Mid-level urban average is over?
Forty years ago, Nashville and Birmingham, Ala., were peers. Two hundred miles apart, the cities anchored metropolitan areas of just under one million people each and had a similar number of jobs paying similar wages.
Not anymore. The population of the Nashville area has roughly doubled, and young people have flocked there, drawn by high-paying jobs as much as its hip “Music City” reputation. Last month, the city won an important consolation prize in the competition for Amazon’s second headquarters: an operations center that will eventually employ 5,000 people at salaries averaging $150,000 a year.
Birmingham, by comparison, has steadily lost population, and while its suburbs have expanded, their growth has lagged the Nashville area’s. Once-narrow gaps in education and income have widened, and important employers like SouthTrust and Saks have moved their headquarters. Birmingham tried to lure Amazon, too, but all it is getting from the online retail giant is a warehouse and a distribution center where many jobs will pay about $15 an hour.
That is from Ben Casselman (NYT), interesting throughout. Ben is yet another example of just how good the Times is at talent selection…
Measures of cultural distance
A new paper with many authors — most prominently Joseph Henrich — tries to measure the cultural gaps between different countries. I am reproducing a few of their results (see pp.36-37 for more), noting that higher numbers represent higher gaps:
Distance from the U.S.
Algeria: 0.15
Australia: 0.03
Brazil: 0.07
Canada: 0.02
China: 0.17
Ecuador: 0.12
Egypt: 0.24
Ethiopia: 0.14
Georgia [the country]: 0.15
Hong Kong: 0.09
Indonesia: 0.19
Japan: 0.11
Malaysia: 0.12
Nigeria: 0.15
Switzerland: 0.06
Egypt is the most distant, then Yemen, with Canada as the closest.
As for cultural distance from China, we have:
Great Britain: 0.20
Hong Kong: 0.09
Japan: 0.14
Russia: 0.09 (not *so* far away)
Taiwan: 0.10
Vietnam: 0.06
Overall the numbers show much greater cultural distance of other nations from China than from the United States, a significant and under-discussed problem for China. For instance, the United States is about as culturally close to Hong Kong as China is.
Sunday assorted links
2. Facial boarding.
3. Erik Torenberg free lunch list.
4. “In 2016, Marriott Hotels, which had 19 hotel brands, merged with Starwood, which had 11. They didn’t abolish any brands in the merger, and so the company faced a challenge: How to explain to customers, or even to its own employees, what makes all 30 of these brands different from each other.” Here is more from Josh Barro.
5. New Egyptian tomb discovered, what else to come?
6. Daniel Gross podcast on Pioneer and talent discovery, with Erik Torenberg.
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
Tim May, physicist, libertarian-Randian, cypherpunk revolutionary, has died. Here is his Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto first published in 1992.
A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.
Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re- routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.
The technology for this revolution–and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution–has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification. The focus has until now been on academic conferences in Europe and the U.S., conferences monitored closely by the National Security Agency. But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable. And the next ten years will bring enough additional speed to make the ideas economically feasible and essentially unstoppable. High-speed networks, ISDN, tamper-proof boxes, smart cards, satellites, Ku-band transmitters, multi-MIPS personal computers, and encryption chips now under development will be some of the enabling technologies.
The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.
Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.
Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!
Addendum: Inspiring! But see my post The Demise of Crypto Anarchy from 15 years ago.
Deconstructing cultural codes
As I continue to do Conversations with Tyler, more people ask me about “the Tyler Cowen production function.” Well, here is one piece of it I don’t think I’ve written about or talked about before. I’m going to bring you there in slightly long-winded fashion, long-winded for a blog post that is.
I’ve long been convinced that “matters of culture” are central for understanding economic growth, but I’m also painfully aware these theories tend to lack rigor and even trying to define culture can waste people’s time for hours, with no satisfactory resolution.
So I thought I would tackle this problem sideways. I figured the best way to understand culture was to try to understand or “crack” as many cultural codes as possible. As many styles of art. As many kinds of music. As many complex novels, and complex classic books, and of course as many economic models as well. Religions, and religious books. Anthropological understandings. I also learned two languages in my adult years, German and Spanish (the former better than the latter). A bit later I realized that figuring out how an economic sector works — if only partially — was really not so different from cracking these other cultural codes. For instance, once I spent three days on a boat (as keynote speaker), exclusively with people from a particular segment of the shipping trade. It was like entering a whole new world and every moment of it was fascinating.
