Friday assorted links
2. Are driverless cars overrated?
3. What is it like to run someone over with a train?
4. The micro-sociology of planning mass killings.
5. “Ms. Brewer, 33, and her understudy, Edward Barbanell, 40, are thought to be the only known performers with Down syndrome to play the lead in an Off Broadway or Broadway theater production.” NYT link here.
The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education
That is a new paper by Gjisbert Stoet and David C. Geary, here is the abstract, noting that the last sentence is perhaps the most important:
The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys’ science achievement and girls’ reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects.
So what is the implied prediction for our future?
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My debate with Noah Smith on fiscal policy
This is at Bloomberg, I think this is the most interesting paragraph:
But Noah, I have a question for you. You’ve written several columns about how the American economy is becoming more monopolistic. If true (and it is not exactly my view), that implies output could be much higher with current resources, even at full employment. A boost in demand could spur firms to produce more, rather than restricting output so much. So are you now a fan of these Trumpian deficits? They may not be your preferred form of deficit spending, but do you see them still as a net positive?
But of course there is much more at the link.
Is Los Angeles America’s most “right-wing” city?
Right-wing isn’t exactly the right word, but neither is conservative nor libertarian. Let’s put it this way: in which American city is the principle of sexual dimorphism so pronounced and so accepted and so built into the city’s most fundamental sector (Hollywood)? In which American city is risk-taking and the resultant income inequality so much a part of the founding culture, in this case the business of entertainment? Entertainment is also relatively free of government interference and subsidy, and has been so from its beginnings in American history. In which city are the market outcomes — the winners and losers — so accepted as the final verdict of relevance?
Dare I say Los Angeles (and environs) is the answer to all of these questions, or at least in the very top tier of answers?
Note that defense spending also has long been a foundational sector for much of southern California.
Of course I am well aware of the actual politics of L.A., and all the more of Santa Monica. Sometimes I toy with a “portfolio” theory of politics, namely that if your city or region’s core sector is quite capitalistic, your city’s politics will be fairly left-wing as a kind of expressive recompense against daily life.
Which American city or region is most like Denmark? How about the Washington, D.C. area? Very well educated, a thick middle class, job stability through government, and not many billionaires. It is easy enough to live here and feel like a libertarian!
Thursday assorted links
1. Russ Roberts’s 12 Rules for Life.
2. The rise and fall of the waterbed.
3. Spy lizards? (speculative, very speculative)
4. The Posner-Weyl proposal for individual hosting of immigrants.
5. Small steps toward a much better world, Norwegian style: “The northern Norwegian city of Bodø has approved ambitious plans to literally move its airport just 900 meters, thereby opening up valuable new waterfront land for redevelopment. If also approved by Parliament, it will be the biggest land-based construction project ever undertaken in Northern Norway, and further boost a city that’s already blossoming.”
The side effects of the decline of men
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and it is not just about male wage stagnation:
The researchers Guido Matias Cortes, Nir Jaimovich and Henry E. Siu split jobs into categories, with “cognitive” occupations relying on brain power corresponding closely to what many call white-collar jobs. Their worrying result for men is this: In 1980, 66 percent of college-educated men worked in these cognitive occupations. By 2000, that had fallen to 63 percent. Those three percentage points may not sound like a major change, but that’s over a 20-year period when the American economy became wealthier and more Americans became educated. Men also grew older as a group during this time, which should have propelled them into more white-collar jobs. Relative to those expectations of improvement, the retrogression is startling.
…One possible reason for this shift is that more jobs demand good social skills. The data show that the growing demand for social skills, as measured by job characteristics and employment ads, has matched where women have gained relative to men in the workplace. The researchers suggest the scientific evidence shows that women have on average stronger skills in empathy, communication, emotion recognition and verbal expression, and corporate America is valuing those qualities all the more.
There is much more at the link.
*Can it Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America*
It will be out soon, you should buy it. I’ve only read my own essay in the book, but that one is very good and also original, I haven’t made the argument elsewhere. Presumably the other essays are better yet, as they feature Jon Elster, Timur Kuran, Samantha Power, Duncan Watts, Noah Feldman, and other luminaries.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “A transcriber on the Isle of Man can decipher almost anything.”
2. Why don’t skateboards get any cheaper?
3. Is the Cold War game of provocative street-naming coming back?
4. Can Washington be automated?
5. The Obama portraits are in fact excellent. Here is praise from the NYT. Quite good is Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker. Mood affiliation here prevents the correct outcome, which is that Obama skeptics should be more sympathetically inclined to the portraits, which (correctly or not) raise the possibility that his was in large part a presidency of hagiography.
