Friday assorted links
1. Will wild puffins go extinct?
2. Do neurotics spend more time doing chores? Is the control premium” lowest in Japan?
3. Is this good or bad advice? (“Don’t mention the war!”) And “The University of Colorado’s Board of Regents will consider a proposal to remove the word “liberal” from a description of the university’s academic freedom principles.”
4. How Lebron James masters the media.
5. Alternatives to detention are usually cheaper.
6. Further update on EU internet regulation.
7. How corrupt are judges at musical competitions barter markets in everything?
China-U.S. fact of the day
Credit card debt in China is $2t v. $815b in the United States.
Mind….blown https://t.co/7HvCooryPX
— Blue Check Balding 大老板 (@BaldingsWorld) June 22, 2018
Do liberals and conservatives shop differently?
I usually urge care in interpreting or even believing such results, but if you are game here is another entry into the sweepstakes:
In our research, conservatives tended to differentiate themselves through products that show that they are better than others – for example, by choosing products from high-status luxury brands. In contrast, liberals tended to differentiate themselves through products that show that they are unique from others – for example, by choosing products with unconventional designs or colors. These distinct preferences emerged across multiple studies in which U.S. participants (university students who completed surveys in the lab, adults who took surveys online, and members of a research panel) indicated their political ideology and made real or hypothetical choices between products.
In one study, participants chose between coffee mugs that would be customized with their names and the message “Just Better” or “Just Different.” Conservatives were 2.2 times more likely than liberals to choose the mug that signaled superiority (“Just Better”) over the one that signaled uniqueness (“Just Different”). In another study, participants could win a gift card from one of two brands as a reward for participation — Ralph Lauren, which based on our numerous pretests of consumers’ brand perceptions generally signals superiority, and Urban Outfitters, which based on our pretests generally signals uniqueness. Conservatives tended to prefer Ralph Lauren, whereas liberals tended to prefer Urban Outfitters.
That is from Nailya Ordabayeva.
What should I ask Michelle Dawson?
I will be having a Conversation with her, here is part of her Ordre de Montréal citation:
Ms. Dawson is autistic and has never attended university as a student. In the early 2000s, faced with the devastating effects of human rights violation based on her diagnosis, she started learning about autism science, ethics, and law.
Since 2004, she has been affiliated with the Université de Montréal’s autism research group. Despite her lack of formal education and the precariousness of her situation, she has collaborated widely with academics here at home and around the world, and made original contributions to autism research in scientific journals, encyclopedias, scholarly books, and conference presentations. She has also used social media to promote better standards in autism research.
Her work has contributed to the advancement of knowledge in several areas, including perception, cognition, learning, and intelligence in autism. She has documented the poverty of scientific and ethical standards in autism intervention research, and the resulting harm to autistic people. Contrary to long-entrenched views, she believes that autistics deserve the same basic rights as the rest of humanity. She also believes that in research, as elsewhere, autistic and non-autistic people should work together as equals.
She tweets at @autismcrisis, and here is her work at scholar.google.com. I also have a co-authored paper with her, on Alan Turing. Many of you also will know Michelle as a long time MR correspondent.
So what should I ask her?
U.S.A. fact of the day
Number of unaccompanied minors, age 17 or lower, apprehended during or after border crossings, fiscal year 2017:
Trump aside, what exactly is the plan here?
Hat tip goes to @BaldingsWorld.
Was the Colombian peace deal so wonderful?
It seems to be increasingly unpopular with the Colombian electorate, and now there is this report:
Hundreds of Colombian farmers, activists, and community organisers have been killed over the past 18 months, despite the landmark peace deal that supposedly ended 52 years of war. For them, and for local leaders in the former conflict zones, the war – which left an estimated 220,000 dead and seven million displaced over five decades – didn’t end: it only became worse.
“Whenever we hear talk of peace, we worry,” says Anadelia Trochez, 43, president of the community council in El Ceral, a village in the Cauca Valley, the most productive coca-growing area in the country. “Out here, that usually means more trouble.”
Of course that is not the final word, but the evidence increasingly suggests it is a perspective to be taken seriously. I recall how many outsiders swooned when the initial Colombian peace deal was first announced, and how tragic they considered it when the Colombian electorate rejected the first version of the deal. Critics of the deal were considered warmongers. Those are classic signs of mood affiliation.
The pointer is from Tom Murphy.
