Do dictators and autocracies build more impressive monuments?
I was having an email exchange about the possibility that dictatorships and autocracies do centralized monument-building much better than the freer democracies do. But while this is probably true on average, some of the deviations are of interest. Here is an excerpt from my response:
In some ways France looks like an autocracy, whereas in Singapore (not a dictatorship of course, but not a full democracy either) the government buildings are deliberately underwhelming (a kind of counter-signaling?).
Almaty and Skopje go overboard in the autocratic direction, the latter being a democracy. Washington, D.C. does centralized monuments very well, better than anything modern China has come up with. Cuban government buildings do not at all impress, nothing like Pyongyang.
Morocco invested in what was then the world’s largest mosque, in lieu of a government building upgrade. Ivory Coast has done much more monument-building than the other African autocracies.
So I wonder what the deeper model looks like…
Here are a few options:
1. Insecure nation-states invest in monuments. That is correlated with autocracy, but imperfectly.
2. Perhaps nation-states invest in monuments in lieu of concrete achievements for their citizenries.
3. Cuba has not built many monuments because its “origin story” is so strong, and its ideology for a long time has had a fair amount of support from the Cuban people. Alternatively, Castro himself was the monument.
4. Is Singapore itself the monument to Singapore? The same might be said of Dubai. What artificial monuments could top those?
Advocates of Confederate monuments, by the way, ought to ponder the possibility that those very structures are a sign of weakness not strength.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Is it better if the audience for classical music is growing older? Here is one chart of best-selling classical albums.
2. Register for my September 6th DC chat with Larry Summers.
3. Interview with Jesse Shapiro.
4. Jewish-Americans soldiers in WWII (pdf). They fought very hard.
5. “Cortana, open Alexa!” Having one of your voice assistants give orders to the other (NYT). And Chinese hyperloop at 1,000 kmh?
6. They are starting to build major arenas for e-Sports (NYT).
The culture that is Icelandic horse nationalism
Recently, the International Federation of Icelandic Horse Association (FEIF) passed a new law stating that Icelandic horses may not be named any name not registered in the WorldFeng database. If a horse owner wants to name the horse something else, their suggestion needs to be approved by the horse naming committee.
According to Vísir, a horse farmer in Skeggsstaðir farm, Guðrún hrafnsdóttir, suggest the name Mósan for her mare. The committee rejected the name since it doesn’t conform to Icelandic name traditions.
The Icelandic Ministry of Industries and Innovation is currently investigating if rulings of the horse naming committee are legal or not. So far, Guðrún has waited for 5 months for a reply from the ministry, Vísir reports.
China retailers face food vigilantes
1. Xue Yanfeng has now filed 40 lawsuits against supermarkets and retailers for violating food safety laws.
2. Under Chinese law, it is no longer the case that a victimized customer has to prove personal injury or loss to receive compensation.
3. Xue has found raisins with no nutritional labels, potato chips with proscribed additives, and biscuits with multiple production dates.
4. In the past 18 months, he has been awarded somewhat over $10,000 in compensation, plus there are 18 other settled cases where compensation was not disclosed.
5. Some provincial reports indicate that 80 to 90 percent of food safety complaints are from “specialist” plaintiffs.
China, of course, has had notoriously lax food safety practices in the past. So might the actions of these individuals be efficiency-enhancing? But more than 2/3 of the cases are based on labeling mistakes.
The above is from Bloomberg News.
Is full expensing the right path for tax reform?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Since 2008, the federal government has extended “bonus expensing,” which allows for a 50 percent deduction for many investments and covers about two-thirds of all investment. There are already various expensing provisions for investing in equipment, advertising, and research and development, and many forms of accelerated depreciation. By one estimate, corporations in 2012 were able to deduct more than 87 percent of the value of their investments, over time. So moving to “full expensing” may not be a complete economic game changer.
If nothing else, full expensing would benefit businesses by accelerating when the relevant deductions could be taken (right away, rather than over a multiyear period), and for that reason it would boost investment. But that in turn benefits some kinds of businesses more than others. What about businesses that invest a lot today, but earn back the cash slowly and turn a profit only years later? Without a big tax bill, they won’t get a significant tax reduction now, which would blunt the benefits of full expensing. That’s OK, but again it means not to expect a miracle from tax reform.
And near the end:
But so often the devil is in the details, and the simple idea of applying economic logic to the tax code can be harder to pull off than it might seem at first.
Do read the whole thing.
Headlines of 2017
Burger King launches WhopperCoin crypto-cash in Russia
That is from the BBC, sprightly throughout, via Stuart Harty.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Over 44,000 Haitians have entered Chile so far this year.
2. Facebook removes posts by people smugglers.
3. My podcast with David Lizerbram, including a discussion of movies vs. TV.
A Classic Gerrymander
In North Carolina, the Senate Redistricting Committee adjusted the boundaries of a state-Senate district to include a senator’s new house.