My Conversation with Matt Levine
Here is the transcript and audio, Matt was in great form. We covered Uber, derivatives, crypto, Horace, Latin and the ancient world, neighborhoods of New York City, whether markets are volatile enough, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whether IPOs are mispriced, Nabokov and modernist literature, Achilles and Homer, and of course the Matt Levine production function (“panic”).
Here is one excerpt:
LEVINE:
…What I’d like the story to be is that financial markets have gotten smarter and they reacted less to news. So even though the news is noisier, they react less to that noisy news because it turns out not to affect asset prices in as noisy a way as you’d think by watching TV.
I think that there is something compelling to that because we actually have seen smart people build smart things that do a good job of making investing decisions. So you’d expect over time, as people build more rational investing tools, investing would become more rational.
The good counterargument to that is that investing is not a technological problem in the world that can be solved. It’s an interpersonal fight. Trading, in particular, is an attempt to be better than someone else. You can never make trading more rational because as you get better, someone else gets better. The residue will ultimately still be your human biases.
I’m biased towards the view that we have gotten smarter at decoupling our emotional reactions to the news from financial asset prices. Part of that is — whether or not that’s true globally — there’s a local sense in which the first day of Trump’s election everyone panicked. Then he said another crazy thing, and then he said another. Eventually you tune it out. That’s a form of this thing of financial assets reacting less to human reactions to the news.
Here is another:
COWEN: Do you have a single biggest worry [about asset markets], however tiny, tiny, tiny it may be?
LEVINE: I don’t think I do. I don’t think I do. The thing that I find weirdest is the lack of volatility in the face of a very strange and volatile world, but I’ve reconciled myself to that. This is my efficient markets optimism, where I assume that if something bad is happening, it would happen.
COWEN: But efficient markets is also a pessimism, right? It’s harder to make the world better than it already is because you can’t see past what others are seeing very easily.
LEVINE: Sure, it’s an efficient markets conservatism or something.
And finally:
LEVINE: I have an idiosyncratic take on Book 9 of the Iliad. The Iliad is the story of Achilles is the great warrior on the Greek side in the Trojan War. He gets mad at some slight, and he goes back to his tent to sulk, and the Greeks start losing.
So then they send emissaries to his tent to say, “Please come back.” And he says, “No.” Then, the Greeks start losing some more.
Eventually, he comes back, and he gets killed. That’s basically the story of the Iliad. Book 9 is where they send the emissaries to say, “Please come back,” and he says, “No.”
He gives this speech, this response that is weird, where he says, effectively, “The prophecy is that if I go back to fight here, I will die here. My name will be immortal. If I don’t go back to fight, I’ll go home and live a long life and will be forgotten.” He chooses to go back and be forgotten. Then, later, he changes his mind because his friend gets killed.
I think the existential examination of this Greek warrior and this heroic culture that clearly valorizes heroism and deathless fame and everything, and who is, canonically, the most famous heroic warrior and the one with the most deathless fame, he’s the one who says, “Nah, I’d rather go back and live a long life on my farm.”
The forcing of that choice is the central point of the highest work of Greek art, sort of prefigures a lot of existentialist thought in the future, I think.
Do read and listen to the whole thing…
Why the center-left became immoderate
Lack of ideology and belief in nothing in particular (except perhaps more redistribution):
In polarized times, political competition comes to resemble tribal warfare. Everyone is under pressure to close ranks and boost morale. Lacking an animating vision beyond expert-led incrementalism, center-left politicians and pundits have few options to rally the Democratic base other than by attacking adversaries and heightening partisan divides. The other option—laying out an alternative that differs from what Hillary Clinton or even President Obama offered—requires ideological conviction.
That would explain why Rep. Adam Schiff —previously “known as a milquetoast moderate,” according to the New Yorker—has emerged as one of the most outspoken figures in the Russian collusion investigation. Before being appointed to succeed Mrs. Clinton in the Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand was an upstate New York representative who belonged to the Blue Dog Coalition. Her 2013 New Yorker profile was titled “Strong Vanilla”—and she now boasts the upper chamber’s most anti- Trump voting record.
When people don’t believe in so much with conviction, the logic of the crowd will sometimes dominate, because actual belief is no longer such a constraining force. This is one reason why a totally secular “Enlightenment” society is not in every way to be welcomed — we humans are not worthy of it in every regard.
