Results for “age of em” 17250 found
Do recessions benefit our health?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The human and economic costs of recessions are deep and well-documented. They can also have real health benefits, however, and seldom are they expressed so starkly as in this sentence in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research: “The Great Recession provided one in twenty-five 55-year-olds with an extra year of life.”
…Overall, the paper notes, age-adjusted mortality in the US fell by 2.3% during the Great Recession. The finding, from professors at MIT, the University of Chicago and McMasters University, broadly tracks previous research showing that that mortality rates rise in good times and fall in hard times.
And:
One answer is related to air pollution, which is lower in recessions, typically because of reduced economic activity. The benefits of lower pollution levels persist long after the recession — at least 10 years, according to the researchers’ estimates. Air pollution reduction accounts for more than one-third of the mortality benefits from the Great Recession.
And all of this:
The data do provide some additional clues. Except for cancer, for example, all major causes of mortality fell during the Great Recession. Decreases in cardiovascular-related deaths accounted for about half the mortality gains during that time. Furthermore, the mortality benefits were concentrated among Americans without college degrees. You might think that some of these improved health outcomes were due to people losing their stressful, low-paying jobs, but unemployment can be pretty stressful too.
For a 55-year-old, according to the paper’s estimates, about one-quarter of the economic costs of the Great Recession were countered by these mortality gains. So the Great Recession was still a very bad event — just less bad than we used to think. That is especially true for less educated Americans, who were hit harder by unemployment but also reaped the mortality gains.
At the top end of the age distribution, Americans aged 65 and older didn’t lose much from the Great Recession, in part because so many were already retired or working only part-time (in some cases, they were ensconced in jobs they were not going to lose). The researchers estimate that those over age 60 were also better off, on net, from the Great Recession.
Worth a ponder. Here is the original paper by
The Erosion of Financial Privacy
Here is a bit on privacy from Eric Hughes’s Cypherpunk’s Manifesto of 1993.
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
…Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction….In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.
Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.
I am saddened and dispirited by the evolving situation. Privacy is losing. Cash has nearly vanished without being replaced by cryptographically private alternatives. Instead, we rely on credit cards, debit cards, Venmo, PayPal, and other systems that log every transaction in vast databases.
Cash gave us substantial privacy by default because there was no technological alternative but there was never a collective vote for cash or, sadly, a consensus for privacy. You might hope that people would demand to keep the privacy rights they they once had but no. The populace seems indifferent to the erosion of privacy. Instead, paranoia about criminals hijacks the narrative. “What about the sex traffickers and terrorists?!” they shout. People seem more than willing to give up their privacy in exchange for a promise of security–false though the promise may be. Thus, we get ever more draconian regulations, effectively strangling our financial freedom. The $10,000 cash rule, for example, is insane, a reflection of Nixonian paranoia and not fit for a free society.
If you deposit or withdraw cash in excess of $10,000, your bank must fill out a currency transaction report (CTR) on a Department of the Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Form 104. The person making the deposit or withdraw must provide identification to the bank, and the bank must report details of the transaction as well as the name, address, social security number, and birthdate of the person making the deposit or withdrawal. Multiple deposits made in one day must be added together and will trigger the reporting requirement if, combined, they exceed $10,000.
Bankers are also required to file suspicious transaction reports (STRs). Withdrawing or depositing amounts just under $10,000 often does not succeed in avoiding reports to the government, because STR’s have no dollar limit. A person who withdraws $8,000 three times in a week may trigger the filing of an STR, and that person will not be notified that the STR was filed. Banks are also directed to perform account audits to look for suspicious activity. If the banking activity is not consistent with the “customer’s profile,” banks are directed to file a suspicious activity report (SAR).
Reporting requirements are not limited to banks. Business are also required to report cash transactions over $10,000. Any business (including a sole proprietorship) that receives more than $10,000 in cash in a single transaction or in related transactions must file an IRS Form 8300. If a business or individual fails to file a Form 8300 when required, the business or individual can be fined. The penalty for intentionally disregarding the filing requirement is the greater of $25,000 or the amount of cash received in the transaction not to exceed $100,000.
