Dark oxygen: jubiliant for others, cry for yourself and your kin

by  Tyler Cowen in

To summarize the new results:

An international team of researchers recently discovered that oxygen is being made by potato-shaped metallic nodules deep under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. In July, their findings, which throw into dispute the concepts of oxygen production, were published in the Nature Geoscience jonal. The discovery could lead to a reconsideration of the origins of complex life on Earth.

The findings from a team of researchers led by Professor Andrew Sweetman at the U.K.’s Scottish Association for Marine Science, show that oxygen is being produced at around 4,000 metres below the surface of the ocean in complete darkness. This contradicts previous scientific assumptions that only living organisms, including plants and algae, can use energy to create oxygen through photosynthesis, using sunlight for the reaction.

As Julian Gough suggests, most life probably is on icy moons.  This means a lot more life!  Over a time slice, it could mean billions of additional lives out there.  Did you pop up the champagne?

The bad news is that the chance that Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter” lies behind us is somewhat smaller.  Which boosts the chance that it may lie in our near future.  Did you pull out the tissues?

On net, did this news change your mood at all?  Why or why not?

Prices vs. price paths

by  Tyler Cowen

Recently I have been writing about how the federal government should not go further in bargaining or forcing down the prices of pharmaceutical drugs.  Supply is elastic and the benefits from new pharma drugs are enormous.

But it is not as simple as being “for higher prices.”  There is also a price trajectory over time.  Higher prices today can induce more competition, which can mean lower prices tomorrow, maybe even much lower prices.  If not tomorrow, perhaps five or ten years hence.

Higher prices today can mean greater efforts at price discrimination, including over time.  That too can mean lower prices (compared to the counterfactual) at later points in time, or sometimes today as well.

So yes it is fine to be for higher prices for pharmaceuticals.  But in many scenarios you end up being for lower prices too, just not all the time and just not for everybody.

So shout it from the rooftops: “I am not the demonic Satan, I am for both higher and lower prices as part of a complex mix, to expand elastic supply.”  Catchy, right?

What to think about ranked choice voting?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one key segment:

Game theory can help explain how ranked choice voting changes the behavior of candidates, as well as the elites who support them. Consider a ranked choice election that has five or six candidates. To win the election, you can’t just appeal to your base. You also can’t alienate your opponent’s base. You want supporters of other candidates to regard you as “not too bad,” because if they hate you, they could rank you very low and get you tossed out of the running quickly.

Candidates are thus encouraged to moderate their positions and their behavior — that is, not to call each other too many names. If the favorite candidate of one voter calls the favorite of another “weird,” for example — to choose an example not quite at random — the latter voter might respond by voting down the name-caller to the very bottom.

The result? Negative campaigning diminishes, and politics moderates. The effect can be especially pronounced in party primaries, which sometimes are dominated by the most extreme voters.

The candidates also compete in different ways. In particular, they try to outdo each other when it comes to constituency service, which is a way of being popular without offending anybody.

The broader evidence on ranked choice voting shows that, when used, it has made US politics more moderate. Alaska’s ranked choice voting helped moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski beat her more ideological opponents in 2022. In Idaho, some conservatives regard ranked choice voting with suspicion, fearing it is a plot to neutralize their influence.

In Ireland, politics is fairly non-ideological on most matters of policy, and elections are not typically seen as major, course-altering events. After more than a century with this system, the Irish seem happy to keep it.

The lesson here is that it is not possible to evaluate ranked choice voting in the abstract. It usually makes politics less extreme and less ideological, but those are descriptive terms, not normative ones. I would prefer California’s politics to be less ideological, for example, but that is because it embodies an ideology distinct from mine. And sometimes the more extreme and ideological positions are entirely correct, as for instance John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of women’s suffrage and birth control in the 19th century.

In general, ranked choice voting is best for places where voters feel things are already on the right track and ought to stay there. It is a voting system for the self-satisfied. Which parts of contemporary America might that describe? No voting method yet devised can settle that question.

ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode

by  Tyler Cowen

It is extremely versatile, very responsive to feedback, and has response lags comparable to that of a human, or better yet.  Just keep on telling it what to do, if you need to.  If you ask it to be better, guess what?  It gets better.  Her really is here.  Now.