Eventually it seemed to me that problems of management were themselves a kind of cultural code, each one different of course.
And travel was the most potent form of this challenge, every new place a new culture to be unraveled and partially understood, and how much time was there to do that anyway?
It is very time-consuming — years-consuming — to invest in this skill of culture code cracking. But I have found it highly useful, most of all for various practical ventures and also for dealing with people, and for trying to understand diverse points of view and also for trying to pass intellectual Turing tests.
I am not recommending this you at any particular margin, or at the margin I have invested in. But if you ask me about the Tyler Cowen production function, every now and then I will tell you.
Addendum: It occurs to me that the number and diversity of cultural codes is increasing much faster than the ability of any individual to track them, much less master them. In this regard, an understanding of matters cultural is always receding from us.
Alexa for animals
A peckish parrot has been caught ordering strawberries, a watermelon and even a water boiler through his foster owner’s electronic personal assistant.
Rocco, an African Grey, requested the items through an Alexa device while his minder was out of the home. Luckily, due to a parental lock, none of his attempted purchases went through.
Rocco, who lives with Marion Wischnewski in Berkshire, U.K., has attempted to order everything from kites and lightbulbs through Alexa since moving to her home. He also gets the device to tell him jokes and play his favorite tunes.
“I’ve come home before and he has romantic music playing,” Wischnewski told The Times of London. “He loves to dance and has the sweetest personality.”
Here is the story, via Michael Rosenwald.
Michael’s short review of *Stubborn Attachments*
From my email, he said this was the entirety of his review:
A reflection on how to best worship humans or some form of enduring human community as a god or gods. From a religious perspective, such an approach may at first seem illusory, but an attentive reader will be left wondering how close that illusion is to the actual truth.
Quito, Ecuador bleg
I haven’t been for about twenty-five years, so I very much welcome your recommendations on what to do, see, and eat there. And what should one do with a spare day in Guayaquil?
I thank you all in advance for your extreme wisdom and counsel.
Saturday assorted links
1. Birth rates for conservative Protestants are doing worse than you think.
2. Ethereum update.
3. Professor freed her graduate student from Islamic state war zone.
4. “Individuals expect honesty to be less pleasant and less socially connecting than it is.”
5. “The most Googled TV show of 2018 is a 70-episode Chinese period drama, “Story of Yanxi Palace.””
6. Roland Fryer update (NYT).
A social credit system for scientists?
Researchers in China who commit scientific misconduct could soon be prevented from getting a bank loan, running a company or applying for a public-service job. The government has announced an extensive punishment system that could have significant consequences for offenders — far beyond their academic careers.
Under the new policy, dozens of government agencies will have the power to hand out penalties to those caught committing major scientific misconduct, a role previously performed by the science ministry or universities. Errant researchers could also face punishments that have nothing to do with research, such as restrictions on jobs outside academia, as well as existing misconduct penalties, such as losing grants and awards.
“Almost all aspects of daily life for the guilty scientists could be affected,” says Chen Bikun, who studies scientific evaluation systems at Nanjing University of Science and Technology.
The policy, announced last month, is an extension of the country’s controversial ‘social credit system’, where failure to comply with the rules of one government agency can mean facing restrictions or penalties from other agencies.
The punishment overhaul is the government’s latest measure to crack down on misconduct. But the nature and extent of the policy has surprised many researchers. “I have never seen such a comprehensive list of penalties for research misconduct elsewhere in the world,” says Chien Chou, a scientific integrity education researcher at Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.
By David Cyranoski in Nature, via Michelle Dawson.
A Progressive review of *Stubborn Attachments*
By Joshua Kim, here are a few excerpts:
An oddity of Stubborn Attachments is that Cowen is reluctant to apply his pro-economic growth philosophy to real-world political choices.
[TC: that is on purpose of course]
Stubborn Attachments would have been more persuasive if Cowen was more willing to explore the implications of his philosophy on the political and policy choices before us. The question is, are progressive values are at odds with the belief that long-term economic growth is the engine of progress?
