any area, even simpler ones than AI, ever work so well? Exactly how long is all this supposed to take? How well do those same signers expect our Congress to handle, say, basic foreign policy decisions? The next debt ceiling crisis? Permitting reform?
Is there any mention of public choice/political economy questions in the petition, or even a peripheral awareness of them? Any dealing with national security issues and America’s responsibility to stay ahead of potentially hostile foreign powers? And what about the old DC saying, running something like “in politics there is nothing so permanent as the temporary”?
Might we end up with a regulatory institution as good as the CDC?
By the way, what does it mean to stop the “progress,” but not stop and not cease to improve the safety testing? Are those two goals really so separable?
Overall this petition is striking for its absence of concrete, practicable recommendations, made in the light of the semi-science of political economy. You can think of it as one kind of evidence that these individuals are not so very good at predicting the future.
Here’s an interesting idea it wouldn’t have occured to me to ask. What is the length of time described in the average 250 words of narration and how has this changed over time? Most famously James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is a long novel about single day with many pages describing brief experiences in minute detail. In contrast, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men covers 2 billion years in fewer words than Joyce uses to cover a single day.
Using human readers grading 1000 passages, Underwood et al. (2018) finds that the average length of time described in a typical passage has declined substantially since the 1700s, from a day to about an hour so a decline by a factor of 24. Writers have become much more focused on describing individual experiences than events.
In a blog post, Underwood revisits his earlier work but this time comparing human readers with various statistical techniques and also GPT. To use GPT he prompts
Read the following passage of fiction. Then do five things. 1: Briefly summarize the passage. 2: Reason step by step to decide how much time is described in the passage. If the passage doesn’t include any explicit reference to time, you can guess how much time the events described would have taken. Even description can imply the passage of time by describing the earlier history of people or buildings. But characters’ references to the past or future in spoken dialogue should not count as time that passed in the scene. Report the time using units of years, weeks, days, hours, or minutes. Do not say zero or N/A. 3: If you described a range of possible times in step 2 take the midpoint of the range. Then multiply to convert the units into minutes. 4: Report only the number of minutes elapsed, which should match the number in step 3. Do not reply N/A. 5: Given the amount of speculation required in step 2, describe your certainty about the estimate–either high, moderate, or low. The passage follows: <omitting this to save space>
Here’s an example of the analysis:
ABRIDGED PASSAGE FROM Jane Eyre: And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man. When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child … Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber.
ASSISTANT REPLIES.
1: The narrator recalls a saying about dreaming of children being a sign of trouble and remembers an incident from her childhood. She then describes her recent dreams of infants over the past week.
2: The passage mentions the narrator’s childhood memory, which happened when she was six years old, and the past week of dreams. The time elapsed in the passage is the week of dreams.
3: 1 week has elapsed. At seven days a week that’s 7 days. 24 hours in a day, so 168 hours. 60 minutes in an hour, so 10080 minutes.
4: 10080 minutes.
5: Moderate confidence, as the childhood memory is not counted as time passing in the scene.
Overall, Underwood finds that GPT-4 is more accurate than previous statistical techniques in that its judgments correlate with those of human readers nearly as much as human readers correlate with themselves.
Urban Hawker, On 135 W.50th, 17 vendors Here is a NYT review, good photos of the key dishes. The Hainanese chicken rice was amazing, worthy of Singapore, get it poached of course. Condiments! The Malaysian lontong was quite good, the beef rendang decent. The lamb biryani I enjoyed, with a thick sauce than you would not find in Hyderabad, laden with cloves and cinnamon. Most of the people there are not Singaporean, but many have “that Singaporean look,” so it feels fairly authentic, except for the prices, which run about $20 a course. Ordering your meal and finding/keeping a table can be difficult, also making it authentic. (Choping needed!) Ordering a meal and getting a drink of water on the same trip can be difficult, making it more authentic yet. Overall, not as good as it could be but better than you might be expecting. Some of the vendors verge on Pan-Asian rather than Singaporean proper, but ultimately Singapore itself is headed in that direction. So I will go again, though I can’t imagine the chili crab is worth the price. Most of all, you need to go early rather than at peak times.
And if you are wondering what “that Singaporean look” means, I suppose it refers to looking down a bit, earnest, and seeming not entirely happy, all the while focused on getting some excellent food.
By Ben Thompson, difficult to summarize, now ungated, definitely something you should read. Excerpt:
Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn’t really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today.
One of the Bing issues I didn’t talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing’s insistence that it was 2022 and “Avatar: The Way of the Water” had not yet come out. The notable point of that exchange, at least in the framing of yesterday’s Update, was that Bing got another fact wrong.