Some complain that the foreign voices have American accents, presumably this is from the training data?  This will be fixed soon enough.  In the meantime, prompt it in the destination language.

It’s happening, and this is to date one of the most vivid and impressive illustrations of what is possible.  A mere three years ago this would have seemed like witchcraft.

El Salvador notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here are a few observations from the trip:

1. El Salvador does truly seem safe, arguably “Canada safe” or maybe safer yet.

2. Hardly ever have I had quicker and more convenient airport and entry procedures.

3. Hardly any tourists are there, unless you count returning El Salvadorans from the United States.

4. For a small country, always visit the #2 city, in this case Santa Ana.  There is nothing to do there, but that is part of the point.  You can stroll through the local Walmart.

5. Mostly you should eat pupusas in less formal settings.  The basic corn, beans, and cheese products of the country are excellent, though they get worse the nicer the restaurant.

6. There is one exception to #5: go eat at El XoLo, it is one of the best meals I have had in years.  The squash dishes and the cochinita were best, and you get a fun look at the El Salvadoran elite.

7. You can go to lovely ocean spots and no one will be there.

8. I visited the colonial city of Suchitoto again, after a nine (?) year absence.  It had perhaps 10x the amount of commerce as last time.

9. El Rosario, the brutalist church, is one of the great landmarks of the New World.

10. The gifted Chinese library in San Salvador is hilarious, here is some photos.

11. Measured gdp growth in El Salvador is a disappointment.  But consumption seems to be growing rapidly, both in the numbers and what one sees on the ground.  Which series matters more?  This is a common paradox in development economics.

12. Taking 3-4 day trips in groups of five or six is very much underrated.  Hope you can organize your own outings!

13. People love it when you tell them you are from Virginia.

14. I may consider “future of safety” issues in more detail in a later post.

15. Overall, I would encourage you to go, go, go.  From Washington, D.C. it is a simple, direct four hour flight — isn’t that closer than Denver?  What are you waiting for?

Shaping the Habits of Teen Drivers

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one new method to lower teen-age driving deaths:

We show that a targeted law can modify teens’ risky behavior. We examine the effects of an Australian intervention banning first-year drivers from driving late at night with multiple peers, which had accounted for one-fifth of their traffic fatalities. Using data on individual drivers linked to crash outcomes, we find the reform more than halves targeted crashes, casualties and deaths. There are large positive spillovers through lower crashes earlier in the evening and beyond the first year, suggesting broad and persistent declines in high-risk driving. Overall, the targeted intervention delivers gains comparable to harsher restrictions that delay teen driving.

That is by Timothy J. Moore and Todd Morris in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

The Unseen Fallout: Chernobyl’s Deadly Air Pollution Legacy

by  Alex Tabarrok in

A fascinating new paper The Political Economic Determinants of Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chernobyl by Makarin, Qian, and Wang was recently presented at the NBER Pol. Economy conference. The paper is nominally about how fossil fuel companies and coal miners in the US and UK used the Chernobyl disaster to successfully lobby against building more nuclear power plants. The data collection here is impressive but that is just how democracy works. I found the political economy section less interesting than some of the background material.

First, the Chernobyl disaster ended nuclear power plant (NPP) construction in the United States (top-left panel), the country with the most NPPs in the world . Surprisingly, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 (much less serious than Chernobyl) had very little effect on construction; albeit the 1-2 punch with Chernobyl in 1986 surely didn’t help. The same pattern is very clear across all countries and also all democracies (top-right panel). The bottom two panels show the same data but looking at new plants rather than the cumulative total–there was a sharp break in 1986 with growth quickly converging to zero new plants per year.

Fewer nuclear plants than otherwise would have been the case might have made a disaster less likely but there were countervailing forces:

We document that the decline in new NPPs in democracies after Chernobyl was accompanied by an increase in the average age of the NPPs in use. To satisfy the rise in energy demand, reactors built prior to Chernobyl continued operating past their initially scheduled retirement dates. Using data on NPP incident reports, we show that such plants are more likely to have accidents. The data imply that Chernobyl resulted in the continued operation of older and more dangerous NPPs in the democracies.

