Results for “brexit” 205 found
Will the European Union ruin the internet?
A committee of MEPs has voted to accept major changes to European copyright law, which experts say could change the nature of the internet.
They voted to approve the controversial Article 13, which critics warn could put an end to memes, remixes and other user-generated content.
Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved.
One organisation opposed to the changes called it a “dark day”.
The European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs voted by 15 votes to 10 to adopt Article 13 and by 13 votes to 12 to adopt Article 11.
It will now go to the wider European Parliament to vote on in July.
…Article 11 has been called the “link tax” by opponents.
Here is further information. If ever there was a case for Brexit…
For the pointer I thank Saku.
Why consume the most recent news?
Here is another left-over question from my recent talk:
How do you think about when it makes sense for to consume the most-recent news, in light of Robin Hanson’s “news isn’t about info”? How would you advise the rest of us?
I consume the news avidly for (at least) these reasons:
1. For professional reasons, I am required to do so. That said, I am happy to note the endogeneity of that state of affairs. Consuming the news is fun, though in a pinch more sports, games, and the arts could serve much of the same role.
2. I actually care what is happening.
3. Consuming the news is one of the best ways of testing your views about the past. We are always revaluing what we thought we knew, in light of new data. Brexit teaches us that the UK was never quite so well integrated into the EU. The election of Trump may imply that certain late 19th century strands of American politics are enduring, and the evolution of the racial income gap will induce us to reassess various policies of the last few decades.
Under this theory, reading a lot of history books should raise the return to following the news. For most people, they haven’t read so many books and at the margin they need more books rather than more news. In this sense, following the news doesn’t make intellectual sense for most people, though they may need it for social bonding, signaling, and conversation purposes.
I would stress the concomitant point that following the news does not make one a much better predictor of the future, if at all. It may even cause people to overweight the most recent trends, due to availability and recency bias.
4. I also use the news to make history more interesting to me. It is easier to get “wrapped up” in the news, if only because of the social support and the element of dramatic suspense. If somehow the Balkans no longer existed, I would find it hard to wish to understand that “…the medieval Serbian Orthodox Church had established a new see at Pec in Kosovo in 1297…” As it stands, my interest in that event is sufficiently intense, and it remains important for understanding the current day.
5. It is perhaps addictive that the news comes every day. But that is a useful discipline. If you follow the news, you will work at it every day, more or less. Better those compound returns than to do something else once every three months and a half.
In essence, the news is a good, cheap trick for getting yourself to care more about things you should care about anyway, but maybe don’t.
Why we still should be optimistic about free trade
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
A lot of the recent cross-border migration is planting a hugely positive, pro-trade legacy that will yield dividends for decades to come. The Chinese, Indians, Nigerians and many other groups around the world will continue to build economic connections, even when the countries involved aren’t always so geographically close. I expect the positive trade gains from these connections and personal networks will outweigh the downside from some higher tariffs in the meantime. Ultimately the opportunities are there, and the biggest problem is the lack of human talent to execute on them.
I do however see one big problem:
The internet shows some signs of breaking down into separate networks, connected only imperfectly. The Chinese “Great Firewall” has proved robust, and recently the European Union has moved toward creating its own set of stringent privacy and data protection laws, such as the new General Data Protection Regulation standards. Sitting here in Norway for a conference, I find I am unable to access many American websites, such as the Chicago Tribune, which are not (yet?) GDPR-compliant. There is thus a danger that the internet will become carved into three or more separate systems, to the detriment of trade, data flows and eventually personal connections.
Do read the whole thing.
Saturday assorted links
1. Prom expenses are going up at a relatively slow rate, one economist calculates (WSJ). And MIE: murder stories are now being in the Faroe Islands (also WSJ), where there is basically no murder.
2. Maybe emblematic maybe not (dead kangaroo edition).
3. Heathrow for sale. And Sir Patrick Stewart calls for a second vote.
4. Unconscious bias training doesn’t seem to work.
5. “So although she does not receive any benefit of believing in God—because she doesn’t—she honestly believes she has deceived herself into believing in God…” Link here.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Do blockchains and tokens break aggregation theory? I say no, but still there is an interesting idea in this short essay.
