Author Archives: Arnold Kling

What makes a good podcast?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

A podcast really works when it is the dramatic unfolding of a story and mood between the guest and host.

Julia Galef did a podcast with me which has not (yet) been released. My guess is that by Tyler’s standards it worked, since Julia really brought out my state of depression and contrasted with it. To exaggerate, it was Mary Poppins meets “Have a nice day.”

When I judge a podcast, I use more mundane criteria.

Did anyone say anything that I did not expect? Robert Wright does this. I forget which podcast, but out of nowhere he questioned the right of government to interfere with international trade using rhetoric that could have come straight from Don Boudreaux.

Did the host ask the Devil’s Advocate questions that needed to be asked? Russ Roberts usually succeeds. Robert Wright again. I have observed Ezra Klein failing to do this, and I found the results painful.

Did they avoid the use of profanity? I know that cursing can be a way to sound “cool,” but not to me–I have outgrown my adolescence.

I think it’s actually difficult to spell out what makes for a good podcast. Tyler is right that the interpersonal dynamics have a lot to do with it. I find it hard to articulate what works and what does not.

An interesting question is whether reading a transcript ends up being more efficient/rewarding than listening to the podcast. I am inclined to say yes. But are there counter-examples in which hearing the voice is more compelling? Jordan Peterson perhaps?

The moral weakness of an eviction moratorium

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I wrote,

If you understand that rental contracts are socially desirable in normal times, then you should be wary of the idea of having government break them during a pandemic. To put it clearly: anyone who advocates an eviction moratorium is being deeply immoral.

Speaking of recent essays, I also wrote on baseball, race and economics.

in 1965, in a sense only the National League was integrated. Only one American League team, the Minnesota Twins, had more than one black contributor. The Twins’ black cadre included catcher Earl Battey, shortstop Zoilo Versalles, right fielder Tony Oliva, and pitcher Jim “Mudcat” Grant. Not coincidentally, that team waltzed to a pennant.

Is it 2016?

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I thought of the 2016 election as Bobo vs. anti-Bobo.
David Brooks himself writes,

over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of the bobos has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The bobos—or X people, or the creative class, or whatever you want to call them—have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Brooks concludes,

The bobos didn’t set out to be an elite, dominating class. We just fit ourselves into a system that rewarded a certain type of achievement, and then gave our children the resources that would allow them to prosper in that system too. But, blind to our own power, we have created enormous inequalities—financial inequalities and more painful inequalities of respect. The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us.

The essay struck me as somewhat off base. Sometimes he describes bobos as 1960s liberals. At other times he describes them as wokists. They cannot be both simultaneously (many may have been both sequentially).

Brooks writes,

The creative class has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.

But the wokists do not really believe in truth. They tell you what is ok to believe, and they do not care so much about empirical truth in the old-fashioned sense.

My review of Noise

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It begins,

Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony (henceforth KSS) argue that inconsistency in human judgment is widespread, not well appreciated, and very costly. Sentences differ for similar crimes. Underwriting decisions differ for similar loan applicants. Hiring decisions differ for similar job candidates. Performance evaluations differ for similar employees.

I found their book worth reading, although if you read my review you will see where I quibble.

A government debt crisis?

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I write,

a debt crisis is always an improbable scenario. If we could be sure that a debt crisis will occur, then we would already be in one. If investors thought that the U.S. would have difficulty rolling over its debt next week, then they would stop buying bonds today, and the U.S. would have trouble rolling over its debt today, so that the crisis would take place today.

Don’t send your kids to college

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From a poll of recent college grads:

Nearly one in five (17%) college grads polled still don’t know how to cook or do their own laundry. Twenty-six percent are also feeling lost when it comes to basic apartment maintenance too – like unclogging a toilet or resetting a Wi-Fi router.

Before you allow your children to go to college, make them take at least a year to live in the real world first.

Is it 1976?

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In terms of inflation and interest rates, I think so.

By 1976, inflation was 5.74 percent. Although the interest rate in November, at 4.75 percent, was higher than in 1964, it was lower than the rate of inflation. In that sense, the interest rate was low

That was when inflation was poised to take off.

Every time I hear someone talk about “temporary supply” shortages causing inflation I want to grab them by the collar and shake them. If the government hasn’t gone wild with deficit spending, then a price increase in a supply-constrained sector will be offset by a price decline somewhere else.

Will it always be March of 2020?