Currency transaction reports and suspicious transaction reports, do they not sound like something the Stasi would demand in communist East Germany? A free people would throw off this outrageous transgression. But could we get rid of such rules today? Could we even index the rules to inflation? $10,000 in 1970, when the Bank Secrecy Act was passed, is about $80,000 today.
Privacy suffers from a collective action dilemma: individually it isn’t worth much and so we don’t defend it, but lack of privacy is immensely costly when lost en masse. Moreover, our data, en masse, is worth a lot to corporations and governments. Thus privacy has few defenders and strong attackers.
We are on technology path that by default leads to less and less financial privacy. Another path exists, a path on which technology safeguards our financial privacy, but that path must be chosen and time is running short.
Scientific Talent Leaks Out of Funding Gaps
Lack of speed kills:
We study how delays in NIH grant funding affect the career outcomes of research personnel. Using comprehensive earnings and tax records linked to university transaction data along with a difference-in-differences design, we find that a funding interruption of more than 30 days has a substantial effect on job placements for personnel who work in labs with a single NIH R01 research grant, including a 3 percentage point (40%) increase in the probability of not working in the US. Incorporating information from the full 2020 Decennial Census and data on publications, we find that about half of those induced into nonemployment appear to permanently leave the US and are 90% less likely to publish in a given year, with even larger impacts for trainees (postdocs and graduate students). Among personnel who continue to work in the US, we find that interrupted personnel earn 20% less than their continuously-funded peers, with the largest declines concentrated among trainees and other non-faculty personnel (such as staff and undergraduates). Overall, funding delays account for about 5% of US nonemployment in our data, indicating that they have a meaningful effect on the scientific labor force at the national level.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Wei Yang Tham, Joseph Staudt, Elisabeth Ruth Perlman, and Stephanie D. Cheng. Here is my earlier piece, with Collison and Hsu, and what we learned doing Fast Grants.
Trump’s threat to let Putin invade NATO countries
I don’t usually blog on “candidate topics,”or “Trump topics,” but a friend of mine asked me to cover this. As you probably know, Trump threatened to let NATO countries that failed to meet the two percent of gdp defense budget obligation fend for themselves against Putin (video here, with Canadian commentary). Trump even said he would encourage the attacker.
Long-time MR readers will know I am not fond of Trump, either as a president or otherwise. (And I am very fond of NATO.) But on this issue I think he is basically correct. Yes, I know all about backlash effects. But so many NATO members do not keep up serious defense capabilities. And for decades none of our jawboning has worked.
Personally, I would not have proceeded or spoken as Trump did, and I do not address the collective action problems in my own sphere of work and life in a comparable manner (“if you’re not ready with enough publications for tenure, we’ll let Bukele take you!” or “Spinoza, if you don’t stop scratching the couch, I won’t protect you against the coyotes!”). So if you wish to take that as a condemnation of Trump, so be it. Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel there is some room for an “unreasonable” approach on this issue, whether or not I am the one to carry that ball.
Even spending two percent of gdp would not get many NATO allies close to what they need to do (and yes I do understand the difference between defense spending and payments to NATO, in any case many other countries are falling down on the job). I strongly suspect that many of those nations just don’t have effective fighting forces at all, and in essence they are standing at zero percent of gdp, even if their nominal expenditures say hit 1.7 percent. Remember the report that the German Army trained with broomsticks because they didn’t have enough machine guns? How many of those forces are actually ready to fire and fight in a combat situation? It is far from obvious that the Ukraine war — a remarkably grave and destructive event — has fixed that situation.
The nations that see no need to have workable martial capabilities at all are a real threat to NATO, and yes this includes Canada, which shares a very large de facto Arctic border with Putin, full of valuable natural resources. Even a United States led by Nikki Haley cannot do all the heavy lifting here. What if the U.S. is tied down in Asia and/or the Middle East when further trouble strikes? That no longer seems like such a distant possibility. And should Western Europe, over time, really become “foreign policy irrelevant,” relative to the more easternmost parts of NATO? That too is not good for anybody.
