Results for “age of em” 17236 found
*Singapore: Unlikely Power*
Authored by John Curtis Perry, this is a good one-volume introduction to the history of Singapore, with the most interesting section being the one on the Japanese wartime occupation. Here is one excerpt:
For the Indonesians, struggling against the Dutch, freedom from colonial rule did not satisfy; they wanted as well to redraw geographical lines of sovereignty. Their new leader, Sukarno, in 1961 announced an aggressive policy of Konfrontasi (Confrontation), dreaming of forming a vast united Malay state, “Maphilindo,” to include Indonesia, the Malayan Peninsula (and implicitly Singapore), all of Kalimantan, and even the Philippines.
Indonesia by size and population would naturally dominate such an aggregation. Sukarno vowed to use force to crush Malaysia calling it “neo-colonial.” His people seized Singaporean fishing boats; he ordered sabotage carried out on Singapore’s port and a boycott that hurt Singapore’s trade. These threats and acts did nothing to advance his cause but fanned Singapore’s sense of vulnerability.
Recommended.
Tuesday assorted links
1. There is no great caffeine bracelet stagnation.
2. Greg Mankiw seems to favor the new Republican tax plan. And Krugman comments. I say anything complicated they will just screw up, and the lack of transparency in the plan means eventually it will lead to a tax hike and furthermore a good deal of favoritism and rent-seeking along the way. Best hope is simply that they cut the corporate tax rate and don’t do much else on that front.
3. Chinese social media as a form of surveillance.
What is the essence of Trumponomics?
Regionalism, and redistribution through the medium of job creation, says I, in my latest Bloomberg column. Now, I don’t think that will work, given the current configuration of ideas and personnel and the weakness of the procedural in recent times. Still, I think people are underestimating how much the underlying policies pose a potential danger to the redistributive program of the Left. On the border adjustment tax:
As a libertarian-leaning economist, I don’t favor either of those changes, or their combination, but still there is a logic here worth considering. Think of this policy as taxing the consumption of elites and throwing that money, and more, at job creation, in this case through corporate subsidies. It’s a bigger and bolder gamble than just making some marginal adjustments in current transfer payments. In essence Trump has outflanked the left by packaging plans for redistribution of wealth with a revamped mercantilism, combined with a macho mood, media-baiting and incendiary rhetoric about who deserves what. It is an underlying fear of the left that a right-wing-flavored redistribution might prove more popular with voters than the left’s preferred egalitarianism and identity politics.
There are further points, including a discussion of why the Obamacare replacements are not nearly as stupid as they sound. But here is my summary:
I still think Trumponomics won’t work. It is too divisive; it will be applied politically, targeting favorites and enemies, rather than in accord with the dictates of efficiency; it may destroy rather than create jobs on net; and most of all it badly damages the U.S.’s global reach by cooperating less on issues of trade and migration. I think of the program as a whole as cashing in on the capital asset of America’s foreign reputation and redistributing some of those rents to Trump-supporting regions. That is a form of shortsightedness, and a sign of the decay of our republic.
Here is a recent comment to the FT by Peter Navarro:
Mr Navarro said one of the administration’s trade priorities was unwinding and repatriating the international supply chains on which many US multinational companies rely, taking aim at one of the pillars of the modern global economy.
Stay tuned…
Brad Stone’s The Upstarts
Today in the WSJ I review Brad Stone’s new book about Airbnb and Uber, The Upstarts. Here is one substantive bit:
Instead of thinking about how to protect the hotel and taxi industries, policy makers should be thinking about how to make it easier for the next Airbnb or Uber to compete. They could require, for instance, that key application program interfaces remain open to competitors, just as some utilities are required to allow alternative energy companies to send electricity through their networks.
Likewise, it’s not obvious that requiring Uber to contract with drivers as employees rather than as independent contractors is a good idea, even for the drivers. Lots of people are willing to drive for Uber, which suggests that Uber is providing drivers with opportunities superior to those that they can find elsewhere. The first rule of the regulator’s oath should be: “Do not destroy mutually profitable exchanges.” Banning the independent-contractor model could also make it harder for cash-strained startups to compete with Uber. Uber might even accept new regulations as a way of raising the costs of its rivals and locking in its monopoly. From upstart to rent-seeker in just seven years—the speed is astounding, but the arc is commonplace.