And:
Nor does Cowen answer the question of at what point a wealthy society should be able to provide a measure of economic security to all of its citizens? Does the guarantee that work should come with a living wage and that everyone deserves access to health care and education incompatible with a long-term focus on economic progress?
As is always the case with a Cowen book, his writing will make you think. Stubborn Attachments is too abstract for my tastes. But I’m happy to have spent 3.5 hours arguing with Cowen.
If he reads MR, he can always spend more.
Friday assorted links
1. “Contrary to expectations derived from social role theory, sex differences in physical aggression decrease as societal gender inequality increased. In regards to sexual selection theory, we find no evidence that sex differences in frequent fighting varies according to societal rule of law or income inequality.” Link here.
2. Arnold Kling’s 93 pp. macro memoir.
3. Do people donate money to signal their intelligence?
4. Governance within the caravan.
5. Houllebecq on Trump. And Peter Beinart on populism and gender lines, interesting stuff though the framing is too slanted.
Gulf States fact of the day
Between them the six Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — have provided $2.2bn to US universities since the beginning of 2012 to June this year, according to a Financial Times analysis of the US education department’s Foreign Gifts and Contracts Report. The Gulf total represents just under a quarter of all foreign gifts and contracts over that period. Qatar, the world’s richest state in per capita terms, led with $1.3bn, followed by Saudi Arabia with $580.5m and the UAE with $213m.
The figures include funding from state oil companies, such as Saudi Aramco and Qatar Petroleum, Gulf universities and cultural missions. Much of the money also goes to student fees — Riyadh funded about 110,000 US scholarships for Saudis between 2005 and 2015.
That is from Andrew England and Simeon Kerr in the FT. On the list of recipients, Georgetown and Northwestern are the top two.
The second cohort of Emergent Ventures winners
Here is the list of the second set of winners, in the order the grants were made, noting that the descriptions are mine not theirs:
Kelly Smith has a for-profit project to further extend a parent-run charter school system in Arizona, using Uber-like coordinating apps and “minimalist” OER methods.
Andrew L. Roberts, Northwestern University, a small grant to further his work on how sports relates to politics.
Stefan de Villiers, high school student, to create podcasts on the decisions of other high school students and how/why they become successful.
Brian Burns is working (with Samo Burja) on the history of mathematics and career networks, with special attention to the blossoming of innovation in 18th century Göttingen: “The secret to producing flourishing mathematical and scientific traditions may lie in a careful study of institutions. I will undertake this investigation and in the process uncover lost mathematical knowledge.” Gauss, Riemann, and Hilbert!
Can Olcer is one of the two entrepreneurs behind Kosmos School, a K-12 school that exists only in virtual reality, a for-profit enterprise with an emphasis on science education.
Anonymous, working on a board game for ten years, aimed at teaching basic economics, including supply and demand and the core ideas of Ronald Coase. The grant is for marketing the game.
Sophie Sandor is a 23-year-old Scottish film-maker making films with “noticeable themes [of] rational optimism, ambition and a rejection of the victimhood notion that millennials are prone to.” She is also interested in making documentaries in the education space.
Nicholas Dunk has a for-profit to bring voice recognition/machine transcription to the daily tasks of doctors. The goal is to solve paperwork problems, free up doctor time, encourage better record-keeping, and improve accuracy, all toward the end of higher quality and less expensive health care.
Lama Al Rajih, a young Saudi CS student, building Therma, among other projects, she received a travel grant to visit potential mentors.
I am very excited by this new cohort. Here is a list of the first round of winners, and here is the underlying rationale for Emergent Ventures. You can apply here.
Who read what in 2018
Jed McCaleb
Tyler Cowen’s “Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals” is a well-reasoned moral argument for how we should behave as a civilization. It makes two main points: First, we should take a longer view of things. Right now we place too high a discount rate on the future, when in fact most of humanity is there. This leads to the second conclusion: that almost everything else we attempt to do to help the world is far less effective than just increasing the economic growth rate. My only complaint about the book is that I was left wanting more. I wish Mr. Cowen had gone into more detail, for instance, about individual freedoms vs. economic growth. There are inevitably trade-offs between the two, and he doesn’t delve into how we should make these decisions.
—Mr. McCaleb is a co-founder of the cryptocurrency ventures Ripple and Stellar.