With or without Trump’s remarks, we are likely on a path of nuclear proliferation, starting in Poland.
People talk about threats to democracy in Poland, and I am not happy they have restricted the power of their judiciary. But consider Germany. The country has given up its energy independence, it may lose a significant portion of its manufacturing base, its earlier economic strategy was to cast its lot with Russia and China, AfD is the #2 party there and growing, and the former east is politically polarized and illiberal, among other problems. Most of all, the country has lost its will to defend itself. That is in spite of a well-educated population and a deliberative political systems that in the more distant past worked well. You can criticize Trump’s stupid provocations all you want, but unless you have a better idea for waking Germany (and other countries) up, you are probably just engaging in your own mood affiliation. On this issue, “argument by adjective” ain’t gonna’ cut it.
The best scenario is that Trump raises these issues, everyone in Canada and Western Europe screams, they clutch their pearls and are horrified for months, but over time the topic becomes more focal and more ensconced in their consciousness. Eventually more Democrats may pick up the Trump talking points, as they have done with China. Perhaps three to five years from now that can lead to some positive action. And if they are calling his words “appalling and unhinged,” as indeed they are, well that is going to drive more page views.
The odds may be against policy improvement in any case, but by this point it seems pretty clear standard diplomacy isn’t going to work. I am just not that opposed to a “Hail Mary, why not speak some truth here?” approach to the problem. Again, I wouldn’t do it, but at the margin it deserves more support than it is getting. Of course it is hard for the MSM American intelligentsia to show any sympathy for Trump’s remarks, because his words carry the implication that spending more on social welfare has an unacceptably high opportunity cost. So you just won’t find much objective debate of the issues at stake.
If you’re worried about Trump encouraging Putin, that is a real concern but the nations on the eastern flank of NATO are all above two percent, Bulgaria excepted. Maybe this raises the chance that Putin is emboldened to blow up some Western European infrastructure? Make a move against Canada in the Arctic? I still could see that risk as panning out into greater preparedness, greater deterrence, and a better outcome overall. Western Europe of course has a gdp far greater than that of Putin’s Russia. they just don’t have the right values, in addition to not spending enough on defense.
So on this one Trump is indeed the Shakespearean truth-teller, and (I hope) for the better.
Lithium
WEF 2002: The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”.
Reuters 2023: Lithium producers are growing anxious that delays in mine permitting, staffing shortages and inflation may hinder their ability to supply enough of the battery metal to meet the world’s aggressive electrification timelines.
GEP 2023: Lithium faces supply shortages due to past underinvestment amid surging electric vehicle demand.
This list could easily be extended. In contrast here from Nat Bullard’s presentation is data on battery prices per kilowatt-hour. Note that almost all of the above is very short-term extrapolation from the price increase in 2022. As Tyler says, do not underrate the elasticity of supply.
But I haven’t yet given you my favorite headline on this topic, an all-time classic:
Lithium Price Crash Could Trigger Shortages From 2025
Be long energy infrastructure, find the truly scarce input there
Governments around the world are intensifying scrutiny on the building of data centres over fears that their huge energy usage is putting excessive pressure on national climate targets and electricity grids.
Ireland, Germany, Singapore and China as well as a US county and Amsterdam in the Netherlands have introduced restrictions on new data centres in recent years to comply with more stringent environmental requirements.
The threat to new projects is highest in Ireland, a hotspot for server farms built by cloud computing companies such as Google and Microsoft, because of its low tax rate and easy access to high-capacity subsea cables through which global internet traffic is run.
A decision by the country’s energy and water regulator in 2021 to limit new data connections to the electricity grid is now having a “material impact at the ground level”, said Hiral Patel, head of sustainable and thematic research at Barclays and lead author of a report on data centres.
