Thursday assorted links
3. What/who will the future remember from rock music? By Chuck Klosterman.
4. How cyclical is the current extension of octopi biomass?
5. Myths about Chinese debt. And Chinese debates over the yuan, the article has real information.
6. Mood affiliation with Bernie Sanders (NYT).
Environmental lawsuits and the vengeance donors
There are so, so many environmental lawsuits, often brought by non-profits backed by philanthropists. These institutions, among other things, target polluting corporations and bring lawsuits against them for purposes of constructing a deterrent against yet more pollution. The Sierra Club and Greenpeace would be two examples, and of course a big chunk of the funds comes from the relatively wealthy. How is this for one example of many?:
On 7 October, Greenpeace filed a lawsuit in Superior Court for the District of Columbia against Dow Chemical, Sasol North America (owned by the South African State Oil Company), two public relations firms – Dezenhall Resources and Ketchum – and four individuals.
On top of that, it is easy enough to be an anonymous donor to these groups, and to stay anonymous. That said, I have heard tales — apocryphal perhaps — of donors who gave to environmental causes because they too earlier in their lives had suffered under the adverse effects of pollution. In back room whispers they are sometimes called “vengeance donors,” and it is suggested that because of the vengeance donors soon enough all companies will go out of business or at the very least be at the mercy of the whims of the wealthy.
Now, to be sure, many of these environmental lawsuits are excessive, or unfair, or would fail both a rights and cost-benefit test and we should condemn them, as indeed you see happening with equal frequency on the Left and on the Right. Many companies have gone out of business because of environmental lawsuits or the threat thereof, or perhaps the companies never got started in the first place because they couldn’t afford large enough legal departments. I can safely say that just about everyone sees the problem here.
But we shouldn’t condemn the good lawsuits, right? Right? Or is this whole philanthropic lawsuits business simply out of control and needs to be stopped altogether?
And oh, that Greenpeace lawsuit I linked to above? It actually wasn’t about environmental pollution at all, at least not directly. It was because Greenpeace felt it was under secretive and privacy-intruding surveillance. You should have seen my Twitter feed light up when the vengeance donors let on their role in that one.
A life cycle theory of status-seeking, and why do billionaires complain?
One strategy I sometimes recommend to people is that early in their career they live in the place where their industry is headquartered. Bay Area for tech, New York for finance and publishing, LA for movies, Michigan for furniture and cars, Nashville for country music, etc. Soak up everyone’s expertise. Study. Learn. Even if you don’t want to start the next Google, you’ll learn a lot by way of “network intelligence” from physically living in Silicon Valley. But feel free to leave and join a lower-cost-of-living secondary market if and when you begin to feel perpetually not-quite-good-enough. This doesn’t mean moving to the boonies, but to a place where there’s plenty of industry activity but less happiness-hurting status jostling.
Here is more from Ben Casnocha. Here is an email I wrote to Ben about related themes:
Talk, though, I think is in this case deceiving.
Take non-billionaires. They (like billionaires) gossip an enormous amount. Yet it is still ultimately a self-centered activity. It is a way of processing the self. I am not saying there is *no* concern for other people involved, but talking about other people is very often mainly a way of talking about the self.
Now, if one billionaire says “isn’t XXXX a bigger billionaire than I am?,” I think this is often somewhat similar. It is still a way of consuming being a billionaire.
It’s a bit like how people enjoy complaining. When people complain about events on their vacation, that is very often (not always!) their mode of enjoying.
It’s as if being a billionaire isn’t real until you complain about it, and compare yourself to the others. Think of “manufacturing vividness” as what is going on here, in the ultimate anthropological sense, more than just mere status games.
Hi from Hunan!
I agree that status is addictive, but I do not in general think of it as zero-sum.
Jason Willick on Gawker, Hulk Hogan, and Peter Thiel
Hogan’s lawsuit was not “frivolous”—at least, not in the mind of the judge, who allowed the suit to proceed over Gawker’s many appeals, nor in the minds of members of the jury, who were so disgusted by Gawker’s conduct that they ordered the mischievous media mavens to pay Hogan tens of millions of dollars more than he asked for. And it is not at all clear that Thiel and Hogan did anything to menace to press freedom: As the legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky told the New York Times when the verdict came out: “I think this case establishes a very limited proposition: It is an invasion of privacy to make publicly available a tape of a person having sex without that person’s consent.”
It’s also not clear what policy response Gawker’s outraged defenders would recommend. Put caps on the amount of money people can contribute to legal efforts they sympathize with? That would put the ACLU and any number of advocacy groups out of business. It would also represent a far greater threat to free expression than a court-imposed legal liability for the non-consensual publication of what is essentially revenge porn. If Marshall and others are worried about the superrich harassing critics with genuinely frivolous lawsuits—as, yes, authoritarian characters like Donald Trump have attempted to do—they would have more success backing tort reform measures to limit litigiousness overall than attacking Thiel for contributing to a legitimate cause he has good reason to support.
