Tag: arnold kling

On True Roles

Arnold Kling has a nice post up on his Substack about “The True Role of the Central Bank“.

He was asked recently about three ideas that he (Arnold Kling) is known for, and these are the three that he came up with:

  1. Subsidize demand and restrict supply: Government intervention might well be thought of as the subsidization or provisioning of what the market fails to provide. But in practice, he says, the political process tends to be controlled by incumbent producers or owners. These guys are going to lobby the government for subsidized demand and restricted supply. He cites the example of housing: subsidize demand (subsidized home loans, for example), and restrict supply (zoning restrictions). Might higher education be another? Do we end up restricting the supply of quality higher education, and subsidizing demand for it by giving subsidized student loans?
    If you distrust the private sector, now would be a good time to say, “Hah! See? Big bad incumbents derail well-meaning government”
    If you distrust the government, now would be a good time to say, ”Hah! See? Government is as corrupt as big bad incumbents”
    If you agree that incentives matter, you might want to think about how to redesign various systems with better incentive design front and center. But that’s boring work. Saying “Hah! See?” is much easier.
  2. His second idea is that “price discrimination explains everything”. Given high fixed costs in so many different industries (especially Internet-based businesses), the marginal cost of serving an additional consumer is zero. So if marginal-cost pricing makes no sense, what to do? Announce Big Billion Day sales, for example. How’s that price discrimination, you say? That’s just low prices all around for all goods, you say? Well, what about the rest of the days in the year, when the Big Billion Day sale isn’t around? Who do you think is buying then? Are those folks paying the same price for the same good? And that’s just one example. You could teach a semester’s worth of micro by using nothing more than the Amazon app on your phone!
  3. And his third idea is to do with the true role of the central banks. In the 2008 financial crisis, he says, the main concern of the Fed wasn’t forestalling a recession, but rather to focus on the health of the primary dealers. Or more simply put (although you should read the whole blog, as always), the central bank’s top priority is “always going to be enabling the government to borrow more money”. His last paragraph is worth quoting in full:
    “The Fed’s job is to make sure that the Treasury can market its debt. For that purpose, it has to be much more concerned with keeping banks healthy than with hitting a target for inflation, unemployment, nominal GDP, or any other supposed goal.”

Fascinating ideas, all of them. But the last one in particular mad me think about the phrase “the true role” more generally.

What is the true role of:

  1. Educational institutes?
  2. Hospitals?
  3. The Patenting System?
  4. YouTube?
  5. Students?

Ask yourself, and the people around you, these questions. And add to the list! Try answering them yourself. See if the answers differ, and ask yourselves what that reveals about the items on these lists, and about the respondents.

Does The Supply of An Effective Remedy Create Its Own Demand?

Arnold Kling has an interesting essay in which he attacks… books.

When I finish writing a book review, I will often say to myself, “There! Now nobody has to read the book. I’ve boiled it down for them.” We would be better off if authors did that work themselves.

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-books

Arnold Kling has read a ton of books, I can guarantee you. He is not saying this because he has always disliked books, or because he dislikes thinking. That, in fact, is what makes this essay worth reading – he is saying this a person who used to love books, and is still in love with what the book represents: knowledge.

But, as any good economist should, he applies his knowledge of economics to the market for consuming books, and tells us that:

  1. Books don’t have that many ideas in them (they are not information dense, to use his phrasing)
  2. Our time today is limited (by which I mean we have a lot of alternate uses for our time)
  3. So either make the books way shorter, or just stop writing them.

If you are someone like me (that is, a book lover), this might fill you with worry. A world without books? What a horrible thought!

Bear in mind that Arnold Kling is talking about non-fiction books, not books in general. And even in such cases, his arguments will not always hold. I don’t read a Bill Bryon non-fiction book to only learn about new ideas, for example. I want Bill Bryson books to contain delightful digressions, delectable diversions and dizzying descriptions. A little spice can liven up even the dullest of subjects, and Bryson is a master in this regard.

