Results for “water” 831 found
What I’ve been reading
1. John Elliott Cairnes, The Slave Power, from 1862. Cairnes remains greatly underrated as an economist. But The Slave Power is most remarkable for seeing that slavery was a system that pervaded (and corrupted) all aspects of the economy and society of the South. An excellent early integration of economic reasoning and sociology. And to think he wrote this from Galway, not Mississippi.
2. Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer: A Biography. A revelatory book that proves Stettheimer’s reputation deserves to be upgraded to the top tier of American artists of her time. The color plates are wonderful. I hadn’t known of her inspiration coming from Ballet Russe works. For those who care, definitely recommended, deserves to make the best of the year list.
3. Stanislaw Lem, The Invincible. One of the better Lems, reminds me of a Star Trek episode, with shades of gray goo hypotheses and an East Bloc ending.
I liked Meghan O’Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness.
John Davis, Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher is mostly a social history.
There is also Penelope J. Corfield, The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain.
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy elicited this blurb from me: “How does the concept of intangible capital help explain some features of what has gone wrong in our world? How is the concept of intangible capital key to fixing what has gone wrong and improving our world? This is the go-to book for those and other critical questions for boosting economic growth.”
*Oceans of Grain*
A good book, think of it as a more general (non-technical) economic history of wheat, authored by Scott Reynolds Nelson. The sad thing is the book’s subtitle: “How American Wheat Made the World” — yes it covers America, but a lot of the book, and I would say its best parts, focus on Russia and Ukraine.
I guess the publisher figured American readers don’t care that much about Ukraine? Here is one excerpt:
Before Odessa [which had just been described as a major grain port], the Russian Empire had expanded slowly and defensively, one line of forts at a time. After Odessa, Russia — just like the United States — possessed foreign exchange and could expand dramatically. Wheat exports allowed the Russian Empire to fund its foreign wars, and so it surged into Poland, across the Caspian Sea, and toward China. Nothing seemed capable of stopping the yeasty, kvassy expansion of the Russian Empire. In fact, the spread of a different invisible creature, an invisible water mold, would further entrench Odessa as Europe’s city of wheat.
And this:
Fish sandwiches emerged as a regular meal for workers in Britain around 1870 once American grain arrived; a decade later this became fish and chips.
A fun book for me.
Fishy Results on Ocean Acidification
The replication crisis isn’t just about social psychology. A meta-analysis of the effect of ocean acidification on fish behavior shows a big decline in effect size as the studies get larger and better.
Using a systematic review and meta-analysis of 91 studies empirically testing effects of ocean acidification on fish behavior, we provide quantitative evidence that the research to date on this topic is characterized by a decline effect, where large effects in initial studies have all but disappeared in subsequent studies over a decade. The decline effect in this field cannot be explained by 3 likely biological explanations, including increasing proportions of studies examining (1) cold-water species; (2) nonolfactory-associated behaviors; and (3) nonlarval life stages. Furthermore, the vast majority of studies with large effect sizes in this field tend to be characterized by low sample sizes, yet are published in high-impact journals and have a disproportionate influence on the field in terms of citations. We contend that ocean acidification has a negligible direct impact on fish behavior, and we advocate for improved approaches to minimize the potential for a decline effect in future avenues of research. [emphasis added, AT]
Sunday assorted links
1. MIE: “For $995, Love Cloud will fly you and a partner in a private airplane for 45 minutes so that you can have sex.” (NYT)
3. Is the hotel minibar disappearing?
4. Nasal vaccines (NYT).
5. Tim Harford’s ten best books for thinking about numbers and statistics.
6. The debate at the time as to whether Ukraine should have given up nuclear weapons (NYT).
7. MIE: First Norwegian salmon vending machine.
8. Claims about Ottawa, also reflecting “context is that which is scarce.”
Gulf of Guinea fact of the day
Worryingly, the security threats in west Africa now include piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. In 2020, all but one of the world’s 28 kidnappings recorded at sea occurred in these waters. Similarly, in 2018, all six hijackings at sea, and 13 of the 18 incidents of ships fired upon occurred in the Gulf of Guinea. Of the 141 hostages held at sea that year, 130 were captured by pirates here.
Here is the full FT story.
