Popular music CDs from 2018
The two CDs I enjoyed the most this year were both sound worlds, and silences, from the distant past:
Brian Eno, Another Green World, and
van Morrison, Astral Weeks, fifty year anniversary for that one, and I hadn’t realized how closely the lyrics were tied to details of Belfast. Next up will be the quieter cuts on Electric Ladyland.
The Beatles’s White Album tapes were a revelation, but it is enough to hear them once or twice. I learned that the album was remarkably well-produced, no less than Sgt. Pepper, to get that under-produced sound. “I Will” came directly from “Blue Moon” (!), and “Blackbird” came from Bach’s Bourree (less surprising). Classic Beatle songs such as “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude” and many others were basically written by 1968, making 1966-68 a truly remarkable period in their songwriting output. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was better in its early acoustic version. Some of my best Beatles listening was to track down their most Cage-Stockhausen-influenced passages, such as Paul’s acoustic fade-out at the end of “You Never Give Me Your Money,” or the instrumental close of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Paul’s new album Egypt Station does not have much ear candy, but it does reveal his longstanding status as a very horny dude; listen to his much earlier Temporary Secretary for something unacceptably obscene (and creative). Then go back and re-listen to his early Beatle lyrics through this lens. The best argument for LSD I’ve heard is simply that it got Paul to stop singing about girls for a few years, so it must be pretty powerful.
I got sick of hip-hop this year, so of the new releases I’ve been most intrigued by:
Lush, Snail Mail (at least three excellent songs)
Low, Double Negative
Mitski, Be the Cowboy
But it is too early to judge their staying power. Sitting in the “I still haven’t listened to this yet pile” is:
Aphex Twin, Collapse EP (too many other CDs piled on top of the record player!)
Autechre, NTS Sessions, an 8-CD set.
Self-recommending is Desmond Dekker: Action!/Intensified
What do you all recommend?
Race discrimination in the NBA, alas I have long suspected this
Here is part of the abstract:
Weighted quantile regressions show evidence of consumer discrimination in that black players with high audience visibility (role and star players) experience a larger racial wage gap. The size of the share of the white population is shown to be positively correlated with the racial wage gap. No employee nor employer discrimination is found.
And:
Black players receive on average 20.5% less than their counterparts, all else equal.
Here is the paper by Candon Johnson and Eduardo Munici, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Saturday assorted links
1. Short podcast with David Gil about Stubborn Attachments.
2. What will a Chinese world order look like? (Bruno M.)
3. A remarkably good (video) debate about smart phone use and teen well-being (Jean Twenge and Nir Eyal).
4. Why angels hide.
5. 51 tips for a successful life.
6. Claims about dollar stores, probably not all correct.
Kenneth Tynan on Alec Guinness, circa 1952
He can — and this is rare — act mind, and may be the only actor alive who could play a genius convincingly: Donne, for instance, Milton, Pope, or even Shakespeare…would be comfortably within his grasp. But he is not, and never will be a star, in the sense that Coward and Olivier are stars. Olivier, one might say, ransacks the vaults of a part with blowlamp, crowbar, and gun-powder; Guinness is the nocturnal burglar, the humble Houdini who knows the combination. He does everything by stealth. Whatever he may do in the future, eh will leave no theatrical descendants, as Gielgud will. He has illumined many a hitherto blind alley of subtlety, but blazed no trails. Irving, we read, was rapt, too: but it was a weird, thunderous raptness that shook its fist at the gods. Guinness waves away awe with a witty fingertip and deflects the impending holocaust with a shrug. His stage presence is quite without amplitude, and his face, bereft of its virtuosity of make-up, is a signless zero. His special gift is to imply the presence of little fixed ideas, gambolling about behind the deferential mask of normality. The characters he plays are injected hypodermically, not tattooed all over him; the latter is the star’s way and Guinness shrinks from it. Like Buckingham in Richard III he is “deep-resolving, witty”; the clay image on whom the witches work. An innocence, as of the womb, makes his face placid even when he plays murderers.
Whether he likes it or not (and I suspect he does), his true métier will continue to be eccentrics — men reserved, blinkered, shut off from their fellows, and obsessed. Within such minority men there is a hidden glee, an inward fanatical glow; and in their souls Guinness is at ease.