But that being said, it is nonetheless true that a book can often be dreadfully dreary. As Arnold Kling says:

But it is hard for a book to be information-dense in terms of ideas. If you have one really important idea, why does it require a whole book? And if you have several important ideas, chances are that readers will miss some of them, or else not remember them. Better to put the ideas into separate essays.

https://wordpress.com/post/econforeverybody.com/13883

A book, like a song from the sixties, is but a vehicle for carrying ideas. The point always was to convey ideas, and lots of them. Inventing the printing press changed humanity for the better, because that allowed for the spread of oh-so-very-many-ideas.

Understanding that electronic screens and artificial intelligence are here to stay will also change humanity for the better, because these will allow for the spread of even more oh-so-very-many-ideas. The supply is already here, who is to say what will happen to demand?

A chat with Pi about blended learning in Indian higher education

Arnold Kling:

I tried Personal Intelligence (Pi) from Inflection AI. As a chatbot companion, it charms you by offering encouraging reactions to what you tell it. After commenting on what you have to say, it always asks an interesting question. Think of it as a very skillful and probing interviewer. Yes, it’s only software playing a game with you, but it plays it well.
To get an idea of where a conversation with Pi can go, see part of my chat with Pi. The excerpt I posted starts with its message after I’d told it about my Marginal Revolution is Dead post. I predict that you’ll be impressed by it.

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/gptllm-links-dfa

I did go and see Arnold’s chat with Pi, and yup, I was impressed.

Impressed enough to have a conversation with Pi myself. What topic would you guess I chose? The one closest to my heart in a professional context, of course:

I am convinced that classroom education in higher education in India is inefficient, takes too much time, leads to sub-optimal learning and rote memorization for examinations. This is because of a lot of different factors, most of which are interlinked with each other in many different ways. But long story short, young people in India, even in the very best universities, do not learn as well as they could. And since best practices trickle down to other universities, we end up creating a culture of learnng that is sub-optimal at all levels.

https://pi.ai/s/Z3QUR9V69aAmNgc2ek1rS

If you, like me, are convinced that classroom learning is overrated, please do go and read my conversation with Pi. If you, unlike me, are not convinced that classroom learning is overrated, definitely go and read my conversation with Pi, and please do tell me where I’m wrong.

Three points that I would like to highlight:

  1. Far too much of student’s time is spent in passive listening (and that for hours on end). Reduce it dramatically, and even the bit that remains should be online. If your choice is between packing a hundred and fifty students into a classroom like sardines or allowing students to learn online, go online. Is online bad? Well it’s not perfect, sure. But relative to what alternative? If the alternative is the sardines-in-a-can approach, then why not?
  2. To me, the job of a professor in higher education is to mentor, not to teach. This is not a binary variable, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but more mentoring than classroom teaching, that much is for sure. So if anything, the workload for a professor will go up in my proposal, not down. But more personalized teaching/mentoring. Leave the large scale classroom to online education. What else is it for?
  3. AI in education is coming. You may not like it, you may resist it and you may say (as a professor) “but what are we here for then?”. But read the rest of Arnold’s post and ask yourself if the median professor in your university is better or worse than AI tutoring. Then ask yourself how many students this professor can mentor/tutor. Again, AI in education is coming. But the answer to the question “but what are we here for?” lies in learning to think of ourselves as complements to AI. Ask what AI can’t yet provide, and provide that. What the “that” will be changes based on a variety of factors, but in my specific case, I would think it is working on projects with students. And that is what I am focussing on this year.

I sent my conversation with Pi to two friends of mine, who gave me extremely thoughtful responses.

Samrudha Surana highlighted the fact that I should also be thinking about the question “what is college for?”. Different students want different things from the same course. Some may wish to become professors, while many more may wish to join the corporate world. This is as it should be: higher education is not a replication machine, whose sole job is to produce more professors over time. But we need both (future professors and future employees in the corporate world), and people trained in many other professions besides. Blended learning, and AI’s introduction allows for more customization, and that is a good thing.

