a16z Podcast: Talent, Tech Trends, and Culture
I interview Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, not a Conversation but nonetheless a conversation, they were both in top form. Here is the link.
Saturday assorted links
1. The next generation of Indian intellectuals? Is the list maybe a bit too high-falutin’?
2. How some of China’s spies operate. And update on Chinese CRISPR patients, lots is going on here and we are seeing just the tip of it.
3. “Libraries are incredibly risk averse…” And this bit: “We will err very much on this side of caution. We would rather not gather the information in the first place, then run the risk of holding it and losing it. And we do have to have information. With one exception, we get rid of it the moment we can. The only one exception is fines information.”
5. More skepticism about carbon taxes, from Justin Gillis (NYT).
6. Scott Sumner on how to teach economics (recommended, there is much truth and wisdom in this post).
7. Top economists pick the best research papers of the year.
Demographics matters more and explains more than you think
The US economy has undergone a number of puzzling changes in recent decades. Large firms now account for a greater share of economic activity, new firms are being created at a slower rate, and workers are getting paid a smaller share of GDP. This paper shows that changes in population growth provide a unified quantitative explanation for these long-term changes. The mechanism goes through firm entry rates. A decrease in population growth lowers firm entry rates, shifting the firm-age distribution towards older firms. Heterogeneity across firm age groups combined with an aging firm distribution replicates the observed trends. Micro data show that an aging firm distribution fully explains i) the concentration of employment in large firms, ii) and trends in average firm size and exit rates, key determinants of the firm entry rate. An aging firm distribution also explains the decline in labor’s share of GDP. In our model, older firms have lower labor shares because of lower overhead labor to employment ratios. Consistent with our mechanism, we find that the ratio of nonproduction workers to total employment has declined in the US.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Hugo Hopenhayn, Julian Neira, and Rish Singhania, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Yonas thanks you all for buying *Stubborn Attachments*
I went to see him and his family in Lalibela over Thanksgiving holiday (they cook amazing lentils), and they are doing fine and making good progress on their activities:
The moral horror of America’s prisons
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the final bit but not the main argument:
So what then to do? The first and most important step is for Americans to realize they have been creating and sanctioning a moral horror, and to treat it as a major political issue. Step No. 2 is to modify the career incentives for prosecutors to seek out ever tougher sentences. Step No. 3 is to experiment with more electronic monitoring of criminals, and to see if that can limit the number of people behind bars. Step No. 4 is to frame prison reform in more straightforward economic terms. It is not only about guaranteeing rights on paper. It’s also about designing the economic incentives for prisons to create secure and orderly environments. That has hardly been the focus of current systems. Finally — and this idea is broader in scope — the decriminalization of additional offenses should also be considered.
I realize these are complex issues, and potential remedies require far more consideration than I can give them here. But if you think America’s current penal system is the very best we can do, that is about the most pessimistic verdict on this country I have ever heard. Has anyone ever suggested that the American prison system is the world’s best? The can-do attitude is one of my favorite features of American life. We just need to apply it a little more broadly.
Can I simply say “I am right”?
Friday assorted links
1. Anonymous and pseudonymous inventions other than Bitcoin.
2. Bhaven N. Sampat long NBER survey paper on evidence on patents and copyright. I won’t get to read this soon, but it looks very useful.
3. “When young sailors need a minor course correction, he said, instead of ordering a spell in the brig, he often orders them to write reports on works by authors like Patrick Henry or Ayn Rand.” (NYT)
4. Data on founders of billion-dollar start-ups.
5. Why is Serbia a nation but Karnataka not? Recommended.
Athletes Don’t Own Their Tattoos
NYTimes: Any creative illustration “fixed in a tangible medium” is eligible for copyright, and, according to the United States Copyright Office, that includes the ink displayed on someone’s skin. What many people don’t realize, legal experts said, is that the copyright is inherently owned by the tattoo artist, not the person with the tattoos.
Some tattoo artists have sold their rights to firms which are now suing video game producers who depict the tattoos on the players likenesses:
The company Solid Oak Sketches obtained the copyrights for five tattoos on three basketball players — including the portrait and area code on Mr. James — before suing in 2016 because they were used in the NBA 2K series.
…Before filing its lawsuit, Solid Oak sought $819,500 for past infringement and proposed a $1.14 million deal for future use of the tattoos.
To avoid this shakedown, players are now being told to get licenses from artists before getting tattooed.
Shared Plates, Shared Minds: Consuming from a Shared Plate Promotes Cooperation
A meal naturally brings people together, but does the way a meal is served and consumed further matter for cooperation between people? This research (n = 1476) yielded evidence that it does. People eating from shared plates (i.e., Chinese style meal) cooperated more in social dilemmas and negotiations than those eating from separate plates. Specifically, sharing food from a single plate increased perceived coordination among diners, which in turn led them to behave more cooperatively and less competitively toward each other compared with individuals eating the same food from separate plates. The effect of sharing a plate on cooperation occurred among strangers, which suggests that sharing plates can bring together not only allies, but strangers as well.
That is the abstract from a piece by Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell, via the estimable Chug, with whom I have shared meals.
What were the questions I thought about most this year?
As for background context, I’ve for years wondered why people get so bugged by each other on Twitter. A second question is why political correctness — even if you think it is fully bad — occasions so much opposition compared to many other maladies.
