Links for June

Persian quatrains, Stalin’s funeral, Ricardian trade

Here are the most interesting things I read, listened to, and watched so far this month.

If I still haven’t given you enough links, you can read something wonderful or use my invite code to join Lynkmi.

Blogs and short links

I just got back from London, where the company I keep was viewed as sufficiently bizarre that it merited its own blog post:

An Emergent Ventures (EV) fellow was visiting London, and I just returned from dinner with him and some others. I made the 4 EA/Crypto/Superforcaster nerds talk about dating. I catalogued their relationship histories and generously offered my own. The one person with a partner at the table shared his interest in bricklaying and mentioned the bricklaying seminar he was attending. I explained to the single boys that such hobbies are a luxury reserved for those who are already partnered up. Training, work, and being normal are my prescriptions for everyone else.

Surprisingly, I am not the one with the interest in bricks.

New on The Fitzwilliam: I gave a talk about Bertrand Russell and Henry George.

Applications close on June 22nd for the AI security bootcamp.

The Emergent Ventures UK tranche.

Morris Chang’s memoir has been translated into English. I am a big fan of Karina and look forward to seeing what she does next…

Kevin Kelly’s list of Asian festivals. I only learned about Tết for the first time last year.

Read the time in Sumerian cuneiform.

If you, like me, find scrolling Twitter to be a waste of time, but think that there is some good stuff on there if someone were to curate it, then you may want to follow Alexey Guzey’s Best of Twitter roundup. In my ideal format, this would arrive at my house printed every week.

Did South Korea just elect a Georgist president? I had not heard of this:

15% [of South Koreans] use the unique ‘jeonse’ system, in which tenants pay a large deposit (typically 60-80% of the property’s market value) which landlords can reinvest during the tenancy but have to return in full at the end of the lease.

Here is my conversation with o3 about why this system has not spread to other countries.

Graphing connections between Victorian engineers. Hat-tip Anson Yu.

Apply for a Magnificent Grant on a rolling basis. I don’t currently have a project in mind for this, but thankfully, I still have a while before I turn 25. Similarly, you may want to apply for an Inflection grant.

Along similar lines, applications have just opened for Genesis, an attempt to reboot startup formation in the EU. Now may be a good time to re-read Paul Graham on what it would take for Silicon Valley to move somewhere else.

When the first telephone was installed in the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Emperor used it to make prank calls.

The story of that emperor, Puyi, is completely fascinating. His last concubine was still alive in 2001. Puyi was introduced to phones by his tutor Reginald Johnston, an Edinburgh man who became the first foreigner in Chinese history to be invited into the Forbidden City. He maintained a lifelong friendship with Puyi, and his book Twilight in the Forbidden City was adapted into a film in which Johnston is portrayed by Peter O’Toole. What would Confucius have thought about prank calling?

The emperor’s request for a phone of his own set off a frenzy of angry bewilderment from his tutors at court, who reminded him that “There is nothing in the ancestral regulations to provide for this.”

And:

Once the phone was installed in his residence, Puyi quickly thumbed his way through the Beijing telephone directory until he found the number of Yang Xiaolou (1878-1938). Yang was one of the most famous Peking Opera stars of his day. When Yang answered his phone, Puyi asked, “Could this be the famous opera actor of Peking?” When Yang answered in the affirmative, the Last Emperor of China started giggling uncontrollably and hung up the phone. Among Puyi’s other favorite stunts was to dial up famous restaurants, order an extravagant meal, and send it to a random address . . . His most frequent victim was his tutor Reginald Johnston, the original inspiration for the installation of the telephone.

Best of Wikipedia: The first BBC presenter with a Northern accent was employed as a deliberate effort to make it more difficult for Germans to impersonate the news during World War II.

From Luis Garicano: The European Union has nobody to blame for its stagnation other than itself. The EU now generates less electricity per capita than Brazil!

A new tranche of dating microsites has arrived. Through Commitment Corp, Ava Huang is matching people on the basis of their three favourite Substacks. You can also be matched with a partner based on your browser history (!).

Preliminary thoughts on Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ new book. Here is a WhatsApp message from a friend about this book – his analysis seems broadly correct to me:

[W]hen the post linked by [our other friend] says Yud[kowsky] is “uniquely skilled at explaining the problems”, I’d almost say exactly the opposite, that he’s uniquely bad at explaining the problems. It remains true that the only way to get an overview of his thoughts on the topic that (a) is somewhat comprehensive and (b) somewhat explains the philosophical motivations behind his stance as well as most of the implications of it, is to read the several thousand Sequences blog posts, most of which have nothing to do with AI but where he’s scattered evidence of his reasoning across all of them. I worry that this book too will completely lack any sense of logical structure, or provide readers with a model of the problem that they can manipulate and apply to novel situations; it will just re-state (with increased alarm) theses that Yud takes to be true, with some gesture at a body of reasoning behind them, but no actual explication that stands up to questioning. If I’m wrong I’ll be pleased, but I read the LessWrong Discord conversations where people trying to get clear on what Yud thought were led by him into bizarre meandering discursions on ‘consequentialism’ (by which he didn’t mean consequentialism). I bet that this book lacks the meandering discursions but replaces them with standard-issue trade-nonfiction copy encouraged by an editor, rather than any sort of explicable and understandable model, but Yud is uniquely bad at explicating his models and making them understood . . . I think there are a lot of reasons why he’s in an almost-uniquely bad position to be making this (very important!) case.

