Economics

Goodbye Rudy

Aside Rick Weber Economics , ,

In 2008 I found myself at SJSU study economics as an undergrad. That was the big turning point that landed me on this blog.

A lot of people insist that was a fantastically interesting time to study economics, what with the global financial sector crumbling and society at large humbly learning a lesson in allowing markets to discipline irresponsible risk taking. (Right? Isn’t that what happened?). But for me, what was fascinating was the intellectual framework that allowed you to dig into the root causes. The SJSU econ department was a fantastic place for me to start building up that framework.

Fall 2008 was professor Rudy Gonzalez’s last semester before retirement and my second semester in that program. I took advantage. Rather than four discrete classes (Law & Econ, History of Economic Thought, Labor Econ, and Public Choice) I essentially had a 12 credit class in Economics broadly understood. It was the most intellectually fruitful semester in my economics career.

Rudy was the sort of freewheeling professor I try to be. He set a tone. In Rudy’s classes I learned the most in the gaps between the stuff for the exam. My classmates and I came out of his classes debating concepts and engaging with ideas. This was the semester I wrote my best joke: The Physiocrats. I learned a lot from studying for those exams, but the best stuff was in the digressions.

I think my students hate it when I digress. They’ve been trained by a lifetime of standardized tests and the empty promise that ambition is as simple as uncritically ticking off the right boxes: take these classes in this order, get a degree, then get a job (whatever that means). There’s a lot of lip service to the importance of education, but now education is a commodity. Bricks to be stacked mechanically.

In Rudy’s class, education was a process of enlightenment. Knowledge wasn’t an assembly of bricks, but a garden–different bits of knowledge growing and complementing one another, fertilized with jokes and stories.

It was in his class I decided I wanted to be an economics professor. He also gave me a copy of the paper that convinced me of anarchism. I’m still trying to share a taste of the excitement I got in his class with my students. It’s an uphill battle, but I’m glad I’ve had the chance to fight ignorance with economics and humor.

Goodbye Rudy. You will be missed.

Computational Economics is the Right Perspective

Rick Weber Economics, Liberty, Philosophy , ,

Here’s a vastly oversimplified picture of mainstream economics: We pick some phenomenon, assume all the context into the background, then build a model that isolates only the variables specifically relevant to that phenomenon.

Once you’ve simplified the problem that way, you can usually build a formal mathematical model, make a few more (hopefully) reasonable enough assumptions, and make some strong ceteris paribus claims about your chosen phenomena.

That’s a reasonable enough approach, but it doesn’t shed much light on big picture issues. I’m interested in root causes, and this “reduce things to their component parts” approach doesn’t give enough of a big picture to find those roots.

How do we broaden our perspective? One approach is to return to the more “literary” approach of the pre-Samuelson days. A bit of philosophy of science has me convinced that the primary flaw of such an approach is rhetorical. Written and mathematical arguments leave some assumptions in the background, but the latter is more convincing to a generation of economists trained to be distrustful of natural language (and too trusting of algebra).

As a pluralist, I think we should use as many approaches as we can. Different schools of thoughts allow you to build different imaginary worlds in your mind. But the computational approach isn’t getting enough play. I’d go so far as saying agent based modeling is the right form of mathematics for social science.

What does this mean? In a nutshell, it means modelling processes, simulating those processes, and seeing how interactions between different agents leads to different sorts of outcomes.

A common trope among Emergent Order folks is how ants are individually stupid but collectively brilliant. Neoclassical economics runs into the opposite problem: individually brilliant individuals who get trapped in Prisoners’ Dilemmas.

Computational economics starts with models that are more like ants than homo economicus. Agents are essentially bundles of heuristics/strategies in an out-of-equilibrium world. But these competing (and cooperating) strategies can interact in interesting ways. Each agent is a part of all the other agents’ environment, so the mix of strategies is a function of the success of the strategies which is a function of the mix of strategies in the environment.

In essence, computational economics starts from what the mainline economists have long recognized: human society is a complex, interwoven, recursive process. The world is, essentially, a sort of meta computer with a complex web of programs interacting and evolving. We don’t need to assume in any sort deus ex machina (that’s a bit of an overstatement, but we haven’t got time to explore it this week), we just need replicating entities that can change over time.

Such a view, to my mind, provides an end run around rationality assumptions that can explain the brilliance of entrepreneurship (without making heroes out of the merely lucky) as well as the folly unearthed by Behavioralist economics (without the smugness). We’ve always known it. It’s all just evolution. But the methodology hasn’t made its way into the main stream of economics. If there are any undergrads reading this on their way to a PhD program, let me know in the comments so I can point you in some interesting directions!