He also pointed out that we should carefully think through how the online courses will be chosen by the students, and to what end. What he means by this is how much of a say a student should have in choosing their course(s), and how much of it should be the decision of the professor. Not just the choice of the courses, but also the choice of the project/assignment/paper for which the course is being taken. He favors more autonomy for the student, and while I’m inclined to agree, the magnitude will be tricky to set as a rule. In general, a higher degree of autonomy in later semesters, I would think.

Much more discussions are needed in our classrooms. Much, much more. We professors need to be challenged in class, our assumptions and claims scrutinized, our premises questioned and our conclusions critiqued. Learning is best achieved through Socratic discourse (in my opinion). But our classrooms are more about proclamations by the professor rather than any of the above. Smaller class sizes will help, as will more seminars, discussion groups and workshops. That matters, and is rendered more probable under such an arrangement.

Undergraduate courses, finally, might involve much more of classroom learning in the initial semesters. Although under the new four year undergraduate programme (and the likelihood of them more or less replacing Masters programmes altogether), even here you would want to shift to more of blended learning towards the end of the degree.

We need to teach students in higher education better, of that I am convinced. What I have suggested here is worth further discussion, I’m fairly sure. Whether you agree with me or otherwise (and I hope it is otherwise), please tell me why 🙂

Say It Ain’t So, Please?

Or is that just nostalgia talking? Here is how Arnold Kling ends a recent blog post:

I speculate that nonfiction books are headed down the path of academic journals. They will be useful for academics positioning themselves for tenure, but they will be too slow and ponderous for communicating ideas. People who really care about ideas will turn to reading and writing substacks instead of books and journals.

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/books-are-not-information-dense

I don’t attempt to quantify it, but I’m fairly sure that the time I spend reading has not gone down over time. If anything, in fact, I think it may have gone up slightly. But what I read has certainly changed over time. Tweets, blogs, columns and articles make up the lion’s share of the time that I spend reading, and time spent on books is on a steady decline. Again, this has not been formally quantified, but given that it’s me I’m talking about, I am fairly sure that this is the case.

One of my resolutions this year was to read more long-form content, and I’ve done ok on this goal in the month of January. Not just books, but also longer articles and columns. But I’ve had to consciously set aside time for it, and have had to make an effort to continue reading beyond the point where I’m tempted to reach out for my phone and check ‘what is happening’.

On a related note, I’ve switched off all notifications on my phone, and I can tell you that it has worked wonders for me. Your mileage may vary, of course, so this is not me recommending that you do the same – but in my case, it’s been A Very Big Help.

But the ‘what is happening’ disease is real – I’ve lost the ability to go for hours without checking my phone.

All of which is to say that while I am very tempted to agree with the entirety of Arnold’s post – and please do read the whole thing, of course – I do worry about the opportunity costs of preferring tweets or substacks to books. It’s been something I’ve written about in the past, and god knows I’m not the only one worry about this:

The emergence of shorter reading formats: tweets, book summaries, blogposts (ahem) are easier to read, quicker to digest and most importantly for the era we live in, save us a lot of time.
And that, unfortunately, means that most readers today (myself included) are akin to T20 batsmen. It turns out that we are very, very good at consuming very large amounts of snippets of information – in fact, we positively excel at it.
But the opportunity cost (and it is always there, isn’t it?) is that we struggle to sit and consume a full length book. I can’t remember the last time I sat down and read a classic, for example, and struggle to read in one sitting an entire book. We’re today a generation of T20 readers, as it were. To borrow from another Aakash Chopra column from way back in the day, we’re all Murali Vijay now.

https://atomic-temporary-112243906.wpcomstaging.com/2021/01/18/on-t20-and-reading/

Most books, it is unfortunately true, ought to have been a blogpost instead. And very few blogposts, whether in isolation or as a collection, merit the promotion to a full-length book. So more often than not, you’re actually better off consuming information-dense’ content. Or as Arnold puts it, blogposts and tweets get to the point much more quickly:

Actually, showing off erudition is more of a bug than a feature. Professors who enjoy citing a wide range of references in their lectures and writing are kidding themselves if they think the rest of us have the patience for it. Niall Ferguson’s The Cash Nexus had a major, lasting influence on my view of banking and finance. But re-reading it now, it’s really painful. I want to say, “Stop showing off and get to the point.”