Several others rushed to clarify that the final cut of the book has been heavily edited down and was mostly written by Soares. Is the main thing we know this book has going for it that it wasn’t written by its author?

I find it dispiriting that modern literature addresses so few of the issues that I think are actually interesting.

The open database on university spinouts. Hat-tip Tom McCarthy.

The Lomax Digital Archive of folklore. And: an archive of old maps online.

The map of AI safety.

If I told you how fucked Irish water infrastructure is, you wouldn’t believe me. Dublin hasn’t built a new water source since 1940.

In the most prestigious general interest philosophy journals, David Lewis is cited almost twice as often as all women put together.¹ I wish that more academic acknowledgements were as honest as Kieran Healy’s:

In what follows, I’m very indebted to—i.e., I am basically copying—something Neal Caren did last year.

It hadn’t crossed my mind why citation analysis is more informative in philosophy than in other fields:

Our 2,200 articles and 34,000 citations works out to an average of about 15 citations per paper. To academics outside of philosophy this will seem like a very low number. Citations flowing from general literature reviews, summaries of previous results, or ritual signaling of affiliation are not the norm in philosophy. This makes for an informative body of data, as citations are very much more likely to reflect topics of substantive current interest in the field.

In last month’s post, I was making fun of Wolfgang for his unbelievably abstruse discussion of “neo-Fregeanism”. This month, I learned the amazing fact that Michael Dummett, arguably the most influential interpreter of Gottlob Frege, also happens to have been the leading historian of Tarot cards:

Research by Michael Dummett and others demonstrates that the Tarot pack was invented in northern Italy in the early 15th century and introduced into southern France when the French conquered Milan and the Piedmont in 1499.

A friend with a PhD about Frege (why do I keep attracting these people?), who is decidedly not a fan of Dummett, snidely notes that this fits with him being an expert at making up stuff.

Mr and Mrs Psmith review Mark Rippetoe’s classic introduction to weightlifting. I felt I was making a lot of progress in building upper body strength until about a year ago, after which I stalled. My most recent trick has been to stop bringing my phone to the gym. The valley of self-consciousness is excruciating, but then after that, I continually surprise myself with how often, when I deprive myself of stimulation, I end up doing the hard thing out of pure boredom.² I wonder how Descartes would have been different if he had lifted:

Our culture (by which I mostly mean “online nerd culture” but if you’re reading this isn’t that your culture too?) can be very strange about bodies. There’s a real strain of vulgar dualism, a sense that what’s going on in your mind is the only “real” part and that your physical existence is a weird concession to the decaying meat-mecha you’re doomed to pilot until you can upload your consciousness to the cloud. At best, the body can transmit the sensations of the occasional sybaritic luxury, and beyond that the most you can hope for the absence of pain. The great joy of strength training has been realizing on a visceral level that this is dead wrong. Yeah, yeah, the Church has taught this for two thousand years: our embodiment matters in a fundamental way, we are not merely souls trapped by flesh (and still less intellects trapped by flesh), our temporary separation from our bodies in death is a consequence of the Fall, and our eternity will be spent not floating among the clouds strumming harps but in bodies. But there’s a big difference between intellectually assenting to something and actually believing it, and I didn’t actually believe all that until I experienced the way simply existing as a body, moving through space, interacting with physical objects, could feel good. Not physically pleasurable, quite (though sometimes it is!), but satisfying, meaningful — like you’re doing the thing you’re here to do. I am slothful and take no pleasure in reporting this.

You can’t make this stuff up:

In fact, [Nassim] Taleb didn’t just read Rippetoe, he trained at Rippetoe’s gym. Imagine having this guy screaming at you about isometric contraction of spinal muscles while you're squatting heavy DURING THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS (which you saw coming), then eating an entire bowl of squid ink pasta and getting oneshotted by a six-dimensional ancient Phoenician demon. I think few men could handle that combo without turning into whatever sort of being Nassim is now. We should be thankful that he’s too distracted by Levantine grammar and morphology to properly establish his reign of terror.

And, on whether getting into exercise should be difficult:

A way to interpret this book is as one long, bitter act of “gatekeeping.” But what if gatekeeping is good, actually? The right attitude for picking up any kind of new skill is humility. Some people are naturally humble, but most are not. Since time immemorial, practiced sages have hazed their apprentices, made them perform menial tasks, enforced brutal hierarchy between older and younger students, and so on. As a modern and a lib, I naturally assume that these are benighted backward customs preserving the legacies of ancient power imbalances blah blah blah, and like most libs I subconsciously find such institutions offensive and I structure my life to avoid them. But what if I’m completely wrong? Monasteries force novices to be humble because humility is the path to salvation, but if humility is also the path to education then there’s a reason for other sorts of institutions to put the newbies in their place as well.

What are the things humanity can only achieve over a very long period of time?