Be Our Guest: “The U.S. Economy: A Fading Illusion?”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics , , , ,

This essay, by longtime NOL reader and CPA Jack Curtis, is the first essay of 2020’s “Be Our Guest” feature. Here is a snippet:

This widespread financial vulnerability seems a natural result of government policies that minimize interest rates and support monetary inflation as the Federal Reserve and other central banks have continued to do in recent decades. There is little incentive to save money when it offers no significant return and its value is inflated away. Governments that cling to such policies are imposing dependence upon their citizens, forcing them in essence to live hand to mouth, deprived of the ability to provide for their own futures.

Jack paints a pretty gloom picture of the U.S. economy. Does this square with what economists have been telling us about the state of the world? Please, read the whole essay, and if you have been thinking about writing for the public in 2020, give us a holler. We’d be happy to put your thoughts up for the whole world to read.

Sunday Poetry: Gender Equality where it matters? The Scandinavian Unexceptionalism

Alexander Albrecht Books, Culture, Economics, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , ,

Deja-Vu! Social Democrats once again bring up the topic of “Democratic Socialism” to cure all of the evils of the world. Once again, the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Finnland, Denmark and Norway) are used as an example of how “a third way Socialism” can work. Although I still would consider myself young, I have already lost all of my stamina to engage in the same debates all over again until they pop up again a few months after.

So, instead of pointing out the fallacy in labelling the Scandinavian countries moderately socialist (Nima Sanandaji, for example, does an excellent job in doing so), I want to look at one aspect in particular: The myth of peak emancipation of woman in the labour market in these countries. So apologies for neglecting Poetry once again for the sake of interesting information. Have a look at the following graphic and the remarks by Sanandaji:

“Some boards in Nordic nations are actively engaged in how the companies they represent are run. Others have a more supervisory nature, meeting a few times a year to oversee the work of the management. The select few individuals who occupy board positions – many of whom reach this position after careers in politics, academia and other non-business sectors – have prestigious jobs. They are, however, not representative of those taking the main decisions in the business sector. The important decisions are instead taken by executives and directors. Typically individuals only reach a high managerial position in the private sector after having worked for a long time in that sector or successfully started or expanded a firm as an entrepreneur. The share of women to reach executive and director positions is the best proxy for women’s success in the business world. Eurostat has gathered data for the share of women among ‘directors and chief executives’ in various European countries between 2008 and 2010. The data show that Nordic nations all have low levels of women at the top of businesses. In Denmark and Sweden, only one out of ten directors and chief executives in the business world are women. Finland and the UK fare slightly better. Those Central and Eastern European countries for which data exist have much higher representation.

sanandaji.png

[…]

A key explanation lies in the nature of the welfare state. In Scandinavia, female-dominated sectors such as health care and education are mainly run by the public sector.
A study from the Nordic Innovation Centre (2007: 12–13) concludes: Nearly 50 per cent of all women employees in Denmark are employed in the public sector. Compared to the male counterpart where just above 15 per cent are employed in the public sector. This difference alone can explain some of the gender gap with respect to entrepreneurship. The same story is prevalent in Sweden. The lack of competition reduces long-term productivity growth and overall levels of pay in the female-dominated public sector. It also combines with union wage-setting to create a situation where individual hard work is not rewarded significantly: wages are flat and wage rises follow seniority, according to labour union contracts, rather than individual achievement. Women in Scandinavia can, of course, become managers within the public sector, but the opportunities for individual career paths, and certainly for entrepreneurship, are typically more limited compared within the private sector.

If you are interested in the whole book, it is completely available online for free.

I wish you all a pleasant Sunday.

A Lesson in Inventing Your Own Statistics

Joakim Book Economics, Philosophy , , ,

Nothing makes me happier than pointing out when someone is wrong.

I admit, that’s a pretty sad life. And for some unfathomable reason that doesn’t endear me to the person who uttered the incorrect statement – which it really should as I’m correcting some mistaken belief of theirs, assisting them on the path to truth.

Perhaps, as Jonathan Haidt teaches us, my endeavour is a hopeless one as approaching truth is forever clouded by confirmation bias. Polarization runs rampant and scientific disciplines are scarred by replication crises and publication bias.

I don’t take issue with any of those points: reduce my ambitions to “a little less wrong” and what follows still holds.

A few days after the Riksbank had upped its interest rate to 0% last month, Daniel Lacalle, a Spanish economist, author and fund manager – and whose musings are usually quite insightful – decided to vent his (questionable) objections to central banks and negative interest rates (NIRP) in a very strange way:

  1. Deliver a bunch of vague one-liners about monetary policy and unsustainable capital markets.
  2. Make shit up about Sweden and Swedish capital markets.

Obviously, I don’t mind too much the rhetoric of those who vehemently oppose central banks, but I do mind people pulling numbers out of their behinds and just inventing things about the world that clearly are not true.

So let’s do some fact-checking.

It’s apparently really bad for governments to have public debt – and negative interest rates allegedly work like crack-cocaine for politicians in their endless desire for more and more and more underfunded expenditures. Spend away, minister!