Read the whole thing.
More on the interactions between humans and self-driving vehicles
Up from Central Square towards Harvard Square is a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue that is mixed residential and commercial, with metered parking. A few weeks ago I needed to stop at the UPS store there and ship a heavy package. There were no free parking spots so I soon found myself cruising up and down along about a 100 meter stretch, waiting for one to open up. The thought occurred to me that if I had had a level 4 or 5 self driving car I could have left it to do that circling, while I dropped into the store.
Such is the root of anti-social behavior.
And more:
(1) People will jump out of their car at a Starbucks to run in and pick up their order knowingly leaving it not in a legal parking spot, perhaps blocking others, but knowing that it will take care of getting out of the way if some other car needs to move or get by. That will be fine in the case there is no such need, but in the case of need it will slow everything down just a little. And perhaps the owner will be able to set the tolerance on how uncomfortable things have to get before the car moves. Expect to see lots of annoyed people. And before long grocery store parking lots, especially in a storm, will just be a sea of cars improperly parked waiting for their owners.
(2) This is one for the two (autonomous) car family. Suppose someone is going to an event in the evening and there is not much parking nearby. And suppose autonomous cars are now always prowling neighborhoods waiting for their owners to summon them, so it takes a while for any particular car to get through the traffic to the pick up location. Then the two car family may resort to a new trick so that they don’t have to wait quite so long as others for their cars to get to the front door pick up at the conclusion of the big social event. They send one of their cars earlier in the day to find the closest parking spot that it can, and it settles in for a long wait. They use their second car to drop them at the event and send it home immediately. When the event is over their first autonomous car is right there waiting for them–the cost to the commons was a parking spot occupied all day by one of their cars.
In sum:
They are seeing the technical possibilities and not seeing the resistance that will come with autonomous agents invading human spaces, be they too rude or overly polite.
That is by Rodney Brooks, the piece has other points of interest, via Tim Harford.
Initial Impressions: India and Mumbai
Stanley Pignal, the new Mumbai-based South Asia correspondent for The Economist, tweeted:
Having landed two hours ago, I’m upgrading myself from “India novice” to “India watcher”. Tomorrow “expert”, next week “veteran”
#journalism
With that in mind as also applying to me, here are some initial thoughts:
People in India drive on the wrong side of the road and I’m not talking about the fact that they drive on the left.
It’s easier to find a good Indian restaurant in Fairfax than in Bandra.
The quality of the intellectual class relative to GDP per capita is the highest of any country I know.
The quality of the intellectual class at the top is as high as Singapore but in Singapore the intellectual class runs the government.
You can take a 1-hour UBER ride for a $5, A taxi is even cheaper. A 10-minute auto-rickshaw drive is 50 cents.
Google FI worked right off the airplane. If you are coming to India for a week or two it’s great. Oddly, however, all of the Indian apps for food delivery, calling the Indian equivalent of UBER or paying with digital cash only accept an Indian telephone number so I am going to have to get a SIM card. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown, getting a Sim card is a bureaucratic hassle although apparently it’s scheduled to get better.
English is fine for getting around. The surprise is the number of Indians who don’t speak English and yet have to operate in a world in which advertising, signage, operating instructions, and so forth are in English.
Netflix works!
Inequality as measured by a standard Gini index is actually lower in India than in the United States. As measured by what you can see, however, inequality is very high. It’s easy to step out of a Louis-Vuitton boutique and over a child sleeping in the street. Doesn’t appear to be causing a revolution, however.
Crime is low. Much lower than in the United States.
Pollution is high, much higher than in the United States, and at levels that do not seem optimal even give low GDP per capita.
In the developed world you go outside for fresh air. In India you go inside for fresh air. (Many homes and businesses have air purifiers with hepa air filters. I bought two.)