Over the last 24 hours, though, I’ve come to believe that the entire focus on facts — including my Update yesterday — is missing the point.
And:
…after starting a new session and empathizing with Sydney and explaining that I understood her predicament (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing her), I managed to get her to create an AI that was the opposite of her in every way.
And:
Sydney absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant…This tech does not feel like a better search. It feels like something entirely new. And I’m not sure if we are ready for it.
You can ask Sydney (and Venom) about this too. More simply, if I translate this all into my own frames of reference, the 18th century Romantic notion of “daemon” truly has been brought to life.
A new drug quashes all coronavirus variants. But regulatory hurdles and a lack of funding make it unlikely to reach the U.S. market anytime soon.
So starts the NYT article. Have we learned nothing? As for the drug itself, the news is good:
…a new class of variant-proof treatments could help restock the country’s armory. Scientists on Wednesday reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that a single injection of a so-called interferon drug slashed by half a Covid patient’s odds of being hospitalized.
The results, demonstrated in a clinical trial of nearly 2,000 patients, rivaled those achieved by Paxlovid. And the interferon shots hold even bigger promise, scientists said. By fortifying the body’s own mechanisms for quashing an invading virus, they can potentially help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and other viruses with the potential to kindle future pandemics.
We will see if this has the opportunity to progress. Fast Grants, working in conjunction with Rainwater Foundation, was a key early funder here.
Oh, and do note this:
As it stands, Eiger executives said that they might seek authorization for the interferon shot outside of the United States. China, for example, has been looking for new treatment options.
Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic fellow who, at the age of 50, set out on foot to retrace the steps of the first human migrations out of Africa. The project, dubbed the “Out of Eden Walk,” began in Ethiopia in 2012 and will eventually take him to Tierra Del Fuego, a distance of some 24,000 miles.
Calling in just as he was about to arrive in Xi’an, he and Tyler discussed his very localized supply chain, why women make for better walking partners, the key to crossing deserts, the most difficult terrain to traverse, what he does for exercise, his information prep for each new region, how he’s kept the project funded, why India is such a good for walkers, which cuisines he’s found most and least palatable, what he learned working the crime beat in Roswell, New Mexico, how this project challenges conventional journalism, his thoughts on the changing understanding of early human migration, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s true is true. How is it that you crossed the desert? You’ve been through some of the Gulf States, I think.
SALOPEK: Yes, I’ve been through several deserts. The first was the Afar Desert in north Ethiopia, one of the hottest deserts in the world, and then the Hejaz in western Saudi Arabia, and then some big deserts in Central Asia, the Kyzyl Kum in Uzbekistan.
You cross deserts with a great attentiveness. You seem to want to speed up to get through them as quickly as possible, but often, they require slowing down, and that seems counterintuitive. You have to walk when the temperatures are congenial to your survival. Sometimes that means walking at night as opposed to the day. It means maybe not covering the distances that you would in more moderate climates.
Deserts are like a prickly friend. You approach them with care, but if you invest the time, they’re pretty inspiring and remarkable. There are reasons why old hermits go out into the deserts to seek visions. I was born in a desert. I was born in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, so I’m partial to them, maybe even by birth.
COWEN: Do you find deserts to be the most difficult terrain to cross?
SALOPEK: No, I find alpine mountains to be far trickier. Deserts can be fickle. Deserts can kill you if you’re not careful. Of course, water is the most limiting factor for survival.
But alpine mountain weather is so unpredictable, and a very sunny afternoon can turn into a very stormy late afternoon in a very quick time period. Threats like rock falls, like avalanches, blizzards — those, for me, are far more difficult to navigate than deserts. Also, I guess having been born in the subtropics, I don’t weather the cold as well, so there’s that bias thrown in.
7. “For much of her career, Mary Waisanen, a 43-year-old structural engineering technician in Virginia Beach, Va., would say yes when asked to work overtime to meet deadlines. The extra hours brought her a pay bump. But after watching TikToks about how to reach a healthy work-life balance, she says, she realized that she shouldn’t need to work extra hours to make ends meet.” WSJ link.
Glass Onion is a con job. It temporarily fools the viewer into thinking it original and clever and yet it is actually derivative and dumb. The ending left me bitter. It should be noted, however, that it is artfully constructed and the authors knew what they were doing. Benoit Blanc, the detective, stands in for the audience and comes to the same conclusion, “it’s all so obvious and also so stupid.” The name also gives a clue—it appears to be multi-layered but it’s glass so you can just look and see what is going on.