Except that many (non-crisis) countries such as Sweden aren’t borrowing. In fact, Sweden’s debt-to-GDP ratio is at its lowest point since 2012 and has been dropping like a stone since about the time that the Riksbank first lowered its policy rate to below 0%. In fact, as the Riksbank sits on over 35% of the outstanding government debt, there’s been quite a scramble among commercial banks to meet their capital requirements; there aren’t enough bonds to go around. The big macro debate in Sweden right now is over how much more the government ought to spend given that the debt is so small.

My favorite part is when Lacalle starts inventing numbers to support his case. Strangely enough, he’s arguing that NIRP fuels an unsustainable boom such that increasing share prices and property prices (things that most of us individually tend to think are good or at least harmless) are, in Lacalle’s mind, actually evidence of how bad life is.

Ye, I too hate it when my retirement fund or house go up in value.

  1. Sweden’s “Real estate price index has increased 50 percent (from 160 points to 240).”

The official statistics agency, Statistics Sweden, reports a +17 increase in broad real estate indices since early 2015, but they only include data until late-2018. The index is also on a completely different level, suggesting that Lacalle used some other source. 

Using numbers from Ekonomifakta we find house price increases of 9% and 19% across various regions from Q1 2015 (when the Riksbank NIRP policy began) to Q3 2019. Again, wrong index numbers so couldn’t have been Lacalle’s source.

But maybe house prices have increased some in the last few months such that Lacalle’s 50% number is correct? No, they’ve been flat, reports the realtor industry organization Svensk Mäklarstatistik.

Searching high and low for a Swedish house price index that conforms to Lacalle’s peculiar range (160 to 240), I finally found a promising one at Trading Economics:

Trading econ Sweden House Price Index.png

Interestingly enough, Lacalle seems to have misread the chart; the index value for Feb 2015 is around 190 – not 160 – producing a much more reasonable +26% increase over the last five years. Even that, as we’ve seen with the more reputable sources above, might be tad exaggerated.

2. Sweden’s stock market is up “more than 20%”

Next up: the stock market – always a grateful subject for unsubstantiated rants.

“more than 20%” is cheating as technically anything above “20%” would work. Curiously enough, no index for the Swedish stock market shows those numbers between Feb 18, 2015, and today:

  • OMXS30, a commonly quoted index that does not include dividends, is up 8% since then.
  • Using indices that do account for (reinvested) dividends, OMXSPI shows 27.5% gain since NIRP was introduced;
  • OMXS30GI shows a 30.5% gain;
  • and OMXSCAPGI reports a 52% return.

Then again, if gradually increasing stock markets are a bad thing, then why didn’t Lacalle go with the highest, most inflated number he could find?

3. “Average residential index” is apparently up 27%

Not a statistics I’m familiar with, but I refer the reader to (1) above for sources on property prices.

4. “nonreplicable assets have risen between 30 and 70 percent”

First: that’s quite a range, Sir.
Second: ye, I’ve never heard that term before (let alone something to measure it) – and neither, it seems, has Google. I suspect Lacalle invented some more numbers to complement his already fake-y statistics. 

Tl;dr – don’t just make shit up, kids. Do look into your claims before you mindless utter them. You may be entitled to your own opinion (actually not really), but you can’t just believe whatever you want, making shit up along the way.

There is no Bloomberg for medicine

Kevin Kallmes Economics, Liberty , , , ,

When I began working in medical research, I was shocked to find that no one in the medical industry has actually collected and compared all of the clinical outcomes data that has been published. With Big Data in Healthcare as such a major initiative, it was incomprehensible to me that the highest-value data–the data that is directly used to clear therapies, recommend them to the medical community, and assess their efficacy–were being managed in the following way:

  1. Physician completes study, and then spends up to a year writing it up and submitting it,
  2. Journal sits on the study for months, then publishes (in some cases), but without ensuring that it matches similar studies in the data it reports.
  3. Oh, by the way, the journal does not make the data available in a structured format!
  4. Then, if you want to see how that one study compares to related studies, you have to either find a recent, comprehensive, on-point meta-analysis (which is a very low chance in my experience), or comb the literature and extract the data by hand.
  5. That’s it.

This strikes me as mismanagement of data that are relevant to lifechanging healthcare decisions. Effectively, no one in the medical field has anything like what the financial industry has had for decades–the Bloomberg terminal, which presents comprehensive information on an updatable basis by pulling data from centralized repositories. If we can do it for stocks, we can do it for medical studies, and in fact that is what I am trying to do. I recently wrote an article on the topic for the Minneapolis-St Paul Business Journal, calling for the medical community to support a centralized, constantly-updated, data-centric platform to enable not only physicians but also insurers, policymakers, and even patients examine the actual scientific consensus, and the data that support it, in a single interface.