Moreover, safety declined because the existing plants got older but in addition “the slowdown of new NPP construction…delayed the adoption of new safer plants.” This is a point about innovation that I have often emphasized (see also here)

The key to innovation is continuous refinement and improvement…. Learning by doing requires doing….Thus, when considering innovation today, it’s essential to think about not only the current state of technology but also about the entire trajectory of development. A treatment that’s marginally better today may be much better tomorrow.

Regulation increased costs substantially:

The U.S. NRC requires six-to-seven-years to approve NPPs. The total construction time afterwards ranges from decades to indefinite. Cost overruns and changing regulatory requirements during the construction process sometime forces construction to be abandoned after significant sunk costs have been made. This often leads investors to abandon construction after already sunk billions of dollars of investment. Worldwide, companies have stopped construction on 90 reactors since the 1980s. 40 of those were in the U.S. alone. For example, in 2017, two South Carolina utilities abandoned two unfinished Westinghouse AP1000 reactors due to significant construction delays and cost overruns. At the time, this left two other U.S. AP1000 reactors under construction in Georgia. The original cost estimate of $14 billion for these two reactors rose to $23 billion. Construction only continued when the U.S. federal government promised financial support. These were the first new reactors in the U.S. in decades. In contrast, recent NPPs in China have taken only four to six years and $2 billion dollars per reactor. When considering the choice of investing in nuclear energy versus fossil fuel energy, note that a typical natural gas plant takes approximately two years to construct (Lovering et al., 2016).

Chernobyl, to be clear, was a very costly disaster

The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, required more than 500,000 personnel and an estimated US$68 billion (2019 USD). Between five and seven percent of government spending in Ukraine is still related to Chernobyl. (emphasis added, AT) In Belarus, Chernobyl-related expenses fell from twenty-two percent of the national budget in 1991 to six percent by 2002.

The biggest safety effect of the decline in nuclear power plants was the increase in air pollution. The authors use satellite date on ambient particles to show that when a new nuclear plant comes online pollution in nearby cities declines significantly. Second, they use the decline in pollution to create preliminary estimates of the effect of pollution on health:

According to our calculations, the construction of an additional NPP, by reducing the total suspended particles (TSP) in the ambient environment, could on average save 816,058 additional life years.

According to our baseline estimates (Table 1), over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of NPPs worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies. Our calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in NPP growth in these countries after Chernobyl.

The authors use the Air Quality Life Index from the University of Chicago which I think is on the high side of estimates. Nevertheless, as you know, I think the new air pollution literature is credible (also here) so I think the bottom line is almost certainly correct. Namely, Chernobyl caused many more deaths by reducing nuclear power plant construction and increasing air pollution than by its direct effects which were small albeit not negligible.

High and low decoupling, and other matters (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is all from an anonymous reader, not by me, but I will not indent:

“Hi Tyler,

I enjoyed your post – I’m kind of tired of this – and wanted to respond to it as I think what you wrote gets at two important trends happening in politics today.

1 – High and Low Decoupling

First of all the examples of idiotic tribal behaviour you cited remind me of an idea I was first introduced to by Tom Chivers about the difference between high decouplers – individuals comfortable separating and isolating ideas from actions, and low decouplers – individuals who see ideas as inextricable from their wider contexts. – https://unherd.com/2020/02/eugenics-is-possible-is-not-the-same-as-eugenics-is-good/

I would argue that up until today low decoupling (along with the everpresent sin of motivated reasoning) has been the cultural norm in politics for over a century, if not longer, and so much of the bollocks we see in political rhetoric and in corporate news coverage across the western world can be explained by everyone having to conform to the norm if they want to succeed.

hat I would argue we are seeing now thanks to Twitter (and especially its inspired Community Notes feature) is the first proper challenge to the low decoupling cultural norm and the vacuum that is developing thanks to more and more people seeing (and criticising) politicians conforming to it. Indeed whilst the internet may not forget anything, up until Elon’s takeover of twitter the internet has been something of a toothless old dog.

