Results for “age of em” 17229 found
How will AI shape linguistic survival?
But the revered Icelandic language, seen by many as a source of identity and pride, is being undermined by the widespread use of English, both in the tourism industry and in the voice-controlled artificial intelligence devices coming into vogue.
…A number of factors combine to make the future of the Icelandic language uncertain. Tourism has exploded in recent years, becoming the country’s single biggest employer, and analysts at Arion Bank say that half of new jobs are being filled by foreign workers.
…The problem is compounded because many new computer devices are designed to recognize English but not Icelandic.
“Not being able to speak Icelandic to voice-activated fridges, interactive robots and similar devices would be yet another lost field,” Mr. Jonsson said.
Here is the interesting NYT piece.
Monday assorted links
1. Poor Alice Goffman, academia has gone crazy. Here is the full letter.
2. Shipping container architecture.
3. Libertarianism should be more realistic.
4. Model this (photo of the British electoral process).
5. Software that produces and sells its own art. And you can own a piece of it.
The culture and polity that is Singapore, strategic sand reserve edition
Lim had told me that Singapore holds a strategic sand reserve, for emergencies. It lies somewhere near the area called Bedok, I said. I spotted it one day as I rode past in a taxi. The site was strewn with No Trespassing signs, installed by the Housing and Development Board, a government agency. Fenced off from the public, the giant trapezoidal dunes shone bone-white in the sun and caramel in the shade, as the sand waited to be summoned.
That is from an excellent piece by Samanth Subramanian (NYT), about Singapore, land, and preparing for climate change. The Singaporean constitution also devotes several pages to outlining how the government will manage its investments.
*The Dynamics of War and Revolution*, by Lawrence Dennis
Dennis was actually the first stagnation theorist I read, at about the age of eighteen, due to a recommendation from Walter Grinder. His strength is to tie stagnationist claims into the political economy of war. This is from 1940 (book link here), I hope it is no longer relevant:
The importance of clearly understanding the dynamic and purely unmoral function of change cannot be exaggerated at a time like this when the major problem is stagnation. America’s problem of unemployment could be solved by rebuilding America or going to war with Japan. The war with Japan is more likely. Why? The answer is that our social philosophy recognizes a need for national defense but not for social dynamism.
And:
…stagnation in any culture is far more normal or usual than what we have been accustomed to think of as progress.
I found this interesting:
A civilization must exalt a tradition of heroism. This it may do in war or pyramid building. Liberalism never glorified heroism in theory but, in its frontier empire-building days, it exemplified heroism in its practice.
You can read Dennis as an extension of the Henry George model, except he is more bullish about population growth and adds the variable of war. In the George model, there are increasing returns and so city life becomes crowded and the scarce factor of land captures the social surplus. Think San Francisco or Singapore. Dennis assumes diminishing returns, and so the frontier is usually more potent than the city, if only a frontier can be kept open and alive. But that is hard to do because it runs against the natural desire of so many human beings for stasis, and thus capitalism tends to evolve into a kind of socialistic fascism.
Dennis, by the way, had an interesting life. Unlike most “alt right” writers, he was half black, but his skin was pale so he was able to pass for white. (In fact he started life as a child preacher, touring the south, accompanied by his African-American mother.) He spent some of his energies trying to convince his “fellow travelers” to support civil rights for blacks, but without much success, and he also was desperately afraid of being unmasked.
Early in his career, he was accepted into mainstream American intellectual life and hung out with elites, rising to the top through the State Department and Wall Street. As the 1930s passed, he became more extreme and the center became more hostile to fascist and semi-fascist ideas, especially if bundled with tolerance for potentially hostile foreign powers. His career had a long downward trajectory, and during World War II he was tried for sedition, though he got off and later died in obscurity, after a final gig as a critic of the Cold War. Gerald Horne wrote a very interesting biography of Dennis.
That was then, this is now, immigration edition
Some of Trump’s first actions in office were two executive orders meant to crack down on illegal immigration by implementing tougher enforcement not just at the border but also within the country. This week The Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested 21,362 unauthorized immigrants across the country since Trump took office, a 32.6 percent increase from the previous year. (The data runs through mid-March.) At first glance these numbers might seem consistent with Trump’s promise to get “the bad ones” out of the country. But the Post also noted that of those arrested roughly a quarter, or 5,441, had no criminal record. That’s more than double the number of noncriminal arrests of undocumented immigrants during the same period in 2016. (Many of those arrested eventually will be deported, but because that process can be slow, changed enforcement patterns show up more quickly in arrest data.)
Look back a bit further, however, and the recent increase in enforcement looks less dramatic. The pace of arrests is running well behind the 29,238 made during the same period in 2014; that year, there were 7,483 noncriminal arrests through mid-March, which represented a similar share of the total as this year’s numbers.
That is from Ben Casselman, et.al. at 538.
Public sector expenditure cut when economies are not already imploding
Portugal slashed its public sector deficit by more than half in a single year, when measured as a proportion of GDP, the national statistics bureau has said, taking the shortfall comfortably below euro zone limits.
The deficit dropped to 2.1% of gross domestic product in 2016, a staggering reduction from its 4.4% level a year earlier.