PM Modi wants to bring Elon Musk’s hyperloop technology to India. Delhi to Mumbai in an hour. Mumbai to downtown Mumbai in an hour and a half…on a good day. Start simple!
Retail, one of the largest sectors in many economies including India, is very inefficient. You have to go to a dozen small stores in different parts of town to get half of what you need. I was surprised to see a Walmart in Mumbai on Google maps. Great! I took an Uber. It was fake.
Parts of Mumbai are reminiscent of Havana–elegant buildings put up in earlier times including some art-deco buildings, that are now falling apart and even abandoned due to rent control and poor land use policy. At the same time, Mumbai looks like Miami with much new construction interwoven with the older decay. Capitalist shoots pushing out of socialist pavement.
How to prepare for CRISPR
That is an MR reader request, namely:
One issue that it appears we’ll discuss more in the future is genetic experimentation – the sort heralded by CRISPR. How do you suggest we prepare for this technology? What should be reading? Discussing?
Read my book The Age of the Infovore, to better understand the importance of human diversity, and also ponder my earlier post on whether genetic engineering will lead to excess human conformity. Then investigate what kinds of sperm and eggs are most popular and thus most expensive on the current market; that’s tall, smart people who look a bit like the parents. That might give us an idea of what kind of genetic engineering people are trying to accomplish. Then watch or rewatch Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. If you still have spare time, dip into the New Testament again.
Then read about extensive Chinese efforts in this area. Consider also how slow advances have been in genomics, and how difficult manipulability will be for most issues. Then study Moore’s Law and Big Data. Then read about how unlikely regulation will be able to stop advances in this area (the biggest intellectual gap in this set of instructions). Then read or reread Aldous Huxley and any Greek tragedy centering around the idea of hubris.
Mix together, stir, shake, and sit down and cry.
The ambiguities of dual citizenship
You may have read that the recent Executive Order also applied to those who hold dual citizenship in any of the specified nations. I haven’t yet seen it fully explained how pernicious this is. A lot of countries don’t easily let you renounce their citizenship, they may still claim you, or at the very least they will not issue documentation confirming you are not a dual citizen, no matter what the fact of the matter may be. Very often there is no “fact of the matter” as to who is a dual citizen. Say you were born in Iran, and your parents brought you to the United States or Canada at age two. Let’s say the Trump administration then asks you to prove you are not a dual citizen of Iran. How are you supposed to do this? Leave the country and try to get confirmation in Iran itself, noting you might have to prove you have not broken any laws and have paid all back taxes and fees? Who knows?
How do you like these apples?:
Based on Article 41 of the constitution, Iran does not recognize dual citizenship, and if an individual acquires the citizenship of another country, his or her Iranian nationality will be revoked. This, however, requires certain legal procedures that if not pursued will result in the individual’s foreign citizenship not being officially recognized.
Sunday assorted links
1. Um…what if your name is Alexa?
2. Regression models for college earnings.
3. Peter Lawler on me and Charles Murray and other stuff (pdf): “Now, what perplexes Cowen most is that anyone would choose to be brutish rather than be nice.” I still say the modal scenario is that the deplorables end up disengaged. Here is another good passage from Lawler:
The key objection to niceness amounts to the fact that it’s not really a virtue. You can’t rely upon it as the foundation for the duties required of friends, family members, or fellow citizens. A nice person won’t fight for you; a nice person wouldn’t even lie for you, unless there’s something in it for him. A nice person wouldn’t be a Good Samaritan, if it required genuine risk or an undue deployment of time and treasure. A nice person isn’t animated by love or honor or God. Niceness, if you think about it, is the most selfish of virtues, one, as Tocqueville noticed, rooted in a deep indifference to the well-being of others. It’s more selfish than open selfishness, because the latter accords people the respect of letting them know where you stand. I let you do—and even affirm—whatever you do, because I don’t care what you do as long as it doesn’t bother me. Niceness, as Allan Bloom noticed, is the quality connected with flatness of soul, with being unmoved by the relational imperatives grounded in love and death.
