Hi all,
The downside of going away for three and half weeks is that a huge amount can change during that time and I can’t get all my frustration and anger out in the form of pithy comments, passive-aggressive economic analysis and gallows humour, so brace yourselves and excuse me for the extended sequence of links, rants, and incoherent marginalia that makes up this week’s email. A framing comment: no matter what political changes we experience there is always space to act: to mitigate bad things (at the margin at least) and to fight wrong-headed ideas (sometimes more effective than p*ssing in the wind). The only thing we don’t have any answer to (yet) is death, so losing both Leonard Cohen and William Trevor in quick succession feels like a particular blow.
1. How do we fight wrong-headed ideas, though? This is probably the defining question of 2016 – it’s underlay much of what I’ve read, it’s been the recurring theme of my own introspections (when my mind isn’t just a muddle of Taylor Swift gifs and random cricket statistics) and it’s come up repeatedly in discussion with my friends and colleagues. Steven Pinker has a great deal of faith in the power of reason. Sad as I am to say it, I don’t think he’s right, or at least, right now there seems to be a definite trend of reason being trumped by … something else. Alex Evans has a book coming out shortly which suggests that we lack an overarching narrative for our changing times; Duncan Green argues something similar here. There are also moments in this completely brilliant article (read it all) by Michael Lewis about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s partnership and research which suggest the same: “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”, Kahneman says. I think this must be part of it, but probably isn’t all of it. Part of the problem is that the myths or stories we’ve believed for years are wrong: in particular the one almost every country has, the myth of its own exceptionalism. Maybe what we need to understand first is that we’re mostly not exceptional (collectively or individually), we never were, and what determines most of our lives is forces far bigger than ourselves on the one hand, and pure random chance on the other. The historian in me rebels against this, but the idea is worming its way around my head.
2. Kierkegaard once wrote that ‘life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards’. When we have enough distance to look back and understand it, what will we say about the election of Donald Trump and the failure of many conventional methods to predict it? Andrew Gelman has a rundown of some of the possible causes for the polls being wrong here, but I preferred this response on the day itself from Nate Silver: that 2% seemed like a huge, epochal shift, and it might prove to be, but he points out that not much had to change for the country that elected Obama to elect Trump. Related: Planet Money look at what Trump can actually do in his first 100 days, and how much concrete a 1000 mile wall would actually need. (Transcript)
3. Speaking of myth and inaccuracy, here’s the story (and truth) behind the UN’s oft-cited and always-wrong claim that 75% of Liberian women were raped.
4. Needing to wash my eyes out after the first three links, here’s Dietz Vollrath going on a geekrant about the misuse and abuse of productivity figures. Long rant short: productivity tells us absolutely nothing about the financial health or performance of businesses in a country.
5. I liked this NYT piece on the slow-burn disaster that is Zimbabwe’s economy as it runs out of cash (not money, literally hard currency), but it dramatically downplays the risks of this for the poor and for their longer term prospects in its eagerness to focus on the novelty of a zero-cash economy.
6. While we’re on the subject of economic disasters, it’s hard to think of a worse situation than the one Chavez and Maduro engineered in Venezuela. Planet Money investigated the fallout and it’s pretty harrowing at times. (Transcript.) Maduro, of course, has decided to go straight to the root of the problem – attacking the economists who have pointed out the insanity of his economic policy.
7. Ok – I’ve just read all of this back, and I think it’s probably the all-time most depressing links ever. I’m going to end it on two slightly more positive notes. First, I spent a few days in Chengdu on my holiday, selected almost entirely due to the writing of Fuschia Dunlop and her efforts to popularize Sichuan food around the world, so I was delighted that Tyler Cowen conducted a fantastic long interview with her. A must-read for people who love food, and especially people who don’t yet love offal.
8. And lastly, a couple of years ago I nearly burst with excitement when the 76ers selected Joel Embiid with the number 3 pick in the NBA draft despite knowing he would not be able to play for a year (if ever) after suffering a fractured foot, a notoriously difficult injury for big players to recover from. He was worth that risk because he was clearly that good. Well, it’s been two years, but he’s finally started to play, and my god has he been worth the wait – virtually every minute has been riveting. It’s been a very long time since a rookie has looked this good. It’s not much, but at least it’s optimistic.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
R