That is from Kenneth Tynan, Profiles, which is in fact a remarkable and remarkably good book.
The jobs of the future, circa 1988
A syndicated article published in the September 5, 1988, edition of the Press and Sun-Bulletin newspaper in New York talked with a number of experts about what the jobs of tomorrow would look like. The article first quotes S. Norman Feingold, a clinical psychologist and career counselor who died in 2005.
From the 1988 article:
Feingold envisions a range of exotic careers: Ocean hotel manager, wellness consultant, sports law specialist, lunar astronomer and even robot trainer.
The piece also quotes the George Tech engineering professor Alan Porter who gave his opinion on the future of fast food.
He predicts such innovations as “the Autoburger,” a fast-food dispensary something like McDonald’s, but without human workers.
And the article ends with a mixed bag of good and bad predictions:
Marvin Cetron, a technological forecaster, looks at the year 2000 and predicts a 32-hour work week. “The only job a woman won’t be holding is Catholic priest,” he said.
Cetron said college students of the future will study enzyme research and genetic and robot engineering.
Here is the piece, via Tim Harford. The broad lesson I think is that bets on computers were basically right, and will be for some time to come, and other bets are either obvious or stupid, in retrospect.
Is the age of man-machine cooperation over in chess?
Given further data on the stunning performances of AlphaZero, Charles Murray asked me that on Twitter. And for now the answer surely seems to be yes: just let AlphaZero rip, and keep the human at bay. It’s a bit like the joke about the factory: “The dog is there to keep the man away from the machines, and the man is there to guard the dog.” (Or is it the other way around?)
But here’s the thing: right now there is only one AlphaZero, and AlphaZero does not play like God (I think). At some point there will be more projects of this kind, and they will not always agree as to what is the best chess move. Re-enter the human! Imagine a human turning on AlphaZero and five other such programs, seeing where they disagree, and then querying the programs further to find a better answer. It is at least possible (though not necessary) that a human will be better at doing this than will a machine.
Keep in mind, the original role in the human in Advanced [man-machine] Chess was not to substitute human chess judgment for machine chess judgment in any kind of discretionary fashion. It was to adjudicate disagreements across programs: “Rybka has a slightly better opening book. Fritz is better in closed endgames. Houdini is tops at defense.” And so on. The human then sided with one engine over the others, or simply spent more engine time investigating some options rather than others.
It could possibly run the same way for neural net methods, once we have a general sense of the strengths and weaknesses of different projects. So yes, man-machine cooperation in chess is a loser right now, but it may well come back. And there is a broader economic lesson in that, namely that automation may eliminate jobs, but it does not necessarily eliminate them permanently.
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.
The Cost of Occupational Licensing
In an NBER paper, Blair and Chung find that occupational licensing reduces labor supply significantly. I had expected that occupational licensing would be worse for blacks than for whites because it imposes an additional locus of discrimination but that effect seems to be opposed by a certification effect (the license helps black workers to overcome statistical discrimination) so the net effect is not as bad for blacks as for whites:
We exploit state variation in licensing laws to study the effect of licensing on occupational choice using a boundary discontinuity design. We find that licensing reduces equilibrium labor supply by an average of 17%-27%. The negative labor supply effects of licensing appear to be strongest for white workers and comparatively weaker for black workers.
An Institute for Justice report by Morris M. Kleiner, the dean of occupational licensing studies, and Evgeny S. Vorotnikov attemps to calculate the net loss to the US economy from occupational licensing and concludes that when all costs are considered it is on the order of $200 billion annually.
In preventing people from working in the occupations for which they are best suited, licensing misallocates people’s human capital. In forcing people to fulfill burdensome licensing requirements that do not raise quality, licensing misallocates people’s human capital, money and time. And with its promise of economic returns over and above what can be had absent licensing, licensing encourages occupational practitioners and their occupational associations to invest resources in rent-seeking instead of more productive activity. Taking these misallocated resources into account, we find potential costs to the economy that far exceed those from deadweight losses and that likely provide a more complete picture of the extent to which licensing reduces economic activity.
…we find licensing costs the American economy $197.3 billion in misallocated resources.