Data centre operators Vantage, EdgeConneX and Equinix had permits for new projects in Dublin rejected by local authorities last year. Ireland’s data centres are set to account for 32 per cent of national electricity demand in 2026, the International Energy Agency forecast last month.
The environmental impact of data centres — huge facilities that hold the servers that create the online storage for the data of millions — has become a growing issue around the world.
Loudoun County in the US state of Virginia, and Germany have recently introduced curbs that include limiting permits for data centres in residential areas, or requiring them to contribute renewable energy to the grid and reuse waste heat.
Here is more from Kenza Bryan at the FT.
Why I don’t like Fischer Random 960
As you may know, a major tournament is going on right now, based on a variant of Fischer Random rules, sometimes misleadingly called “Freestyle.” Subject to some constraints, the pieces are placed into the starting position randomly, so in Fischer Random chess opening preparation is useless. You have to start thinking from move one. This is a big advantage in a game where often the entire contest is absorbed into 20-30 moves of advance opening preparation, with little or no real sporting element appearing over the board.
Yet I don’t like Fischer Random, for a few hard to fix reasons:
1. Most of the time, at least prior to the endgame, I don’t understand what is going on. Even with computer assistance. I could put in five to ten minutes to study the position, and get a sense of the constraints, but as a spectator I don’t want to do that. As a relatively high opportunity cost person, I am not going to do that.
1b. Classical chess sometimes generates positions where one does not really understand what is going on. Then it is thrilling, precisely because it is occasional. A perpetual “fog of war,” as we receive in Fischer Random, just isn’t that thrilling. In the opening, for instance, I don’t even know if one player is attempting “a risky strategy.” I am not sure the player knows either. And I don’t feel that watching more Fischer Random would change that, as there are hundreds of different possible opening positions, mostly with different properties.
2. The younger players have a notable advantage, because they are better at calculating concrete variations and rely less on intuition. (We already see this in the current results.) Experience is simply worth much less in this very novel format. For any one tournament, that is an interesting intrigue. But over time it is a bore, as if only rookies and sophomores could win NBA titles. In fact what spectators enjoy watching is Steph Curry going up against Lebron James, or the analogs in chess. We want to see Magnus meet Fabiano again, not watch two eighteen-year-olds slug it out. Sorry, Pragga! You’ll have your day in the sun.
3. Fischer Random cuts off chess from the rest of its history. That is otherwise a big advantage of chess over many other games and contests. I like seeing that a player’s move is connected to say an idea from Tal in the early 1960s, or whatever. I like “Oh, the Giuoco Piano is making a comeback at top levels,” or “today’s players are more willing to sacrifice the exchange than in the 1970s,” and so on.
4. I get frustrated seeing all those Kings sitting on F1, not able to castle in the traditional sense. There are rules for castling in Fischer Random, but it feels more like pressing the “hyperspace” button in the old Space Invaders video game than anything else. Who wants to see a Knight on C1 for twenty-five moves? Not I.
5. I agree that current opening prep is insanely out of control. I am fine with the remedy of 25-minutes per player Rapid games, or anything in that range, with increment of course. Those contests are consistently exciting and they are not forced draws (you can play something weird against the Petroff, or to begin with) nor are they dominated by prep.
6. If you don’t want to watch Rapid, I would rather randomize the first few opening moves than the placement of the pieces. If you don’t control the first three (seven? ten?) first moves, once again opening prep becomes much tougher. So what if some games start with 1. b4 b6? The resulting position is still playable for both sides and furthermore it still makes intuitive sense to chess spectators. Of course the computers would restrict this randomization to sequences that still are playable for both sides. The very exact nature of current chess opening prep in fact implies you need only a very small change in the rules to disrupt it, not the kind of huge change represented by Fischer Random.
That all said, I am all for experimentation, it’s just that some of them should be strangled in the crib.
Sunday assorted links and stuff
1. Lookism in sentencing decisions.
2. An autonomous vehicle was set on fire by a crowd in San Francisco. In some alternate universe, a small drone would emerge from the burning vehicle and strike them all down.