How will this shift away from low decoupling change political discourse? I suspect it will make debate more elitist and less accessible for ordinary people because arguments will have to become more sophisticated and require a certain level of engagement to understand. This will probably make political discussions seem  duller to many people due to a more analytical and rigorous style as opposed to the quick trite phrases of the present moment. because political actors will know that they can be “owned” or discredited as “fake news” if they are shown to be using spin or overly simplistic arguments. Counter intuitively (for those not paying attention) I also then think the decline of low decoupling will see the death of “fact checkers” because of the growing cynicism towards this movement and the growing appreciation of the fact that there are inherent biases underlying those checking the facts and that they often present their responses in emotive and low decoupling ways.

It’s important to say I don’t think this change will necessarily change everyone’s behaviour but then it doesn’t need to. If it just changes the behaviour of the 10-20% of the population who take a moderate to high interest in politics (and are more important for changes within politics) then this will change the discussion even if the remaining 80% are still by and large low decouplers on political matters. But this change will itself play into the wider changes we are seeing in politics and which is the other point I want to highlight.

2 – The political realignment

Now going back to your post, what is arguably more interesting is the subtext of what you said, specifically your (low decoupling) defence of the new right. It could be argued that a Straussian reading of what you are saying is that despite where you thought you would be in the political new realignment you keep finding yourself in a different position and you find this fact unsettling. I think it shouldn’t be. It’s just that the present framing of the realignment is wrong and based on outdated understandings of the forces involved.

Now in the established narrative the new realigned politics should pit socially conservative economic nationalists against cosmopolitan socially liberal centrists (and leftists). And for libertarians/classical liberals the argument by many has been that the best position for the libertarian/classical liberal right is towards the cosmopolitan liberal end of the spectrum due to alleged shared norms for open societies. However, I actually disagree with this interpretation as whilst it’s a good theory it does not fit the reality of what has happened or indeed is happening in western politics.

The cosmopolitan liberal tribe could be about a commitment to open societies and broad liberal values but the reality has been and I would argue continue to be (because of the need to include radical leftists in this divide) a commitment to egalitarianism and the social democratic (left liberal) norms of political conduct which are poorly designed for our very online, wealthy multiracial Western nations.

These norms have led to the toleration of state corruption and inefficiency “how dare you criticise the teachers”, “how dare you criticise the NHS”, “how are you criticise the EU/Federal government” and the promotion of cancellation against those who go against the established narrative on issues such as the speed/scope/direction of Net Zero, stand up for women’s rights against the trans ideology or who critique the current model of immigration/integration.

The cosmopolitan liberals are on a hiding to nothing with all of these issues. And why? Because they as a political wing represent the status quo, and what we are seeing now is the beginning of the end for the dominant post 1945 social democratic settlement. 2020-21 I would argue, with the twin pillars of massive state control through the excuse of COVID and the cultural dominance of the BLM/Woke movement,  was Western social democracy at its apex and the longer that model to hold the more it will corrode and wither into either a Robespierre-esque focus on equity, or else a degeneration into deep green anti growth nihilism, either of which will kill it as a force anyway. This is why Emmanuel Macron now seems out of his depth, why Trudeau keeps failing, and why the European Union continues to stagnate – they are the status quo establishment and they’ve run out of ideas.

So what then do I think will take its place. Well inevitably one wing of politics seeks to preserve the status quo and one wing seeks to overturn it and looking at the ideas floating around the populist/rightist/nationalist camp we can already see trends emerging. Now I will caveat that it will take a while for these to develop as intellectually there is no fertile “home” for this wing (being excluded from academia and more generally all sympathetic intellectual figures being shunned/condemned/cancelled but substack seems to be developing into a way “rightist” intellectuals can work and be paid to be intellectuals. And those intellectuals will not be drinking from a barren pool and when we look at the expected intellectual influencers it gets hard for classical liberals/libertarians to pretend they have no sympathy with this movement.

Now in a previous comment you’ve stated you think that religious intellectual figures will be at the core of intellectual developments going forward but what I see is that the core figures will actually be 5 irreligious figures namely; Roger Scruton, Elinor Ostrom, Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell and Lee Kuan Yew. Together these five offer a philosophical basis, an economic analysis and a political roadmap from which western rightist parties can seek direction. I struggle to think of 5 other intellectuals who could have more relevant ideas for the current moment. If I could term the ideology brewed from this pool of thought I would not call it populism or even national conservatism but State Capacity Localism (wink), or as a slogan, Politics for improving the oikos.

