Results for “400” 1128 found
Wednesday assorted links
1. Caetano Veloso profile (New Yorker).
4. How it started, and now how it is going.
Saturday assorted links
1. Something about Youngkin, charters, and education reform. I don’t understand it all, but it seems something is going on here and it does not seem the Democrats are resisting.
2. Is our current writing culture defined by deletion?
3. Good NYT article on the whole Gamestop phenomenon.
4. WSJ profile of Pano Kanelos of University of Austin.
5. Tom Tugendhat.
6. Children who are precocious at math do quite well later in life.
China’s Private Cities
In Rising private city operators in contemporary China, Jiao and Yu report that China’s private cities are growing.
…the last decade has witnessed a large growth in private city operators (PCOs) who plan, finance, build, operate and manage the infrastructure and public amenities of a new city as a whole. Different from previous PPPs, PCOs are a big breakthrough…they manage urban planning, industry development, investment attraction, and public goods and services. In other words, the traditional core functions of municipal governments are contracted out, and consequently, a significant neoliberal urban governance structure has become more prominent in China.
In the new business model, the China Fortune Land Development Co., Ltd. (CFLD) was undoubtedly the earliest and most successful. It manages 125 new cities or towns with a total area of over 4000 km2. Founded in 1998, the enterprise group has grown into a business giant with an annual income of CNY 83.8 billion in 2018. The company’s financial statements demonstrate that the annual return rate of net assets has grown as much as 30% annually from 2011 to 2018, which is the highest among the Chinese Fortune 500 companies.
As Rajagopalan and I argued in Lessons from Gurgaon, India’s Private City the key development has been to scale large enough so that the private operator internalizes the externalities. Quoting Jiao and Yu again:
The key to solving this problem is to internalize positive externality so that costs and benefits mainly affect the parties who choose to incur them. The solution of the new model is to outsource Gu’An New Industry City as a whole to CFLD, which becomes involved in the life cycle including planning, infrastructure and amenity construction, investment attraction, operations and maintenance, and enterprise services. In this way, a city is regarded as a special product or a spatial cluster of public goods and services that can be produced by the coalition of the public and private sectors. The large-scale comprehensive development by a single private developer internalizes the externality of non-exclusive public amenities successfully and achieves a closed-loop return on investment.
As a result private firms are willing to make large investments. In Gu’An, an early CFLD city, for example:
CFLD has invested CNY 35 billion to build infrastructure and public amenities, including 181 roads with a length of 204 km, underground pipelines of 627 km, four thermal power plants, six water supply factories, a wastewater treatment plant, three sewage pumping stations, and 30 heat exchange stations. The 2018 Statistical Yearbook of Langfang City illustrates that the annual fiscal revenue increased to CNY 9 billion, and the fixed asset investment was approximately CNY 20 billion, and Gu’An achieved great success in terms of economic growth and urban development strongly promoted by the collaboration with CFLD.
By the way, The Journal of Special Jurisdictions, is looking for papers on these cities:
Although a relatively recent phenomenon in urban development, Chinese Contract Cities already cover 66,000 square kilometers and house tens of millions of residents. They host a wide range of businesses and have attracted huge amounts of investment. In cooperation, local government entities, private or public firms plan, build and operate Chinese contract cities. Developers obtain land via contracts with local government or long-term leases with village collectives and enjoy revenues generated from economic activity in the planned and developed community. Residents contract a management firm for housing and other municipal services. In that way, Chinese contract cities offer innovative solutions to urban finance, planning, and management challenges.
The Chinese Contract Cities Conference will offer the world’s first international gathering of experts on this important new phenomenon.
…The proceedings of the Chinese Contract Cities Conference will appear in the Journal of Special Jurisdictions.
See also my previous post on Jialong, China’s Private City.
School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error
Jonathan Chait brings the fire:
In the panicked early week of the pandemic, the initial decision to close schools seemed like a sensible precaution. Authorities drew on the closest example at hand, the 1918 Spanish flu, which was contained by closing schools.
But in relatively short order, growing evidence showed that the century-old precedent did not offer much useful guidance. While the Spanish flu was especially deadly for children, COVID-19 is just the opposite. By the tail end of spring 2020, it was becoming reasonably clear both that remote education was failing badly and that schools could be reopened safely.