3. Have you noticed that Michelle Obama was, less than 24 hours ago, up to #3 in the betting markets for likelihood of being the next U.S. President? She was at about 7%. Now it is Gavin Newsom who is #3 at about ten percent. At the same time, the NYT Editorial page, other MSM sources, and Hillary Clinton all seem to be turning on Biden, on the issue of age of course. I would not place too much emphasis on that seven percent number, or that ten percent number, as I suspect there is private information at work here — either private information that Biden is toast, or private information that he isn’t toast. The problem is I don’t know which. Still, this is a live issue.
It is also a good test of public intellectuals. Obviously, the issue is not just about Biden’s current competency (which I cannot judge — articulateness is overrated!), but also a) how the public perceives him, b) how his staff and other countries perceive him, and c) how matters will be four to five years from now, when he is still President, if he is still President. (Start by reading Shakespeare on political leadership.) If you’re defending Biden, for reasons related to your expected value calculations, I hope at least you are being honest with yourself about your Straussianism here. But please do add to your calculations the notion that the American public is pretty fed up with this kind of response from our mainstream political institutions.
One possible lesson here is that our political establishment really cannot coordinate on making needed changes. The other possible lesson is that they can. I am prepared for Bayesian updates, as my status quo assessments by necessity will be disturbed.
4. Susie Essman is a comic genius (NYT).
5. A three-minute clip on how various top chess players walk into a tournament entrance. Can you guess who shows up last?
What should I ask Michael Nielsen?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. No description of Michael quite does him justice, but here is Wikipedia:
Michael Aaron Nielsen (born January 4, 1974) is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco.
In 1998, Nielsen received his PhD in physics from the University of New Mexico. In 2004, he was recognized as Australia’s “youngest academic” and was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland. During this fellowship, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Alongside Isaac Chuang, Nielsen co-authored a popular textbook on quantum computing, which has been cited more than 52,000 times as of July 2023.
In 2007, Nielsen shifted his focus from quantum information and computation to “the development of new tools for scientific collaboration and publication”, including the Polymath project with Timothy Gowers, which aims to facilitate “massively collaborative mathematics.” Besides writing books and essays, he has also given talks about open science. He was a member of the Working Group on Open Data in Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Nielsen is a strong advocate for open science and has written extensively on the subject, including in his book Reinventing Discovery, which was favorably reviewed in Nature and named one of the Financial Times’ best books of 2011.
In 2015 Nielsen published the online textbook Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and joined the Recurse Center as a Research Fellow. He has also been a Research Fellow at Y Combinator Research since 2017.
In 2019, Nielsen collaborated with Andy Matuschak to develop Quantum Computing for the Very Curious, a series of interactive essays explaining quantum computing and quantum mechanics. With Patrick Collison, he researched whether scientific progress is slowing down.
Here is Michael’s Notebook, well worth a browse and also a deeper read. Here is Michael on Twitter. So what should I ask him? (I’m going to ask him about Olaf Stapledon in any case, so no need to mention that.)
Sticky norms
Shanhong Luo, a professor at Fayetteville State University, studies the factors behind attraction between romantic partners, including the norms that govern relationships. In a paper published in 2023 in Psychological Reports, a peer-reviewed journal, Dr. Luo and a team of researchers surveyed 552 heterosexual college students in Wilmington, N.C., and asked them whether they expected men or women to pay for dates — and whether they, as a man or a woman, typically paid more.
The researchers found that young men paid for all or most of the dates around 90 percent of the time, while women paid only about 2 percent (they split around 8 percent of the time). On subsequent dates, splitting the check was more common, though men still paid a majority of the time while women rarely did. Nearly 80 percent of men expected that they would pay on the first date, while just over half of women (55 percent) expected men to pay.
Surprisingly, views on gender norms didn’t make much of a difference: On average, both men and women in the sample expected the man to pay, whether they had more traditional views of gender roles or more progressive ones.
Here is more from the NYT.
Is El Salvador special?
