Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger

How to work with Arnold

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Stripe Press has launched, with a book called High Growth Handbook, by Elad Gil, about taking a successful start-up through the stage where it has hundreds of employees. Books scheduled for later release include one from Tyler Cowen and a revised edition of Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public that includes a forward from yours truly.

I liked parts of Gil’s book. It focuses on an interesting phase for a business–not a start-up, not mature, but in the process of growing from sub-Dunbar to super-Dunbar, from a tribal band to a Weberian bureaucracy.

But I would have been much more demanding as an editor. I would have gotten rid of all the advice that I think is non-actionable, “Make sure you hire a ____ who is smart.” “Don’t do too little X, but don’t do too much, either.” etc. On some topics, I would have pressed for more specific examples, as when the author interviews Patrick Collison, who says

some of these companies–by no means all, but some of them–are in the process of making either major cultural or organizational errors

You don’t have to name names, but at least describe one or two of the types of errors you are talking about.

In fact, I would have asked Gil to devote more discussion to companies that failed in the high-growth phase. What went wrong at MySpace? Netscape? AOL? Napster?

There are some actionable ideas in the book. One of them is for an executive to circulate a document that describes “how to work with me.” If I had thought of doing something like this back when I was in business, here are some things I could have written, some to communicate with my supervisor, some to communicate with people working for me:

1. Don’t give me too many things to do at once. I need to feel like I have my work under control.

2. If you want me to do something that requires my utmost concentration, let me work on it in the morning.

3. If you want me to do something that I hate doing, find someone else to do it.

4. I often give vague project assignments. Push back with clarifying questions, until you know what to do or until I back off because I realize that I don’t really know what I want.

5. When I give a deadline, it is the last possible moment to complete a project. When you miss a deadline, I am devastated. When you just make a deadline, I am disappointed. Get it done sooner.

6. I hate it when people focus on assigning blame. When something goes wrong, focus on fixing it.

7. I like sharing interesting articles and books that I come across. Feel free to do the same with me.

8. I believe in hiring people for attitude and ability, not for experience.

9. The key attitude is being oriented toward solving problems rather than just complaining. I will not tolerate a chronic complainer.

10. I’ll let a software developer get away with being a prima donna*, if you’ve got the right combination of ability, conscientiousness, and stamina. Show me you can really get stuff done, in which case I’d rather keep you happy and let other employees get annoyed than the other way around.

*I define a prima donna as someone who thinks that their superior talent demands recognition and special treatment

Eric Weinstein on Inequality

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Interviewed by Sean Illing for Vox. A couple of excerpts:

I believe that market capitalism, as we’ve come to understand it, was actually tied to a particular period of time where certain coincidences were present. There’s a coincidence between the marginal product of one’s labor and one’s marginal needs to consume at a socially appropriate level. There’s also the match between an economy mostly consisting of private goods and services that can be taxed to pay for the minority of public goods and services, where the market price of those public goods would be far below the collective value of those goods.

Beyond that, there’s also a coincidence between the ability to train briefly in one’s youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we’ve typically called a career or profession, and I believe that many of those coincidences are now breaking, because they were actually never tied together by any fundamental law.

. . .A friend of mine said to me, “The modern airport is the perfect metaphor for the class warfare to come.” And I asked, “How do you see it that way?” He said, “The rich in first and business class are seated first so that the poor may be paraded past them into economy to note their privilege.” I said, “I think the metaphor is better than you give it credit for, because those people in first and business are actually the fake rich. The real rich are in another terminal or in another airport altogether.”

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I would describe the interview as a set of very interesting threads, which to my frustration are left dangling. I don’t know whether the fault lies with Eric, the interviewer, or the editor.

Christian exceptionalism

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Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich write,

the institutions built around kinship and marriage vary greatly across societies (21–23) and that much of this variation developed as societies scaled up in size and complexity, especially after the origins of food production 12,000 years ago (22, 24–29). In forging the tightly-knit communities needed to defend agricultural fields and pastures, cultural evolution gradually wove together social norms governing marriage, post-marital residence and ingroup identity (descent), leading to a diversity of kin-based institutions, including the organizational forms known as clans, lineages and kindreds (21, 27, 30). The second insight, based on work in psychology, is that people’s motivations, emotions, perceptions, thinking styles and other aspects of cognition are heavily influenced by the social norms, social networks, technologies and linguistic worlds they encounter while growing up (31–38). In particular, with intensive kin-based institutions, people’s psychological processes adapt to the collectivistic demands and the dense social networks that they interweave (39–43). Intensive kinship norms reward greater conformity, obedience, holistic/relational awareness and in-group loyalty but discourage individualism, independence and analytical thinking (41, 44). Since the sociality of intensive kinship is based on people’s interpersonal embeddedness, adapting to these institutions tends to reduce people’s inclinations towards impartiality, universal (non-relational) moral principles and impersonal trust, fairness and cooperation. Finally, based on historical evidence, the third insight suggests that the branch of Western Christianity that eventually evolved into the Roman Catholic Church—hereafter, ‘the Western Church’ or simply ‘the Church’—systematically undermined the intensive kin-based institutions of Europe during the Middle Ages (45–52). The Church’s marriage policies and prohibitions, which we will call the Marriage and Family Program (MFP), meant that by 1500 CE, and likely centuries earlier in some regions, Europe lacked strong kin-based institutions, and was instead dominated by relatively weak, independent and isolated nuclear or stem families (49–51, 53–56). This made people exposed to Western Christendom rather unlike nearly all other populations.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who tells us how politically incorrect the paper is by saying that he expected (but did not find) a Steve Sailer citation. This paper should be catnip for the IDW.