Read the full article at https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2019/12/27/there-is-no-bloomberg-for-medicine.html!

Sunday Poetry: Rüstow vs. Mises

Alexander Albrecht Culture, Economics, History, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

One of the bests books I’ve read this year was Serge Audier’s & Jurgen Reinhoudt’s relatively unknown (unfortunately!) translation of the protocols of the Walter-Lippmann-Colloquium. The NOUS-Network organized a wonderful seminar in which we thoroughly discussed the book and the emergence of Neoliberalism. For the preparation of this weekend’s Hayek-Kreis seminar, I reread the book and stood once again in awe of the magnificence of the discussion during the Colloquium.

By the way: If you are an undergraduate, graduate, or PhD scholar, please consider joining the NOUS-Network for Constitutional Economics and Social Philosophy as a Young Affiliate! NOUS is an information platform and a community for interdisciplinary research. The network links all academic fields relevant for thinking about social order and liberty. It spans philosophy, politics, economics and fosters scholarly research, contact and exchange.

In the following excerpt, it becomes clear, that the participant’s opinion on the psychological and sociological causes of the decline of Liberalism differed significantly. Mr Rüstow eloquently captures the standpoints of the two opposing groups (not without bias to be fair) and even cheekily disses Ludwig von Mises.

“Mr Rüstow: ‘All things considered, it is undeniable that here, in our circle, two different points of view are represented. One group does not find anything essential to criticize or to change in traditional liberalism, such as it was and such as it is, apart from, naturally, the adjustments and the current developments that are self-evident.

In their view, the responsibility for all the misfortune falls exclusively on the opposite side, on those who, out of stupidity or out of malice, or through a mixture of both, cannot or do not want to discern and observe the salutary truths of liberalism. 

We, on the other hand, we seek the responsibility for the decline of liberalism in liberalism itself; and, therefore, we seek the solution in a fundamental renewal of liberalism. In order to justify in a positive manner this second point of view, I have to refer to what I have said and, especially, to the excellent arguments of Mr Lippmann.

Here, I would only like to draw attention to the fact that if the unwavering representatives of old liberalism were right, the practical prospects [for liberalism] would be almost hopeless. Because it does not really seem that old liberalism has gained in persuasive and in seductive force or that the arguments, no matter how shrewd they may be, of these representatives have the least possibility of bringing about a conversion movement within the realm of Bolshevism, Fascism, or of National Socialism. If they did not listen to Moses and the prophets—Adam Smith and Ricardo—how will they believe Mr. von Mises?'”

As always, I wish you all pleasant Sunday.

 

Confessions of a Fragilista: Talebian Redundancies and Insurance

Joakim Book Economics, Liberty , , , ,

I’ve been on a Taleb streak this year (here, here and here). Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that is, the options trader-turned-mathematician-turned public intellectual (and I even managed to get myself on his infamous blocklist after arguing back at him). Many years ago, I read Fooled by Randomness but for some reason it didn’t resonate with me and I wasn’t seeing the brilliance.

Last spring, upon reading former poker champion Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets and physicist Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk, I plunged into Taleb land again, voraciously consuming Fooled, The Black Swan and Skin in the Game, followed by Antifragile just a few months ago.

Taleb is a strange creature; vastly productive and incredibly successful, everything he touches does not quite become gold, but surely stirs up controversy. What he’s managed to do in his popular writing (collected in the Incerto series) is to tie almost every aspect of human life into his One Big Idea (think Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog): the role of randomness, risk and uncertainty in everyday life.

One theme that comes up again and again is the idea of redundancies: having several different and overlapping systems – back-ups to back-ups – that minimize the chance of fatally bad outcomes. The failures of one of those systems will not result in the extremely bad event you’re trying to avoid.

Focusing primarily on survivability – “absorbing barriers” – through the handed-down wisdom of the Ancients and the Classic, the take-away lesson for Taleb in almost all areas of life is overlapping redundancies. Reality is complicated, and the distribution from which events are drawn is not a well-behaved Gaussian normal distribution, but one of thick tails. How thick nobody knows, but wisdom in the presence of absorbing barriers suggest that taking extreme caution is a prudent long-term strategy.

Of course, in the short run, redundancy amounts to “wasted” resources. In chapter 4 of Fooled, Taleb relates a story from his option trading days where a client angrily calling him up about tail-risk insurance he had sold them. The catastrophic event from which the insurance protected had not taken place, and so the client felt cheated. This behavior, Taleb maintains quite correctly, is idiotic. After all, if an insurance company’s clients consist of only soon-to-be claimants, the company won’t exist for long (or it prices insurance at prohibitively high rates, undermining the business model).