But Bukele copycats and those who believe his model can be replicated far and wide overlook a key point: The conditions that allowed him to wipe out El Salvador’s gangs are unlikely to jointly appear elsewhere in Latin America.
El Salvador’s gangs were unique, and far from the most formidable criminal organizations in the entire region. For decades, a handful of gangs fought one another for control of territory and became socially and politically powerful. But, unlike cartels in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, El Salvador’s gangs weren’t big players in the global drug trade and focused more on extortion. Compared to these other groups, they were poorly financed and not as heavily armed.
Mr. Bukele started to deactivate the gangs by negotiating with their leaders, according to Salvadoran investigative journalists and a criminal investigation led by a former attorney general. (The government denies this.) When Mr. Bukele then arrested their foot soldiers in large sweeps that landed many innocent people in prison, the gangs collapsed.
It would not be such a simple story elsewhere in Latin America, where criminal organizations are wealthier, more internationally connected and much better armed than El Salvador’s gangs once were. When other governments in the region have tried to take down gang and cartel leaders, these groups haven’t simply crumbled. They have fought back, or new criminal groups have quickly filled the void, drawn by the drug trade’s huge profits. Pablo Escobar’s war on the state in 1980s-90s Colombia, the backlash by cartels to Mexican law enforcement activity since the mid-2000s, and the violent response to Ecuador’s government’s recent moves against gangs are just a few examples.
El Salvador also had more formidable and professional security forces, committed to crushing the gangs when Mr. Bukele called on them, than some of its neighbors. Take Honduras, where gang-sponsored corruption among security forces apparently runs deep. That helped doom Ms. Castro’s attempts to emulate Mr. Bukele from the start. In other countries, like Mexico, criminal groups have also reportedly managed to co-opt high-ranking members of the military and police. In Venezuela, it has been reported that military officials have run their own drug trafficking operation. Even if presidents send soldiers and police to do Bukele-style mass roundups, security forces may not be prepared, or may have incentives to undermine the task at hand.
Here is more from Will Freeman and (NYT), interesting throughout.
My notes/outline on the rise of Scottish economic thought
1650s, wars with England, invasions, Cromwell repels the Scots
1690s – Darien Scheme in Panama, Scots more generally grow interested in empire
1707 – Union with England
Scotland keeps its Presbyterian church and laws
Scotland never settled by Rome, for a long time closer to France
Post Glorious Revolution, many Scots still loyal to the Stuart monarchy, recurring theme
Jacobites – loyal to James, who was expelled by the Glorious Revolution
Glasgow – tobacco and sugar trade
Edinburgh – Intellectual, educational, and administrative center
Overall good educational system at multiple levels
Frances Hutcheson – born in Ireland to Scots family, key works in the 1720s, beauty, approbation, ethics, 1729 starts professorship in Glasgow
1739-40 – David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature
1745 – Major Jacobite uprising
Post-1745: The Highlanders and the clan system starts its true decline
Linen, cotton, wool, jute industries
Good schools, good universities, competitive, English-language, no class system
1748 – David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
1750s – David Hume’s essays on economics
1755 – 1.3 million people in Scotland
1759 – Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
1762 – Ossian [James Macpherson], beginnings of Scottish romanticism
1767 — Adam Ferguson – Essay on Civil Society, progress, commercial society, militarism
1776 – David Hume dies
1776 – Wealth of Nations
The sciences: the physician and chemist William Cullen, the agriculturalist James Anderson, chemist and physician Joseph Black, natural historian John Walker, and James Hutton, the first modern geologist.
Late 18th century – onset of Scot inventors/tinkerers, most of all James Watt and the steam engine
Thursday assorted links
2. How to model the Putin interview.
3. What really happened with the Hugo Awards?
4. In this one study, wage subsidies have a pass-through rate of about 28%.
5. When it comes to Ontario, the world is waking up.
6. Bard is now Gemini. And a quick overview here. And here is Zvi on Gemini. And Ethan Mollick.
My Conversation with the excellent Ami Vitale
Here is the audio, visual, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Ami Vitale is a renowned National Geographic photographer and documentarian with a deep commitment to wildlife conservation and environmental education. Her work, spanning over a hundred countries, includes spending a decade as a conflict photographer in places like Kosovo, Gaza, and Kashmir.