Corporate science fiction markets in everything
…the business world has been increasingly aware of the genre’s potential. In 2017, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the professional services firm that advises 440 of the Fortune 500 companies, published a blueprint for using science fiction to explore business innovation. The same year, the Harvard Business Review argued that “business leaders need to read more science fiction” in order to stay ahead of the curve…
A number of companies, along with a loose constellation of designers, marketers, and consultants, have formed to expedite the messy creative visualization process that used to take decades. For a fee, they’ll prototype a possible future for a [corporate] client, replete with characters who live in it, at as deep a level as a company can afford. They aim to do what science fiction has always done — build rich speculative worlds, describe that world’s bounty and perils, and, finally, envision how that future might fall to pieces.
Alternatively referred to as sci-fi prototyping, futurecasting, or worldbuilding, the goal of these companies is generally the same: help clients create forward-looking fiction to generate ideas and IP for progress or profit. Each of the biggest practitioners believe they have their own formulas for helping clients negotiate the future. And corporations like Ford, Nike, Intel, and Hershey’s, it turns out, are willing to pay hefty sums for their own in-house Minority Reports.
That is from Brian Merchant on Medium.
Tamara Winter on how to generate compound returns
This is a concordance of responses she received on Twitter, I am not sure she endorses all of these ideas, the rest is her I won’t double indent:
Interpersonal and Mindfulness
- Wake up early.
- Spend time in prayer and/or meditation first thing in the morning. Or, if you can’t fit it in then, find time later in the day. I love using Headspace. If you’re Catholic, pray the Rosary daily.
- Practice gratitude, and be specific when thanking someone.
- Keep a personal calendar.
- Write something, anything, everyday.
- Study a foreign language for 5, 15, or 25 minutes a day. Here’s a list of 10 great options.
- Eat meals with people you love.
- Keep in touch with close friends.
- Read to your children, and take pictures of them frequently.
- Read for at least 15 minutes daily.
- Read or watch something new daily. Ideally something you’re curious about.
- Ask questions often.
- Don’t slouch.
- Learn to dance.
- Call your parents and grandparents.
- Go on lots of first dates. Law of large numbers.
- Introduce yourself to new people.
- Before dinner, write down tomorrow’s priority list.
- Restrict your tv time. Or substitute tv time for your most potent distraction. For me that’s Twitter. Here are some practical ways to reduce screen time.
- For young people, ask people you admire in your area for coffee once, twice, or a few times a month. Email is another option. The likelihood of a positive response in both scenarios is probably higher than you expect.
Finances
- Negotiate your salary.
- Practice making money online. For a fun place to start, try PredictIt.
- Contribute early and often to your IRA/401(k).
- Invest as you’re able to. (Would welcome reading suggestions in the comments).
- Save a predetermined percentage from each paycheck.
- Pay off your credit cards monthly.
Health
- Sleep 8 hours or more each night. Limiting your blue light exposure after sunset can also improve your sleep quality.
- Try not to use your cell phone in bed. You can also go even further, and put away your phone 30 minutes, an hour, or even two hours before bedtime.
- Increase your water consumption, and whenever possible, drink it to the exclusion of everything else.
- Reduce your sugar, carb, and processed food intake.
- One way you can do this is by bringing your lunch from home to work rather than ordering take out. Added bonus: saving money.
- When you do eat out, choose the healthier options.
- When grocery shopping, check the ingredients of what you’re buying. Try to avoid processed foods with numerous and complicated ingredients.
- Take the stairs if and when you can. If you live in a fairly walkable area, walk everywhere within a mile.
- Don’t overeat — stop just before you’re full.
- If you can, try intermittent fasting at least once a week.
- Exercise daily. Try exercises that you enjoy, otherwise it’s unlikely that you’ll stick with them.
- Incorporate resistance weight-training into your routine.
- Floss!
TC again: Here is the full Medium essay.
*The Economist* covers *Stubborn Attachments*
Philosophers are accustomed to discussions about how to value lives distant from our own in time and place; economists are not. But in a new book, “Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals”, Tyler Cowen of George Mason University argues that the moral status of human lives ought not to be traded off over time in the same way that a bond portfolio might be. He puts the results of discounting in evocative terms: given a 5% rate of discount, one human life today is worth 132 a century hence. Is it really ethically acceptable to save one life now at the expense of so many in the future? The lives of humans born decades from now might be difficult for us to imagine, or to treat as of equal worth to our own. But our own lives were once similarly distant from those taking their turn on Earth; the future, when it comes, will feel as real to those living in it as the present does to us. Economists should treat threats to future lives as just as morally reprehensible as present threats to our own.