2. The beauty premium correlates strongly with personal interaction in a job.
3. More on abortion and prosecution.
4. My 2016 post on why Brexit happened. And Akiva Malamet defends liberalism and men without chests.
5. Profile of Ben Falk and his NBA internet moonshot.
Sunday assorted links
1. Interview with Ken Rogoff (on chess).
2. The economic impact of major league baseball in the Dominican Republic.
3. More on autonomous vehicle safety (NYT). And uh-oh. More here. Do you prefer zombies eating kitties!? And at this point I don’t think the “Google city” in Toronto ever will be built, do you?
4. Paul Samuelson’s changing views on women.
5. Bach and sex.
6. Fraser Nelson argues the Brexit process is proving manageable (WSJ).
Friday assorted links
1. The implicit theology of Jordan Peterson: “No one has come to save you; you will have to save yourself.”
2. Comedy complaints about Facebook.
3. Not a very satisfying abstract, but what was I expecting?
4. A claim that Irish border solutions are possible.
5. Will the UK simply stop building museums? If so, what does this say about us?
6. Can the Catholic Church become Silicon Valley once again? “That the Catholic Church should put Silicon Valley—or any other institution or culture—to shame when it comes to world-changing innovation is not some tantalizing yet naïve prospect. It should be the baseline expectation for any educated Catholic.” And indeed that once was the case.
My Conversation with Douglas Irwin, audio and transcript
Doug’s new book Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy is the greatest book on trade policy ever written, bar none. and also a splendid work of American history more generally. So I thought he and I should sit down to chat, now I have both the transcript and audio.
We covered how much of 19th century American growth was due to tariffs, trade policy toward China, the cultural argument against free trade, whether there is a national security argument for agricultural protectionism, TPP, how new trade agreements should be structured, the trade bureaucracy in D.C., whether free trade still brings peace, Smoot-Hawley, the American Revolution (we are spoiled brats), Dunkirk, why New Hampshire is so wealthy, Brexit, Alexander Hamilton, NAFTA, the global trade slowdown, premature deindustrialization, and the history of the Chicago School of Economics, among other topics. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Here goes. The claim that 19th century American growth was driven by high tariffs. What’s your take?
IRWIN: Not really true. If you look at why the US economy performed very well, particularly relative to Britain or Germany or other countries, Steve Broadberry’s shown that a lot of the overtaking of Britain in terms of per capita income was in terms of the service sector.
The service sector was expanding rapidly. It had very high productivity growth rates. We usually don’t think as that being affected by the tariff per se. That’s one reason.
We had also very high productivity growth rates in agriculture. I’ve done some counterfactual simulations. If you remove the tariff, how much resources would we take out of manufacturing and put into services or agriculture is actually pretty small. It just doesn’t account for the success we had during this period.
COWEN: Is there any country where you would say, “Their late 19th century economic growth was driven by tariffs?” Argentina, Canada, Germany, anything, anywhere?
IRWIN: No. If you look at all those, once again, in late 19th century, they were major exporters, largely of commodities, but they did very well that way. You know that Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world in the late 19th century. It really wasn’t until they adopted more import substitution policies after World War I that they began to fall behind.
Definitely recommended, and here is Doug’s Wikipedia page.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Mr. Regret, of Bangalore. Though he finally succeeded.
2. Might the SNP reverse Brexit?
3. IV and 2SLS.
4. Catalini and Gans on the economics of blockchains.
My Conversation with Douglas Irwin, podcast
Because Doug’s book is just out, we are rushing out the podcast, here is the audio, most of all about trade, trade history, and trade policy. We covered how much of 19th century American growth was due to tariffs, trade policy toward China, the cultural argument against free trade, whether there is a national security argument for agricultural protectionism, TPP, how new trade agreements should be structured, the trade bureaucracy in D.C., whether free trade still brings peace, Smoot-Hawley, the American Revolution (we are spoiled brats), Dunkirk, why New Hampshire is so wealthy, Brexit, Alexander Hamilton, NAFTA, the global trade slowdown, premature deindustrialization, and the history of the Chicago School of Economics, among other topics.