More from the Fayetteville Observer.
More on Houston and flood insurance
But the climate is not changing fast enough to explain the dramatic spikes in disaster costs; all seven of the billion-dollar floods in American history have made landfall in the 21st century, and Harvey will be the eighth. Experts believe the main culprit is the explosive growth of low-lying riverine and coastal development, which has had the double effect of increasing floods (by replacing prairies and other natural sponges that hold water with pavement that deflects water) while moving more property into the path of those floods. An investigation last year by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found that the Houston area’s impervious surfaces increased by 25 percent from 1996 to 2011, as thousands of new homes were built around its bayous. Houston is renowned for its anything-goes zoning rules, but the feds have also promoted those trends by providing extremely cheap insurance in high-risk areas.
Created in 1968, the national flood program was actually supposed to help prevent risky development. Its complex rules required new construction within designated 100-year floodplains to meet higher floodproofing standards, and “substantially damaged” properties that received claims worth half their value to be relocated or elevated. But most of the program’s 100-year flood maps are woefully obsolete, relocation almost never happens, and Uncle Sam has continued to cut multiple checks for repetitive losses. A recent Pew Foundation study found that the Higher Ground problems have not been solved; about 1 percent of insured properties have sustained repetitive losses, accounting for more than 25 percent of the nation’s flood claims. One $69,000 home in Mississippi flooded 34 times in 32 years, producing $663,000 in payouts. The government routinely dishes out more in claims than it takes in through premiums, and the program has gradually drifted deeper and deeper into debt.
That is from a superb Politico piece by Michael Grunwald.
How many sellers are needed for markets to become competitive?
…competitive conduct changes quickly as the number of incumbents increases. In markets with five or fewer incumbents, almost all variation in competitive conduct occurs with the entry of the second or third firm…once the market has between three and five firms, the next entrant has little effect on competitive conduct.
That is from Bresnahan and Reiss, “Entry and Competition in Concentrated Markets.”
Part of their method is to compare doctor and dentist pricing practices across towns of different size, and thus across different numbers of providers. Then they see where bigger numbers makes a difference in terms of pricing. Plumbers and tire dealers are considered too. One lesson seems to be that market concentration has to rise to very high levels to make a big difference in outcomes.
If you are wondering, the “sweet spot” for a town to have a single dentist or doctor is population between 700 and 900, at least circa the early 1990s.
Companies run by lawyers (who’s complacent?)
We looked at about 3,500 CEOs, about 9% of whom have law degrees. They were associated with nearly 2,400 publicly traded firms in the S&P 1500 from 1992 to 2012.
And:
Companies run by lawyers behaved differently in several dimensions related to risk taking than those run by non-lawyers. CEOs with legal training tended to implement more-cautious earnings management policies, especially in industries with high litigation risk, like pharmaceuticals. One measure we used was current accruals, where managers accelerate recognition of revenues and delay recognition of expenses. Lawyers were much less aggressive in accrual accounting relative to industry levels.
And:
We found that lawyer CEOs were not only associated with less litigation but, conditional on experiencing litigation, were also associated with better management of litigation.
That is all from M. Todd Henderson, more at the link.
Monday assorted links
1. Premium mediocrity: “As a result, as another buddy Rob Salkowitz put it in our Facebook discussion, premium mediocrity is creating an aura of exclusivity without actually excluding anyone.”
2. Machine learning and the new physiognomy. Interesting, and neglected.
3. Uncovering Somalia’s forgotten music from the 1970s.
4. Today the St. Louis minimum wage falls from $10 to $7.70.
5. “But in recent weeks, the monsoon rains have relentlessly pounded this part of Bangladesh. Rainwater from the Himalayas is travelling down through Nepal’s lower lying areas, through swollen rivers in north-east India and eventually through the floodplains of Bangladesh. Vast swaths of land across all three countries are under water.” Link here. In Bangladesh alone, 7.1 million people are affected.
6. The great Pessoa.
Facts about flood insurance
The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) owes $24.6 billion to the Treasury. Most of it covered claims from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and floods in 2016, the program’s third most severe loss-year on record with losses exceeding $4 billion, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which manages it.
The NFIP was extended 17 times between 2008 and 2012 and lapsed four times in that period. A 2012 law extended the program to September.
The only source of flood insurance for most Americans, it will be in place for homeowners and businesses in Harvey’s path along the central Texas coast.
But Harvey-related claims covered under the program could push it deeper into the red and possibly toward its borrowing limit of just over $30 billion, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog in Washington, D.C.
Federal law requires that homes in flood-risk areas have flood insurance before a mortgage can be completed. The program is the only flood insurance available to the vast majority of Americans, although a small market for private flood insurance is sprouting in flood-prone states such as Florida.
