Category Archives: International issues

Why math education has suffered

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Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman write,

Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.

That report also concluded that many programs in these fields couldn’t even be maintained without international students. In our field, mathematics, we find that at most top departments in the United States, at least two-thirds of the faculty are foreign born. (And even among those faculty born in the United States, a large portion are first-generation Americans.) Similar patterns may be observed in other STEM disciplines.

Later,

China pursues none of the equity programs that are sweeping the United States. Quite the contrary: It is building on the kind of accelerated, explicitly merit-based programs, centered on gifted students, that are being repudiated by American educators. Having learned its lesson from the Cultural Revolution, when science and merit-based education were all but obliterated in favor of ideological indoctrination, China is pursuing a far-sighted, long-term strategy to create a world-leading corps of elite STEM experts.

Have another nice day.

Afghanistan and Hong Kong

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I looked at what some of the FITS are saying. Subsequently, I saw Richard Hanania’s take.

Why leaving had to go this poorly, and why Biden made the right decision.

I think that the Afghanistan withdrawal would have been a political disaster a few months before an election. But Biden has plenty of time to recover. The short attention span of the media works in his favor.

In fact, by the time this post goes up, Afghanistan may no longer be front-page news, and Internet pundits will have moved on.

I have read takes of all sorts about Afghanistan, and most seem to agree that the mission of turning that country into a liberal state was hopeless. We cannot create a liberal culture where none existed before, and we cannot save a culture that is not liberal.

So what about Hong Kong? Did the British create a liberal culture there, and if so, how? And what might we have tried in order to keep Hong Kong’s liberal culture from being destroyed by an illiberal regime?

To be sure, I never believed that liberal culture would grow in Afghan or Iraqi soil. Instead, I thought in terms of North, Weingast, and Wallis. Those countries were not ready to move beyond what NWW call a limited-access order, with key violent groups dividing up power and resources.

But I would like to hear the 20-20 hindsight pundits on Afghanistan say more about Hong Kong. I feel much more regret about our inability/unwillingness to prevent the conquest of Hong Kong than about “losing” Afghanistan.

I also worry about possible demoralization of our military. President Reagan’s otherwise frivolous invasion of Grenada was somehow necessary and sufficient to restore morale after Vietnam.

Claire Lehmann vs. me

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She sent out an email:

Facebook has blocked Australian users from viewing or sharing news content on their platform. The mass-blocking is in response to new media laws proposed by the Australian Government which would mean that digital giants such as Facebook are required to pay for news content.

in resistance to the proposed laws, Facebook has now blocked Australian news sites, and Quillette has been included in the wide net that has been cast. Our Facebook page has been wiped and our links are blocked on the platform. If you would like to share a Quillette article on Facebook you will be unable to, even if you live outside of Australia.

I replied:

1.  I consider Quillette the best of online magazines, and I link to its content often on my blog. 

2.  I see the Australia-Facebook imbroglio as a reason for hope.  If they can ban content from Australian news sites, then they might someday ban content from all news sites.  Then I could go back to using Facebook.

What everyone is reading

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Lee Smith on China and the U.S. A few representative excerpts:

he [President Trump] failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.

. . .Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.

. . .The leading members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the population at large. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression.

File this one under: poses a dilemma for libertarians.

Re-litigating the Vietnam War

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I can’t believe I’m doing this.

The conservative claims that:

1. The Communist side was really evil.

2. And we beat them. Or we could have.

My comeback is: And then what?

Look at Afghanistan or Iraq.

Were the Taliban evil? Yes. Did we beat them? Yes. Did we bring the war to a successful conclusion? No.

Was Saddam Hussein evil? Yes. Did we beat him? Yes. Did we bring the war to a successful conclusion? No.

To successfully conclude an overseas war, you need to be able to establish a government that can pacify the country. After World War II, we could do that in Japan. We could do that in Germany.

We could not do it in South Vietnam.

The people who were correct about Vietnam were the people who understood the difficulty of trying to establish a successful non-Communist government in South Vietnam. That stubborn feature of reality eluded conservative war hawks at the time. It eludes them today.

And please, don’t make me re-litigate the Diem regime. It had a stronger grip on Washington than on its own country.

Violence and revolutionary outcomes

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Tyler Cowen links to a paper that says

regimes founded in violent social revolution are especially durable

This reminded me of a paper published in 1963, which said that

possible links between varieties of violence and revolutionary outcomes are left unexplored

The latter paper examined Latin America, and its author had considerable influence on my intellectual outlook. Its thesis is that limited, narrow violence, as in a coup, produces less dramatic overall change than broader violence, as in the Cuban revolution.

My conversation with Eric Weinstein

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I talked about one area where we disagree and one area where we agree.

Let’s start with where we disagree. I take the conventional economic view in favor of international trade, and you differ.