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/books-are-not-information-dense

The problem with short-form content (remember, TINSTAAFL!) is that every now and then, one is tempted as a reader to say “Stop being so concise and think about the nuance”. And I don’t know about you, but one is almost always tempted to say this while composing a tweet. Sure Twitter threads get around this problem somewhat, but there are cases where a book is better than a Twitter thread.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and this is something that goes for all of us. So each one of us needs to figure out the right mix of very long, long, medium, short and very short content. But just as a healthy diet for the body needs the right mix of all micro- and macro-nutrients, with the occasional fast thrown in for good measure, so also a healthy diet for the mind!

I’m still trying to figure out both the correct way to think about this, and fashion this lesson for my own personal ends, so if you have any content to share regarding this, it will be most welcome.

I’m currently agnostic about its length!

Links for Friday, 23rd Oct, 2020

Human evolution produced gossip. Cultural anthropology sees gossip as an informal way of enforcing group norms. It is effective in small groups. But gossip is not the search for truth. It is a search for approval by attacking the perceived flaws of others.

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/gossip-at-scale/

Arnold Kling writes an excellent essay about gossip and (as he puts it), the ISS. That, to be clear, stands for Internet, Smart Phones and Social Media. Excellent essay, well worth your time.

Low level of CRAR not only hampers bank health but also restricts smooth transmission of monetary policy. Injection of capital by the Government of India in public sector banks is likely to increase the credit flow to the real sector and help in smoother transmission of monetary policy.

https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIWPS12.PDF

How much of this paper is signaling/laying the groundwork, and how much of it is a genuine addition to what we already know about monetary policy? The link comes via Amol Agarwal

This is exactly why I am so pleased to see how narrowly focused the Justice Department’s lawsuit is: instead of trying to argue that Google should not make search results better, the Justice Department is arguing that Google, given its inherent advantages as a monopoly, should have to win on the merits of its product, not the inevitably larger size of its revenue share agreements. In other words, Google can enjoy the natural fruits of being an Aggregator, it just can’t use artificial means — in this case contracts — to extend that inherent advantage.

https://stratechery.com/2020/united-states-v-google

The concluding paragraph from this blog post by Ben Thompson is even better, and I was tempted to go with it, but this works too! Please read the whole thing – excellent writing, as always.

If you’re looking to get an iPad right now and can afford it, the new $599 iPad Air is the best tablet for most people. Apple has taken the design from the more expensive iPad Pro and brought it down to a more reasonable price point. It’s $100 more than it was last year, but in return this year’s iPad Air has a bigger, better screen and a faster (and very intriguing) processor.

https://www.theverge.com/21525780/apple-ipad-air-2020-review

Dieter Bohn’s review of the iPad Air (2020). If I could, I would!

Miniature paintings are among the most beautiful, most technically-advanced and most sophisticated art forms in Indian culture. Though compact (about the same size as a small book), they typically tackle profound themes such as love, power and faith. Using technologies like machine learning, augmented reality and high-definition robotic cameras, Google Arts & Culture has partnered with the National Museum in New Delhi to showcase these special works of art in a magical new way.

https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/india-miniature-masterpieces

This is a must have app on your phone. I mean, it was always a must-have app on your phone, this latest collection only makes the argument stronger!

Five articles from economists about tackling the crisis

  1. Arnold Kling advises us to not worry about “going back to normal”. It’s about winning the war, no matter what it takes. There will be a new normal at the end of it, and no one today knows what that normal will be like. Focus on winning!

