Results for “age of em” 16697 found
*Westworld* as Haitian Hegelian instantiation
I don’t want to give you spoilers, so I’ll put key points behind links — read them at your peril. The ending of last night’s finale reminded me of this historical episode in 1804. Bernard reminds me of this Haitian figure, this fellow too. Anthony Hopkins is an updated version of the impresario from this 1932 movie. As for the Hosts:
Haitian slaves believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free. Though suicide was common among slaves, those who took their own lives wouldn’t be allowed to return to lan guinée. Instead, they’d be condemned to skulk the Hispaniola plantations for eternity, an undead slave at once denied their own bodies and yet trapped inside them—a soulless zombie.
Zombies can change their “status” through a number of means. Don’t show them the ocean!
And that symbol everyone is always asking about and trying to discern the meaning of? That is a vevé, obviously.
And to frame the whole thing, here is Hegel on the master-slave dialectic.
Monday assorted links
1. Can a cosmology do without dark matter?
2. The forthcoming Parag Khanna book on American democracy. And 80,000 Hours, your career can make the world a better place.
3. Why doesn’t Canada innovate more?
4. Christopher Balding on the Taiwan phone call.
5. Carlos Lozada’s book picks.
6. The argument that the Italian bank situation is manageable. Brad Setser adds on Twitter: “Challenge for Italy never size of recap. It has been managing politics of retail bail-in required alongside recap by state aid rules/ BRRD”
Why you should worry less about the weather, especially when you travel
Here I am referring to your personal plans, not to climate change. The weather can make your current circumstances seem more difficult or less pleasant. But extreme weather also tends to make your memories of journeys stronger and more lasting (“…remember that time in Goa when the monsoon came earlier than anyone thought…”). Since we overemphasize the maximization of current utility, and under-invest in the creation of significant memories, we worry too much about the weather.
China insurance markets in everything
Medical insurance often becomes invalid if the customer is drunk. But during the football World Cup in 2014, Shanghai-based Zhongan Insurance turned that rule upside down by offering Chinese football fans a policy specifically for self-inflicted liver damage.
It cost less than $1 and covered sports enthusiasts against alcohol poisoning for 30 days — paying out up to Rmb2,000 ($290) for hospital fees. It soon came to be known as “watching-football-drinking-too-much” insurance.
This has not been Zhongan’s only foray into more specialist areas of China’s insurancemarket. Another of its policies, called “high heat”, reimburses customers when the temperature hits 37°C. Another insures against flight delays — and, in many cases, pays out while the customer is still waiting in the departure lounge.
But while such products might seem niche, the company behind them is anything but. From a standing start three years ago, it has sold 5.8bn policies to 460m customers. This has quickly translated into profit. Zhongan went from making a loss in 2013 to posting Rmb168m in net profit two years later. Total assets jumped more than 500 per cent between 2014 and 2015, to Rmb8bn.
That is from Don Weinland at the FT. And this:
Zhongan is finding it has competition in the market for offbeat insurance policies. TongJuBao already sells specialist policies to cover for the cost of divorce lawyers and for search teams to look for missing children. It also sells insurance that offers income protection for people who leave their jobs to move to a different city.
Shades of Robert Shiller…
A very good sentence
Sex-cynicism and race-pessimism, of course, often travel in tandem.
That is from Christopher Caldwell’s excellent NYT article on Alt-Right.
Truth, Independence, and Liberty
Jacob Levy has an excellent post on why respect for truth is a foundation for republican government:
…the great analysts of truth and speech under totalitarianism—GeorgeOrwell, Hannah Arendt, VaclavHavel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is. Sometimes—often—a leader with authoritarian tendencies will lie in order to make others repeat his lie both as a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them.
Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the huge lies and blatant reversals of language associated with the Holocaust. Havel documented the pervasive little lies, lies that everyone knew to be lies, of late Communism. And Orwell gave us the vivid “2+2=5.”
Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless; it also makes you complicit. You’re morally compromised. Your ability to stand on your own moral two feet and resist or denounce is lost. Part of this is a general tool for making people part of immoral groups.
…insisting on the difference between truth and lies is itself a part of the defense of freedom. Orwell, Arendt, and Havel teach us that the power to tell public lies and to have them repeated is evidence of, and a tool for the expansion of, a power that free people should resist and refuse.