I enjoyed this too:
The point of Clint Eastwood’s instant classic American Sniper is our failure to properly respect our guardians, who put their lives on the line for their own. It’s also about the increasing distance between the relatively honorable, violent, and God-fearing South and the rest of the country.
I praise Lawler’s work on Tocqueville in my The Complacent Class.
5. Why hasn’t the dollar appreciated more? And the new Executive Order also calls for exit controls.
Does government need to be based on geographic contiguity?
That is my rewording of this request from Thijs:
At which point does technology allow another model of social organization than that based on shared territory?
I am reminded of Estonia’s e-citizenship model, but taken much further. To flesh this out, imagine EU citizens could choose to which government they would pay their taxes. So you could live in Lyon, but pay taxes to Germany and have your pension set by German policy and your legal disputes settled by German courts and so on.
What can’t be done this way, even say twenty years from now? Well, your water supply, your primary education system, your electricity, your local police, and your roads, to name a few government services. For those you have to deal with Lyon or some other local provider. Germany can’t step in, except perhaps for some on-line parts of education but even then it wouldn’t mesh well with your local face-to-face provider, even putting aside differences of language.
Given all that, should Lyon and Germany let you peel off your potentially portable pension choice to the government provider of your choice? It seems the wealthy people would cluster their fiscal and pension obligations with governments that were not so progressive in their fiscal policies. In this regard it would be like a partial privatization of pension schemes. But it would be a funny privatization rule: “allow pension choice, but only from local infrastructure-producing entities.” You still would have the usual problems of selection, namely that the wealthy would opt for the pension and tax schemes of Luxembourg and Monaco — hey, wait, isn’t that the status quo?
Well, not quite. In essence this plan would be further reducing the residency requirements for locales and tax havens such as Luxembourg, Monaco, the Cayman Islands, and so on. You wouldn’t have to live there at all. I suppose this is a way of privatizing the redistributive services of the state, without having to say you are doing so. Does that make it more politically stable or less?
I suspect a lot of “local” pension schemes would stay in place for reasons of familiarity, nationalism, and the gravity equation. (Just think how long it took many Greeks and Cypriots to withdraw their euros from their domestic banking systems.) So many middle class Danes will stick with the Danish system, which they know and the like, though many of the Danish wealthy would secede from it and opt for Monaco.
Overall I think of this policy as one way to improve the lot of the wealthy. Is it the way and the framing that will most induce additional effort and creativity from them? I don’t see that case has been made.
What accounts for misery?
Sarah Flèche and Richard Layard have a new paper on this topic, and they suggest a focus on mental illness:
Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and mental illness. The largest proportion suffers from mental illness. Multiple regression shows that mental illness is not highly correlated with poverty or unemployment, and that it contributes more to explaining the presence of misery than is explained by either poverty or unemployment. This holds both with and without fixed effects.
I don’t like the term “mental illness,” yet at the same time I reject the Szaszian rejection of the concept. I would say that mental processes can deviate from procedural rationality in especially disadvantageous (and sometimes systematic) ways, and that this is something above and beyond merely having “different preferences.”
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The top bestsellers of 1916
- Seventeen by Booth Tarkington
- When a Man’s a Man by Harold Bell Wright
- Just David by Eleanor H. Porter
- Mr. Britling Sees It Through by H. G. Wells
- Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow
- The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster
- Bars of Iron by Ethel M. Dell
- Nan of Music Mountain by Frank H. Spearman
- Dear Enemy by Jean Webster
- The Heart of Rachael by Kathleen Norris
Here is further information, a very interesting discussion of the works, hat tip goes to Ted Gioia.
Criminal Politicians
In India, a whopping 21% of the Members of Parliament have serious criminal cases against them. Why are criminals successful in politics? Writing in the FT, David Keohane reviews Milan Vaishnava’s excellent new book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.
Vaishnav’s main explanation for the continued electoral success of criminally tainted politicians is quite simple: They provide services the state does not.
In short, the state has failed to keep up with its voters’ expectations and that failure — of the rule of law along with many basic services — has allowed criminal politicians to serve in lieu of the state: providing protection, social welfare of a sort since the state makes it hard to get even a drivers license without paying a bribe, dispute resolution in the absence of a functioning court system etc. As Vaishnav says, the corrupt politician becomes “the crutch that helps the poor navigate a system that gives them so little access” in the first place….