    “We are acting as if our biggest worry is how to get back to our “normal,” pre-war economy. Our biggest challenge instead is to win the war, after which we will transition to an economy that looks considerably different, just as the post-WWII economy was quite different from the pre-war economy.”

  2. I found this fascinating: on how the RBI is working to keep our financial system alive.

    As the country goes on a self-imposed lockdown to fight the coronavirus contagion, a crack team of 150 people, in hazmat suits, is keeping India’s financial system up and running since March 19 from an unknown location in a completely quarantined environment. These 150 people, including 37 officials from critical departments of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), such as debt management, reserve management and monetary operations, and third-party service providers, are now in charge of the business continuity plan of the central bank, designed in a way that could help create a benchmark for such exigencies in the future as well.

  3. Greg Mankiw comes up with a form of social insurance. Here’s a challenge for you – how would you game this system?

    Let’s send every person a check for X dollars every month for the next N months. In addition, levy a surtax in 2020–due in April 2021 or perhaps spread over several years–equal to N*X*(Y2020/Y2019), where Y2020 is a person’s earnings in 2020 and Y2019 is a person’s earnings in 2019. The surtax would be capped at N*X.

  4. Via MR, how about pausing time?

    Sometimes, the best solutions to big problems are very simple. Regarding the current outbreak of COVID-19, I propose a solution that—on the surface—might seem preposterous, but if one manages to stay with it and really think through the potential benefits, then it emerges as a much more credible course of action.I propose temporarily stopping time. This means that today’s date, Tuesday, March 17th, 2020, will remain the current date until further notice. This also means that everything that happens in time (e.g. mortgage due dates, payrolls, travel bookings, stock market trading, contractor gigs, concerts, sporting events) will be paused. It also means that all of these events remain on the books, and will continue as planned once time is resumed.

     

  5. And on the same point, Tim Taylor:

    “Here, I want to focus a bit on a theme that comes up in a number of the essays: the idea that sensible economic policy can put the economy in the freezer for a few months, and the pull the economy out of the freezer, thaw it out, and restart it. I find myself in the awkward position here of largely being in agreement with this policy as a short-run approach, and at the same time also feeling that the ultimate consequences of the policy are going to be more difficult than a number of authors are envisaging. ”

    (An aside: WordPress formatting has already cut years from my life, and will continue to do so. That last bit is, to be clear, an excerpt. That is clear to me, to you – but not to WordPress)

An assortment of links, with the one common theme

Arnold Kling runs some numbers, and comes away less than optimistic:

Now for some grim math. Let C be the number of known cases, H be the ratio of hospitalizations to known cases, and D be the ratio of deaths to hospitalizations. Then we have:

(1) total deaths = DxHxC

For example, if there are 1000 known cases (C=1000), 5 percent of these are hospitalized, and 20 percent of those who are hospitalized die, then deaths = 1000x.05x.20 = 10. Note that in this particular example, I assumed that no one dies who is not hospitalized. In reality some people will die without being hospitalized, and they will count in D.

FT Alphaville with a three point agenda for economic policy, and in the order mentioned:

deal with the health crisis | make sure incomes don’t spiral downwards | investment led programs to boos incomes

Read the post for the details.

Also from FT Alphaville, a plea to let markets be:

We don’t disagree that calming markets is important; the current volatility is bad for thousands of viable businesses looking to raise capital, and for those who are hoping to retire soon. But a ban on short-selling helps absolutely no one, bar perhaps the egos of the regulatory community. Time for a change of tack.

And Alex Tabarrok over at MR is fuming about Theranos and patents. Here are old EFE posts on patents.

And finally, EconLife on externalities, the corona virus and demographics:

An externality refers to the impact of an activity or a contract or a decision on an uninvolved third party. Good and bad, externalities can be positive and negative. A vaccine creates a positive externality while water pollution results in the negative ripple. For the coronavirus, we have a cascade of results that can become positive and negative externalities. They include a depressed or accelerated birth rate and divorce rate.

