Tag Archives: tylercowen

Another idea for the intellectual space

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The goals are to:

  • Reward old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. Find the next James Fallows, the next Chris Arnade, the next Sam Quinones.
  • Reward people who serialize major projects on line, rather than going through the book process
  • Reward people who engage in high-level discourse, fighting the trend toward what Tyler calls “Twitter economics”
  • Discover, promote, and compensate talented commentators. Find the next Scott Alexander, the next Matt Yglesias, the next Coleman Hughes

Think of this idea as a cross between a multi-author Substack and Tyler’s Emergent Ventures. Think of a producer/editor (me, for example) having a stable of 100 contributors, each of whom contributes on average one essay or podcast about every 20 days, for a total across all contributors of about 5 a day. All contributions would sit behind a single paywall, as in a newspaper subscription. Perhaps it could run on Substack, with the editor handling the administration involved in managing and compensating the contributors.

Each day, a subscriber would receive a newsletter with 200-word summaries of each of the daily contributions, along with a link to each contribution. Assuming 100,000 subscribers each paying $100 a year, that would allow for average compensation of $100,000 a year to each contributor (less after paying for overhead expenses, such as payments to Substack if we were to use that platform).

At first, we would have to get some established contributors to bring in subscribers. These contributors would have to be willing to be paid less than the value of the subscriber base they pull in, so that there would be funds for the new talents.

The editor’s job is to filter contributors, not each individual contribution. As a contributor, you produce your essay or your podcast without interference. The editor acts as an adviser. I would be willing to be an editor without monetary compensation, but as the project scales up there would be paid editors.

I do not have the connections to be able to find enough contributors to pull this off myself. But I think I could with the help of others (Reihan Salam? Tyler?)

It is a project that could scale up with more editors. It is hard to know in advance whether revenue is maximized with one giant bundle or with different bundles based on topics or channels or user-defined packages (it’s like the Cable TV pricing problem in that sense).

At sufficient scale, this project could invade the space of major news media, the advertising-based models of news provided by Google/Twitter/Facebook, and university presses.

Tyrone on social media censorship

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Supposedly, Tyler Cowen wrote this about Twitter’s decision to ban President Trump:

I am fine with their decision. Furthermore I think they made it at exactly the right moment.

But Tyler has an evil twin, Tyrone, who occasionally takes over his blog posts.

Here are my thoughts on “terms of service” and their enforcement.

1. In my case, I dislike comments that include personal attacks, especially when they are personal against other commenters or personal against me. Criticize a person’s ideas all you want, but avoid name-calling and insults. I do not have the capability to enforce this all of the time, so sometimes inappropriate comments do get through. But apart from personal attacks, I have not found myself wanting to delete comments.

2. Terms of service should be clear, not vague. You should try to make it as clear as possible how to distinguish what is ok from what is not. Examples are helpful.

3. When you delete someone’s content, you should have a good answer to the question, “You deleted X, but why did you not delete Y?” Ideally, you should be able to show that your terms of service allow Y but not X.

4. Banning an act is serious, but banning the actor is grave. Banning a person should be a very last resort. It seems right to ban someone only after they have been found multiple times to have posted content that is against your policy, you have warned them that their abuse is excessive and could result in a personal ban, and they continue their abuse.

5. When you ban a person, then you must be able to answer the question of “You banned this person, why did you not ban that person?”

6. My sense is that the main social media companies cannot give good answers to the question of “You took down X, why did you not take down Y?” A big part of the answer is that the enforcement of terms of service is costly. That is my excuse for not getting rid of every single personal attack in the comment section. But apart from that, I hope that my enforcement is not selective.

7. But enforcement costs do not excuse selectively shutting out ideas or people you dislike. As with laws, selective enforcement undermines the legitimacy of terms of service.

Tyler Cowen at Princeton, annotated

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Tyler Cowen talks about medium and long-term consequences of the virus crisis. I give it an A+.

For a couple of days I worked on a post on the economic outlook, which I scheduled to go up tomorrow. I think you will see a lot of similarity in our views. We differ in terms of tone. Tyler sounds detached and fatalistic. I sound cranky. Below are some more detailed comments of mine, sometimes amplifying his remarks and sometimes disputing them. Continue reading →

Eric Weinstein and Tyler Cowen, partially annotated

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The podcast is here.

For the first hour, it reminds me of conversations I occasionally had at home as a teenager, in which I would climb onto an intellectual ledge and my father would try to gently talk me down. Here, Tyler plays the role of my father.

At one hour and six minutes, Tyler himself climbs onto a ledge. In talking about the stagnation that began in 1973, he speaks of the “feminization” of our society.

One possibility is that he was thinking, “Our society reduced its rate of risk-taking and novelty-seeking. Women tend to like risk-taking and novelty-seeking less than men. Therefore, it is fair to speak of feminization.”

The first two statements are controversial, but suppose that they are true. The conclusion still does not follow. We need some link that connects the premises to the conclusion at the level of society. Did women, starting around 1973, acquire significant power to direct corporate investment and/or the regulatory apparatus? Or did men in these positions lose their, er, manhood around this time? I don’t think that’s a ledge you want to stand on.

Another interpretation of “feminization” works much better but is somewhat less interesting. That is, we can say that because of the decline of manufacturing and the rise of the New Commanding Heights industries of education and health care, employment opportunities for women improved while those for men worsened. At the same time, widening the door for women to enroll in universities was like opening up professional sports to African-Americans in that the formerly-excluded were able to compete effectively and some of the formerly-protected were left worse off.

This latter interpretation allows “feminization” to explain why earnings of the median working-age male have shown at best disappointing growth over the past 35 years. But it does not work as a broad sociological explanation for other phenomena, such as a slowdown in scientific discovery or an apparent decline in the productivity of civil engineering.

About 15 minutes later in the podcast, Eric tries to interest Tyler in a comparison of mainstream and heterodox thinkers. Tyler will have none of it. He says that we are the last generation that will understand the distinction. His view appears to be that institutional brand names, such as “New York Times” or “Harvard Economics Department” will not impress the Internet generation.

So where does that lead? What becomes of what Eric would call society’s “sense-making apparatus”? One scary scenario is that it doesn’t get any better than it is today, so that the loss of the information Leviathans with which we grew up will lead to a sort of Hobbesian “war of all against all.” A more optimistic scenario would be a “cream rises” outcome in which to attain broad credibility you have to rise to a very high level of intellectual rigor. Think of Scott Alexander as an example.

Scientific progress and institutions

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1. Institutions solve the problem of “phase change” as groups get larger than the Dunbar Number, of about 150 people. Below that number, you don’t need market prices, organization charts, written reports, written rules, and other formal apparatus. Somewhere around or above that number, you do.

2. Historical examples of scientific institutions that made a difference: Royal Society, Encyclopedie, German universities, Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, Institute for Advanced Studies, Xerox PARC, DARPA, Internet Engineering Task Forces, Human Genome Project.

3. But institutions can be a problem as well as a solution. In his forthcoming book, Yuval Levin notes that institutional leaders can abuse their power. We don’t hear much about the scientific labs and projects that are dysfunctional, but I would guess that abuse of power by leaders plays a role in such cases. The other problem is that individuals focus on exploiting institutions for personal gain rather than contributing to the mission of the institution. I would argue that the NSF and the Federal grant-making process have been looted like this in recent decades.

4. There may be a “narrow corridor” in which scientific progress in an area requires some institutional structure but progress is inhibited by too much structure or the wrong structure.

5. How do you reform institutions or build better ones? My guess is that reform requires replacing a cadre of leaders with Young Turks. That probably is hard to do with something like NSF. It might be easier to do–but still quite difficult–at a tech firm or a pharmaceutical company.

6. My guess is that building new and better scientific institutions requires a fortunate combination of compelling mission and visionary leadership among the founding team. The leaders are sometimes strong scientists (e.g., Oppenheimer) but often strong scientists are not skilled at bringing out the best in others.

7. What would be a compelling vision today? Improving human longevity? Improving human cognition? Augmented reality sufficient to substitute for in-person meetings?

8. And how do you develop skill at choosing the founder or founders for scientific institutions? What qualities do great institutional founders have?

Cultures of conventional failure

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In this essay, I will offer a theory of slow progress based on the maxim, “It is often easier to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” My claim will be that in health care, education, and construction/infrastructure, the consuming public is more receptive to conventional failure than unconventional success. This is less the case in other realms, so progress is faster in those realms. We are willing to try ride-sharing apps or airbnb, but no middle-class parent wants to tell their peers that their kids are not going to an established college.

In the Zuckerberg-Cowen-Collison conversation, Zuckerberg repeatedly asks why costs are high in health care, education, and rent.

So you were talking a minute ago about the explosion in costs in healthcare. And right now, I think one of the defining aspects of the moment that we’re in is a lot of the basic costs of living for a lot of people have just increased a lot. . .things that matter so much like healthcare, education, rent–those things have generally just increased, right? And the normal dynamics that you’d be hoping would play out aren’t. And to some degree, for the quality of life for a lot of people, the increases in those costs may even be dwarfing all the other advances in everything else

1. As I was listening, I was frustrated, because I wanted to point to my essay What Gets Expensive, and Why?. There I include the Baumol effect, but note my critical comments on the attempt by Alex Tabarrok to put it all on the Baumol effect.

2. Patrick notes that our ability to do large construction projects has declined over the past 70 years or so.

it’s very clear that our productivity has fallen off a cliff and for reasons that we can be pretty sure are not that it’s getting intrinsically harder. And so, for example, when New York decided to build the subway in 1900…4.7 years later, they opened 23 subway stations, and in 2019 dollars, they spent just over a billion dollars doing so. … When New York decided to build the Second Avenue subway in the year 2000, 17 years later they opened three stations and they spent $4 1/2 billion doing so. And so our productivity in subway construction has, at least in New York, decreased by a factor of 40. … California, you have high speed rail where… when France decided to build the TGV, its high speed rail, it opened the first line after five years. California started pursuing high speed rail 11 years ago. They forecast–we forecast–being finished in 2033. So we project a 25-year project, but of course, that’s a projection. It’ll probably end up being much longer

3. I already gave away my instinct on this when I wrote,

my inclination is to focus on broader cultural values. The enemies of progress are fear of novelty and envy of success. My thinking is that when those enemies hold sway, progress will be slow. When those enemies are weak, progress will be rapid.

I agree with Tyler that there is a lack of will. In the case of infrastructure projects or housing development, we now have a culture of conventional failure. Look at how hard it has been for Google to try to find a city that will allow it to experiment with a city of the future. Cities are only willing to approve politically correct development–bicycle lanes, as opposed to dedicated lanes for self-driving cars.

4. Patrick says,

empirically the entry costs of forming a new university are really high, but that’s not because there’s a kind of formal toll you have to pay. It’s not like zoning where there are deliberate, specific legal restrictions that prohibit you from doing so. But just as a practical matter sociologically, institutionally, accreditation dynamics, who knows, it’s apparently almost impossibly difficult to create a successful new university today.

Again, that is because we prefer conventional failure to unconventional success. I recently was hosted by a family in Texas. The oldest daughter was in the midst of applying to college. I wanted to scream “No! Don’t do it!” I do not believe that she is ready to go to college. I think she would be much better off just working at a low-paying job for a year or two and living on her own. I believe that is true for the vast majority of high school seniors these days.

Patrick is in the business of making it easier to start a company. Suppose he were in the business of making it easier to start a university. From the standpoint of technology, that seems like a very plausible business. Tools exist to deliver education in different ways. Look at Tyler’s and Alex’s MRU. The barriers are mostly cultural. Nobody wants to be the parent whose child succeeds unconventionally by taking a nontraditional approach to higher education.

I also want to scream “No!” when I see wealthy donors giving money to universities. The top schools have these enormous endowments already, which act like moats protecting them from competition. Don’t help them fill their moats! Instead, put that money into higher education start-ups. But if you give to your alma mater or to create a research institute at an established university, you can enjoy conventional failure. That seems to be more appealing to philanthropists than unconventional success.

Tyler and Patrick offer some provocative views about the way that success in research tends to come from less conventional institutional processes. But people stick with the conventional. For example, Tyler says

So I think in general, big questions are under-studied– the tenure system, I think, increasingly is broken. A lot of academics do work pretty hard, but that so much of your audience is a narrowly defined set of peers who write you reference and tenure letters–I think we need to change. And the incentive for academics to integrate with practitioners and learn from them and actually try doing things–we need more of that. I’ve often suggested for graduate school, instead of taking a class, everyone should be sent to a not-so-highincome village for two weeks. They can do whatever they want. Just go for two weeks, think about things. No one wants to do this. No one wants to experiment with it.

And I would add, require internships for economists. You can learn a lot while working in business.

Turning to health care, I think that Zuckerberg over-states the amount of money wasted in futile care in the last six months of life. But I think that the point is correct that we undergo many procedures with high costs and low benefits. I strongly believe that if we took away dollars at the margin from medical procedures and put those dollars into public health measures, the net effect would be positive. But wasting money on medical procedures with high costs and low benefits is a way to fail conventionally.

In short, when it comes to urban construction/civil engineering, education, and health care, we have evolved cultures of conventional failure. Innovation and entrepreneurship are discouraged. The heavy influence of government in these sectors probably serves to reinforce this. But ultimately the political process gives us something like what most people want. As Pogo would put it, we have met the enemy of progress, and he is us.

Telepresence

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[Note: I originally scheduled this post to be published next week, but I moved it up after listening to the conversation between Mark Zuckerberg, Tyler Cowen, and Patrick Collison. In the transcript, Zuckerberg says

So rather than people moving–inventing a new hyperloop or cars, I tend to think the set of technologies around–whether it’s augmented reality or virtual reality or video presence that just lets people be where they wanna be physically and feel present with other people wherever they need to be to do their job, to connect with the people they care about–that feels to me the better long-term solution.

Those are the thoughts I express and elaborate on below.]

I remember hearing Robert Metcalfe (link goes to Wikipedia) speak about twenty years ago, and when he was asked what he thought was the killer application for the Internet, he said “telepresence.”

I thought of this when I saw the paper on mobility in the United States by Kyle Mangum and Patrick Coate, pointer from Tyler Cowen.

repeat mobility is common. That is, people living in their “home” locations are far less likely to migrate than those away from home.

My train of thought went as follows.

1. I view the paper as showing that many people come to like where they live. The repeat movers are either innately restless or experimenting.

2. When people my age talk about their children’s work lives, a sentence that comes up frequently is, “They let him (her) work remotely.” Of my three daughters, one works in Boston for an organization based in Maryland, one works from home three days a week, and the third probably could continue to work remotely if her husband moves.

3. In fact, a lot of married couples have job opportunities in different cities.

4. Recall that Patrick Collison said that his firm set up a department that he calls “Remote.”

5. As Patrick pointed out in that same conversation with Reid Hoffman, Zoom Meeting is quite a step forward in the videoconferencing arena. I can’t really articulate what makes it better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but it just feels more conference-y.

6. If I were in the venture capital business, I would make a bet that remote work will grow exponentially, and I would assemble a portfolio of companies based on that bet. Will more people wear body cameras? Do small companies need better support for interstate human resource functions? What are the needs of the home-office worker? What sorts of meeting-scheduling systems address the challenges posed by remote work forces?

7. I think that blue-collar work may be an overlooked opportunity for telepresence. Techies talk about telemedicine, but it seems to me that it is much harder to remotely work on someone’s body than it is to do other tasks remotely. So blue-collar telepresence may come first. Professor Daniel Markovitz, author of the Meritocracy Trap (in another conversation I plan to annotate) says that Amazon warehouse workers already are subject to remote monitoring.

–How about tele-sanitation? Bathrooms at places like airports and hospitals have to be cleaned and re-stocked very often, and robots could do that. But the robots might not be able to operate completely independently. A remote operator could help the robot be more adaptable to situations.

–How about tele-chauffer? Even if self-driving cars are not ready for the road, who says that the driver has to be in the car? In the case of truck driving, the number one source of job dissatisfaction is being away from home all the time Telepresence could solve that problem. Perhaps a co-pilot does not have to be on the plane (assuming you want the pilot to be there).

–The highway construction workers who operate machines. Do they need to be there?

–The workers building skyscrapers. Could they operate by managing robots remotely?

8. Think of what Zoom Meeting and other telepresence apps will be able to do when 5G is ubiquitous.

How should elites replicate?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another. Otherwise they tend to fade away;

At first, I had a hard time figuring out what he meant. So here was my thought process:

In context, Cowen seems to be defending non-merit based means by which an elite replicates. That is, to be a replicating elite, you have to give unfair advantages and disadvantages to people trying to join the elite. As another example, he writes,

I was struck by a recent paper showing that “almost 80 percent of the faculty at a top 10 economics department did their Ph.D. in a top 10 department.”

It is possible that this shows the ability of top departments to select the most promising students, so that if you don’t get into a top 10 department you are probably a clod. I am sure that is what the departments themselves believe, and if it’s true, then the paper is uninteresting. On the other hand, it could be that hiring at top departments is a game of “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” played by thesis advisers. If that is the case, then what you have is selection for orthodoxy.

I think both mechanisms are at work. The lesser departments tend to get a fair amount of clods to work with. And the better departments give an unfair disadvantage to heterodox thinkers.

So I think that what Cowen means by an elite “replicating” is something like this:

An elite replicates if the selection process for new members ensures that they tend to respect and enhance the status of incumbent members. That is, I would replace the word “replication” with “holding onto status acquired when you became a member.”

The potential problem is that the goal of protecting the status of existing members may cause too much diversion away from true merit. I believe that this is what has happened in many academic disciplines. Cowen may disagree.

Next, you can ask what would happen if whites became a minority at Harvard. Would current white Harvard alumni (the relevant incumbents) lose status if newly-admitted Harvard students were heavily Asian? One way to read Cowen is that Harvard is acting as if it believes this to be the case.