What happened next was truly disturbing: The left by and large rejected this evidence. Progressives were instead carried along by two predominant impulses. One was a zero-COVID policy that refused to weigh the trade-off of any measure that could even plausibly claim to suppress the pandemic. The other was deference to teachers unions, who were organizing to keep schools closed. Those strands combined into a refusal to acknowledge the scale or importance of losing in-person learning with a moralistic insistence that anybody who disagreed was callous about death or motivated by greed.
…the Democratic Party’s internal debate on school closings was making room at the table for some truly unhinged ideas. The head of the largest state’s most powerful teachers union insisted on the record “there is no such thing as learning loss” and described plans to reopen schools as “a recipe for propagating structural racism.”
Within blue America, transparently irrational ideas like this were able to carry the day for a disturbingly long period of time.
Chait is completely correct, of course. It really was remarkable watching in real time how supporters of public education suddenly started shouting that education didn’t matter and how supporters of structural racism suddenly started arguing that it was the people who wanted to open the schools who were racist despite the obvious deficits that closing the schools was causing.
It was almost as if there was a formation of a mass psychosis.
Read the whole thing.
What to Watch
Some things I have watched, some good, some not so good.
Cobra Kai on Netflix: A reliable, feel good show, well plotted. It plays like they mapped each season in advance covering all permutations and combinations of friends turning into enemies and enemies turning into friends. Do I really need five seasons of the same thing? No. But I still watch. Popcorn material.
Maid on Netflix: I appreciated the peek into the difficulties of managing the welfare system and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps when your family is pulling you down. Margaret Qualley (Andie MacDowell’s daughter who plays her mother on the show) has an odd charisma. It’s been noted that she is an impossibly perfect mother. Less noted is that she is a terrible wife, a poor daughter to her father and a bad girlfriend. Everyone deserves a break is the message we get from this show, except men. Still, it was well done.
The Last Duel is one of Ridley’s best. Superb, subtle acting from Jodie Comer–deserving of Oscar. Slightly too long but there are natural breaking points for at home watching. N.B. given the times it can’t be interpreted ala Rashômon as many people suggest but rather the last word is final which reduces long term interest but I still liked it.
Alex Rider on Amazon: It’s in essence a James Bond origin story. If that sounds like something you would enjoy, you will. I am told the books are also good for YA.
14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible: A mountain documentary following Nimsdai Purja as he and his team attempt to summit all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks in seven months. In many ways, the backstory–Purja is a Gurka and British special forces solider–is even more interesting. It does say something that most people don’t know his name.
The Eternals on Disney: Terrible. Didn’t finish it. A diverse cast with no actual diversity. Kumail Nanjiani, Dinesh from Silicon Valley, plays his super hero like Dinesh from Silicon Valley. Karun, the Indian sidekick, is the most authentic person in the whole ensemble. Aside from being boring it’s also dark, not emotionally but visually. It doesn’t matter the scene, battle scenes, outdoor scenes, kitchen table scenes–all so dark they are literally hard to see.
Wheel of Time: It’s hard to believe they spent a reported $10 million per episode on this clunker. The special effects were weak, the editing was bad, the mood-setting and world building were poor. The actors have no chemistry. Why would anyone be interested in Egwene who shows no spunk, intelligence or charisma? For better in this genre is The Witcher on Netflix.
The French Dispatch (theatres and Amazon): I loved it. Maybe the most Wes Anderson of Wes Anderson movies, so be prepared. Every scene has something interesting going on and there’s a new scene every few minutes. A send-up and a love story to the New Yorker. Lea Seydoux is indeed, shall we say, inspiring.
What should I ask Sam Bankman-Fried?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia, shorn of footnotes:
Samuel Bankman-Fried (born March 6, 1992), also known by his initials SBF, is an American businessman and effective altruist. He is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. He also manages assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm he founded in October 2017. He is ranked 32nd on the 2021 Forbes 400 list with a net worth of US$22.5 billion. In addition, Bankman-Fried a supporter of effective altruism and pursues earning to give as an altruistic career.
SBF is also well-known for his interests in veganism and utilitarianism and philanthropy. So what should I ask him?