I would put it this way: Respect for the truth is tied to individualism because any person may have truth and reason on their side. But the acceptance of the public lie signals that only the will of the collective matters.
The new school choice debate (a child is more than just a test score)
Since Donald Trump has picked Betsy DeVos to be education secretary, many commentators have been pulling out their anti-school choice arguments from the closet, and for the most part it isn’t a pretty sight. To insist on a single government-run school and trash school choice, while out of the other side of one’s mouth criticizing Trump for “authoritarianism,” and other times proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” is from my point of view a pretty poor mix.
To be sure, we’re still not sure how well vouchers work, and I would suggest continuing experimentation rather than full-on commitment. Frankly, I find a lot of the voucher advocates unconvincing, but let’s not forget the single most overwhelming (yet neglected) empirical fact about vouchers: they improve parent satisfaction.
That result is not much contested. For instance:
Universally, school choice parents are highly satisfied with choice schools, reporting greater discipline, more responsive staff and better educational environments than the public schools they left. That parents are satisfied with their choice schools is a valuable indicator that school choice delivers real benefits. As University of Wisconsin professor John Witte, the official evaluator of the Milwaukee choice program, recently commented on school choice research: “There’s one very consistent finding: Parental involvement is very positive, and parental satisfaction is very positive…parents are happier. The people using vouchers are mostly black and Hispanic and very poor…they deserve the same kind of options that middle-class white people have.”
Patrick J. Wolf’s survey of twelve voucher programs (pdf) supports this interpretation. And here are strongly positive results on parental satisfaction Indiana. I could go on, but I don’t think there is much need.
Of course parents may like school choice for reasons other than test scores. To draw from the first link above, parents may like the academic programs, teacher skills, school discipline, safety, student respect for teachers, moral values, class size, teacher-parent relations, parental involvement, and freedom to observe religious traditions, among other facets of school choice.
Perhaps now is the time to remind you that how the buyers like the product is the fundamental standard used by economists for judging public policy? That is not to say it is the final standard all things considered, but surely economists should at least start here and report positive parental satisfaction as a major feature of school choice programs. In fact, I’ll say this: if you’re reading a critique of vouchers and the critic isn’t willing to tell you up front that parents typically like this form of school choice, I suspect the critic isn’t really trying to inform you.
To be sure, you still might not favor school vouchers. You might think they cost too much, you might think they will politicize private schools too much, or you might think they weaken national unity too much, to cite a few possibilities. (Although please, on that latter matter you can’t just say something silly like “public schools and the army made America what it is today.” You need some actual evidence. Won’t parents who are happy with the schooling of their children also contribute to national unity and push us away from polarization? That effect might outweigh whatever more negative mechanism you have in mind. Evidence please, not just sentiment.)
And as for test scores, the evidence there is still unclear. Here are a few earlier MR posts, no cherry- or lemon-picking, please.
Scott Alexander has some excellent comments on vouchers and school choice.
Best movies of 2016
45 Years, British drama about a creaky marriage.
The Boy & the World. A Brazilian animated movie, it actually fits the cliche “unlike any movie you’ve seen before.” Preview here, other links here, good for niños but not only. Excellent soundtrack by Nana Vasconcelos.
The Second Mother. A Brazilian comedy of manners about social and economic inequality, as reflected in the relations between a maid, her visiting daughter, and the maid’s employer family. Now, to my and maybe your ears that sounds like poison, because “X is about inequality” correlates strongly with “X is not very good,” I am sorry to say. This movie is the exception, subtle throughout, and you can watch and enjoy it from any political point of view. It helps to know a bit about Brazil, and it takes about twenty minutes for the core plot to get off the ground. Links here.
Cemetery of Splendor, Thai movie by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, here is a good review.
City of Gold, a documentary with Jonathan Gold doing the ethnic food thing in Los Angeles.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople is an original movie, mostly about race, full of cinematic allusions (LOTR, First Blood, Smash Palace, classic Westerns, Butch Cassidy, Thelma and Louise, so many more) and Kiwi finery as well. None of the reviews I read seem to get it and I don’t want to send you to any of them.
The Innocents, how did those Polish nuns get pregnant?
Maggie’s Plan, a fun comedy, not at the top of this list but intelligent comedies are a dwindling species.