Let me see if I can steel-man your argument. You say that American workers, as citizens of this country, should have a right to access to job opportunities that give them a decent way of life. If we are willing to have their family members go off to fight wars in the name of protecting the rest of us from terrorists, then we certainly owe them protection from having their jobs taken away by outsourcing to Chinese factories.

My counter will be that international trade is isomorphic with other economic actions that you are more likely to approve. Outsourcing to a factory in China and taking away a factory worker’s job is not very different from developing Uber and taking away a taxi driver’s job or a rental-car agent’s job.

Our prosperity comes from breaking production down into steps. When you break the process down into steps, you get more efficiency. This goes back to Adam Smith’s pin factory. Breaking a process into steps can involve what most economists call capital, but the Austrian economists use the term “roundabout production,” which I like. When a farmer uses a tractor instead of a horse to pull a plow, this is roundabout production–manufacturing the tractor becomes a step in the farming process.

International trade is another form of roundabout production. As David Friedman put it, one way to manufacture an automobile is to grow wheat, put it on a ship to Japan, and have the ship turn around carrying an automobile.

The process of breaking production down into steps is mind-boggling in its complexity. There are so many conceivable ways to break down a production process into different steps. How are we to know which is best? The answer is that the price system co-ordinates the process. Prices inform entrepreneurs about the costs of alternative patterns of specialization.

The profit system directs the evolution of the process. As new ideas are tried, the most efficient ones prove sustainable, as indicated by profitability. Less efficient patterns of specialization and trade are weeded out by losses.

Thus, progress proceeds by creative destruction. Ways of life that are tied to a particular step in the production process are bound to be undermined if a new production process emerges that is more efficient. A society cannot enjoy the benefits of economic progress without incurring the cost of job destruction. The market treats work as a bug, not a feature, and it tries to get rid of it.

Back to the comparison of outsourcing to a factory in China or developing Uber. You might be tempted to say that when Uber changes the process of providing people with car rides, at least it doesn’t use Chinese labor in the process. But is that really the case? For Uber to work, somebody has to take the step of adding computer and communications capacity, and that probably uses components imported from China. Consumers need smart phones in order to hail rides, and those phones are partially manufactured in China. And even if there were no Chinese workers involved in the steps to create Uber rides, would that be any consolation to the taxi drivers and rental-car agents who lose their jobs?

If you want to suggest policies for making economic progress less painful for people whose jobs are displaced, that would be very constructive. But insinuating that economists are engaged in a conspiracy to hide the truth about international trade isn’t constructive–it’s just scapegoating.

On the area where we agree, I said,

I’m more in agreement with you on what you call the DISC, which I believe stands for Distributed Information Suppression Complex. Although once again, it sounds a bit too conspiratorial for my taste, and I prefer to think of it in terms of an emergent phenomenon.

Think of life in academic research as consisting of two games. If you play Game One, you pose important questions within your field and try to answer them. If you play Game Two, you try to climb the ladder of prestige by participating in the latest fads and fashions and by ingratiating yourself to people who are in a position to help you get jobs and publication acceptances. Let me use the Game One, Game Two model to offer my take on the DISC.

1. I can imagine a world in which the strategies for playing Game One and Game Two are basically the same. When that sort of Divine Coincidence exists, you will see a very vibrant academic discipline.

2. I don’t think that anyone ever consciously chooses between playing Game One and Game Two. We just go with our instincts. When I was in grad school in the late 1970s, my instinct just happened to be to play Game One. But by that point in time in economics, the profession was selecting away from Game One types and in favor of particularly ruthless Game Two types.

[Note: As John Cochrane wrote recently,

Self-interest, for people to preserve hard-won human capital, and for institutions to support research that keeps them going, is a powerful explanatory force. Even if individuals do not respond to this incentive, and are all pure in their pursuit of ideas, selection is a powerful explanatory force. Economics is a good way to explain economics!

]

The Game Twoers of my era wrote dissertations on Rational Expectations Macroeconomics, which I thought was a dead end. Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind about that.

When I was on the job market, an assistant professor from Amherst came to MIT to interview all of us on the market that year. I gave him a copy of my job market paper, and I talked about it with him. He never offered me an opportunity to audition for a job at Amherst. But he did subsequently publish my exact idea, including a new term that I introduced, called “reputation price,” meaning the price that consumers would expect to see at a store based on their last purchase there. He published it in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which has typically been a top-five journal, although at that time it was more in the 6-10 tier. No attribution to me of course. I was lucky just to get a version of my dissertation published in Economic Inquiry, a much lower-tier journal.

Why didn’t I go after the guy? My dissertation supervisor, Robert Solow, advised me not to. Even though I am still bitter about the Amherst guy (who got tenure), and bitter about Solow’s nonchalance about it, I have to admit that there is nothing that going after the guy would have done to improve my life, which has turned out pretty well if I may say so.

Anyway, such was my introduction to Game Two.