How to start art collecting
The answer here depends so much on how much money and how much time and how much interest you have that I can’t give you a simple formula. Nonetheless here are a few basic observations that might prove useful at varying levels of interest:
1. At some you should just start buying some stuff. You’re going to make some mistakes at first, treat that as part of your learning curve and as part of the price of the broader endeavor.
2. Don’t ever think you can make money buying and selling art. The bid-ask spread is a bitch, and finding the right buyers is a complex and time-consuming matching problem.
3. Art is strongly tiered in a hierarchical fashion. That means most fields are incredible bargains, at least relative to the trendy fields. A lot of HNW buyers are looking for large, striking contemporary works they can hang over their sofas in their second homes in Miami Beach or Los Angeles or Aspen. Good for them, as many of those works are splendid. Nonetheless that opens up opportunities for you. I find the price/beauty gradient ratio can be especially favorable for textiles, ethnographic works, Old Master drawings (and sometimes paintings), paintings from smaller or obscure countries, various collectibles, and many other areas.
4. As for the price/beauty gradient, prints, lithographs, and watercolors usually are much cheaper than original paintings. And they are not necessarily of lower quality. Figure out early on which are the artists whose prints can be as good or better than many of their original works (Lozowick, Picasso, and Johns would be a few nominees) and learn lots about those areas. A Goncharova painting can costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, but one of her Ballet Russe designs — an original done by the same hand — can go for thousands.
4b. The “mainstream art market” still discriminates in favor of “original” works, but it already has started laying this convention aside for photographs, and I wonder if further erosion along these lines is not on the way. The “internet generation” is getting wealthier all the time, and do they all hate reproducibility so much?
5. Pick a small number of areas and specialize in them. Learn everything you can about them. Everything. Follow auction results. Read about their history. Read biographies of their creators. Go visit exhibitions. And so on. It is also a great way to learn about the world more generally.
6. If you are an outsider, you can’t just walk up to a gallery and buy the best stuff at a market clearing price. You have to invest in your relationships there. Or consider buying at auction. Whatever your choice, be aware of the logic and why things work that way. Selling practices are also an exercise in reputation management of the artist and of the gallery, and maybe they think you are not up to snuff as a buyer!
7. Visit other people’s art collections as much as you can. You will learn a great deal this way, and learn to spot new forms of foolishness that you had never before imagined.
8. Don’t treat art collecting as like shopping, or as motivated by the same impulses. If you do, you will accumulate a lot of junk very quickly. Thinking of it more as building out a long term narrative of what an artistic field, and a culture, is all about. Fine if you don’t want to do that! It is a demanding exercise, and if you wish to escalate your collecting to higher levels, you need to ask yourself if you are really up for that. Does it sound like something you would be good at?
9. Fakes are rampant in so many parts of the art world, but they are especially likely if the artist is “popular” (e.g., Chagall, Dali) or if the style is easily copied ex post (Malevich). In contrast, if you buy a piece of complex stained glass, it is probably the real thing. The major auction houses are usually reasonably good at rooting out fakes, but there is no institution you can trust 100 percent. And sometimes, as with the recently auction Botticelli and da Vinci paintings, no one really knows for sure (Botticelli pro and con; in any case I don’t like the work, certainly not for $45 million).
10. Don’t buy art on the basis of the artist’s name. This is a good way to end up with a lot of crap and, for that matter, fakes. Just about every famous artist has a fair number of mediocre works, overpriced at that. (That said, if you really just want to “collect names,” you will find it is remarkable on a limited income just how many top names you can wrack up.)
11. Few of the important art collections were built by just throwing tons of money at the task. That is a recipe for being ripped off, and it attracts poor quality sellers to your orbit. You have to understand something more deeply than other people do. Obviously money helps, but you can’t rely on outbidding others as your most important ally.
12. Maybe sometime I’ll tell you the story of how I obtained an especially fine, rare work by throwing a stone at a wild dog in rural Mexico. Or how I tracked another painter down at the mental hospital.
13. Get a mentor!
There is much more I could say of relevance (e.g., how to present yourself to dealers? how to avoid winner’s curse?), but I’ll stop there for now.