Here is more. Here are Thiel’s own words (NYT), here is one bit:
“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” he said in his first interview since his identity was revealed. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”
Mr. Thiel said that Gawker published articles that were “very painful and paralyzing for people who were targeted.” He said, “I thought it was worth fighting back.”
Mr. Thiel added: “I can defend myself. Most of the people they attack are not people in my category. They usually attack less prominent, far less wealthy people that simply can’t defend themselves. He said that “even someone like Terry Bollea who is a millionaire and famous and a successful person didn’t quite have the resources to do this alone.”
Jinan and Qufu notes
Jinan is the second largest city in Shandong province, and a good place to see “normal China”; it is much more in the “concrete and motorbikes” mode than is Qingdao.
Qufu is the birthplace of Confucius, and a longstanding home of the Chinese nobility and Chinese scholars, with monument-building visits by various emperors. Reputedly the town is full of fine-featured individuals with very exact patterns of speech. In any case downtown is pleasant to walk and shop in, and has relatively few environmental problems.
The tomb of Confucius was my favorite site. There is a continuity of civilization (if not regime) for over 2500 years, and visiting the tomb drives this point home. Even the Cultural Revolution did not much damage this area of homage, in part because of loyalty to Confucius, itself a form of Confucian behavior.
Many of the flowers on the tomb were left by the national television station, perhaps as advertising and also signaling loyalty to Confucian ideals.
But that is not China’s oldest heritage, far from it:
This research reveals a 5,000-y-old beer recipe in which broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears, and tubers were fermented together. To our knowledge, our data provide the earliest direct evidence of in situ beer production in China, showing that an advanced beer-brewing technique was established around 5,000 y ago.
One local functionary said to me: “We think Trump will win. You always surprise us — he is the next surprise.”
Incentives in Action
A nice example of incentives in action from Jason Furman speaking at the World Bank (based on a good GAO report):
Prior to the [2009] law’s enactment, the tax rates on roll-your-own tobacco and pipe tobacco were the same. After the law’s enactment, the tax rate on roll-your-own tobacco was over $20 per pound higher than the tax on pipe tobacco. And, as you can see in the figure below, sales of roll-your-own tobacco plummeted after the law and sales of pipe tobacco increased by a factor of ten.
Hat tip: Justin Wolfers.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Is currency duopoly coming to Libya?
2. Extracting sperm from dead men. And Walt Whitman advertising markets in everything.
3. How many young British men feel masculine?
4. New economics books for the fall, including Rogoff and Mokyr.
5. Which is the correct way to measure fertility?
6. Don’t forget the East China Sea. And what just happened in the new Greek deal?
Sentences to ponder
Plug those numbers into the formula, and the prediction is that the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote in 2016 will be 44.99%.
That is from Timothy Taylor, here is an earlier piece by Jeff Sommer.
What the hell is going on?
Donald Trump may get the nuclear suitcase, a cranky “park bench” socialist took Hillary Clinton to the wire, many countries are becoming less free, and the neo-Nazi party came very close to assuming power in Austria. I could list more such events.
Haven’t you, like I, wondered what is up? What the hell is going on?
I don’t know, but let me tell you my (highly uncertain) default hypothesis. I don’t see decisive evidence for it, but it is a kind of “first blast” attempt to fit the basic facts while remaining within the realm of reason.
The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males. The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them? Brutes?
Quite simply, there are many people who don’t like it when the world becomes nicer. They do less well with nice. And they respond by in turn behaving less nicely, if only in their voting behavior and perhaps their internet harassment as well.
Female median wages have been rising pretty consistently, but the male median wage, at least as measured, was higher back in 1969 than it is today (admittedly the deflator probably is off, but even that such a measure is possible speaks volumes). A lot of men did better psychologically and maybe also economically in a world where America had a greater number of tough manufacturing jobs. They thrived under brutish conditions, including a military draft to crack some of their heads into line.
To borrow a phrasing from Peter Thiel, perhaps men did better in the age of “technological progress without globalization” rather than “globalization without technological progress,” as has been the case as of late.
Here’s a line from Martin Wolf:
Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton note, in addition, a sharp relative deterioration in mortality and morbidity among middle-aged white American men, due to suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse.
(Addendum: note this correction.)
For American men ages 18-34, more of them live with their parents than with romantic partners.
Trump’s support is overwhelming male, his modes are extremely male, no one talks about the “Bernie sisters,” and male voters also supported the Austrian neo-Nazi party by a clear majority. Aren’t (some) men the basic problem here? And if you think, as I do, that the incidence of rape is fairly high, perhaps this shouldn’t surprise you.
The sad news is that making the world nicer yet won’t necessarily solve this problem. It might even make it worse.
Again, we don’t know this is true. But it does help explain that men seem to be leading this “populist” charge, and that these bizarre reactions are occurring across a number of countries, not just one or two. It also avoids the weaknesses of purely economic explanations, because right now the labor market in America just isn’t that terrible. Nor did the bad economic times of the late 1970s occasion a similar counter-reaction.