That is from Shadi Hamid at the WSJ; given this perspective, it is perhaps no accident that he is a scholar of Islam. “Lack of real belief,” and lack of genuine religious communities, is often more of a problem behind terrorism than is “excessively fanatical belief.”
Hat tip goes to the excellent Samir Varma.
The evolution of Eurish
Over years of attending conferences, chairing panels and running training programmes in more than a dozen European cities, I have begun to note the contours of this changing language that I call Eurish. It is still English, but it has its own features that are often common to both romance and Germanic languages.
One feature is the European uncountable noun — singular in native-speaker English but plural in Eurish: “he received feedbacks”, “we have a lot of informations” and “we are producing online contents”.
There are other Eurish differences. I have heard both Germans and Italians say “we discussed about” rather than “we discussed”. “I will answer to your question” is common in many European discussions. Writing in the World Englishes journal, Mr Modiano adds others: “I am coming from Spain” rather than “I come from Spain” and “We were five people at the party” rather than “There were five people at the party”.
Continental Europeans are increasingly unworried about what Brits think of their developing English.
That is from Michael Skapinker at the FT, via Lennert.
What should I ask Martina Navratilova?
I will be having a Conversation with her on March 19, in Arlington at George Mason University. So what should I ask?
I thank you all in advance for your usual enthusiasm and sagacity.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Ad-blocking really matters.
2. John Collison and Alex Rampell podcast on the future of payments. Bitcoin uses 40x times the power of the Visa network.
3. Is there any better poorly written, rambling narrative on why D.C. is a kind of nightmare?
4. MIE: Snowball vending machine, better or worse than bottled water?
5. Venezuelan banknotes as an input for origami.
6. Is there a great Olympics stagnation? (NYT)
Two men and a bulldog showed up unannounced at Caitlin Strickland’s after-school job on a Friday afternoon.
Admissions officers are traveling hundreds of miles with a live animal to inform high-school seniors they have been accepted to a college—and to urge them to enroll. It’s not just the star athletes or scholarship winners who get the treatment. It is pretty much anyone, a tactic driven by competition to snag the declining number of college-bound high-school students.
I would have brought a schnauzer:
Trip [the bulldog] is “not generally a heavy drooler unless there is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich nearby and then he drools like crazy,” said Michael Kaltenmark, his handler and the school’s director of external relations. “Unless someone is actively making dinner in front of him he’s going to be fine.”
Trip’ silver collar is valued at $10,000, bring on the direct instruction.
That is from Douglas Belkin at the WSJ, courtesy of the excellent Samir Varma.
What I’ve been reading
1. Kathryn Lomas, The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars. A very thorough, reasonable, and well-researched account and synthesis of what we know about the origins of the Roman empire. By my standards it is insufficiently concerned with generalizations, but I do understand how many might consider that an advantage.
2. Michael E. Hobart, The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide. I wanted to love this book, and I still think it is quite important and worthy, but I don’t love reading this book. Yet here is the first and marvelous sentence of the preface: “This book uses the history of information technology — in particular, the shift from alphabetic literacy to modern numeracy — to narrate and explain the origins of the contemporary rift between science and religion.” After that it is dense.
3. Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography. The most interesting material concerns Khaldun’s history as a Sufi. Which brings me to Alexander Knysh’s Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism, which I enjoyed. Overall I find this a fruitful area to study, and I benefited from some parts of Alexander Bevilacqua’s The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment.
4. David Hockney and Martin Gayford, A History of Pictures. How artists have thought about space and light over the centuries, consistently interesting and insightful, wonderful color plates too. I am not persuaded by all of Hockney’s claims about art history, but overall he is much underrated as a writer and thinker, including on the nature and import of photography.
5. Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World, covers the economics of the Kibbutz.
6. Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. I don’t have the time to make my way through the details of this 900+pp. book, but upon browsing it appears to be a work of incredible quality, scope, and original research.
7. Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History. A radical revision of the usual story, based on a careful reexamination of Spanish and Nahuatl stories. Restall seems to be mostly correct, but I will add two points: a) I never took the older account very seriously anyway, and b) I am more interested in the new macro-story than the micro-revisions of the march and the encounter and surrender and so on. One big difference seems to be there was more early resistance to Cortés than the common accounts would have you believe. And outright slaughter and starvation were more important for the war in the short run than we used to think, relative to smallpox and other maladies. In any case, this is an important book for anyone who follows this area.