Here is the article. Note the Trump administration previously was pushing a plan to cut the insurance to pay for The Wall. I do see a case for doing without a federal role for this insurance, but the benefits there come ex ante, not from yanking it away ex post.
Where India Goes
Where India Goes, a book about the problem of open defecation in India, is the best social science book I have read in years. Written by 
Diane Coffey and Dean Spears, Where India Goes, examines an important issue and it does so with a superb combination of human interest storytelling and top-notch empirical research made accessible.
Drawing on the academic literature, Coffey and Spears show that open defecation sickens and kills children, stunts their growth, and lowers their IQ all of which shows up in reduced productivity and wages in adulthood.
The dangers of open defecation are clear. Moreover, Gandhi said that “Sanitation is more important than independence” and Modi said “toilets before temples,” yet in India some half a billion people still do not use latrines. Why not? Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen (2013), offer a typical explanation:
In 2011 half of all Indian households did not have access to toilets, forcing them to resort to open defecation on a daily basis…
The phrasing presents the problem as a lack of access that forces people to resort to open defecation. From this perspective the solution seems obvious, provide access. After all, if you or I had access to latrines we would use them so if someone else isn’t using latrines it must be because they don’t have access. A bit of thought, however, dispels this notion.
Latrines are not expensive. Many people in countries poorer than India build their own latrines. If access is not the problem then building latrines may not be the solution. Indeed, India’s campaign(s) to build latrines have been far less successful than one might imagine based on the access theory. Quite often latrines are built and not used. Sometimes this is due to poor construction or location but often perfectly serviceable latrines are simply not used as latrines. In fact, surveys indicate that 40 per cent of households that have a working latrine also have at least one person who regularly defecates in the open (Coffey and Spears 2017).
For many people in India, open defecation is preferred to latrine use. The reasons relate to issues of ritual purity and caste. Latrines in or near homes are considered polluting, not in a physical so much as a spiritual or ritual sense. Latrine cleaning is also associated with the Dalit (out)-caste, in itself a polluting category (hence untouchable). That is, the impurity of defecation and caste are mutually reinforcing. As a result, using or, even worse, cleaning latrines is considered a ritual impurity. The problem of open defecation is thus intimately tied up with Hindu notions of purity and caste which many do not want to discuss, let alone condemn.
In the villages the idea of open defecation is also associated with clean air, exercise, and health. Thus, in surveys “both men and women speak openly about the benefits of open defecation and even associate it with health and longevity.” Even many women prefer open defecation if only because it gives them a chance to get out of the house and have some freedom of movement.
Eventually, flush toilets and sewage will eliminate the problem of open defecation, but many people will die before sewage comes to rural India. Building latrines is not enough but is there an opportunity for an Indian entrepreneur? If standardized latrines were bundled with service contracts and provided by professional, uniformed workers who emptied the latrines mechanically (and thus had dignity), demand could well be high. A Walmart for latrine construction and management.
Coffey and Spears, however, offer no silver bullets. Problems brought about by belief and behavior are usually more difficult to solve than material problems. Nevertheless, by demonstrating the importance of the problem and by facing the causes squarely, Coffey and Spears have done India a tremendous service.
Where should you fear private internet censorship the most?
Alex already has covered this topic. I am less worried than he is, and I’ll go through a list, but first here are a few general remarks.
Most of the ban attempts seem directed at versions of alt right ideas. Whether you like it or not, those ideas have benefited from the internet perhaps more than any other. I am seeing a small amount of that gain clawed back, but in a manner consistent with principles of liberty and free association and probably Coasean efficiency as well. The claim “the tech companies are way more open than the previous mainstream gatekeepers, but they have to spend more customer and employee goodwill to be all the more open yet” has some resonance with me, but I can’t say it is in the top 300 list of demands I wish to place on the world. It might not be in the top 1000.
It remains the case that the most significant voluntary censorship issues occur every day in mainstream non-internet society, including what gets on TV, which books are promoted by major publishers, who can rent out the best physical venues, and what gets taught at Harvard or for that matter in high school. In all of these areas, universal intellectual service was never a relevant ideal to begin with, and so it seems odd to me to pick on say Facebook. It’s still not nearly as important an influence as the above-mentioned parts of non-internet society, nor is it anywhere close to being as discriminatory.
That all said, I am happy when I see people complain about voluntary censorship, even when I disagree with the complaints, or think the complainer is being too pessimistic. Complaining > complacency. That said, here is my wee dose of complacency, in the form of a list across various parts of the internet:
1. On-line dating services. No fears here. Christian, Jewish, and other dating services are already set up to include some groups and exclude others. If OK Cupid excludes neo-Nazis, or supposed neo-Nazis, this seems entirely in order.