Here is the full article, on Twitter attributed to Ryan Avent.
Thursday assorted links
1. Managing rock and roll bands.
2. Scott Sumner on Chinese intellectual property theft.
3. The other daughter, the debutante, who has not been arrested in Canada.
4. Is book coverage a substitute for actual books?
5. Gavagai: the film (it has very good reviews and is Norwegian).
Why Brexit is so important
In this dilemma, I think of U.K. citizens as a kind of stand-in for the human race. Per capita income and education in the U.K. are well above the global average and, more important, Great Britain has one of the most firmly established democratic traditions in the world. So if the U.K. cannot get this decision right, it’s pretty gloomy news for all of us. I am reminded of the scene in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” where the traveling knight has to play a game of chess against the figure of Death, and his life will be spared if he wins…
Paul Krugman opined recently that Brexit would likely cost the U.K. about 2 percent of GDP, a fair estimate in my view. But that is not the only thing at stake here. Humanity is on trial — more specifically, its collective decision-making capacity — and it is the U.K. standing in the dock.
I’ll be glued to my seat, watching.
Recommended! Here is the full column.
“Maybe it’s not that I am a regional thinker, but a regional feeler.”
Portugal has now had two lost decades. Adjusting for inflation, GDP per capita grew 7% between 2000 and 2008. I mean it grew 7% over that whole period, not on a yearly basis. Then it fell during the crisis and only last year did it get back to 2008 levels, so that between 2000 and 2017, total growth was 7%…
The population who lived in Portugal through the last 10 years now get extactic over 2.2% year-on-year growth. After so many years of nothing, mediocre growth feels amazing. Still, if you cross the border into Spain it no longer feels “this is what Portugal will be in 2021”, it feels like a much wealthier, qualititatively different, better economy. Portugal could have been that, but, at least in my lifetime, it probably won’t be. This is a lost opportunity and it brings me sadness.
Maybe it’s not that I am a regional thinker, but a regional feeler. I have a visceral feel for what it means to “grow to the level of Greece and then stop there” that comes from lived experience.
In summary, this is why I recommend you read Stubborn Attachments.
That is from Luis Pedro Coelho, there is more of interest at the link.
What I’ve been reading
1. Sevket Pamuk, Uneven Centuries: Economic Development of Turkey since 1820. The best economic history of Turkey I know, it comes with strong recommendations from Daron Acemoglu and Dani Rodrik. Not an engaging read, but a useful survey.
2. Nell Dunn, Talking to Women. Interviews with British (and Irish) women, circa 1964, remarkably frank and open, “witty, anarchic, and sexually frank.” Strongly recommended, is it possible that the quality of discourse on these matters has not much advanced or even declined?
3. Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India. “I have called this book Coromandel chiefly for sentimental reasons. I first became aware of that sonorous word as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy exiled in England. Coromandel! was the title of the third in a series of Boy’s Own-style adventure stories set in India written by John Masters, an ex-Indian Army officer turned popular novelist. It was all about a West Country lad who sails to India with a map to find the legendary Coromandel and make his fortune. I reread it recently and found it not half as good as I thought it was — but the magic of that word Coromandel has always stayed with me, as the very essence of South India in all its elusiveness and allure. I’m not alone in thinking this.”
4. Sally Rooney, Normal People. A novel, they’re not, Irish, recommended.
Louise I. Shelley, Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy is Threatening Our Future, is a useful survey of varying kinds of black and dark markets.
M. Todd Henderson, Mental State, “When conservative law professor Alex Johnson is found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at his house in Chicago, everyone thinks it is suicide. Everyone except his brother, Royce, an FBI agent.”
Kimberly Clausing, Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital delivers exactly what its subtitle promises.
Jeffrey Lane, The Digital Street, is an interesting and original urban ethnography of how digitalized media, and the recording of street interactions, affect gang norms and patterns of violence.