Same thing applies for one of his verbose rants about airline “efficiency,” a rather absurd episode of illustrating “asymmetry” – the idea that downside risks are larger than upside gains. Consider a plane departing JFK for London, a trip scheduled to take 7h trip. Some things can happen to make the trip quicker (speedy departure, weather conditions, landing slot available etc), but only marginally; it would, for instance, not be possible to arrive in London after only an hour. In contrast, the asymmetry arises as there are many things that can delay the trip from mere minutes to infinity – again, weather events, mechanical failures, tech or communication problems.

So, when airlines striving to make their services more efficient by minimizing turnaround time – Southwest’s legendary claim to fame – they hit Taleb’s antifragile asymmetry; getting rid of redundant time on the ground, makes the process of on-loading and off-loading passengers fragile. Any little mistake can cause serious delays, delays that accumulate and domino their way through crowded airport networks.

Embracing redundancies would mean having more time in-between flights, with extra planes and extra mechanics and spare parts available at many airports. Clearly, airlines’ already brittle business model would crumble in a heartbeat.

The flipside efficiency is Taleb’s redundancy. Without optimization, we constantly use more than we need, effectively operating as a tax on all activity. Taleb would of course quibble with that, pointing out that the probability distribution of what “we need” must include Black Swan events that standard optimization arguments overlook.

That’s fine if one places as high a value on risks that Taleb does, and indeed they’re voluntarily paid for. If customers wanted to pay triple the money for airfares in order to avoid this or that delay, there is a market for that – it just seems few people value that price over the damage from (low-probability) delays.

Another example is earthquake-proving buildings that Nate Silver discussed in his The Signal and the Noise regarding the Gutenberg-Ritcher law (the reliably inverse relationship between frequency and magnitude of earthquakes). Constructing buildings that can withstand a high-magnitude earthquake, say a one-in-three-hundred-year event is something rich Californians or Japanese can afford – much-less so a poor country like the Philippines. Yes, Taleb correctly argues, the poor country pays its earthquake expenses in heightened risk of devastating damage.

Large redundancies, back-ups to back-ups, are great if you a) can afford them, and b) are risk-averse enough. Judging by his writing, Taleb is – ironically – far out along the right-tail of risk aversion; for most other people, we have more urgent needs to look after. That means occasionally “blowing up” and suffer hours and hours of airline delays or collapsing buildings after an earthquake.

Taleb rarely considers the trade-offs, and the different subjective value scales (or discount rates!) that differ between people. While Taleb may cherish his redundancies, most of us would rather eliminate them for asymmetrically small gains.

Insurance is a relative assessment of price and risks. Keeping a reserve of redundancies are subjective choices, not an objective necessities.

Changing the way doctors see data

Kevin Kallmes Current Events, Economics, Liberty , , , , , ,

Over the past four years, my brother and I have grown a business that helps doctors publish data-driven articles from the two of us to over 30 experienced researchers. However, along the way, we noticed that data management in medical publication was decades behind other fields–in fact, the vital clinical outcomes from major trials are generally published as singular PDFs with no structured data, and are analyzed in comparison to existing studies only in nonsystematic, nonupdatable publications. Effectively, medicine has no central method for sharing or comparing patient outcomes across therapies, and I think that it is our responsibility as researchers to present these data to the medical community.

Based on our internal estimates, there are >3 million published clinical outcomes studies (with over 200 million individual datapoints) that need to be abstracted, structured, and compared through a central database. We recognized that this is a monumental task, and we therefore have focused on automating and scaling research processes that have been, through today, entirely manual. Only after a year of intensive work have we found a path toward creating a central database for all published patient outcomes, and we are excited to debut our technology publicly!

Keith recently presented our venture at a Mayo Clinic-hosted event, Walleye Tank (a Shark Tank-style competition of medical ventures), and I think that it is an excellent fast-paced introduction to a complex issue. Thanks also to the Mayo Clinic researchers for their interesting questions! You can see his two-minute presentation and the Q&A here. We would love to get more questions from the economic/data science/medical communities, and will continue putting our ideas out there for feedback!

Why some countries are stuck in poverty

Bruno Gonçalves Rosi Culture, Economics, History, Liberty, Politics , , ,

It is fairly common for young children in Brazil (or at least in Rio de Janeiro, the part of the country I know better) to call adults “uncle” or “aunt”. My closest friends’ children call me uncle and I’m totally ok with that. I do see them as my nephews and nieces. That also happens in schools: children up to 11 or 12 call the teachers “aunt”. Some people think that this is normal or even cute. However, I studied in a school that strictly forbid children to call the teachers aunt. The teachers were supposed to be called simply “teacher”. One interchange became folkloric in my house: “Am I your father’s sister? Am I your mother’s sister? Am I married to your uncle? Then I’m not your aunt.” Ouch! As gruff as it might sound, that’s the mentality I grew up with. My mother was also never totally comfortable with some of my friends calling her “aunt”.