Possibly related, but not as controversial: I did a podcast with Russ Roberts recently (it may or not already be up) on the theme that human beings are social. I argue for the importance of culture, based in part on my reading of Henrich. Compared with animals, for humans the ratio of culturally learned behavior to innate behavior is extremely high. This is important, in my view.

Almost certainly related: The Origins of English Individualism, by Alan MacFarlane.

Can the academy be saved? part 2

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Tyler Cowen thinks that at least part of higher education should be redesigned from scratch.

especially those tiers below the top elite universities. Completion rates are astonishingly low, and also not very transparent (maybe about 40 percent?). I would ensure that every single student receives a reasonable amount of one-on-one tutoring and/or mentoring in his or her first two years. In return, along budgetary lines, I would sacrifice whatever else needs to go, in order to assure that end.

I am not sure I would exempt the elite schools. Just because they have better graduation rates does not mean that the benefits exceed the costs. Depends on how you measure, especially “compared to what.” You can’t just take two people and say this one went to Harvard and that one didn’t and compare their earnings. You have to figure out what would have happened had both taken the same educational path. My reading of the relevant literature is that it supports the Null Hypothesis.

I think that the idea of close personal mentoring is the model that existed hundreds of years ago. It might still be the best model.

Technology and Autocracy

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Tyler Cowen writes,

the governance technologies and strategies of authoritarian regimes have become much more efficient.

I’m not sure that this holds in general. Venezuela?

I am willing to speculate that right now autocrats have a comparative advantage at staying in power. That is, in a Martin Gurri world, where the public is in revolt in many places (Italy, Germany, the U.S., Iran, various countries in Latin America), it is easier for an official to remain in power if he has the tools to suppress the most challenging forms of opposition.

Eric Weinstein on the IDW

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He speaks and futzes with a coffee mug in a twenty-minute video, in which he explains the origins of the intellectual dark web. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

My thoughts.

1. Weinstein speaks of “we” as if the label IDW was concocted by a a conspiracy of folks sitting in a room kicking around ideas for names. I doubt that it happened that way.

2. I think that my post following the Bari Weiss article mostly got the IDW’s philosophy correct. I wrote,

Really, the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.

Although he uses different terminology, Weinstein seems to suggest that institutions of the mainstream media–he names CNN, NPR, the NYT, and “magazines like The Atlantic“–have degenerated into put-downs and expressions of outrage at the expense of reporting the news. Stories that would reflect badly on the ability or moral conduct of oppressed groups, or that would reflect favorably on the moral conduct of privileged groups, cannot be processed by these institutions that hitherto were fairly reliable curators of news. The IDW is a reaction against, or an alternative to, the dereliction of duty on the part of the mainstream outlets. Not an alternative news source, but an alternative source of discussion and analysis.

3. Weinstein thinks that the mainstream media will not appreciate a rival. But it is worse than that. The oppressor-oppressed narrative is a main binding tribal force for progressives. I would say the main binding force. I doubt that these folks can tolerate someone who claims to be on the left but challenges that narrative. The Jonathan Haidts and Eric Weinsteins of the world are going to be chased out of their village with spears and rocks.

4. After watching the video, I would say that the IDW is making a wager. The bet is this: we know that we will be branded as racists or troglodytes by the mainstream media. Our wager is that the public will see us as the decent human beings we are, and the attacks will rebound to discredit the mainstream media rather than discredit those who identify with the IDW.

I know from watching other videos that Weinstein is far from confident that he can win such a wager. But the attempt is to his credit.

How to not write a book

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Tyler Cowen writes,

One good reason to write a book is when you have the feeling you cannot do anything else without getting the book out of your system. In that sense, you can think of the lust to write books as a kind of disability.

Read the whole post, which is filled with cynical comments directed at anyone who wishes to write a book. I will add these:

1. Assume that one year from publication the book will not be read by anyone unless one of your grandchildren picks it up.

2. If you don’t get advice about writing a marketable book, you may have to self-publish and your book will sell fewer than 1000 copies. If you do get advice, you will sell fewer than 1000 copies and you won’t like your book as much.

3. Writing a negative review of someone’s book is like telling a mother that her newborn baby looks ugly. Yet many of us cannot resist writing negative reviews.

Two views of California

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Peter Leyden wrote,

So how has California’s big, bold progressive political approach worked for the state? It turns out — awesome. The California economy is booming, doing better than the rest of the United States by many standard economic measures. Since Brown started leading as governor, California has added 2.3 million jobs, which leads the nation (from 2012 to 2016, California accounted for 17 percent of job growth in the United States, and a quarter of the growth in GDP.) From 2011 to 2014 coming off the Great Recession, California’s economic growth rate was 4.1 percent. In 2016, California’s rate was still 2.9 percent compared to rival Texas’s paltry growth rate of 0.4.

Michael Shellenberger writes (pointer from Tyler Cowen),

Where 56 percent of Californians could afford a middle-class home in 2012, in the third quarter of 2017, just 28 percent could.

…Progressive leaders who daily denounce Republicans as racist have blithely presided over a significant decline in the academic performance of black and Latino eighth graders relative to their counterparts in other states. Today, less than 40 percent of non-white and non-Asian students meet state educational standards.

There is more at both links. Did you two visit the same state?