My excellent Conversation with the excellent Stewart Brand
Here is the audio, transcript, and video, here is part of the CWT summary:
Tyler and Stewart discuss what drives his curiosity, including the ways in which he’s a product of the Cold War, how he became a Darwinian decentralist, the effects of pre-industrial America on his thought, the subcultural convergences between hippies and younger American Indians, why he doesn’t think humans will be going to the stars, his two-minded approach to unexplained phenomena, how L.L. Bean inspired the Whole Earth Catalog, why Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don’t seem interested in the visual arts, why L.A. could not have been the home of hippie culture and digital innovation, what libertarians don’t understand about government, why we should bring back woolly mammoths, why he’s now focused on maintenance and institutions, and more.
COWEN: As you know, San Francisco was a relatively small city. Why did it, and not Los Angeles, become the center of hippie culture?
BRAND: That’s a fair question. Los Angeles never had 49ers. Los Angeles never burned to the ground. San Francisco — the phoenix city, they still say sometimes — has waves of boom and bust. It’s not particularly infrastructural. Los Angeles is completely based on oil and then water infrastructure and major shipping, even more than the Bay Area.
There’s a frivolousness that the Bay Area is good at. It has two universities of significance, with Stanford and Cal. So does LA, but LA does not feel like a college intellectual world, whereas San Francisco somewhat does. Silicon Valley really is an outgrowth of the industrial park at Stanford [laughs] that was invented by one guy. Then those things, as you know, take off economically. They feed themselves, and then they become their own storm system.
There’re a lot of people like me from the Midwest who come to places like California, and one of the things I saw — because I spent time on the East Coast in prep school, and then in New Jersey as a military officer, and then a lot in New York as an artist — the sense I got is that people go to New York and LA to be successful. If you can make it in the Big Apple, you can make it anywhere — that sort of thing. Nobody says that about San Francisco. They never have, and I bet they never do.
People go to San Francisco to be happy, by and large, and then that leads to sort of a devil-may-care creativity, which is actually good for business startups of certain kinds, especially ones that have a low threshold, like anything digital or anything online. Screwing around is not only possible but encouraged, and screwing around is a way you discover new, useful things in the world, I think. I knew by the time I graduated from Stanford that I wanted to stay in the Bay Area. I went away to be in the army, and then I came right back.
Interesting throughout.
Friday assorted links
1. David Brooks on America falling apart (NYT).
2. Jonah Goldberg is right. And Megan McArdle is right.
3. Shawn Bradley’s life is tough.
4. “Likewise, authors from the same PhD program or who previously worked with the reviewer are significantly more likely to receive a positive evaluation. We also find that sharing “signals” of ability, such as publishing in “top five”, attending a high ranked PhD program, or being employed by a similarly ranked economics department significantly influences editor decisions and/or reviewer recommendations.” Link here.
5. So a virus triggers multiple sclerosis? And more here (NYT). And, not unrelated, the nature of Long Covid.
6. Links from Chris Blattman, who is blogging again.
7. Good Bridgewater/Dalio piece (FT).
What Adam Smith thought of large, shareholder-owned companies
The only trades which it seems possible for a joint stock company to carry on successfully, without an exclusive privilege, are those, of which all the operations are capable of being reduced to what is called a routine, or to such a uniformity of method as admits of little or no variation. Of this kind is, first, the banking trade; secondly, the trade of insurance from fire, and from sea risk and capture in time of war; thirdly, the trade of making and maintaining a navigable cut or canal; and, fourthly, the similar trade of bringing water for the supply of a great city.
Of course that is from Wealth of Nations. Always worried about agency problems and incentives, Smith saw them in large, capitalist firms as well.
How do geologists think?
From Dinwar, in the comments:
As for what it means to think like a geologist….it’s complicated. There definitely is a particular way of thinking unique to geologists. I’m convinced that it’s something you’re either born with or not; training just finishes what you started. Engineers and geologists think VERY differently, in nearly incompatible ways, which is fun because we work together all the time.
The main thing is, geologists think in terms of the context of deep time. We view everything from the perspective of millions of years, minimum. When a geologist looks at a stream they see the depositional zones, the erosional zones, the flood plane–and they are thinking both how the local geology affected it and how the stream will look in five million years. (As an aside, you get really strange looks when you discuss this with your eight-year-old son at a park.) And I do mean EVERYTHING. I remember drinking some loose-leaf tea once, adding the tea to the cup then the water, and realizing as the leaves settled that the high surface-area-to-volume ratio combined with cell damage from desiccation made them get water-logged very quickly, allowing for certain flood deposits to form. I’d always been curious about that.