This confirms Finance Minister Mario Centeno’s prediction last month that the deficit would be “not more than 2.1%”, its lowest share of GDP since the advent of democracy in 1974.
Euro zone members are required to keep their public deficits to below 3% of GDP, but some are struggling to do so.
Portugal’s public deficit shot up into the double digits during the global economic crisis, and despite an international bailout it had difficulty bringing it back down to 4.4% in 2015.
Portugal’s economy expanded by 1.4% in 2016, the national statistics institute said in February, after growing by 1.6% the previous year on the back of stronger exports and private consumption.
Here is the full piece, here is a useful Bloomberg piece on Portugal. Furthermore, by one estimate:
Greek gov’t makes a 6.8%/GDP fiscal adjustment in a single year, without any decline in country’s GDP.
You can quibble over those numbers, and yes I do agree this is bad and also not sustainable, but still people this is not exactly the Keynesian model at work.
Friday assorted links
1. Which body part hurts most when stung by a bee? A study in self-experimentation.
2. Autocrats build more skyscrapers.
3. Was Trump sad when he won the election?
4. How the San Francisco fire of 1906 drove subsequent land use patterns. And Canaan, Haiti’s start from scratch “city.”
5. Thwarted moon rock markets in everything.
6. How Dan Ariely manages email. In a funny way, I think he has ends and means backwards.
7. Robin Hanson’s forthcoming book now has an Amazon page, you can pre-order.
Why don’t people care more about economic inequality?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
One possibility is that a lot of talk about inequality gives the audience the impression that it is inevitable, and thereby renders potential remedies less urgent. Another speculation is that human beings are constantly evaluating the status of others. To the extent analysts reiterate that some group of citizens doesn’t have as much, maybe they’re actually reminding us that those citizens hold a lower social status. Perhaps subconsciously, we then respond by thinking those citizens deserve less, or by downgrading the urgency of their needs.
Another possibility is that talk about economic inequality increases political polarization, which lowers the chance of effective action. Or that criticizing American society may cause us to feel less virtuous, which in turn may cause us to act with less virtue. Perhaps if critics of inequality praised this nation more for what is has done to redress inequality, rather than criticizing it for the gaps, that might cement a self-image of Americans who are capable of tackling this problem, and thus spur interest in additional progress. That mechanism shouldn’t sound so strange to anyone who has tried to raise children.
When I bring up such points in dialogue, I’ve found that a lot of my fellow academicians retreat to the moral platitude that the “good guys” simply need to fight harder against the special interest groups. Maybe so, or maybe that response is just another way of digging in deeper to what so far has been a losing battle. The reality is that income inequality has gone up a great deal since the early 1980s, and we haven’t done so much to reverse the basic trend. The potentially egalitarian effects of tax increases under the past two Democratic presidents and Obamacare have been outweighed by globalization, which benefits most those individuals who can access global markets, and by increases in the returns to highly skilled labor. The reality is that government expenditures have not become radically more poverty-reducing over the last few decades, although we do send more resources to the elderly.
Do read the whole thing, the various biting comments about other academics are in other parts of the piece.
State income tax matters for sports team performance, Miami Heat edition bet against the Raptors
State- and local-income tax rates differ across locations, giving low-tax teams a competitive advantage when bidding for players. I investigate the effect of income tax rates on professional team performance between 1977 and 2014 using data from professional baseball, basketball, football, and hockey in the United States. Regressing income tax rates on winning percentage, I find little evidence of income tax effects prior to 1994, but since then a ten percent increase in income taxes is associated with a three percent decline in winning percentage. A robustness check using within state variation in income taxes affirms this result. The income tax rate effect varies by league, with the largest effect in professional basketball, where teams in states without income tax win 4.5 more games each year relative to high-tax states. The income tax effect is smallest in major league baseball, which could be explained by greater team payroll disparity. Placebo tests using college team performance find no evidence of an income tax effect.
The pointer is from the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Thursday assorted links
What will Bretton Woods 3.0 look like?
Nigel, a loyal MR reader, asks me:
Is it possible for the US to abuse the dollar’s privileged position, and do you expect a monetary conference to take place in the future that would alter the post-Bretton Woods arrangement in ways less favorable to the US?
A good question, but at current margins I don’t see many directions for movement. I don’t know whether such a monetary conference will take place, but it is unlikely to be a decisive event for shaping actual outcomes. I see these as the relevant questions:
1. Will China move to a true “free float”? And if so, what is the collateral damage along the way?
2. Will some countries leave the eurozone? (and if they do, it is a big deal for them, but probably not a big deal for the global monetary order, unless it is Italy or France)
3. Will more countries attach to the euro (Iceland?) or to the U.S. dollar (additional parts of Latin America?)
4. How many additional countries will institute capital controls?
For the most part, those questions will be decided at the national level, although for potential euro leavers the nature of the proposed EU alternative (another bailout?) will be significant.