 

EC101: Links for 17th October, 2019

  1. “In order to combat global poverty, we must identify the most effective forms of action. This year’s Laureates have shown how the problem of global poverty can be tackled by breaking it down into a number of smaller – but more precise – questions at individual or group levels. They then answer each of these using a specially designed field experiment. Over just twenty years, this approach has
    completely reshaped research in the field known as development economics. This new research is now delivering a steady flow of concrete results, helping to alleviate the problems of global poverty.”
    ..
    ..
    A simple primer on the work that Duflo, Benerjee and Kremer have won the Nobel Prize for.
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  2. “The first general comment is the idea of randomisation is hardly anything new for researchers who have studied or followed Indian development. The Planning Commission started something called Programme Evaluation Studies way back in 1954 which more or less studied the same thing. Agriculturists — both practitioners and researchers — have also used similar techniques of RCT to see what agricultural intervention worked.In my own research on banking history, I saw how Syndicate Bank started programmes on agricultural and rural development based on near similar ideas of randomisation. To be fair, the 2019 laureates have advanced these ideas using techniques from sampling, statistics, and econometrics to draw finer inferences.”
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    Amol Agarwal over at Moneycontrol points out a more nuanced understanding of both this year’s Nobel Prize as well as the Nobel Prize for Economics in general. Well worth reading!
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  3. The NYT profile on this year’s Nobel Prize.
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  4. “The significance of what Angrist and Pischke termed the “credibility revolution in empirical economics” can be seen in the John Bates Clark Medal awards given to researchers who participated in that revolution. Between 1995 and 2015, of the fourteen Clark Medal winners, by my estimate at least seven (Card, Levitt, Duflo, Finkelstein, Chetty, Gentzkow, and Fryer) are known for their empirical work using research designs intended to avoid the problems that Leamer highlighted with the multiple-regression approach.”
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    Mostly for those truly interested in economics, but Arnold Kling points out how more people should know about Ed Leamer.
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  5. Heavily, heavily recommended: this is the longer version of the first link above, again by the Nobel Prize committee itself.

Etc: Links for 21st June, 2019

  1. “We are doomed not because we have damaged the environment, not becasue we are running out of water; not because we have run up too much debt; not because we have accumulated too much wealth in too few hands but because we know not and refuse to admit we know not.”
    ..
    ..
    In other words, our refusal to acknowledge the unknown unknowns. The link within the article is worth a link in its own right, but that apart, this article is worth reading because of the author’s horror at how little we know, and how little we care about how little we know.
    ..
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  2. “Let’s look at the numbers, shall we? The author has written 179 books, which have been translated into 43 languages. Twenty-two of them have been adapted for television, and two of those adaptations have received Golden Globe nominations. Steel releases seven new novels a year—her latest, Blessing in Disguise, is out this week—and she’s at work on five to six new titles at all times. In 1989 Steel was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times best-seller list for the most consecutive weeks of any author—381, to be exact. To pull it off, she works 20 to 22 hours a day. (A couple times a month, when she feels the crunch, she spends a full 24 hours at her desk.)”
    ..
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    A staggering read, for many reasons. Tyler Cowen often asks guests on his podcasts about their “production function”. Danielle Steele’s production function is positively scary. Honestly, I envy people who can willingly work so hard because they want to.
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  3. “Since then, liver cells, heart cells, lung cells — in the words of Charles Weitz, “just about every tissue we’ve looked at” — have turned out to beat their own time, in addition to taking cues from the suprachiasmatic nucleus. “Almost every cell in our body has a circadian clock,” said Satchin Panda, a clock researcher at the Salk Institute. “It helps every cell figure out when to use energy, when to rest, when to repair DNA, or to replicate DNA.” Even hair cells, for instance, divide at a particular time each evening, Panda has found. Give cancer patients radiation therapy in the evening rather than in the morning and they might lose less hair.”
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    A fascinating article on the many, many clocks in our body – and why some parts of our bodies seem to not have these clocks – with disastrous consequences.
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  4. “The key signal that tornadoes were coming in the US is a phenomenon known as the Madden-Julian oscillation. Similar to El Niño, it’s a periodic swing in temperature and moisture. But unlike El Niño, the MJO originates over the Indian Ocean rather than the Pacific Ocean, it varies on a week-to-week scale rather than over the course of years, and the pattern moves eastward rather than staying put.”
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    An article that helps us understand the weather a bit better – but if anything, I think it tells us how little we know about the weather! This one is about why the USA saw so many tornadoes recently.
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  5. “My guess is that writers could contribute more at the margin by blogging than by composing books. But perhaps blogging is a more difficult skill.”
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    I had linked a while ago to a lovely essay by Andy Matuschak about books – Arnold Kling reviews that essay, and gives us his thoughts about books, blogs and podcasts – and also about scarcity, opportunity costs and substitutes.