Another thing to remember is that geologists by definition are polymaths. You can’t be a third-rate geologist unless you have a deep understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, fluid dynamics, engineering, astronomy, and a host of other fields. Geology is what you get when those fields overlap. I learned as much about brachiopod anatomy from a structural geologist as I did from any paleontologist, and my minerology class started with “Here’s the nuclear physics of stellar evolution.” We’re expected to know drilling and surveying and cartography and…well, pretty much anything that could possibly affect dirt.
Ultimately, since we are dealing with historical sciences, we are detectives. We examine clues, make hypotheses, and look for evidence to support or refute them (for a fantastic discussion of this find the paper “Strong Inference”–that’s held as an ideal for geologic thinking). Like any scientist we look for subtle things, things that have a bearing on our particular field of study. I’m convinced, for example, that the soil in one area I work in has two distinct layers: a loose, fluffy depositional layer of clay, and a more firm layer of clay derived from the limestone bedrock dissolving. This is due to subtle variations in firmness, moisture content, color, whether or not limestone pieces are in the material, etc.–stuff that most people don’t notice. It’s no special ability on my part–my mother notices things about the weave of cloth that are invisible to me, because she makes the stuff. It’s all training. But the desire to look for it? That’s personality.
Field geologists are even worse–we do all that, only in conditions that would make any sane person run screaming. We’re expected to be athletes, MacGyver, scientists, managers, and Les Stroud all rolled into one. On bad days we add combat medic to the list. Hiking on a broken leg isn’t considered an unreasonable expectation (bear in mind I’m talking about the geologists–my safety manager would be VERY cranky to hear about someone doing that!). People who do this sort of thing routinely view the world in slightly different ways from most ordinary people. Most geologists go through a course called Field Camp, which is an introduction to field work. Walk into any geology department that has this and you can tell who’s gone through the class and who hasn’t.
Does Pot Contribute to GDP?
As Tyler and I explain in our textbook, GDP is the market value of all finished goods and services produced within a country in a year. Sounds simple but there are always edge cases including whether or not illegal goods should count towards GDP. According to the definition, illegal goods should count towards GDP. But in practice they often don’t. In part because some people think that counting illegal goods would signal approval (or that not counting them signals disapproval) but also because it’s hard to count the market value of illegal goods. Do we really expect the BEA to survey drug dealers and prostitutes about the price of their goods and services?
But what happens when an illegal good is legalized? The market value of any finished legal good should definitely count towards GDP but just adding it to GDP on the day of legalization causes problems. Did the economy boom the day pot was legalized? Did the recession end that day? Did we all become wealthier? Some countries shrug and just add footnotes.
In 1987, Italy, whose citizens are famous scofflaws when it comes to reporting income and paying taxes, announced that it was adjusting GDP upward by about a fifth to reflect the underground—but not necessarily illegal—economy. Overnight, Italy became the fifth-largest economy in the world, surpassing the United Kingdom. National euphoria ensued. Italians dubbed it “il sorpasso,” the overtaking.
But when Canada legalized pot in 2018, Statistics Canada decided not just to add pot to GDP but to backdate all their previous GDP statistics to create a consistent series. The Walrus has the interesting story.
The teams had to invent codes to capture classifications for new line items. Among them: 71.0105, in the classification of instructional programs for cannabis culinary arts and cannabis-chef training, and 71.0110, for cannabis-selling skills and sales operations.
…Apart from hammering out semantic protocols, StatCan faced two central hurdles in determining how to count cannabis: How much do Canadians use? And what does it cost? But the economists at StatCan wanted to calculate those numbers not just for the final quarter of 2018, when cannabis became legal, but for every year back to 1961, which is as far back as the national accounts go, at least in their current form.
…So the cannabis team dug back through decades of surveys on drug use, addiction rates, law enforcement, and health data to figure out how much cannabis Canadians were consuming back in the day. It started small, with as little as twenty-four tonnes a year in the early 1960s. By 2015, it was close to 700 tonnes. Until the 1990s, when the US war on drugs ramped up, a lot of that came from abroad. Now, we’re a major exporter.