The most likely outcome is that more countries will institute partial capital controls, and in that regard we will move closer to some aspects of the initial Bretton Woods 1.0, in which capital controls were an integral feature. Capital controls may come to keep a euro peg (already happened in Cyprus), to try to keep domestic jobs (ha, but recall Trump and Carrier), to prevent an imminent explosive capital outflow (China), to strengthen or preserve a banking system, to limit wild currency swings, or simply because governments will try all kinds of policies before admitting they have failed. Other forms of “capital controls” may come through tax reforms and regulatory barriers designed to keep capital at home.
My best guess on China is that capital outflow pressures eventually will force a free float, but only briefly, and then they will return to capital controls in some form.
So my forecast for the future is much more in the way of capital controls, but without the hegemonic/cooperative international architecture that characterized Bretton Woods 1.0.
What would people do if they had superpowers?
At the very least we can ask what they say they would do, and it is not entirely encouraging:
Drawing from literature associating superheroes with altruism, this study examined whether ordinary individuals engaged in altruistic or selfish behavior when they were hypothetically given superpowers. Participants were presented with six superpowers—three positive (healing, invulnerability, and flight) and three negative (fear inducement, psychic persuasion, and poison generation). They indicated their desirability for each power, what they would use it for (social benefit, personal gain, social harm), and listed examples of such uses. Quantitative analyses (n = 285) revealed that 94% of participants wished to possess a superpower, and majority indicated using powers for benefitting themselves than for altruistic purposes. Furthermore, while men wanted positive and negative powers more, women were more likely than men to use such powers for personal and social gain. Qualitative analyses of the uses of the powers (n = 524) resulted in 16 themes of altruistic and selfish behavior. Results were analyzed within Pearce and Amato’s model of helping behavior, which was used to classify altruistic behavior, and adapted to classify selfish behavior. In contrast to how superheroes behave, both sets of analyses revealed that participants would hypothetically use superpowers for selfish rather than altruistic purposes. Limitations and suggestions for future research are outlined.
That is from a new paper by Das-Friebel, et.al., and the pointer is from Rolf Degen. Here is an earlier MR post about what an altruistic and incorruptible Superman should do; I found the question wasn’t so easy to answer.
The complacent lass?
The Easter message confirmed something about Mrs May that continues to escape some of the commentary about her. She is a believer in things. She has her own view of the world and it comes, if not from scripture, then at least from the Anglican cast of mind.
She favours a gentle society over a dynamic one, views the market with the suspicion of a mild social democrat and takes nationhood more seriously than the universalist end of Christianity tends to. None of these beliefs are extreme but they are held with enough strength to drive the government.
That is Janan Ganesh on Teresa May (FT). Here is a good BBC analysis of some of the game-theoretic considerations, and one that makes May look a bit less complacent (and less of a lass, too).
Celebrities give (mostly good) financial advice don’t ask for a piano
Here is Rufus Wainwright:
What’s the biggest financial mistake you’ve made?
Signing a publishing deal years ago and asking them to throw in a piano. I thought they were gifting me a piano, when in fact I was just paying for the piano. I was confused by the big leagues—financially, it was a no-man’s land. That happens to most musicians. They get screwed by the industry. It’s a rite of passage. Don’t ask for a piano!
Here is Lee Daniels:
What do you wish you’d known about money before getting into showbiz?
That half of it goes directly to the government. And another 20 percent goes to your representatives, so that’s 70 percent of your income right there. You’d better make some money, honey! You’ve got to put $15 of that $30 away for your retirement.Is that what you did?
No, of course not! That was the learning experience. It took me 34 years to find that out!
It is striking that none of them refer to “The d word,” namely diversification. (Priyanka Chopra does mention she bought land in Goa and Mumbai, and that it worked out very well for her.) Though you also have to wonder if that is not part of the reason why they rose to the top of their respective crafts. Rather than setting for a sufficiently happy and complacent normal existence, perhaps many kept doubling down on what might have been fundamentally unsound bets.
Here is the full piece from Bloomberg.
The concentration of cities claims about Mongolia
From Lyman Stone:
…no matter the adjustment, the US is always one of the lowest-concentration countries, along with China, India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan. We have a very diversified metropolitan ecology, as do those countries.
Third, I’ve highlighted Nordic (purple) and Anglo (orange) countries. Notice that all of the Nordics are much more concentrated than the United States, as are all of the Anglo countries! That one was surprising to me, as I expected large countries like Australia and Canada to be much more comparable to the US. As it is, in terms of population concentration, Poland is more American than Canada.
…my most concentrated countries are indeed Mongolia and Peru. Not kidding here. Both results surprised me given that both countries are fairly large and have big rural populations and, in Peru’s case, my impression was that there were a good number of meaningfully sized cities. But it turns out that, in Peru, Lima metro area alone is almost 30% of the population, and then the other cities are pretty small by comparison; and Lima is, of course, also the capital. In Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar metro area is over half of the nation’s population!
So. If you want to know what country is the most city-state-ish, I would have to answer… it’s Mongolia.
Here is the full essay, noting that Singapore is normalized as a polar option at 100% and thus cannot win the competition. Also scroll down to the interesting graph on “State and Local Taxes Collected as a Share of GDP”: I am surprised to see Sweden come in at number one. For all the talk of American federalism, we are just at the OECD average and in fact slightly behind Iceland in these rankings.