What I’ve been reading
1. Richard Hanania, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy. Could this be the best public choice treatment of U.S. foreign policy? Gordon Tullock always was wishing for a book like this, and now it exists. I see Hanania’s views as more skeptical than my own (in East Asia in particular I think the American approach has brought huge benefits, Europe too), but nonetheless I am impressed by his careful analysis. This is a book that should revolutionize a field, though I doubt if it will.
2. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is one of the best written pieces of literary fiction this year. Very Irish, and it helps to have a one paragraph knowledge of Ireland’s earlier “Magdalen laundries” problem. It is not exciting for the action-oriented reader, but a perfect work within the terms of the world it creates.
3. Justin Gest, Majority Minority. The book considers racial transitions and how majorities may lose their ethnic or racial majority status. To see where America might be headed, the author considers histories from Bahrain, Hawaii, Mauritius, Singapore, trinidad and Tobago, and New York City.
4. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians: The Age of Great Kings. The Persian empire had the best infrastructure of any of the great ancient civilizations. The Royal Road for instance stretched 2,400 kilometers. Read more about the whole thing here.
Hannah Farber’s Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding is a good and economically literate treatment of the importance of maritime insurance during the time of America’s founding.
Gregory Zuckerman, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of The Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine is a good account of what it promises.
In the Douglass North tradition is Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili, Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan.
*The Man From the Future*
That is the new biography of John von Neumann, by Ananyo Bhattacharya, highly recommended, probably the best book about him. Here is one short bit:
Von Neumann himself attributed his generation’s success to ‘a coincidence of some cultural factors’ that produced ‘a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction’. In other words, their recognition that the tolerate climate of Hungary might change overnight propelled some to preternatural efforts to succeed…Moreover, one could reasonably hope that good work in these fields would be fairly rewarded. The truth of general relativity was established through experiment and was not contingent on whether the person who developed the theory as Jew or Gentile.
By the way, a lot of those famous mathematicians thought their high school was crap. And here is another excerpt:
Equally, von Neumann had no interest in sport and, barring long walks (always in a business suit), he would avoid any form of vigorous physical exercise for the rest of his life. When his second wife, Klari, tried to persuade him to ski, he offered her a divorce. ‘If being married to a woman, no matter who she was, would mean he had to slide around on two pieces of wood on some slick mountainside,’ she explained, ‘he would definitely prefer to live alone and take his daily exercise, as he put it, “by getting in and out of a pleasantly warm bathtub.”.
I believe my original pointer here came from Tim Harford.
Let Students Stay in Their Dorms!
Georgetown University, like many universities, closes its dorms for the holidays. Why? Closing the dorms is an especially costly policy this year for international students, many of whom will have to quarantine if they fly home. As a result, lots of students have to find temporary housing over the holidays. Kenan Dogan, Kelly He, and Shurui Liu, students of Jason Brennan at Georgetown, offer a compelling analysis.
The average international student must pay $2,400 to fly home. this number is $3,600 to Asia, $1,200 to Europe, and $1,000 to South America, compared to just $400 within North America. parallel to flight costs, the average international student faces a 24-hour trip back home. This number is 28 hours to Asia, 14 hours to Europe, and 11 hours to South America.
… the average student from Asia faces 21 days of quarantine and must pay $1,200 for quarantine, specific to 2021. With winter break being only 25 days, the average student from Asia would spend virtually all their break in quarantine if they decided to travel home. By contrast, the average student in all other continents faces no quarantine, and thus no quarantine costs.
…the average international student remaining in the US – but that wants to stay in their dorm – will spend $2,225 to remain in the us, combining housing and travel costs. this number might seem high, but it pales in comparison to the $6,100 median cost of returning home for this group, not to mention the 21-day median quarantine time and nearly 30-hour traveling process.
… We find that 76% OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS LIVING ON CAMPUS WOULD CONTINUE LIVING IN THEIR DORMS OVER WINTER BREAK this year if given the opportunity. Further, the average international student that would like to remain on campus over break would be willing to pay $1,000 to do so. Given these topline considerations, WE RECOMMEND THE UNIVERSITY ALLOW INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS TO REMAIN IN THEIR DORMS DURING WINTER BREAK.