Ixcanul, a Mayan movie from Guatemala, might this story of an unwanted pregnancy be this year’s best movie? Here is one useful review.
Sausage Party, beyond politically incorrect, I kept on thinking I would get sick of the stupid animation and yet I never did. I remain surprised they let this one play in mainstream theaters.
Sully. He should have turned the plane around immediately under any plausible calculus, and he didn’t, so you have to give this movie the Straussian reading.
Weiner is a splendid movie with many subtle points, including in the philosophical direction. In another life, Huma Abedin could have been a movie star. She has exactly the right mix of distance and involvement, and she dominates every scene she is in, even when just sitting quietly in the background. Um…I guess she is a movie star. Starlet. Whatever.
Difret, an Ethiopian legal drama.
Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood (reissue). This is one of Tarkovsky’s worst movies, and yet one of the best movies in virtually any year.
The Handmaiden, by Park Chan-wook. Imperfectly eroticized violence, but beautiful nonetheless.
Elle, by Paul Verhoeven.
Nocturnal Animals, by Tom Ford.
The bottom line
My top picks are Ixcanul, American Honey, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Cemetery of Splendor, and Sky Ladder, with Arrival being the best mainstream Hollywood movie.
Unsuccessful book publishing markets in everything
“To forestall his book’s publication he paid a friend to find people who might convince him not to publish it.”
That is Jennifer Senior quoting Michael Lewis on Daniel Kahneman’s remarks about his own book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
The effects of public unions on compensation
I can’t say I followed this debate very closely, still this paper may settle some of the outstanding questions about public sector unions and wages and bargaining power.
The Effects of Public Unions on Compensation: Evidence from Wisconsin (Job Market Paper)
This paper seeks identify the effect that public sector unions have on compensation. Specifically, I look at the compensation premium associated with teachers’ unions in Wisconsin. In 2011, Wisconsin passed a landmark law (Act 10) which significantly lowered the bargaining power of all public sector unions in the state. Using an event study framework, I exploit plausibly exogenous timing differences based on contract renewal dates, which caused districts to be first exposed to the new regulations in different years. I find that the reduction in union power associated with Act 10 reduced total teacher compensation by 8%, or $6,500. Roughly two-thirds of this decline is driven through reduced fringe benefits. The analysis shows that the most experienced and highest paid teachers benefit most from unionization. I supplement the event study approach with synthetic control and regression discontinuity methods to find that regulatory limits on contract terms, rather than other mechanisms such as state financial aid cuts or union decertification, are driving the results.
That is from Andrew Littten, job market candidate at the University of Michigan (p.s.: Michigan, your job market candidate web site is the very hardest to use and browse, please improve it!)
New Zealand to Compensate Organ Donors
New Zealand will now compensate live organ donors for all lost income:
Today’s unanimous cross-party support for the Compensation for Live Organ Donors Bill represents a critical step in reducing the burgeoning waiting list for kidney donations, according to Kidney Health New Zealand chief executive Max Reid.
“The Bill effectively removes what is known to be one of the single greatest barriers to live organ donation in NZ,” Mr Reid says. “Until now the level of financial assistance (based on the sickness benefit) has been insufficient to cover even an average mortgage repayment, and the process required to access that support both cumbersome and demeaning. The two major changes that this legislation introduces – increasing compensation to 100% of lost income, and transferring responsibility for the management of that financial assistance being moved from WINZ to the Ministry of Health – will unquestionably remove two major disincentives that exist within the current regime.”
Eric Crampton (former GMU student, now NZ economist who supported the bill) notes that a key move in generating political support was that New Zealand MP Chris Bishop framed the bill as compensating donors for lost wages rather than paying them. A decrease in the disincentive to donate–an increase in the incentive to donate. To an economist, potato, potato. But for people whose kidneys fail in New Zealand, the right framing may have been the difference between life and death.