ROW: Links for 19th June, 2019

This week, here’s a selection of five articles that help you understand issues in America a little bit better.

 

  1. “The old consensus that the US needed to help address the “root causes” of migration, by investing in the Northern Triangle countries and making it more appealing for people to stay, was never supposed to be an immediate solution to anything. Of course, Trump’s view of migration makes it less likely that anyone will be able to start work on long-term solutions that might bear fruit down the road. It is almost certainly, in the meantime, going to get worse before it gets better.”
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    Vox gives us a clearer picture on the migration crisis at the southern US border. Yes it is bad, yes, there is a crisis, and yes, it likely will get much worse before it gets a little better, for a variety of reasons. All of which are explained in this piece.
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  2. “Of course, if it hadn’t been for Roe, there also wouldn’t have been more than 50 million abortions since 1973; whether that’s a good or bad thing will be left as an exercise for the reader. But many abortions would have been performed anyway, because before the court took the issue away from voters, polls showed public opinion steadily trending in favor of legalized abortion, and the procedure was already legal in several states.”
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    Are you familiar with Roe v Wade? If you aren’t, read up about it first. Then read up about what Alabama is up to today. And finally read this article. And also consider following Megan McArdle (the author of this piece)
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  3. “Rather, regardless of what any deal achieves, the two nations appear to have entered a protracted era of competing for technological advantage, in areas ranging from aerospace and telecommunications to artificial intelligence, all with big military as well as commercial implications. Managing tensions over the issue is an increasingly important part of the U.S.-China relationship, for both sides.”
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    The Christian Science Monitor on what the trade war, or the new cold war (or whatever else it is that you want to call it) really is all about.
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  4. “This resonates with my own view. A large, established enterprise can be thought of as a cultural institution, with particular rules, norms, systems, processes, and institutional knowledge ingrained throughout the firm. In a stable environment, this corporate culture is a valuable asset. But as the business environment evolves, a firm’s culture can inhibit its ability to adapt. Cultural assets can depreciate, and one of the most difficult tasks for top management is to know when and how to replace elements of a culture that otherwise had served to keep the enterprise sturdy and reliable.”
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    Arnold Kling reviews a book that has appeared on these pages before, but the reason I put this article up here is because it helps you understand an important point about America today: it’s reviling of the corporate culture is very real – and Tyler Cowen says perhaps misplaced. Useful to think about how one should think about what made America great, and how perhaps it is changing – for the better or otherwise is your opinion entirely.
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  5. “Before I left, I asked the black waiter, Darick Thomas, how he felt about my hat. “I don’t care. At all. Really. At all! I look at a hat and that doesn’t tell me who the person is,” he said. “I’m not against Trump. He says some smart things; he says some dumb things.” Darick didn’t vote. “Voting is the illusion of choice for the masses,” he explained.”
    ..
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    What happens if you were a MAGA hat in a famously liberal restaurant in LA? This is, of course, at best an anecdote – but an enjoyable one, nonetheless.