Georgetown and other universities with holiday shutdowns could even make money on the deal.
What is a pessimist?
What is a pessimist?
A bad person
(But most pessimists are not pessimists.)
That is from Ludwig Hohl, The Notes, or On Non-premature Reconciliation.
*Get Back*, I
Everything that gets done runs through Paul. As Adam Minter put it (excellent thread more generally):
Nothing would get done if Paul weren’t there. But it’s a fine line, because he’s irritating. also – Ringo, in my opinion, has deep deep reservoirs of patience. I don’t know how he go through some of those days.
In this “prepping for a no overdubs, pure live performance” setting, the studio doesn’t matter. And control over studio production was how Paul exerted an increasing authority over the Beatles. “Let’s work on this more together” de facto meant “let’s give me, Paul, greater influence over the proceedings.” Yet without his studio expertise as a Williamsonian trump card, Paul has to be more of a pain in the ass to induce effort and focus from the others.
“I’m scared of me being the boss, and I kind of have been for a couple of years,” or something like that, is what Paul says. “I know it’s right, and you know it’s right” comes shortly thereafter (remember this?).
“Whatever it is that will please you, I will do it” responds George. John in turn mutters something about maybe they should improvise the whole thing.
George Martin is rendered irrelevant, due to the studio production being omitted, and mostly he stands around and looks like a guy who used to do ads for bad British cars in the 1960s.
Two highlights are Paul singing a mock version of “Gimme’ Some Truth,” and John singing a mock version of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Doesn’t the film show it was actually George who broke up the Beatles? (Or Ringo in 1968?) Doesn’t the person who leaves first split up the relationship?
What is quiet Yoko thinking the whole time?
And from Dave Bueche:
- It’s surprising to see them digging around for material. You’d think they would have had a lineup of songs before they started the project.
- Twickenham [the studio] seems like a drag. You can tell they don’t love it either. It’s big and cavernous and a few colored lights doesn’t change that.
- There’s a certain sad nostalgia in them playing all the old standards they learned in Germany and Liverpool. Like they know this the end and they’re sort of reliving the beginning one last time.
- Paul is clearly more invested than the others. George seems like he’s trying to just learn the songs, do his bit, same with Ringo. John seems like he’s a good sport, but other than Don’t Let Me Down – he seems to be going through the motions.
- It’s fun seeing them cover Dylan and other contemporaries.
The reviews are all “oh, this shows the Beatles loved working together until the very end.” That’s a pretty superficial read of the material. To me, Get Back is much more about “how the main value adders control small groups in a somewhat tyrannical and mostly efficient manner, and why this isn’t always stable.” Mancur Olson remains underrated.
“All Things Must Pass” just wasn’t that good a song, and it would have been worse as a Beatles song.
Friday assorted links
1. Russian army logistics. And Soviet fact of the day.
3. The police culture that is New Jersey (NYT).
4. “Aligning with Lukianoff and Haidt’s assertions, we found that students’ self-reported prevalence of cognitive distortions positively predicted their endorsement of safetyism-inspired beliefs, the belief that words can harm, and support for the broad use of trigger warnings.” Link here.
5. Kalshi: “Will Omicron make up greater than 1% of U.S. COVID-19 cases by the new year?” And here is another market in a new variant.
Nu, a variant of real concern
Here is the Eric Topol thread. Do read it. Here is the scary graph, based on preliminary data. Here is Bloom Lab. Here is a layperson’s take from the Times of London:
When was the variant first discovered?
South African authorities raised the alarm at 2pm on Tuesday of this week, when they found samples with a significant number of worrying mutations.The samples dated from tests taken on November 14 and 16. On Wednesday, even as scientists were analysing the genome, other samples were found in Botswana and China, originating from travellers from South Africa.
Why were scientists initially concerned by this variant?
The spike protein is the tool a virus uses to enter cells, and the part of it our vaccines are trained to spot. This variant had 32 mutations in the spike — meaning it would look different to our immune system and behave differently when attacking a body. As a virologist at Imperial College put it, it was a “horrific spike profile”.Why has worry increased over the course of the week?