3. I think that in the last half of the twentieth century, Game Two economics produced little gain from a Game One perspective, and arguably a net loss.

4. I agree very much with your view that academic economists have been slow to come to terms with the fact that the Internet enables businesses to deliver content to consumers at essentially zero marginal cost, but with some fixed costs. One of my lines is that “Information wants to be free, but people need to get paid.” If you want to say that this implies widespread market failure in a textbook sense, I could agree to that. But widespread market failure in no way ensures widespread government success.

Note that there is no link, because this conversation only took place in my imagination.

Giving globalization a bad name

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Reacting to a post by Peirre Lemieux on the coronavirus, Alberto Mingardi writes,

Will people learn the lesson, and realize that a closed economy is poorer, as Pierre hopes? I fear not. Though the emergency measures somehow provide us with a preview of the kind of country the economic nationalists would like us to live in, they will quickly turn the tables, blaming the virus on globalization, and making trade with China the villain of the story. Italy’s reaction to coronavirus is convincing other countries to treat Italians as we treat ourselves – limiting direct flights, imposing quarantines, etc. This will also increase the perception that reliance on international trade is a weakness, thereby fueling a renewed rhetoric of the marvels of autarky. Sure enough, when people travel they carry their diseases with them: this is not news. Prepare for a new nationalist narrative built around this idea.

I agree. I don’t think that this will make people appreciate globalization–quite the opposite.

Incidentally, I think that this makes it unlikely that President Trump will suffer a political setback because of the coronavirus. Closing the border is his signature issue, and the Democrats have staked out a position as the “resistance” to that. I know that they think they can benefit from this crisis, but I would be surprised if they do.

As for the economics of the crisis, I see it in terms of a PSST story. Many patterns of specialization and trade depend on globalization. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the central banks will be prominent actors, but I could not disagree more. I would suggest that instead of monitoring the Fed, one should watch the transportation hubs–especially ports–and manufacturing centers. To the extent that the attempts to contain the virus cause those places to be shut down, patterns of specialization and trade will be broken, and there won’t be anything that the Fed can do about it.

In my view, Scott Sumner and Jason Furman and other macroeconomists who apply a monetarist or Keynesian “model” are simply not capable of interpreting the world as it really exists. That is a harsh judgment, but I cannot be more gentle.

As Peter Zeihan puts it,

Modern manufacturing is a logistical marvel that taps hundreds of facilities in dozens of countries, but that system is based on frictionless international trade. Break just a few links and the entire network collapses. A modern car has about 2000 parts. If you are missing ten, you’ve got a large paperweight.

I suspect that for the economy, the best-case scenario is that authorities gradually decide that it’s not such a crisis, they let everyone go about their business, and whoever gets the virus, gets it. The worst-case scenario is that clusters of cases continue appearing, and each appearance leads authorities to strangle more transportation and production centers. If the latter happens, then I am pretty sure you will find the PSST paradigm more useful in explaining and predicting outcomes.

Paula Bolyard draws an interesting analogy with the Y2K computer scare. If that analogy proves correct, then we should be closer to the best-case scenario. But one thing about the Y2K scare is that it had a definite endpoint–by mid-January of 2000, doomsday was a dud. I only see the coronavirus panic ending when the media can no longer attract eyeballs to the story.

As to the outlook for the virus itself, consider three scenarios:

1) the proportion of people exposed to the virus approaches 100 percent

2) the proportion of people exposed to the virus approaches 0.

3) the proportion of people exposed to the virus approaches some middle number.

I am not a virologist, but this virus seems optimized for spreading. So wouldn’t you bet on 1)?

Suppose that the virologists in the media successfully convince us to become OCD handwashers and germophobes. Will that actually be able to stop the virus? What other consequences, good and bad, might accompany such a change in culture?

Note that I wrote this at the end of February, adding the Bolyard paragraph on March 2 and the references to Peter Zeihan and Jason Furman on March 6. By the time this post appears, I may have to correct some of my claims in light of developments.

UPDATE: John Cochrane has thoughts. Also, Scott Alexander. And Tyler Cowen.

Hating on China

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Marco Rubio says,

Losing industries to China was not an “unintended consequence” of liberal trade and financial policies; it was very often the goal. It required an assumption that middle-class American fami­lies would be better off with cheaper imported goods and better financing terms on consumer debt. It required the assumption that the American economy would be better off with financial services as its comparative advantage. The reason these assumptions are wrong is not because the changes they brought weren’t managed properly, or not pursued consistently enough, but because the underlying belief about what makes for a good society is not true.

Re-read that paragraph and substitute for China “Uber” or “Walmart” or “the Internet.”

And when you read about “financing terms” and “financial services” think about what sector is running up debt at an insane pace.

As you can tell, reading the interview got my libertarian hackles up. In my view, Washington does more damage to the American economy than China, by far.