One of my favorite interpretations of Brazil came from Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982). In his book Raízes do Brasil (Brazil roots, 1936) he made an analysis of the country, saying that the problem with Brazilians is that they are cordial. Using Max Weber’s categories, Holanda said that Brazilians don’t know how to conduct formal, impersonal relationships. It is really hard for them (or I should say, for us) to understand that the guy in office is the guy in office and not our friend.

I would say that many times I saw Holanda’s interpretation in action. Students who thought they were my friends and that because of that I would go easy on their exams. Colleagues who thought I wouldn’t fine them when I was working in the library. People I barely knew, who were friends of my friends, who thought I would give them answers for the exams. I managed to be friends of some students, but that was the exception. Most students had a hard time distinguishing between “Bruno, my friend” and “Bruno, my professor”. Worse, some, I don’t know how, came to the conclusion that I was their friend.

Lula da Silva, Brazil’s former president, presented himself as a father. He introduced Dilma Rousseff, his successor, as a mother. Getúlio Vargas, the horrendous dictator from the 1930s was widely known as “the father of the poor”. I’m sad to say that Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s current and supposedly right-wing president, doesn’t really scape this logic. It may be nice and cute when little children call adults aunt or uncle, but it sickens me when grownups use this language. Even more so, when they use it to people they don’t even know!

Sergio Buarque de Holanda is one of the few things from college I profited from reading. It helped me to escape the Marxist bog that is much of Brazilian humanities academia. Years later I read Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and I discovered that Brazil was not alone. That is the problem with many so-called capitalist countries that still lag behind. They are not really capitalist in the sense that the US, much of Western Europe or Japan and other Asian countries are, and one of the main reasons for that is that people don’t know how to conduct impersonal, formal relationships. The teacher is not your aunt, and the country is not a big family.

Intellectuals You Should Know About

Joakim Book Books, Culture, Economics, History, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics, Religion , , , , ,

I read a lot. Wide, deep and across quite a number of different fields. As a self-proscribed ‘writer’ and ‘editor’, reading much is both satisfying an intellectual desire and a professionally useful practice in familiarize myself with various styles, voices and topics. A common tip for aspiring writers is to read someone they admire and try to imitate their style; at this, at least, I am somewhat successful, as a friend recently told me that my style reminded him of Deirdre McCloskey. Full of idolized admiration for Deirdre’s work, I couldn’t imagine a higher praise.

As readers, the eternal curse of modernity is our laughable inability to keep up with the couple of millions of books that are published every year. Not to mention written materials on blog or respectable outlets or in magazines and journals. As consumers of the written word, we are completely outstripped, utterly defenseless and overwhelmingly inundated.

When in September I published my discussion of geographer and anthropologist Jared Diamond’s impressive work, I got a lot of feedback of astonishment from friends and family – including the friend that praised me for occasionally (accidentally…?) write like McCloskey: “Wow,” he said, “I’ve never heard of him before!”

Huh, I thought. I wonder what other household names of public intellectuals are not read as much as they deserve.

My exact reaction of astonishment was more like a gaping “What?!”, betraying my wanna-know-everything attitude, slight elitism and writer lifestyle. Contrary to the belief that our times is one of all talking and no listening (well, writing and no reading), it takes a vast amount of reading before you can produce anything that others want to read. Sure, anybody with a laptop and an internet connection can start a blog and flush out their thoughts (I did so for years) but it takes knowledge to say something intelligent and interesting – knowledge acquired by extensive reading.

It also takes a lot of practice to develop a voice of one’s own. Authors with astonishing and recognizable writing styles are made, not born.

What, then, should you read?

In light of this surprise, I decided to make a list of intellectuals I would advise anybody to read. Note that this is not a list of the most important thinkers ever, nor is it a collection of the most profound academic contribution to various disciplines. Instead it’s a gathering of writers whose popular writing (often in addition to their rigorous academic work) is exactly that – popular. That means that a lot of others liked them (and if you’re anything like others, you might too) and more importantly: a lot of smart people you meet are rather likely refer to these authors or to the ideas contained in their work. Here are 11 authors I would consider to be household names and whose writing will make you a much smarter and interesting person.

Jared Diamond

Let’s begin our list with aforementioned Jared Diamond, whose trilogy on humanity is compulsory reading for pretty-much everyone. This year he released Upheaval, which received very mixed responses and that I decided to skip after hearing his pitch on Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast. Diamond’s publisher maintains that this is the third installment of his “monumental trilogy” of how civilizations rise and fall, but to me that was The World Until Yesterday: 

  • Guns, Germs and Steel is the book that definitely made Diamond a well-known name, the kind of Big Picture civilizational economic history we have recently seen in Yuval Harari’s work – the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, that strangely boring book that everyone seems to be reading these days – or the less well-known but more captivating Columbia professor Ruth DeFries’ The Big Ratchet. If you like, you could describe this Pulitzer prize-winning book as well-written geographical reasons for why the West is rich and the Rest isn’t. If that’s your thing, read away.
  • Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the book that my September piece was mostly concerned with, is a dense story of many different human civilizations falling apart: Easter Islanders, Native Americans in the dry southwest or central America and my favourite chapter: The Greenland Norse. Complemented with the Fall of Civilizations podcast and Dan Carlin’s recent book The End is Always Near would make you ridiculously interesting to talk to in these hyper-catastrophist times. Upheaval is a natural extension of Collapse so if you crave more, that one is for you.
  • I would rather point to The World Until Yesterday for Diamond’s third gem as it is a deep dive into the lives of traditional societies in general, but in practice mostly New Guinean societies. Somehow, Diamond made anthropology exciting!