Here you can buy Doug’s Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy.
Tuesday assorted links
A simple theory of baseline mood
During much of the 1982-2001 period, the Western world seemed to be moving in a very favorable direction, indeed most of Asia too. Over time, Westerns intellectuals and commentators came to expect triumphant feelings and relatively low levels of stress.
9/11, the financial crisis, and now Brexit/Trump/populism/nationalism have upset this feeling. The level of stress is now especially high in part because it was, not long ago, especially low. The contrast is difficult for us to stomach, and comparisons with say Richard Nixon or Andrew Jackson help only a little.
In the postwar era, running up through the 1980s, the objective level of stress was much higher than today. The risk of nuclear war was pretty high, overt racism was much more common, the safety net was much weaker, and it was far from clear that so much of the world would develop economically or become democratic. Yet all this came right after the easily-remembered stress of World War II, and so it felt like a relief nonetheless.
As a kind of coincidence, memories of World War II wore off just as stress-relieving positive events were kicking into full gear. That gave America an especially long period of low stress, unprecedented by historical standards.
We are not used to feeling as much stress as we do today. Yet even in the optimistic scenarios in my predictions, the level of stress today is relatively low compared to what we can rationally expect for the next few decades.
Wednesday assorted links
Can an independent Puerto Rico work out?
I don’t think so, here are a few points:
1. Any deal would involve a transition period. During that period, many more Puerto Ricans would move to the mainland than if there were no deal. You may or may not think that is a good outcome, but it is not exactly what the “cut them loose” proponents have in mind. “Let’s make Puerto Rico independent so we can have more Puerto Ricans in the United States” is not a winning rally cry for anyone.
2. The Caribbean as a region has been doing dismally for a few decades now. Puerto Rico is by far the wealthiest part of the Caribbean, small tax and finance havens aside. Without a connection to the United States, Puerto Rico might regress to Dominican Republic levels of income, GNI of roughly 24k vs. 15k.
3. The best thing about independence is that the deal might allow a “pure default” by the Puerto Rican government. Still, that could be arranged under a version of the status quo. Default plus independence would shred the Puerto Rican safety net at least for a few years, perhaps forever. If you think their future is one of falling per capita income, that safety net never would recover. You might believe that such a safety net is in some ways holding Puerto Rico back (true), but if the natural trajectory is to lose both population and per capita income, removing that safety net won’t do much good either.
So it’s simply not clear what is to be gained from independence. On top of that another referendum would be needed, given that Puerto Ricans have rejected the notion in the past. What if they still opt for a continuing attachment to the mainland? That process then will have produced a few years of electoral uncertainty, with no change in the final outcome, as if the UK suddenly decided to reverse its Brexit decision.
Puerto Rico is very likely to remain a part of the United States, one way or another.
Thursday assorted links
1. Why do the Chinese hug less?
2. Linguistic practices of Chinese state media, recommended.
3. “No less than 72% of the most ‘authoritarian’ group voted to leave, while just 21% of the most ‘libertarian’ group did so.” A post-mortem on Brexit (pdf). And in Germany there is a pub The UnBrexit.
4. This piece is a good meditation on what efficiency really means (with apologies to Benjamin L.), here is one bit: “[Chris] Paul can’t consistently create easy shots against an elite defense, but he’s also too disciplined to take bad shots, which limits his upside against higher levels of competition. Paul has averaged more than 25 points a game in a playoff series only once, and it was in his most recent seven-game battle against the Jazz. Westbrook has done it nine times, and Curry has done it eight. Paul’s tricks don’t work as well against his All-NBA peers.”
5. Eduardo Porter on tax reform (NYT).