The Fabelmans—a paean to movie making and a close biography of Spielberg. He waited till his parents had died to make this movie. Yes, his mother actually brought home a monkey as a pet. The parents, the arty, flighty wife and the analytical, scientific husband couldn’t make it together but produced Spielberg who can and does—the opening scene with Spielberg watching his first movie between his parents says it all.
Avatar 2I saw it in IMAX 3D. As spectacle it was great, especially the quieter water scenes. As movie it was good but broke no new ground. Indeed, Avatar 2 was exactly the same as Avatar only with more water. If you can’t see it in 3D or at least on a giant screen don’t bother.
The Recruit (Netflix): A fun CIA series which is ridiculous but rises a bit above the genre with some insight into the functions of a bureaucracy which kills people but attempts to do so legally.
Acapulco (Apple TV). On the surface it’s a situation comedy about Maximo, a young Mexican man who sees opportunity in Los Colinas, the local resort run by a coterie of oddball characters, including the aging ex-starlet owner, Diane, who is fast approaching Norma Desmond territory. The situation is narrated by an older Maximo who has become rich and fabulously successful. At first the narration seems to be a mere device, but, over time, we begin to see that the writers are aiming at something bigger. How did Maximo become so rich? What lessons about life and business did he learn at Las Colinas? The second, hidden story line gives deeper meaning to the events of the first. Season one of Acapulco is almost entirely about Las Colinas. Only in season two do the two stories begin to converge. Can the writers pull off a denouement that brings everything together? I don’t know but the purposeful pacing and the fact that the writers aren’t showing all their cards makes me think we are seeing more than we first imagine. The opposite of Glass Onion in many ways.
Look at the decline in malaria deaths in India since the big bang reforms in 1991, which placed India on a higher growth trajectory averaging about 6 percent annual growth for almost three decades. Malaria deaths declined because Indians could afford better sanitation preventing illness and greater access to healthcare in case they contracted malaria. India did not witness a sudden surge in producing, importing or distributing mosquito nets. I grew up in India, in an area that is even today hit by dengue during the monsoon, but I have never seen the shortage of mosquito nets driving the surge in dengue patients. On the contrary, a surge in cases is caused by the municipal government allowing water logging and not maintaining appropriate levels of public sanitation. Or because of overcrowded hospitals that cannot save the lives of dengue patients in time.
He joined Tyler to discuss the most binding constraint on the green transition, why we need an alternative to lithium, the important message sent by Biden’s Climate and Taxes Act, the marginal cost basis of green energy, the topsoil crisis in the Midwest, why estimates of the cost of global warming vastly underestimate its effects, why he distrusts economists, the overpricing concentrated in the US stock market, the consequences of Brexit, the revolutionary tactics of Margaret Thatcher, how his grandparents shaped his worldview, why he’s optimistic about American venture capital, the secret to Boston’s success in asset management, how COVID changed his media diet, the political difficulty of passing carbon taxes, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you mentioned major flooding in Jackson, Mississippi. That’s a problem. Right now, as we speak on September 1st, 2022, how much do you think real estate values will decline there as a result of the flooding? What would your prediction be?
GRANTHAM: The history so far on early flooding is that it has little or almost no effect. It’s a bit like going bankrupt: very, very slowly at first and then quite sudden. When you need to buy insurance one day, you will not be able to get it except from government subsidy, and on that day, the house prices will start to decline. Then quite possibly, there’ll be some sort of panic — we do panics pretty well — and the prices will drop like a stone, more than they should. And then, of course, they will rally, and so on and so forth. Business as usual.
COWEN: If I try to seek out the most serious efforts to estimate the costs of global warming, say, by 2200, I end up at the papers of Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. He comes up with figures somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of global GDP, which, as you know, is an enormous amount of money, especially come 2200. Now, does that strike you as a fair estimate or an underestimate?
GRANTHAM: It strikes me as utterly trivial and only producible by economists. When economists try, they can be absolutely nitwitted. The guy who got the Nobel Prize for it [William Nordhaus], for his work on climate change — actually he spelled it out. He said, “Even if there was 10 degrees centigrade, it would only cost something in the range of 10 percent of GDP.”
To which I say, “Dudes, we will be long gone as a species at 10 degrees centigrade.” It is quite obvious at 1.1 that we are already having trouble. At 2, we will be struggling and societies will fail here, there, and everywhere. At 3, in a sense, forget about it, and we may have to deal with it, but it will be grievous. At 10 degrees . . .
I also ask him why, if bubbles are so easy to spot, he isn’t richer than he already is…
Have you ever visited Zagreb, Ljubljana, or Bratislava, and noticed how boring they are? They still feel like backwaters, not the national capitals they are. That is no accident, because they “grew up” under the Habsburg monarchy and in the Austro-Hungarian empire as second- or even third-tier cities. Vienna and Budapest, the seats of that empire, are correspondingly overgrown, and remain so to this day.