Paul Collier

Rapidly moving up in controversy, Paul Collier is an Oxford development economist whose work most intellectuals have a distinctly firm opinion about. His popular claim to fame rests on:

  • Exodus, a very cool (and prescient!) take on global migration. Highly recommended.
  • The Bottom Billion, for a plunge into global poverty and development economics. It might be slightly outdated (published in 2007) as many of the 60 failing countries he identifies have seem quite some growth in the last decade.

I should also recommend his latest book, Future of Capitalism, but I wasn’t very impressed with it. In these times of political polarization, populist uprisings, urban-rural divides and worries about AI, it is still a relevant read.

Whenever Collier speaks, you want to listen.

The Four Horsemen of Atheism (or “New Atheism”):
Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett

to which we should add the “one Horse-woman“, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I’m ashamed to only know as “the wife of Niall Ferguson” (yes, my background is money and history, OK, not politics or religion…).

Together, these 5 brilliant minds may have helped many out of their religiosity, but their contributions loom much larger than that. As most of the Western world has gradually abandoned faith, their religious inclinations have turned to other areas: environmentalism (Mike Munger’s take on recycling never gets old!), invented hierarchies or social justice. The writings of these five horsemen can be hugely beneficial here too. Some recommended reading includes:

Speaking of Ferguson, as I’m a big financial history guy, I am shamelessly squeezing in this prolific writer, professor (well, Senior Fellow at Hoover institution nowadays) and public intellectual:

I should also mention his two-volume biography of Henry Kissinger (first volume 2015, next probably finished next year), which I ignored (politics is boring) and his recent book The Square and the Tower, which I heard very bad things about – and so downgraded for now.

Steven Pinker

Ah, this Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist-turned-public-intellectual is a must-read. His top trilogy, which I voraciously consumed last fall, includes:

  • The Blank Slate, the best description of this book that I ever heard came from Charlotta Stern, sociologist at Stockholm University: every sound argument against the “Nurture Only”-idea that biology doesn’t matter compiled into a single book. Yes, you want to read it.
  • The Better Angels of Our Nature, a Big Picture humanity-scale look at violence, resurrecting Norbert Elias’ Civilizing Process theory to explain why we hurt and kill each other less than at probably any point in human history. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (see below) is decidedly not convinced. 
  • Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, as if Better Angels wasn’t Big Picture enough, here’s the ultimate case for why humanity is doing pretty well, why doomsday sayers are wrong on every count and why we shouldn’t despair. Many of the topics of Better Angels re-occur in Enlightenment Now!, but I don’t regret reading both as Pinker’s prose is easy to follow and his content well-sourced should you require more convincing. Originally a cognitive scientist, he has a ton of more books you might wanna check out – The Language Instinct, for instance, ranks pretty high on my Next Up list:
  • The Language Instinct
  • How the Mind Works
  • The Stuff of Thought

Matt Ridley

Speaking of optimistic people taking a Big Picture view of humanity, zoologist and science writer Matt Ridley is a must. Tall (like me!), Oxford-educated (like me!) and techno-optimist (like me!), no wonder I like him.

At last, How Innovation Works is schedule for May 2020. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Oh, boy – here’s a controversial one. Frequently does he get into loud and hostile arguments with other high-profile intellectuals, and rarely does he pull any punches. His popular writing is found in the “Incerto” serie – the Latin term for ‘doubt’ or ‘uncertainty’ that capture Taleb’s core work. The set of books are together described as “an investigation of luck, uncertainty, probability, opacity, human error, risk, disorder, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand:”

They are intended to push One Big Idea: that we frequently overlook how random the world is, ascribing causality where none belongs and overestimate what we can know from (relatively recent) past events. Black Swans, the proverbial unpredictable event, dominates the social sciences in Taleb’s view. While the 2000-odd pages worth of the Incerto series may seem daunting, the books (and even the individual chapters) are designed not to fall very far from each other. The interested reader can, in other words, pick any one of them and work backwards in accordance with whatever is of interest. You wanna read all – or any – of them.

Having read Fooled by Randomness first, I’ve always held that highest. Be ready for a lot of sarcastic and frequently hostile (but thoughtful) objections of things you took for granted.