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Richard Hanania writes,

the burden of COVID-19 falls almost completely on the unvaccinated. The threat to children from the disease is almost 0 regardless of vaccination status, and even closer to literally 0 for those who are vaccinated. It’s also basically 0 for vaccinated adults too. According to an analysis by the AP, in May over 99% of COVID deaths were among the unvaccinated. I’m highly skeptical of long COVID as a serious enough problem to change the cost-benefit analysis, as most of the research on the topic I’ve seen has been extremely flawed, and we should be very doubtful that vaccines that stop almost all hospitalization and death can leave you with a substantial risk of getting a chronic condition that has not been conclusively established as a statistically meaningful problem yet.

I’m all for telling the CDC and public healthocrats where they can stick it. But I personally am in the frame of mind that I was in back in March of 2020. In particular, I am not doing in-person dancing for a while. We have a son-in-law who takes immuno-suppressive drugs and three grandchildren who are too young to be vaccinated. I would like to be able to get together with them with a clear conscience. Note that there was one case of a 5-year old who reportedly died of COVID, with the Washington Post eagerly reporting that this was in Trump country.

Zvi Mowshowitz, the Fantasy Intellectual Teams star who I trust much more than any public healthocrat, writes,

Deaths are going up slower than cases, but faster than one would have hoped.

I think that’s right. On a brighter note, he writes,

The big mystery remains why Delta suddenly peaked and turned around, first in India, and now in the UK and the Netherlands. These turnarounds are excellent news, and I presume we will see a similar turnaround at a similar point, but what’s causing them to happen so quickly? I don’t know.

I would be happy to see a rapid turnaround, but right now things are going in the wrong direction.

Further on, Zvi writes,

The other news here is that Pfizer plans to be calling for booster shots. It seems that a three dose regimen is much more effective than a two dose regimen, now that we’ve had the ability to test such things, and some places are moving to implement this already. The data here suggests that the third dose will bring things back to at least the early stage 96% effectiveness and plausibly even higher. If I am offered a third dose, I will happily accept it.

There is the concern that giving people third doses while others have not had the opportunity even for first doses is not ethical. I respect that perspective, but do not share it, and will leave it at that.

I say fire the head of the CDC and put Zvi in charge, and will leave it at that.

December 1978

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Going through some old letters I wrote to my father, which he saved. An excerpt from December 4, 1978, when I had been a section leader for the first-year econ course at Harvard.

My exam really separated the men from the women. The four worst grades in the class were all from women, and a woman tied for the fifth worst. My class is a sample of students in which sex-based differences in upbringing are apparent. The women are not math and science oriented, whereas the men have some background in math and science.

The exam was not mathematical, but like all economics exams stressed applications to problems rather than knowledge of facts or formulas. I felt that the results, with a few exceptions, represented what people knew about the course.

One sad comment on my teaching is that the student who got the best grade is the one who comes to class least often.

Today, I would say that my teaching was a perfect example of the Null Hypothesis.

Being a teaching assistant at Harvard was eye-opening. It was scary how many weak students were in my section. I remember teaching a simple consumption function, C = a + bY and five of my students independently came up to me afterward because they did not understand what a and b were supposed to mean. They had been too uncomfortable with 8th-grade algebra to understand the concept of line with a slope and an intercept but too ego-protective to ask the question publicly in class.

By the way, if I had to bet, I would wager that Harvard students today are much better at 8th-grade algebra but are even more ego-sensitive. And I would wager that the male–female difference in ability to handle a course with simple applied math has narrowed or even reversed.

The next year, I was a teaching assistant at MIT. That was a completely different experience. There, when I was trying to explain the concept of “rational expectations,” (a concept typically not taught to first-year students in those days) one student piped up skeptically, “That’s like saying that the batter knows what the pitcher is going to throw before he throws it.” That was a darn good analogy.

Ken Rogoff told his first-year students at MIT that he would give an A to anyone who could help him prove a mathematical conjecture (this was for his Ph.D thesis). He ended up getting two different correct proofs.

MIT undergrads were scary that way.

Hard tech and soft tech

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Noah Smith writes,

notice that China isn’t cracking down on all of its technology companies. Huawei, for example, still seems to enjoy the government’s full backing. The government is going hell-bent-for-leather to try to create a world-class domestic semiconductor industry, throwing huge amounts of money at even the most speculative startups. And it’s still spending heavily on A.I. It’s not technology that China is smashing — it’s the consumer-facing internet software companies that Americans tend to label “tech”.

He goes on to say that if you want your country to have a strong military capability, you need hard technologies–network hardware, artificial intelligence, etc. You don’t need Facebook.

when China’s leaders look at what kind of technologies they want the country’s engineers and entrepreneurs to be spending their effort on, they probably don’t want them spending that effort on stuff that’s just for fun and convenience. They probably took a look at their consumer internet sector and decided that the link between that sector and geopolitical power had simply become too tenuous to keep throwing capital and high-skilled labor at it. And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash.