You can go to this page to see the different Fantasy Intellectuals teams. Just select any team. Comment only on the teams you like.

For anyone who wants to discuss Fantasy Intellectual Teams–the scoring rules, controversial picks, how the draft went, what we’re hoping to accomplish, etc. Tonight at 7:30 PM eastern time.

I should mention that I have a few clubhouse invites available, so if you have an iphone and want to join, contact me at arnoldsk at us dot net.

I post one of these every year. My general observations, recycled from previous years. Continue reading →

Could someone produce a 1 sentence definition of Straussian that a high school graduate would easily understand?

Straussian means taking what this question asks for and putting a minus sign in front of it.

Some of us are old enough to remember that Peter, Paul, and Mary had a hit song with Straussian lyrics:

But If I Really Say It, The Radio Won’t Play It
Unless I Lay It Between The Lines!

Or should I call it Grumpy Monetary Theory? He calls it the fiscal theory of the price level. In a podcast with Tyler Cowen, John Cochrane explains,

the distinction between money and government bonds isn’t that important. What matters is overall government debt and the government’s ability to pay that debt back. And inflation comes when people lose faith in the government’s ability to pay back its debt. They try to get rid of the debt because they know it’s not going to get paid back. What do you do with it? You buy stuff, and that drives up the price of goods and services.

There is more at the link. I will spell out my own version of monetary theory tomorrow. It also downplays the distinction between money and government bonds. But I don’t have the sort of forward-looking consumer behavior that Cochrane uses as the basis for his thinking.

FITS note: Cowen and Cochrane disagree. They appear to me to be steel-manning one another. So they each would earn an S point if this were the season.

Finally, I like what Cochrane has to say about non-profits and about the economic profession. So go read the whole transcript.

He asks,

If I buy a bond to sell it back to you tomorrow morning at a profit, am I borrowing the bond, or am I lending the money? . . . And doesn’t this all unravel by 8am, so what’s the point?

Arnold owns a bond. Arnold wants to finance that bond with (very) short-term money. Daniel lends Arnold money, with the bond as collateral. The mechanics of this are that Daniel takes possession of the bond until Arnold repays the loan. Daniel does this by buying the bond today with an agreement that Arnold will buy it back tomorrow. It could be said that Daniel borrows the bond and lends money, while Arnold borrows the money and lends the bond. But I prefer to think of it as Daniel lending to Arnold with the bond as collateral.

It may seem silly to do this just for one day. But (a) these agreements often get renewed and (b) both parties are better off. Arnold’s bond typically is accruing interest at a higher rate than what he pays, so he is earning a spread while he carries the bond in inventory. Meanwhile, Daniel, who has excess funds on hand for a few days (think of a corporate Treasurer with funds that came in from goods sold Monday but who will need to pay suppliers on Wednesday in order to restock) gets to earn some interest without making a long-term commitment of funds and with essentially zero risk.

The repo market works smoothly when the bonds are widely viewed as having no risk. In 2008, some mortgage securities became perceived as high risk, and the repo market for them dried up. Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick called this a run on repo. Until they wrote the paper, 99.9 percent of academic economists had no idea what repo even was. There was, and still is, a huge gap between practitioners’ knowledge and academic understanding. Tim Taylor’s original post speaks to that.

1. We have ten teams, but there is still room for a few more co-owners, where you would share a team with another owner.

2. I am proposing a scoring rules change, but I will take input from the owners. I want to combine the pairings category (P) and the wins category (W) into a single category, called Steel-manning (S). A player scores an S whenever that player does a fair job of representing the point of view of another qualified player (someone who has been selected by any team in the league or someone else who appears on the pre-season cheat sheet). Examples would include a typical joint podcast or a fair book review, like Scott Alexander’s review of Freddy de Boer. To get an S, the discussion of the player has to be extensive–not just a few sentences.

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury appearing together would count as an S for each. But any given pair can only get one S per season. Glenn could get an additional S by appearing with Coleman Hughes, for example.

As of this writing, we have 9 people signed up to play Fantasy Intellectual Teams. For details on how to play, see this post. Most of the people who signed up say that they are willing to be joint owners (being an individual owner would be a fair amount of work).

So there is room for at least 5 more owners. Email me at arnoldsk at us dot net if you want to play.

Fantasy Intellectual Teams (FITs) is a game that is intended to shake up and improve the status hierarchy of public intellectuals. Unless there are last-minute changes, here is how FITS will work. Continue reading →

I propose four scoring categories for Fantasy Intellectual Teams: bets (B); pairings (P); wins (W); and memes (M)

B: Bets is a measure of “thinks carefully.” Your team member doesn’t have to win a bet to have thought carefully. Merely “thinking in bets” shows that one has considered the possibility that you could be wrong. A point is scored when one of your players states a prediction or an opinion in probabilistic terms.

P: A pairing shows that a player is valued as a teammate.

A pairing is when one of your players has a public dialog with another player, typically in the form of essays or a joint podcast. Twitter does not count. A record of the discussion must be accessible on the Web. Past pairings do not count. Only pairings that take place during the season.

Assume Annie Duke and Tyler Cowen are both on teams (not necessarily the same team). Then if she appears on a Conversation with Tyler, each one gets a point. Or if Russ Roberts and Mike Munger are both on teams and Russ hosts Mike on econtalk, points get scored.

In fact, Russ tells me that of the candidates that appear on the cheat sheet, over 70 have appeared on econtalk! So he would be a good one to draft to pick up points in the P category. Of course, as with all categories, only pairings that take place during the season count. Past pairings don’t.

Suppose Martin Gurri and Yuval Levin are both on teams. Then if they participate in a dialog on Pairagraph points get awarded.

But a given pairing can score only one point per season. Points would be awarded once for Glenn Loury in conversation with John McWhorter. A subsequent discussion between the two does not count.

W: A win shows that a team member does well in debate. You score a win when one of your players debunks an idea of a prominent intellectual (not necessarily on anyone’s team). I will be the final arbiter of what is “prominent” (I will be generous there) and what constitutes debunking (I will be strict there–no “one-chart” or “one-tweet” debunkings. Debunking must include steel-manning.)

M: Memes measure the ability to develop creative ideas that stick. You score a meme point when a catch-phrase or acronym of one of your players gets used in an essay or book that appears during the season. The meme itself might be from years ago. So if an essay (it does not have to be written by a fantasy intellectual) uses WEIRD, Joseph Henrich’s owner scores a point. If an essay uses “black swan,” Nassim Taleb’s owner scores a point. If “state-capacity libertarianism” gets used in 4 different essays, then Tyler’s owner gets 4 points. But if it gets used 4 times in the same essay, that is only worth one point.

Scoring mechanics: The season will run from April 1 through September 30. During the season, when you think one of the intellectuals on your team scores a point in a category, email me and I will decide whether to award the point. So plan to pay attention to your team during the season. You don’t want to miss when they score points!

Note that each category has an equal weight. The way scoring works in fantasy is that your team is ranked in each category relative to other teams. In a ten-owner league, suppose your team finishes first in B, ninth in P, fifth in W, and third in M. The points you get are 10, 2, 6, and 8, respectively, for a total of 26. So you cannot win just by piling up B’s and ignoring the other categories. For those of you who are fans of the Arrow impossibility theorem, this scoring technique totally violates his “Independence from irrelevant alternatives” postulate.

****You do not get to unilaterally select your team. You participate in a draft in which you and other owners take turns picking players. If a player you want gets picked by another owner before it’s your turn, you will have to pick someone else.****

I will schedule a draft before the season starts. You can select a player who is not on the cheat sheet. I will explain the mechanics of the draft in a different post.

At this point, questions and comments about the scoring categories are welcome. But don’t suggest more complicated scoring approaches. Since the burden is on me to oversee the scoring, I am going to keep it simple.