In sum: just bloody read more

Any selection of important contemporary intellectuals is arbitrary, highly skewed and super-unfair. There are more, many more, whose fantastic writings deserve attention. As I said, the eternal curse of modernity is our laughable inability to keep up with avalanche of cool stuff written every year.

As readers, we are overrun – and the only thing you can do to keep is is to read more. Read widely.

Above are some amazing thinkers. Drop me a line or tweet me with readings you would add to a list like this.

Discovery Processes

Federico Sosa Valle Economics, Philosophy , , , , , ,

A good friend of mine encouraged me to read this note published by James Jay Carafano, Vice President of The Heritage Foundation.

Despite being as compelling as it is well intentioned, the article misses to mention one of the main arguments for free markets: what once Friedrich Hayek described as “the competition as a discovery process.”

Indeed, the concept is insinuated in Carafano’s piece of writing: “He decided to make a splash in the sports car market by jumping into the race car racket. Initially, he planned to do it by buying the world’s premier race car manufacturer, Ferrari. But that plan fell flat. So Ford moved to Plan B: to field his own, all-American team.”

Businessmen, like any other kind of people, are rational: initially, they try to maximize their profits by avoiding competition. They are not heroes and nobody can ask them to be so. People, businessmen included, respond to incentives.

When there is not any other choice than competition, then innovation, ingenuity, and creativity arise. Not because of a change in the mind of certain businessmen, but for new innovative entrepreneurs outperform the non competitive ones.

The free market capitalist system James Jay Carafano praises is mostly an institutional arrangement named -once  again- by Hayek as “competitive order.” Nevertheless, the most interesting question for our times is not about the virtues of the said free market capitalist system -which seem to be out of discussion- but whether competition under the rule of law deserves to have a Kantian “Cosmopolitan Purpose.”

Some more borderline fraud from the higher education industry.

Link Rick Weber Culture, Current Events, Economics , ,

From the Wall Street Journal: For Sale: SAT-Takers’ Names. Colleges Buy Student Data and Boost Exclusivity

The title pretty much says it all: the College Board is selling data about test-takers (i.e. high school students) to colleges who use that to market to a wider pool of applicants. That wider pool often includes students who don’t stand a chance of getting in to the schools that are now marketing to them, but the marketing gives the false impression that the school wants them.

Joe Six-pack Jr. takes the SAT, fills out a survey, and that survey goes into a database. Some school that normally ranks near the middle of the pack buys a piece of that database, including Joe’s data. They send him a brochure and a letter that looks like it was written specifically for him (and he doesn’t know any better) so Joe, figures he’s being recruited. Instead of just applying to his local state schools, now he shells out an extra $50 to apply to Middling University. They summarily reject his application because his SAT scores were 1100 and they’re only accepting students who scored above 1300. MU now looks a little bit more prestigious in the rankings (which means their current administration can take credit before jumping ship to take a higher paying job at a school looking to also increase in the rankings). The College Board gets paid. The administrators get paid. The U.S. News rankings get a little less useful for incoming students, but they don’t know that. On the other hand the rankings get a little more important for decision makers at schools. And Joe Jr. is funding this whole mess despite being a) the least informed, and b) the least well funded player in this whole mess.

My Startup Experience

Kevin Kallmes Economics, Liberty , , , , , , ,

Over the past 4 years, I have had a huge transition in my life–from history student to law student to serial medical entrepreneur. Essentially, I have learned a great deal from my academic work that taught me the value that we can create if we find an unmet need in the world, create an idea that fills that need, and then use technology, personal networks, and hard work to create novelties. While startups obviously tackle any new problem under the sun, to me, they are the mechanism to bring about a positive change–and, along the way, get the resources to scale that change across the globe.

I am still very far from reaching that goal, but my family and cofounders have several visions of how to improve not only how patients are treated but also how we build the knowledge base that physicians, patients, and researchers can use to inform care and innovation. My brother/cofounder and I were recently on an entrepreneurship-focused podcast, and we got the chance to discuss our experience, our vision, and our companies. I hope this can be a springboard for more discussions about how companies are a unique agent of advancing human flourishing, and about the history and philosophy of entrepreneurship, technology, and knowledge.

You can listen here: http://rochesterrising.org/podcast/episode-151-talking-medical-startups-with-keith-and-kevin-kallmes. Heartfelt thanks to Amanda Leightner and Rochester Rising for a great conversation!

Thank you!

Kevin Kallmes

Three Short Stories on Housing Economics

Ash Navabi Economics , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Do you love housing economics but have struggled to get the basic ideas across the younger generation? Yes, you get excited about reading 60-page reports, but kids these days have better things to do. 

That’s why I wrote these three, action-packed, short stories which you can read to any child (or child at heart). 

So without further ado, here are three stories about how the supply of housing affects the prices of housing.

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