Thursday assorted links
1. Arvind Subramaniam is stepping down from the Indian CEA.
2. The communication ethics of Mister Rogers. And free behavioral economics guide for 2018.
3. The “silly walk” Monty Python culture that is Norwegian traffic management. And what does stand-up comedy in LA pay?
4. “Feulner’s first law is people are policy,” (NYT)
5. The impregnation culture that is Burger King Russia.
6. Amazon and government (WSJ).
Is the bilateral approach to trade liberalization really so bad?
That is my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It seems we are bureaucratizing trade as much as liberating it. Perhaps that is no surprise. If you wish to induce numerous nations to sign on to a deal, you will have to offer exceptions, clauses and conditions for them. The eventual result is that a free-trade treaty morphs into a managed-trade treaty. I still believe that the various trade agreements that have been passed or drawn up are for the better, but I also can’t help being disappointed by them. Note also that progress through the World Trade Organization had ground to a halt even before the election of Trump.
We are now in a setting where the world’s No. 2 economy — China, on its way to being No. 1 — is strongly opposed to free-trade ideals and free flows of information, especially for its own home market.
Enter bilateralism. The smartest case for trade bilateralism is that trade in many goods is already fairly free, but some egregious examples of tariffs and trade barriers remain. Look at agriculture, European restrictions on beef hormones in beef, and the Chinese unwillingness to allow in foreign companies. Targeted strategic bargaining, backed by concrete threats emanating from a relatively powerful nation — in this case the U.S. — could demand removal of those restrictions. Furthermore, the negotiating process would be more directly transactional and less cartelized and bureaucratic.
My colleague John Nye, an economist at George Mason University, has argued that the free-trade revolution of the 19th century came about because of a major trade agreement between Britain and France in 1860. Other European nations were fearful of being locked out of subsequent deals, and they hurried to sign bilateral trade treaties with Britain and France. There was a competition to make deals rather than cartelization of the process.
That said, our current pursuit of this approach does not seem to have enough allies on our side, and thus I doubt if it will work. There is much more in the rest of the column.
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.
Is democracy in danger?
From the highly regarded Daniel Treisman:
Influential voices in academia and the media contend that democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the US. Using a variety of measures, I show that the global proportion of democracies is actually at or near an all-time high; that the current rate of backsliding is not historically unusual; and that this rate is well explained by the economic characteristics of existing democracies. I confirm that breakdowns tend to occur in countries that are poor, have had relatively little democratic experience, and are in economic crisis. Extrapolating from historical data, I show that the estimated hazard of failure in a democracy as developed and seasoned as the US is extremely low — far lower than in any democracy that has ended in the past. Some suggest that undemocratic public attitudes and erosion of elite norms threaten US institutions, but there is little evidence that these factors cause democratic breakdown. While deterioration in the quality of democracy in countries such as Hungary and Poland is itself cause for concern — as is the reversion to authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey — alarm about a global slide into autocracy is inconsistent with current evidence.
The pointer is from the excellent Kevin Lewis.
FRED now has crypto data
Via David Siegel:
Not much, but it’s a start. The individual series are:
Coinbase Index https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBCCIND Coinbase Bitcoin https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBBTCUSD Coinbase Bitcoin Cash https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBBCHUSD Coinbase Ethereum https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBETHUSD Coinbase Litecoin https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBLTCUSD
*High Growth Handbook: Scaling startups from 10 to 10,000 people*
Edited, produced, and partly written by Elad Gil, the book is also a series of interviews with Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, and others.
Marc Andreessen says:
If you don’t start layering in HR once you’ve passed 50 people on your way to 150, something is going to go badly wrong.
Claire Hughes Johnson (COO of Stripe) says:
When I came into Stripe, I had a similar document. I wrote a document back when I was at Google called, “Working with Claire.” And when I first got to Stripe, I adapted it slightly, but it was pretty relevant. I shared it with everyone who was working with me closely, but I have made it an open document. It spread quite quickly through the organization…I think that founders should write a guide to working with them.
Patrick Collison says:
..the CEO ultimately does not have that many jobs, but I think culture is among them. And it ought not be delegated. Briefly speaking, I think there are five top responsibilities of a CEO: being the steward of and final arbiter of the senior management; being the chief strategist; being the primary external face for the company, at least in the early days; almost certainly being the chief product officer, although that can change when you’re bigger; and then taking responsibility and accountability for culture.
Self-recommending, you can order it here.
My Conversation with Elisa New
Here is the audio and transcript, Elisa is a Professor of English at Harvard, with a specialty in poetry, and also star and driving force behind the new PBS show Poetry in America. Most of all we talked about poetry! Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Let me express a concern, and see if you can talk me out of it. I’m going to use the word best, which I know many literary critics do not like, but I believe in the concept nonetheless.