When geneticists and virologists looked at the mutations they realised there was a high likelihood they could increase its transmissibility or help it evade immunity. But these concerns were still theoretical. However, today South African scientists spotted a quirk in the testing regimen. PCR tests look for three genes in the coronavirus and amplify them. If, however, the virus was this variant they were only able to amplify two.In the province of Gauteng, where the proportion of tests coming back positive has rocketed to one in three, they found the proportion in which only two genes were amplified has also rocketed.
What does this mean?
There are three options. It is still possible — though unlikely — this is chance, with the variant’s apparently increased spread relating to an unusual cluster. If it does have a genuine advantage, then it is either better able to spread or better able to infect people who have prior immunity — either from vaccination or infection. Or, it is both.
This might come to nothing, but it is definitely a matter of concern. One more general point is that even if Nu is a non-event, it seems to show that the space for possible significant mutations is largely than we had thought.
What I’ve been reading
1. John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. He went from Ayn Rand to Buckminster Fuller, was deeply involved in Native American issues, saw the San Francisco scene arrive, did his share of LSD, and heralded the birth of Bay Area tech culture and also open source software, among other achievements. Sometimes reads Marginal Revolution. I enjoyed this book, but of course would defer to Stewart’s own judgment.
2. Bobby Duffy, The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think. Millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, and so on. The generations just don’t differ that much from each other, at least not in ways that show up as strong effects in the data, adjusting for other demographic features. This book is a useful corrective to numerous media discussions of these topics. And yet…I am not entirely convinced. That I grew up without an internet, for instance, really does seem to shape a lot of my perspectives, in a way that probably will not hold equivalently true for Generation Z.
3. Scottie Pippen, Unguarded, with Michael Arkush. “Michael Jordan was 1-9 in the playoffs before I joined the team. In the postseason he missed, the Bulls went 6-4. The Last Dance was Michael’s chance to tell his story. This is mine.” Get the picture?
4. Michael Cholbi, Grief: A Philosophical Guide. I like the book when it veers in this direction: “Antipathy toward grief is a common theme among ancient Mediterranean philosophers. Greek and Roman philosophers were far more hostile toward grief than we moderns, tending to view grief as, at best, a state to be tolerated or minimized. For these philosophers, grieving others’ deaths is an unruly condition, a sign that one had become overly dependent on others and lacked the rational self-control characteristic of virtuous individuals.” I like it less when it veers toward: “Regardless of whether there is duty to oneself to grieve, we have strong reasons of a self-regarding moral nature to grieve. For grief presents us with a rare opportunity to relate to ourselves more fully, rationally, and lovingly.”
Michael S. Weisbach, The Economist’s Craft: An Introduction to Research, Publishing, and Professional Development. A straight-up rather than cynical take.
Tao Jiang, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom. Too detailed for me to have time to read right now, but very likely an excellent book (I have browsed it), full of careful study and insight.
Useful is Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare.
Bruce J. Dickson, The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century is a good treatment of exactly what the title promises.
What I’ve been reading
1. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage. I read this as a kid, and was surprised how well my reread held up. To the point, subtle, and with an economy of means. I hope the new Paul Auster biography of Crane (which I will read soon) will revive interest in this classic.
2. Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah. #2 in the Dune series, I disliked this one as a tot, but currently am marveling at its political sophistication. Somewhat uneven, but better than its reputation. The Wikipedia page for the book also indicates that Villeneuve is likely to do a Dune 3 based on this story.
3. Elisabeth Anderson (not the philosopher), Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State. Considers the political economy of child labor reform Germany, France, the United States, and the failed case of Belgium. Pathbreaking, a major advance on the extant literature. The explanations are messy rather than monocausal, but often focus on the success or failure of individual policy entrepreneurs.
4. Gordon Teskey, Spenserian Moments. No one seems to care about poor old Edmund Spenser, yet there seem to be quite a few good books about him.
5. Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. The best book on Hitchcock, John Nye recommended it to me eight years ago.
There is Howard Husock, The Poor Side of Town, And Why We Need It.
And Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.
Richard A. Williams, Fixing Food: An FDA Insider Unravels the Myths and Their Solutions, covers the food regulatory side of the FDA, and:
Markus K. Brunnermeier, The Resilient Society.