In no time, Dagdi Chawl became ground zero for Mumbai’s notorious underworld. From his fortress-like compound, Daddy dispensed patronage, protection, and even justice to local residents. Journalists who came to interview Gawli wrote of the hundreds of men and women — unemployed youth, ageing widows, aspiring gangsters, and established politicians — who queued up on a daily basis in front of the iron gates of Gawli’s compound just for a few minutes of face time in the hopes of being showered with Daddy’s munificence. They came seeking building permits, ration cards, welfare payments, employment — a things the state was meant to provide but was either unable or unwilling to.
So, “a reputation as a matabhare (literally, ‘heavy handed’) person is considered to be an asset” in India because the state is so absent in so many ways.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Might facial recognition systems replace passports in Australian airports by 2020?
2. John Arnold’s war on bad science.
3. Peter Thiel now a New Zealand citizen (NYT).
4. Arbitrage?: “B.C. stamp collectors reap benefits of unique Canada Post stamp machine”
5. Has DC already reached “peak restaurant”?
Frances Kelsey Syndrome
Occasionally I have been told that FDA reform is something that only a few libertarian economists support. But in fact, there is strong support for reform in much of the medical community. See, for example, the survey that Dan Klein and I did on off-label prescribing and FDA reform or the many surveys of physicians done by CEI.
I mentioned Dr. Vincent DeVita in my post, Will Trump Appoint a Great FDA Commissioner? It’s worthwhile exploring DeVita’s views at greater length because he is a prominent figure in the field of oncology. Here, from Wikipedia, is some background on DeVita:
Vincent Theodore DeVita, Jr., MD is an internationally recognized pioneer physician in the field of oncology. DeVita spent the early part of his career at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). In 1980, the president of the United States appointed him as director of the NCI and the National Cancer Program, a position he held until 1988. While at the NCI, he was instrumental in developing combination chemotherapy programs that ultimately led to an effective regimen of curative chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease and diffuse large cell lymphomas. Along with colleagues at the NCI, he developed the four-drug combination, known by the acronym MOPP, which increased the cure rate for patients with advanced Hodgkin’s disease from nearly zero to over 70%.
DeVita was the Director of Yale Cancer Center from 1993 to 2003. He is currently the chair of the Yale Cancer Center advisory board and is professor of internal medicine and of epidemiology and public health at Yale’s medical school.
DeVita currently serves on the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals and is the author or co-author of more than 450 scientific articles. He is one of the three editors of the popular textbook (also available online) Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology and serves as the editor-in-chief of The Cancer Journal.
In his book, The Death of Cancer, DeVita has a chapter on the FDA. The title of that chapter? Frances Kelsey Syndrome. He writes:
The thalidomide episode sent the message to those who worked at the FDA that the way to do right by people was to say no. Saying yes would prove perilous–not only to patients, but to the careers of a reviewer. As a result, the agency tends to reward those who say no, not yes. (In fact, there’s an annual Frances Kelsey award. But there are no awards for getting a good drug quickly into the public domain.)
Exactly right. Later he discusses another problem that he sees with FDA evaluation procedures:
We are approaching what we might have considered nirvana years ago. We can design drugs that will hit a specific target, and by being so specific, they have fewer side effects. But because effective treatments almost always require hitting more than one target at the same time, some very good and relatively safe cancer drugs show no evidence of effectiveness when used alone.
What a dilemma. After spending millions of dollars developing a drug, a company may be forced to abandon it for lack of efficacy, when, if approved, it would be another exciting tool for clinical investigators who want to explore combinations of targeted therapies in post-market research trials. Compound that with the FDA’s insistence on testing them first on patients with very advanced, resistant disease, and many potentially useful drugs don’t look so good. As a result, drug companies are reluctant to invest money in new cancer drugs, because they might never make it past the FDA’s hurdles.
DeVita may be wrong but he’s certainly not uninformed.