My university exams just finished, so I’ve had some time to catch up on reading; here are the highlights from what I’ve read, watched, and listened to so far in May.
Also: I will be in London at the end of this month at the Effective Altruism Global conference, so if you see me say hi!
Blogs
Claim: The average number of working hours per American couple has been constant since the 1880s. They have been working as much as ever: a combined total of 67 hours per week. Over much of that period, women were entering the labour force in droves – though men’s hours were shrinking at almost exactly the rate to cancel out any net effect. I found this very surprising, though I suspect it is not true for other countries. In several respects, the United States is an outlier in developed countries with respect to work hours.
What people at OpenAI read.
I read Saddam Hussein’s romance novel so you don’t have to.
RIP Future of Humanity Institute.
All of the alcohol aboard a recent four-hour flight to Turkey was consumed by English tourists “within 25 minutes”. Total British cultural victory.
Slime Mold Time Mold’s links for April. Some gems from that piece:
The expert wizard amendment was a proposed amendment by a New Mexico state senator which would legally require psychologists and psychiatrists to dress up as wizards while providing expert testimony. It passed unanimously (!) but never reached the House.
“While serving in Congress, [Lucas M Miller] proposed a Constitutional amendment to change the country's name to "the United States of the Earth" because "it is possible for this republic to grow through the admission of new states...until every nation on earth has become part of it."”
Rasheed Griffith reviews ‘The Case for Colonialism’. One of my long-standing disagreements with Rasheed is that I think he’s too soft on the Empire.
Rasheed Griffith again: Why Panama dollarised. Panama uses the US dollar as its currency, and there is a well-known story that this was thrust upon them by future president William Howard Taft. The truth is more interesting, as the post explains. I also learned from this piece that presidential candidate John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone.
From my friend Gytis Daujotas: Training on Mistakes Improves Problem-Solving Performance. A great example of an AI alignment experiment that is nonetheless attainable for an amateur.
Hypertext as Literature, a list of blog recommendations.
I finally got around to reading Works in Progress issue 13, and my favourite piece from it was about New Zealand’s zoning reforms.
Music
Some new albums I discovered this month:
Yussef Dayes, Venna, Charlie Stacey, Black Classical Music.
Wings, Band on the Run.
Chick Corea, Chinese Butterly. My favourite Corea album remains ‘Plays’ from 2020.
Ezra Collective, Ajala.
Camilla George, Ibio-Ibio. Some very good recent jazz from a Nigerian-born artist out of London.
Books
Josh Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke, Mostly Harmless Econometrics. This is a classic graduate econometrics textbook, written informally and without exercises. It harmed me more than its title would imply.
Eric Schwitzgebel, The Weirdness of the World. Excellent recent philosophy book from Princeton University Press. You can also listen to the author talk about it on Sean Caroll’s podcast.
Roy Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000. Foster’s prose can be too ornate for me, but I loved this book’s subject matter and short length. This is the considerably more readable sequel to his classic Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, which I’ve struggled to get into.
Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. This is the 2013 abridged edition of Skidelsky’s critically acclaimed three-volume biography of Keynes. The ‘abridged’ version is still 1,000 pages and benefited from additional editing, so I think there is little reason to read the originals, which are now hard to find in print anyway. For being an authoritative biography, this book is surprisingly sarcastic, sometimes to the point of being annoying. Around 115 pages in, Skidelsky calls Charles Stewart Parnell a ‘demagogue’, which seems unwarranted to me. I would still recommend the Zachary Carter biography to most people, unless you are looking for a very high level of detail (which, in this case, I was). Two other facts: While writing this book, Skidelsky was made a Lord, and he also moved into John Maynard Keynes’ house… I suppose to truly immerse himself in the subject.
Podcasts
The Rest is History on Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn.
A.J. Jacobs has a new book out, and for it he’s been doing the podcast circuit talking about his year of living out the literal word of the United States Constitution. The Constitution is worth a read, and I was surprised Russ Roberts (the host) was so ignorant of it. When I read it, the stuff about ‘letters of marque’ went over my head, i.e. the hilarious clause which gives Congress the power to pay pirates to collect booty on behalf of the American government. Jacobs has an ongoing campaign to become the first legally-invoked pirate since 1815.
Glenn Loury has also been promoting his new book, where he talks about (among other things) what it was like being addicted to crack cocaine while being a famous Harvard economics professor.
Zach Weinersmith talks about what he learned writing his new book about colonising Mars. I am enjoying this genre of sophisticated space-travel scepticism – see also Maciej Cegłowski’s Why Not Mars, one of my favourite essays of all time.
Rory Stewart and Alasdair Campbell talk with Kwasi Kwarteng about what it feels from the inside to blow up the economy. See also: Kwasi Kwarteng University Challenge highlights.
Benjamin Moser on Susan Sontag and the Dutch Masters.
David Pizarro and Tamler Sommers talk about elephant cognition.
Films
Terance, Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. Short, awkward, stop-start documentary about James Baldwin reflecting on his time in Paris. There should be a letterboxd tag for documentaries in which the subject gets progressively more hostile to the existence of the film.
Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave. This didn’t stick with me as much as Oldboy, the director’s earlier film, but I still thought it was great.
Joachim Trier, The Worst Person in the World. Independent Norwegian film about relationships, self-sabotage, cheating, and related topics. I found the main character’s age gap in one of her relationships to be the most interesting part of the film. Still, I feel this is probably not ‘for me’, in that I have a pretty strong revealed preference for movies about topics like World War II, rather than dramedies that plumb the depths of female mental interiority. To each their own.
Taylor Hackford, Ray. Music biopics are a particularly formulaic genre, and I am yet to watch one that I felt had artistic value that wasn’t just parasitic on the musician(s) themselves. Still, Jamie Foxx is superb, and I’m glad he got an Oscar for this. In theory, you can probably get 90% of the value of this film by rewatching the music scenes on YouTube.
Ken Burns, The Vietnam War. I have been meaning to watch this mammoth 10-part documentary series for years, and I’m finally working my way through it at my friend Sean’s house. I am only one episode in so far. Random thought: the transliteration of Vietnamese names into English is a mess, and the pronunciation is deeply unintuitive. My friend sometimes bemoans that we were left with pinyin, which was developed by non-native English speakers, rather than the Wade–Giles system for the romanisation of Chinese. I’d be interested to know if there has been a similar debate over how to transliterate Vietnamese in such a way that English speakers don’t butcher the names as much on the first try.
Papers
Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine, Early Childhood Education by Television: Lessons from Sesame Street. Fascinating paper. The authors exploit the quasi-random assignment of either ‘Ultra High-Frequency’ or ‘Very High Frequency’ transmission as an instrumental variable to determine what the causal effects were of the television programme Sesame Street. Sesame Street first aired in 1969, at a time before large government programmes to subsidise childcare – and when there was nothing else on TV remotely like it. The authors find that Sesame Street significantly improved learning outcomes and school attendance for boys, a particularly neat piece of causal inference. Another W for Jim Henson.
Joshua Angrist, Lifetime Earnings and the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery: Evidence from Social Security Administrative Records. This is a classic paper which exploits the lottery that was used to draft soldiers for the Vietnam War to determine the causal effects of serving in the military. Soldiers are unrepresentative of the general population in many ways, so correlational studies about the effect of military service are close to worthless. The paper concludes that white males on average suffered a 15% wage penalty from serving in the army, though curiously there was no statistically significant negative effect for non-whites. Another thing: It was subsequently discovered that the Vietnam draft lottery was not truly random because (you can’t make this stuff up) the guy did not turn the wheel with the balls in it hard enough. I wonder if anyone has checked whether this affects the Angrist result.
Nick Bostrom, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Bostrom’s famous simulation argument, which I had never read the original of before this month.
Nick Bostrom, The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant. (See also the CGP Grey video.)
Nick Bostrom, Astronomical Waste. I hadn’t previously read anything original from Bostrom other than Superintelligence and his paper about infinite ethics. I read these papers for a Bostrom reading group that I ran in Edinburgh recently. My advisor’s verdict on Bostrom is that he’s a first-rate generator of new interesting ideas, but isn’t as rigorous in developing those ideas as many philosophers.
John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Along with the national self-sufficiency lecture mentioned in last month’s links post, this is the only thing I’ve read from the ‘horse’s mouth’ of Keynes himself. This is perhaps Keynes’ most famous essay, where he predicts that his grandchildren will have a 15-hour workweek. Except (gasp!) that is not an accurate summary, he didn’t predict that at all, and that’s not even really what the essay is about.
Peter Boettke, Why Read Adam Smith Today? For the first time, I am reading Adam Smith, and I’ve started the process of taking a look at the secondary literature. I found this paper forgettable and unconvincing. Adam Smith ranks very highly in my rating system, but I think his relevance to contemporary debates is being overstated here.
Toby Ord, The Lindy Effect. Nassim Taleb popularised the idea of the ‘Lindy effect’. He doesn’t give a precise formulation, but it’s something like: things that have been around for a very long time are likely to persist for a long time into the future. For similar reasons, you might expect the oldest books to be the best ones: if they’ve been around for so long, they’ve survived a long selection process for quality. Ord formalises Lindy and related concepts, especially as they relate to forming Bayesian priors. The paper includes some unintuitive (to me) mathematical results and I strongly recommend it.
Kevin O’Rourke, Burn Everything British But Their Coal. Great (and short) economic history paper about the Anglo-Irish Trade War. Ireland was in a trade war with Britain from 1932 to 1938, due to a dispute about the Anglo-Irish Treaty. One of the British goods slapped with tariffs was coal, hence the Irish expression from the time ‘Burn everything British but their coal’. O’Rourke’s counterintuitive conclusion is that, due to the highly favourable resolution (the equivalent of £100 million in debt was written off), the trade war was net positive for the Irish. I guess it sometimes pays to completely torpedo your relationship with your only significant trading partner?