In my view, the two best American poets are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and they were both a long, long time ago. They were quite early in the literary history of this nation.
Is that a statement about the fame-generating process, a statement about somehow their era was better at generating the best poets because we had a much smaller population, or am I simply wrong in thinking they’re the best American poets?
NEW: I don’t know what to say to you. I revere them. They are the most important poets for me. They invent two ways of being a poet, and two of the ways that so many poets who have followed them also acknowledge.
Would there be Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Carl Sandburg, C. D. Wright, C. K. Williams? Would there be any of those — Frank O’Hara — without Walt Whitman? And they would be the first to say, “No.”
Would there be Susan Howe, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath? All in different ways, would we have them without Emily Dickinson? I don’t know. I’m not sure I can enter . . . Is it that we’ve lost it? I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think we’ve lost it.
COWEN: I turn to European history, again using the “best” word, but it’s plausible to think Homer and Dante are the two best European poets ever in some regards, and they, too, are each quite early in a particular stage of history. What is it about poetry that seems to generate so many people as at least plausible bests who come at the very beginnings of eras?
NEW: Well, isn’t it that poetry is cumulative, and canons are cumulative, and those who are there first, they’re never superseded — unlike, say, for economists who would say, “Adam Smith is a really smart guy, but it’s not like we go to Adam Smith to understand Bitcoin.” They would say, “No. That knowledge has been superseded.”
In literary knowledge, we continue to learn from our predecessors and also continue to feel awe before the persistence of certain phenomena that they . . . Shakespeare saw that Iago was a slippery-mouthed conniver of a kind we still recognize.
We recognize ourselves. We recognize something enduringly human in these oldest of poets, and then, maybe, we elevate them even more.
And:
COWEN: Is it possible that American English isn’t rich enough? I find if I go to Ireland, or especially to Trinidad, I envy the language they have there. They’re both speaking English. If you think of America today, there’s texting, now a long history of television.
Our language is great for quick communication, number one in the world for science. Now there’s social media. Nineteenth-century American English has longer sentences. It’s arguably more like British English. Isn’t the problem just the language we grow up with around us isn’t somehow good enough to sustain first-rate poets?
NEW: It is. It’s so rich. I love the way it evolves, the way my kids don’t say “whatever” anymore. “Whatever” had such incredible potency. “Epic.” When they started to say “epic” had such potency. When hip-hop artists say, “That’s really ill.”
I love the fertility of slang. I love the way mass culture, and its technological limitations, and then its new breaths does funny things to language. I tell my students about this. I say, “You know the way how in ’30s movies, the women are always sweeping around going, ‘Oh, darling,’ in The Thin Man, and there’s this ‘Hi, honey . . .’” [laughs]
If you watch a ’30s movie, and then you watch a ’50s movie, and you see the plasticity and the ingenuity that human beings put into . . . We don’t say, “Hey, kid.” We don’t call anyone a kid anymore. It sounds really archaic and corny.
And:
COWEN: Which is more interesting, Instagram poetry or Facebook poetry?
Definitely recommended, interesting throughout. We talked about Shaq too. After the conversation ended, Elisa said something striking to me, something like: “I liked this conversation because you didn’t ask me about “the humanities,” you asked me about poetry.”
South Korea North Korea fact of the day
According to a survey of 167 [South Korean] businesses earlier this month, almost 75 per cent would be prepared to invest in the North if sanctions were lifted. Companies that stand to benefit, such as steel and cement groups, have seen their stock prices soar in recent weeks. Shares in Hyundai Cement rose more than 500 per cent between March and June as detente unfolded on the Korean peninsula.
Much more is going on (FT).
Claims about British and American English
1. The word “cheerio” does not precede 1910, and furthermore it has been obsolete for some time now, and not because it was pushed out by an Americanism.
2. The Brits are correct to insist on “I couldn’t care less,” rather than the American “I could care less.”
3. Americans used to call an umbrella a “bumbershoot,” yet nowadays if they hear the word they often think it is a Britishism. The British slang term is in fact “brolly.”
4. When Americans speak, they prefer “repetitious” over “repetitive,” even though the latter is nine times more common in American text. Perhaps repetitious is more…repetitious.
5. “One-off” is a Britishism that largely has caught on in America.
6. How can they call it “rumpy-pumpy”?
7. “The British use sorry at the rate four times the Americans do.”
All that and more is from the new and fun book The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English, by Lynne Murphy.