2. Amazon. You can order Mein Kampf on Amazon, and few seem to complain about that. Does it make sense to have a world where Hitler is available but Milo is banned? Well, a lot doesn’t make sense these days, but still I don’t ever expect that to happen. There are cultural and also business reasons why universal booksellers will be among the last to embrace voluntary censorship.
Can you order a swastika, of the evil kind, on Amazon? It seems not. Presumably that has been the case for a while, it doesn’t bug me, and I wouldn’t mind if Amazon selectively stopped carrying other political symbols as well. I bet Wal-Mart doesn’t carry them either.
3. Facebook. Here my worry quotient at least potentially rises, if only because Americans spend so much time on Facebook. Let’s say Facebook bans some neo-Nazi groups and communications, and then goes too far and keeps off some groups that offer valuable intellectual contributions, even if their quality might be too “high variance.”
Yet here’s the thing: given my mixed feelings toward Facebook, I see this as OK either way. If Facebook gets better, well, how bad can “better” be? But say the Facebook censors overreact, some groups are booted off, and Facebook gets worse. I don’t mind if Facebook gets worse! People will spend more time doing other things. And the unjustly banned group still have plenty of other outlets on the web. We know from history that every medium encourages some kinds of ideas and discourages others (TV for instance seems to let people think crime rates are pretty high, because crimes get covered on the evening news). Not long ago, there was no Facebook and those unjustly banned groups couldn’t get on the evening news either. Maybe that was bad, but it was hardly the end of the world, and even with an overly aggressive Facebook censor we are still far closer to a kind of neutrality across ideas than was the case twenty years ago.
4. Google. In China I found it very easy to switch to Bing, because Bing is a second or so quicker in China (that is using Google through VPN, otherwise you can’t). Now maybe Bing bans the same web sites. And maybe the lower-tier search engines are too crummy, or people are simply not used to using them.
On this issue I have modest fears. Still, what I’ve seen so far is a Google (and Bing) that want to be as universal as possible, and the constraints as coming from the regulators, such as the EU “forgetting” policy. Google covers so much material, I think of them as not wanting to devote many resources to adjudicating content. At the very least, they still seem quite willing to take me to Amazon selling Mein Kampf.
I do expect news.google.com to become more mainstream over time, and indeed it already has. They are more careful about what pops up on the page. This too doesn’t bug me, it probably improves average quality, and furthermore it is still a more open forum than is the news on television.
Here you can read a long list of complaints against Google and affiliated services. Given how much data the company handles, and how many cases arise, I’m amazed they’ve done so well. Salil Mehta was just restored, by the way.
5. Twitter. For many people it might be an advantage to be banned from Twitter. Still, for some views Twitter is an important means of connecting with the audience, Donald Trump being the most prominent example. So I have a bit of a worry, but I don’t see Twitter as that powerful in the world of ideas. And overall I have a pretty fluid view of what is likely to matter. I do not think it is impossible or even implausible that some really important ideas, twenty years from now, are circulated using fanzines, or perhaps something like the old usenet groups. More generally, our ability as outsiders to judge the health and quality of an intellectual ecosystem just isn’t that great, so maybe we shouldn’t be so judgmental at each step along the way?
6. YouTube (owned by Google). Due to copyright law, YouTube is already in the business of making plenty of judgments about content and it has the infrastructure to do so. And unlike Google the search engine, content is posted directly on YouTube itself. YouTube is a hosting service, not just a search engine, though it is that too. YouTube search and recommendation algorithms drive a lot of views. If YouTube won’t host your videos, that is a problem.
But I am not very worried about “YouTube as we know it.” The forum seems to work quite well (no need to mention Jordan Peterson in the comments, his account was restored). I am happy that gangs can’t post videos of their killings, and the biggest problem remains government censorship of YouTube. If you google “banned from YouTube,” I do not see a long list of outrages, that said I would not have banned the Prager University videos. Whether you like it or not, it is easy to watch Milo on YouTube, even though the publishing world dropped his book like a stone. The tech companies still seem so much more open than the older media gatekeepers.
Cloudflare, and other internet choke point services: I worry about them a lot. They can in essence kick you off the entire internet through a single human decision not to offer the right services. I focus almost all of my worry on them, noting that so far all they have done is kick off one Nazi group. Still, I think we should reexamine the overall architecture of the internet with this kind of censorship power in mind as a potential problem. And note this: the main problem with those choke points probably has more to do with national security and the ease of wrecking social coordination, not censorship. Still, this whole issue should receive much more attention and I certainly would consider serious changes to the status quo.
A bit more
I hope the tech companies do not go further with voluntary censorship, but I don’t think it is obvious that they will. It seems they felt the need to do something, and now they are hoping the storm will pass. I do favor vigilance against further overreach, but let’s not overrate the importance of what are so far largely symbolic disputes.
By the way, what’s the deal with the Left favoring net neutrality but wanting all this voluntary internet censorship?