This is also a good time to remind readers of Held, McCormick, Ojo and Roberts, A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Government Compensation of Kidney Donors published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
From 5000 to 10 000 kidney patients die prematurely in the United States each year, and about 100 000 more suffer the debilitating effects of dialysis, because of a shortage of transplant kidneys. To reduce this shortage, many advocate having the government compensate kidney donors. This paper presents a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of such a change. It considers not only the substantial savings to society because kidney recipients would no longer need expensive dialysis treatments—$1.45 million per kidney recipient—but also estimates the monetary value of the longer and healthier lives that kidney recipients enjoy—about $1.3 million per recipient. These numbers dwarf the proposed $45 000-per-kidney compensation that might be needed to end the kidney shortage and eliminate the kidney transplant waiting list. From the viewpoint of society, the net benefit from saving thousands of lives each year and reducing the suffering of 100 000 more receiving dialysis would be about $46 billion per year, with the benefits exceeding the costs by a factor of 3. In addition, it would save taxpayers about $12 billion each year.
Carlsen > Karjakin
1. Karjakin played some of the best defensive chess ever, finding resources where there appeared to be none.
2. Carlsen had become a bit lazy, relying too much on his stamina advantage to beat opponents (yes I do understand that is an odd notion of lazy!). Yet he had no real stamina advantage over Karjakin, who is of the same age and came to the match in very good physical shape. So Carlsen simply could not grind him down, and it took Carlsen the entire match to realize that.
3. Karjakin made very few attempts to achieve demonstrable, sharp advantages. That limited his total number of victories to one.
4. In the rapid tie-breaker — four consecutive games in the final day — Carlsen couldn’t try to win on stamina and simply showed he was the better player across many dimensions of the game. Karjakin posed him no problems at all in these contests.
5. Karjakin played as Carlsen’s equal for the twelve regular time control games. Yet I don’t think he will be back as a challenger. His style is too “drab” (Kasparov’s description) to get through all of the risk-rewarding tournaments to reach the final championship match again.
6. Perhaps rapid chess is the future of chess as a spectator sport. Four games in a row, each twenty-five minutes per player, plus increments. It was thrilling, and I watched on the train.
7. Putin finally lost one this year, let’s hope this reverses the trend.
Here is the Chessbase account, here is the quite good NYT story.
The Intel anthropologist on why we are afraid of AI
Here is a separate bit from that interview:
I’m interested in how animals are connected to the internet and how we might be able to see the world from an animal’s point of view. There’s something very interesting in someone else’s vantage point, which might have a truth to it. For instance, the tagging of cows for automatic milking machines, so that the cows can choose when to milk themselves. Cows went from being milked twice a day to being milked three to six times a day, which is great for the farm’s productivity and results in happier cows, but it’s also faintly disquieting that the technology makes clear to us the desires of cows – making them visible in ways they weren’t before. So what does one do with that knowledge? One of the unintended consequences of big data and the internet of things is that some things will become visible and compel us to confront them.
And on the main question at hand:
What we are seeing now isn’t an anxiety about artificial intelligence per se, it’s about what it says about us. That if you can make something like us, where does it leave us?
Wednesday assorted links
1. Estonian food delivery by robots.
2. Why fake data when you can fake a scientist, note that Borat still serves on a few editorial boards.
3. Fooling art experts with fake photographs.
4. Tom Price’s ACA repeal bill.
5. Signs of democratic deconsolidation? (NYT) And Trump and Walter J. Ong.
6. The Obama overtime regulations disrespect workers (and their bosses).
Which kind of countercyclical fiscal policy is best?
Miguel Faria-e-Castro, on the job market from NYU, has a very interesting paper on that question. Here are his findings:
What is the impact of an extra dollar of government spending during a financial crisis? How important was fiscal policy during the Great Recession? I develop a macroeconomic model of fiscal policy with a financial sector that allows me to study the effects of fiscal policy tools such as government purchases and transfers, as well as of financial sector interventions such as bank recapitalizations and credit guarantees. Solving the model with nonlinear methods allows me to show how the linkages between household and bank balance sheets generate new channels through which fiscal policy can stimulate the economy, and study the state dependent effects of fiscal policy. I combine the model with data on the fiscal policy response to assess its role during the financial crisis and Great Recession. My main findings are that: (i) the fall in consumption would had been 1/3 worse in the absence of fiscal interventions; (ii) transfers to households and bank recapitalizations yielded the largest fiscal multipliers; and (iii) bank recapitalizations were closest to generating a Pareto improvement.
Bank recapitalizations — just remember that the next time you hear someone talking about “G” in the abstract.
See also this new Alesina NBER paper, indicating that the how of fiscal adjustment is much more important than the when. No tax hikes!