And looking at the current trends and discussions already happening within politics you can clearly see the influence of the 5 in the way the discussions on the right are beginning to articulate possible policies;

  • Improving state capacity through slewing the deadwood of the bureaucratic state with a burn it down/drain the swamp mentality.

  • Nationalisation offset by deregulation – probably a better compromise than what we have today.

  • Local/community decision making on contentious topics with a focus on finding solutions over the current model of finding problems (forced by national government with the threat of national decision if a local solution is not found)

  • The binning of multiculturalism as an idea and assimilation as the core of all arguments on immigration and racial/cultural integration. Combine this with increasing discussions on what countries have achieved high trust multiracial societies (spoiler – Singapore) I expect we will see a reflowering of support for secularism, the absolute necessity of learning the national language for access to employment and state services, and a zero tolerance for ethnic or religious based politics.

  • Tough law and order policies focused on objective outcomes over cultural contexts. President Bukele (and Gavin Newsom when Xi came to visit) prove it can work.

  • The return of aesthetics as a mode of political analysis – beautiful houses and pleasant neighbourhoods and with that an attempt to improve everywhere in a country, most especially rust belts/flyover country.

  • The introduction of land value taxes – which as an idea is literally the opposite of a transnational globalist politics in how it encourages rootedness by design.

  • A focus on high standards, individual responsibility and the veneration and promotion of outstanding individuals regardless of wider factors. Alongside which there will be a focus on repealing “hate” speech laws and the enshrining of free speech, a la first amendment, into multiple countries statutes.

  • Finally I also expect as a response to overkill from the woke movement we will see (over time) the  return of shame as a cultural norm.

And finally coming specifically to the core of social democracy – the bureaucratic welfare state we know the current model is unsustainable and yet the cosmopolitan liberals at best tinker or at worst do nothing to it – because their leftist element don’t want change just higher salaries. And we know as a certainty it will need to change but what are the practical solutions I think each welfare state could go one of two ways; a) to one based on mutual aid (maybe seeing the return of friendly societies?) and community ownership, or b) a new great bargain of a Hayekian welfare state as originally thought up by Sam Bowman back in 2015. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/philosophy/lets-have-a-hayekian-welfare-state/. Neither of this fits neatly into the cosmopolitan liberal box as they require are particularist, require thinking domestically not internationally and would necessarily require a conversation about who and what  is and isn’t included in welfare coverage – a conversation about the degree to which a society is closed off from others.

And just thinking about these bullet points isn’t it clear there are ample opportunities for classical liberals/libertarians to get involved with the rightist end and influence the discussion and direction of debate. What does the cosmopolitan liberal politics offer – net zero by 2045 or 2050?  DEI officers in every workplace?

A soft warm feeling because the New York Times tolerates your existence.

Looking to the future I think we as western societies face a choice, but it is not between Heaven or Hell (as the corporate press on both sides would have it) or as some classical liberals/libertarians would see it as between a sort of hipster Reaganism and a reactionary Corbynism. I think the choice western societies face is between becoming new Argentinas or new Singapores (and as of last December Argentina have chosen Singapore) and this is why so many (such as yourself Tyler) find themselves on a different political side than they expected. The establishment has failed across the West; it’s just that we keep forgetting the establishment is the cosmopolitan left.”

Mark Skousen on free trade (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Why do so many economic historians ignore the benefits of the largest free-trade zone in history:  inside the US!  Thanks to the “dormant” commerce clause of the US Constitution, the US has achieved rapid growth, despite the tariffs.  I write about it here:  This Little-Known Section of the Constitution Made America the World’s #1 SuperPower – Mark Skousen

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Why has ornament in architecture declined?

2. Patrick McKenzie on the Crowdstrike  failure.

3. David Brooks on AI (NYT).

4. I’ve already linked to this podcast with Julia La Roche, recorded before Biden left office.  In it I predicted Kamala Harris will be the next POTUS.

5. The physics of the emergence of life and assembly theory (NYT),

6. Information aggregation under (not so) naive learning.

7. A rare, funny econ + Olympics joke.

8. ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, seven good examples.  I very much like it.

9. All good news on the U.S. productivity front, up 2.7 percent for the year (NYT).