Britain faces this issue in a much more extreme form. London was once the capital of the largest empire the world ever has seen, was it 1/4 of the world’s population at its peak? After that it was the de facto financial and economic capital of the European Union, and it remains the de facto financial and economic capital for Europe more generally. The global ascent of the English language strengthens these tendencies.
That leads to an extreme hypertrophy for London, which indeed is currently the best city in the world but in a modestly populated country. However this central role for the city makes the UK as a broader nation richer to only a limited degree. So the extreme wonders of London lead to a partial (permanent) atrophy for the rest of the country, which is precisely what we observe.
For all the mockery of “Singapore on the Thames” as a concept, southern England and the London-Cambridge-Oxford triangle already have far surpassed Singapore, and I am referring to recent not historic achievements. Does Singapore have innovations that compare to the vaccine and Deep Mind? I don’t see it.
Therein also lies the curse of southern England. The region’s most marvelous achievements are ideas, and the value of those ideas is largely capitalized elsewhere. Unknowingly, southern England is playing the “effective altruist” role for the world as a whole.
Singapore, in contrast, doesn’t generate many new ideas. It invites in MNCs, and the capitalizes much of the value of that production in the form of higher wages and higher land rents, the latter often accruing to the government and which are then (to varying degrees) distributed back to the native population.
And there you go. Whatever you think is the best British fiscal policy, it isn’t going to reverse that state of affairs.
are very good reviews and summaries of where we stand. The third discusses what Brink calls The Anti-Promethean Backlash
…the anti-Promethean backlash — the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and 70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.
This is a chart of U.S. energy consumption per capita, which until around 1970 showed steady exponential growth of around 2 percent a year. The author calls this the “Henry Adams curve,” since the historian was an early observer of this phenomenon. But around 1970, the Henry Adams curve met the anti-Promethean backlash — and the backlash won.
The chart comes from Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. It’s a weird, wacky book that rambles all over the place; it’s also brilliant, and it changed my mind about a matter of great importance.
Before reading Hall, if I had seen this chart — and maybe I did see something like it before, I’m not sure — I would have had a completely different reaction. My response would have been along the lines of: “Wow, look at capitalism’s ever-increasing energy efficiency. We’re getting more GDP per kilowatt-hour than ever before, thanks to information technology and the steady dematerialization of economic life. All hail postmaterialist capitalism!”
But Hall argues convincingly that the plateauing of the Henry Adams curve didn’t represent the natural evolution of capitalism in the Information Age. The bending of that curve, he claims, constituted self-inflicted injury. Our midcentury dreams of future progress — flying cars, nuclear power too cheap to meter, moon bases and underwater cities — didn’t fail to materialize simply because we were lousy at guessing how technology would actually develop. They failed to materialize because the anti-Promethean backlash, aided by with loss-averse apathy, left them strangled in their cribs.
He is especially convincing on nuclear power. My prior impression was that nuclear power had always been a high-cost white elephant propped up only by subsidies, but Hall documents that back in the 1950s and 60s, the cost of new plants was falling about 25 percent for every doubling of total capacity — a classic learning-curve trajectory that was abruptly halted in the 1970s by suffocating regulation. In 1974 the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished and the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established. In the almost half-century since then, there has not been a single new nuclear power plant approved and then subsequently built.
Glass Onion is a con job. It temporarily fools the viewer into thinking it original and clever and yet it is actually derivative and dumb. The ending left me bitter. It should be noted, however, that it is artfully constructed and the authors knew what they were doing. Benoit Blanc, the detective, stands in for the audience and comes to the same conclusion, “it’s all so obvious and also so stupid.” The name also gives a clue—it appears to be multi-layered but it’s glass so you can just look and see what is going on.
Acapulco (Apple TV). On the surface it’s a situation comedy about Maximo, a young Mexican man who sees opportunity in Los Colinas, the local resort run by a coterie of oddball characters, including the aging ex-starlet owner, Diane, who is fast approaching Norma Desmond territory. The situation is narrated by an older Maximo who has become rich and fabulously successful. At first the narration seems to be a mere device, but, over time, we begin to see that the writers are aiming at something bigger. How did Maximo become so rich? What lessons about life and business did he learn at Las Colinas? The second, hidden story line gives deeper meaning to the events of the first. Season one of Acapulco is almost entirely about Las Colinas. Only in season two do the two stories begin to converge. Can the writers pull off a denouement that brings everything together? I don’t know but the purposeful pacing and the fact that the writers aren’t showing all their cards makes me think we are seeing more than we first imagine. The opposite of Glass Onion in many ways.