She joined Tyler to discuss why we should stay scary to pandas, whether we should bring back extinct species, the success of Kenyan wildlife management, the mental cost of a decade photographing war, what she thinks of the transition from film to digital, the ethical issues raised by Afghan Girl, the future of National Geographic, the heuristic guiding of where she’ll travel next, what she looks for in a young photographer, her next project, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As you probably know, there’s a long-standing and recurring set of debates between animal welfare advocates and environmentalists. The animal welfare advocates typically have less sympathy for the predators because they, in turn, kill other animals. The environmentalists are more likely to think we should, in some way, leave nature alone as much as possible. Where do you stand on that debate?
VITALE: It depends. It’s hard to make a general sweeping statement on this because in some cases, I think that we do have to get involved. Also, the fact is, it’s humans in most cases who have really impacted the environment, and we do need to get engaged and work to restore that balance. I really fall on both sides of this. I will say, I do think that is, in some cases, what differentiates us because, as human beings, we have to kill to survive. Maybe that is where this — I feel like every story I work on has a different answer. Really, I don’t know. It depends what the situation is. Should we bring animals back to landscapes where they have not existed for millions of years? I fall in the line of no. Maybe I’m taking this in a totally different direction, but it’s really complicated, and there’s not one easy answer.
And:
COWEN: As you know, there are now social networks everywhere, for quite a while. Images everywhere, even before Midjourney. There are so many images that people are looking at. How does that change how you compose or think about photos?
VITALE: Well, it doesn’t at all. My job is to tell stories with images, and not just with images. My job as a storyteller — that has not changed. Nothing has changed in the sense of, we need more great storytellers, visual storytellers. With all of those social media, I think people are bored with just beautiful images. Or sometimes it feels like advertising, and it doesn’t captivate me.
I look for a story and image, and I am just going to continue doing what I do because I think people are hungry for it. They want to know who is really going deep on stories and who they can trust. I think that that has never gone away, and it will never go away.
I am very happy to have guests who do things that not everyone else’s guests do.
Might a Georgist land tax help revive Detroit?
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column. Maybe they should try it for federalism/discovery purposes, but overall I am skeptical. Here is one excerpt:
The history of “enterprise zones,” which are specially designated areas (usually urban) with lower taxes and fewer regulations, offers a cautionary tale. Enterprise zones have at best mixed results in revitalizing declining areas. Could fiddling with the marginal incentives embedded in the property tax code really make that much more of a difference? Most economic decisions are made on the basis of broad criteria such as labor force quality, nearby markets and the ease of doing business.
By itself, the uneven record of enterprise zones is no reason not to experiment with land value taxation. But it does limit the upside from any change.
A possible downside from land value taxation is that it discourages land speculation. Land speculators do not, I concede, have the best reputation — but speculation can be either a positive or negative, depending on whether entrepreneurs have good foresight. On the plus side, speculation can keep land from being developed prematurely, or from being locked into uses that later turn out to be too low in value.
If dormant land in Detroit is taxed at a higher rate, that might encourage property owners to develop low-quality housing or retail to lower their tax burden. A landowner might build a small house, for example, rather than holding out for a large, higher-quality apartment complex. The city might get modest growth, but lose out on the chance for a bigger economic redevelopment. Detroit has in recent times shown signs of a revival, so perhaps waiting for the right opportunity is sometimes best.
Of course, speculators can also make mistakes, for example by failing to develop their property more quickly. Still, whether the tax authorities have the foresight and flexibility to do better than property speculators is an open question. In the meantime, some speculators may abandon their holdings to avoid the tax, putting more property in the hands of the municipal government — hardly an ideal outcome.
Note also that the proposal is revenue neutral by design (taxes on developments are supposed to go down), but over time it might simply evolve into a flat-out tax increase.