One response would be to double down on feminizing the men, as arguably some of the Nordic countries have done. But America may be too big and diverse for that really to stick. Another option would be to bring back some of the older, more masculine world in a relatively harmless manner, the proverbial sop to Cerberus. But how to do that? That world went away for some good reasons.
If this is indeed the problem, our culture is remarkably ill-suited to talking about it. It is hard for us to admit that “all good things” can be bad for anyone, including brutes. It is hard to talk about what we might have to do to accommodate brutes, and that more niceness isn’t always a cure. And it is hard to admit that history might not be so progressive after all.
What percentage of men are brutes anyway? Let’s hope we don’t find out.
How much of the attractiveness premium is really about grooming?
For women, most of it, at least according to Wong and Penner:
This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to (1) replicate research that documents a positive association between physical attractiveness and income; (2) examine whether the returns to attractiveness differ for women and men; and 3) explore the role that grooming plays in the attractiveness-income relationship. We find that attractive individuals earn roughly 20 percent more than people of average attractiveness, but this gap is reduced when controlling for grooming, suggesting that the beauty premium can be actively cultivated. Further, while both conventional wisdom and previous research suggest the importance of attractiveness might vary by gender, we find no gender differences in the attractiveness gradient. However, we do find that grooming accounts for the entire attractiveness premium for women, and only half of the premium for men.
Those results are consistent with my intuition, and here is some Ana Swanson discussion of the results. That is via Samir Varma, and here is Allison Schrager on whether female scientists should try to look frumpy.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Scott Alexander survey post on the value of good teachers.
2. Forty percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today under current law.
3. “Ethicists do not appear to behave better.”
4. Stop anti-Asian bias. And a good and thoughtful piece on PC, Oberlin, and the like. Please note I do not usually recommend pieces on this topic.
5. Although the survey consulted some leading economists, these answers on how to boost productivity growth are not so impressive. It is nonetheless a highly instructive post in its failings. On another front, to raise productivity Swedes in Gothenburg are trying six-hour work days (NYT).
6. The successes of Rutgers Newark. And former Clark medal winner Jonathan Levin to head Stanford Business School.
Does Causality Matter More Now?
The subtitle of that new paper is “Increase in the Proportion of Causal Language in English Texts,” here is the abstract:
The vast majority of the work on culture and cognition has focused on cross-cultural comparisons, largely ignoring the dynamic aspects of culture. In this article, we provide a diachronic analysis of causal cognition over time. We hypothesized that the increased role of education, science, and technology in Western societies should be accompanied by greater attention to causal connections. To test this hypothesis, we compared word frequencies in English texts from different time periods and found an increase in the use of causal language of about 40% over the past two centuries. The observed increase was not attributable to general language effects or to changing semantics of causal words. We also found that there was a consistent difference between the 19th and the 20th centuries, and that the increase happened mainly in the 20th century.
For all of its problems, there is much to be said for the twentieth century. The authors — the people who caused that paper to happen (with apologies to David Hume)– are Iliev and Axelrod.
Maybe studying economics doesn’t morally corrupt you after all
So say Hummel, Pfaff, and Rost, in a recent paper:
In view of the numerous accounting and corporate scandals associated with various forms of moral misconduct and the recent financial crisis, economics and business programs are often accused of actively contributing to the amoral decision making of their graduates. It is argued that theories and ideas taught at universities engender moral misbehavior among some managers, as these theories mainly focus on the primacy of profit-maximization and typically neglect the ethical and moral dimensions of decision making. To investigate this criticism, two overlapping effects must be disentangled: the self-selection effect and the treatment effect. Drawing on the concept of moral judgment competence, we empirically examine this question with a sample of 1773 bachelor’s and 501 master’s students. Our results reveal that there is neither a self-selection nor a treatment effect for economics and business studies. Moreover, our results indicate that—regardless of the course of studies—university education in general does not seem to foster students’ moral development.
For the pointer, I thank a lost, forgotten soldier in my Twitter feed.
*Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration*
That is the new book by David Dagan and Steven Teles, here is the publisher’s description:
- Argues, counter to the conventional wisdom, that the conservative embrace of criminal justice reform is not primarily about money
- Provides the most comprehensive account both of the rise of the conservative reform movement and of the criminal justice reforms that have swept the states in the last 10 years
- Features interviews with of the major players in the conservative criminal justice reform movement
- Provides a theory for how to create breakthroughs in other policy areas amid political polarization
I am looking forward to my copy, here is the Amazon link.
Qingdao notes
There are early twentieth century German colonial buildings, some lovely water promenades, and less air pollution than in perhaps any other major Chinese city. Here is the urban plan. The best dishes are the clams, the snails, and the seaweed salads. The cucumbers are an order of magnitude better than what I am used to, and the city’s status as a beer capital comes from the earlier German occupation.
In two days of going around, I did not see a single Westerner. It is sometimes considered China’s most livable city, here is Qingdao on Wikipedia.