Those paths of inquiry have led me to think more about socially neurotic people, and yes that is a pretty big percentage of humans. By that designation I mean people who likely would score high on neuroticism on a five-factor personality test. Here is one definition, useful but maybe not the most precise one:
Neuroticism can lead an individual to focus on, and to dwell on, the negative aspects of a situation, rather than the positives. They experience jealousy and become envious of other people when they feel that they are in an advantaged position over themselves. They may be prone to becoming frustrated, irate or angry as they struggle to cope with life stressors.
Is this kind of neuroticism even well-defined, or is it indirectly bundled with other positive traits, including positive affect toward some other set of external circumstances? Or, to be blunt, are we ever justified in thinking that neurotic people are — ceteris paribus — simply worse than others? Maybe neuroticism is a holdover from earlier times when life was more precarious and nowadays lingering neurotic traits are largely unjustified. Alternatively, is neuroticism simply “another way of being”, deserving of respect the way we might treat another culture, even in the presence of some negative externalities?
How much are five-factor personality traits context-dependent rather than absolute? Is anti-neuroticism neurotic, a kind of negative affect of its own? Or is it a way of standing up for truth, justice, and the American way?
Are there positive social externalities from neuroticism, such as indirectly subsidizing movements for social justice?
Overall, I am coming to the conclusion that, even (especially?) if we are personally annoyed by neuroticism, it is more useful to view it in a broader and less negative context.
Most concretely, when should you seek out or at least not mind neurotic trading partners? It’s that kind of question where the rubber hits the road.
These were perhaps my top questions for mental space, I may soon present you with some others.
52 things learned by Kent Hendricks
Here are a few:
Contrary to the beliefs of roughly 33% of Americans, Kansas is not the flattest state. In fact, it’s the 9th flattest state, and it’s one of only two Great Plains states to make the top ten (the other is North Dakota). The flattest state is actually Florida, the second flattest state is Illinois, and the least flattest is West Virginia. (Disruptive Geo)
…The average high school GPA of a representative sample of 700 millionaires in the United States is 2.9. (Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
…Dinosaurs roamed the earth for a long time. Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus. (Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions)
…Pepperoni pizza is subject to more government regulation than plain cheese pizza. That’s because cheese pizzas are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while pepperoni pizzas—which have meat—are regulated by the Department of Agriculture. (Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany, Risk: A Very Short Introduction)
Here is the full list, interesting throughout.
Thursday assorted links
1. Leather tanners of Ecuador.
2. Science stories from 2018 — are these the important ones?
3. Bach’s most popular works, broader rankings here. Based on YouTube data, not what is played in concert. If there is any composer who in terms of intrinsic quality should not have such a Power Law, it is Bach, yet he does.
That was then, this is now
[Andrew] Jackson imagined his role as that of a Roman tribune or dictator, summoned to executive power for a season for defend the plebeians against corrupt patricians. That meant, among other things, slashing federal expenses and retiring the national debt.
Jackson in fact worked hard to strike down “internal improvements” in only a single state, as he was convinced that such legislation was unconstitutional, and that a corrupt Congress was working to enrich itself.
That is all from Walter A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877, p.60.
Resource wealth depends on market orientation
This paper explores the effect of market orientation on (known or available) natural resource wealth using a novel dataset of world-wide major hydrocarbon and mineral discoveries. Our empirical estimates based on a large panel of countries show that increased market orientation causes a significant increase in discoveries of natural resources. In a thought experiment where economies in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa remain closed, they would have only achieved one quarter of the actual increase in discoveries they have experienced since the early 1990s. Our results call into question the commonly held view that known or available natural resource endowments are exogenous.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Rabah Arezki, Frederick van der Ploeg, and Frederik Toscani, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What I’ve been reading
1. Elaine Dundy, Life Itself. She as a teen taught Mondrian how to jitterbug, married Kenneth Tynan and moved into London high society, became an important writer in her own right, and got tired of him wanting to whip her. I was never inclined to stop reading.
2. Amina M. Derbi, The Storyteller and the Terrorist in Our Newsfeeds. In this novella a Muslim girl in Northern Virginia posts stories of murders on-line and those murders start coming true. I finished this one too. Unusual in its approach.
3. Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith. On the surface this is an account of various famous British anthropologists and their views toward Christianity. At a deeper level it contrasts the anthropological and religious approaches to understanding society. Why do so many anthropologists have more tolerant attitudes toward the religions they study than to Christianity? Do the Christian beliefs of an anthropologist help or hurt that individual’s understanding of other religions in the field? Once you’ve seen another religion “from the outside” as an anthropologist, and observed its apparently arbitrary features, can you still be religious yourself? Definitely recommended, here is my previous review of Larsen on John Start Mill.
4. Colin M. Waugh, Paul Kagame and Rwanda: Genocide and the Rwandan Patriotic Front. This is perhaps the most conceptual book I know on the Rwandan genocide, most of all because it ties the killings to both prior and posterior events very well. Recommended, but (for better or worse) note the author is relatively sympathetic to Kagame in the post-conflict period. I did just buy Waugh’s book on Charles Taylor and Liberia, which you can take as a credible endorsement of this one.
Noteworthy is Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. I have not read it, but had positive impressions from my paw-through.
Sister Wendy has passed away
Here are some notices. In addition to her duties for the Church, she was an art historian “for the people.” I thought she had a remarkably good eye, and was especially strong in explaining the virtues of late medieval/early Renaissance art, most of all works “from a school” or attributed to a pseudonym. She was “a thing” in the 90s, so if you don’t know her work I would recommend all of her books, they are full of life and love for art and yes love for the reader too. Here is the NYT obituary.