Still, StatCan craved more detail. So, in 2018, analysts hooked up with researchers at McGill University’s department of chemical engineering for a year-long scrutiny of wastewater in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver. (Halifax clocked in with the highest cannabis load per capita and roughly triple the usage of Vancouverites. Go figure.) That pilot project has now been suspended for lack of money, says Barber-Dueck.
The latest figures show that more than 2 million Canadians use cannabis at least once a week, and more than a third of those use it every day. But what have they been paying? Barber-Dueck says that the team ploughed into historical databases of weed prices, talked to law enforcement officers, and canvassed longtime illegal growers, mining their memories. British Columbians were especially forthcoming. “People are pretty open about it and have been for years,” Barber-Dueck says.
As the legalization date approached, the team created the crowd-sourcing app StatsCannabis, complete with a cannabis logo. “Statistics Canada needs your help collecting cannabis prices,” the app pleads, adding, “Your data is protected!”
The technique had its drawbacks, Peluso notes. Heavy users of cannabis are the most frequent participants in the surveys by default. But they’re also filling out the survey right after they’ve made a purchase. “When you survey heavy users of a psychotropic substance, the error band is always a little bit bigger. You’re picking up people whose—How shall I put it?—whose awareness might be slightly compromised.”
So does pot contribute to GDP? It does in Canada but not in the United States!
Neither Canada nor the United States include prostitution in GDP although the Netherlands does. The United States has higher GDP per capita than either the Netherlands or Canada but if we included pot and prostitution our GDP per capita would be even higher and would better reflect our true standard of living relative to these other countries!
Hat tip: Ryan Briggs on twitter who notes that as another consequence Canada’s CPI now includes pot prices, at a weight of .55%.
Why is Patagonia so underpopulated?
Patagonia has wonderful summers and tolerable winters, amazing fresh water resources, lots of green, plenty of land, and it is just…gorgeous. So why does hardly anyone live there?
Governance there is hardly perfect, but Chile and Argentina are hardly the worst governed countries on this planet.
Maybe you look at the above picture and are tempted to shriek “Not enough rice!” But for how long can that remain a binding constraint?
Saturday assorted links
Monday assorted links
1. Is China destined to become the world’s largest economy?
2. The Flynn effect, looking at individual twins.
4. Manhattan of the (late) Middle Ages?
5. Wastewater data from South Africa. Is this good news or bad news? And NYT update on vaccine efficacy.
What is the income-happiness gradient for dogs?
Gunther the German shepherd spent a recent morning playing with his tennis ball, rolling in the grass, slobbering a little and napping a lot. Later, he had a “meeting” with the real estate agents selling his Miami mansion that his handlers bought from Madonna.
And of course Gunther was wearing his very best faux diamond dog collar for the meeting — his real gold collar is back at his main home in Tuscany. As crazy as it sounds even by Florida’s standards, Gunther VI inherited his vast fortune, including the eight-bedroom waterfront home once owned by the “Material Girl” singer, from his grandfather Gunther IV. At least that’s what the handlers who manage the estate say.
The Tuscan-style villa with views of Biscayne Bay went on sale Wednesday for $31.75 million — a whopping markup from the purchase two decades ago from the pop star for $7.5 million. The home also boasts a gilded framed portrait of Gunther IV over the living room fireplace.
The dog’s lineage dates back decades to when Gunther III inherited a multimillion-dollar trust from late owner German countess Karlotta Liebenstein when she died in 1992. Since then, a group of handlers have helped maintain a jet-setting lifestyle for a succession of dogs. There are trips to the Milan and the Bahamas, where the latest Gunther recently dined out at restaurants every evening — his handlers like to make sure he’s well socialized.
A chef cooks his breakfast each morning made of the finest meat, fresh vegetables and rice. Sometimes he enjoys caviar, but there’s never any kibble in sight. He travels by private jet, works on obedience skills daily with his trainer and sleeps in a lavish round, red velvet bed overlooking the bay.
“He lives in Madonna’s former master bedroom,” said real estate agent Ruthie Assouline who nabbed the listing with her husband Ethan for the 1.2-acre (0.5 hectare) property in a row of a half-dozen waterfront homes next to a public county park and on the same street where Sylvester Stallone once lived.
“He literally sleeps overlooking the most magnificent view in an Italian custom bed in the former bedroom of the greatest pop star in the world.”
Here is the full story, via Fred Smalkin.