A claim that the phenomenon of Bell inequality violations is widely misunderstood.

Trevor Chow is quoted in The New York Times as an example of a recent college graduate who is taking AI timelines into consideration in his career choices. A British-educated Hong Konger being quoted as a representative American also gives “New York is the Athens of America” vibes – I like it.

On the things that go without saying among my friends:

I don’t get the casual verbal signals that show they even see the world in terms of a few islands of brilliant color in a sea of dismal gray boring pointless stuff.

Ten trivia questions about economics. I only got 6 out of 10; I’ve declined from the height of my QuizBowl powers…

Molly Mielke on the differences between ideas people and people people. Like all the great poasters, Molly knew when to quit.

Rest in peace to the Martian’s daughter.

Reflections from a woman in her 40s taking extra testosterone. I have no idea how representative such an experience is.

Andy Masley on how he uses AI:

There have been a few topics I’ve been thinking “I should really know more about this” for years, and when I actually sit down with an LLM to learn about them I get extremely bored and averse to reading. A hard truth is revealed. I have this basically utopian technology: a smart patient teacher I can ask to clarify anything I want in any style I want, and I still don’t want to learn about the topic. I just want to be seen as a guy who’s learned about the topic. LLMs can be an unpleasant window into our real motivations.

And here’s your periodic reminder that it’s completely insane that large language models actually work.

Why Dublin never got a metro.

In an unsurprising, and welcome, outcome, Stripe is the new sponsor of the Young Scientist Exhibition, Ireland’s largest science competition for secondary school students.

You can pay to ask a forecaster whatever question you want. Unfortunately, they have polluted their website with distracting and immature autofill questions.

Claim: Until the 1980s, it was widely believed that babies could not feel pain.

While we’re on the topic of bashing The Economist, here is a deep dive into how they reported the completely false statistic that 2% of the total value of American exports is blood. That is from the always-excellent Dynomight Internet Newsletter. I recently learned that there is at least one person who thinks that I am the secret identity of the anonymous blogger Dynomight.

Dispatches from a year of classical music. Related: Maybe Mozart doesn’t suck?

Scott Aaronson is starting a theoretical computer science group for AI alignment. I can’t say this is my favoured approach, but if anyone can make it work…

Madhu has gotten nerdsniped by neuromorphic computing. I went to a talk last week by a researcher in this area. From what I understood, he was working on trying to prove a universal approximation theorem for certain biological systems. I had only heard about this in the context of a single-hidden-layer neural net being able to approximate any continuous function to arbitrary accuracy, but it looks like there is a whole family of universal approximation theorems for different architectures. Oddly enough, I think Madhu’s piece pairs well with the discussion of digital clock synchronisation from last month.

Early Mormons had their own alphabet.

Isaak Freeman on Ozempic for sleep.

While the East Asian economic miracle was indeed breathtaking, it’s important not to overstate it. South Korea was already in a much better position to grow than Sub-Saharan Africa by 1960. Here’s a nice tidbit that’s relevant to recent discussion over how Ethiopia managed to avoid colonisation for so long:

It’s important to not succumb entirely to the Eurocentric trap that Africa before colonization was a static, stagnant monolith because of its lack of states. African states formed where it was rational to do so, in places like the Ethiopian highlands where population density was high and the disease burden was relatively low.

That is from Oliver Kim’s helpful Global Developments newsletter.

Isabel’s phone is making her dumb. Is yours too?

Related: What is the average university student like today?

I am strongly considering buying a Lightphone. If anyone has experience with it, let me know. My review of the Daylight will be coming soon.

Henry Oliver claims that the decline in reading serious literature is over. Here’s an excerpt from a message I sent Henry a few days ago:

The postman sitting next to me on the train this morning was reading The Oxford Handbook of German Social History. We are so back.³

I hope it doesn’t break confidentiality to tell you that his reply was “YESS”, in all caps.

You might have heard the claim that the Hajj to Mecca is not even the largest Islamic pilgrimage in the world. There is a Shia pilgrimage in Iraq which is claimed to be even larger. But whether this is actually true is a surprisingly deep and complicated question:⁴

[F]irst to Google, which soon takes me to the Wikipedia ‘List of largest peaceful gatherings’. And sure enough, Hajj is not the largest regular Islamic pilgrimage, not even close. According to this list, in 2017, 30 million people attended the annual Arba'in pilgrimage, where Shia pilgrims travel to Karbala, Iraq; meanwhile, there are only about 2-3 million Hajj pilgrims on the busiest years.

Wait a second. Thirty million people? That’s insane! That’s a huge number! And the 2017 Arba'in pilgrimage wasn’t a one-off, either: the Wikipedia list tells me there were 27 million pilgrims in 2015, 22 million in 2023, and 21 million in 2022. The only peaceful gatherings in human history with more attendees were a number of Kumbh Mela pilgrimages in the Ganges basin.

Model this:

A thought might be: the Saudis have acted like monopolists when it comes to Hajj, restricting the number of people who travel to drive up costs and target especially wealthy pilgrims; maybe in a ‘perfectly competitive pilgrimage marketplace’ Hajj would be the biggest Islamic pilgrimage, but the ‘marketplace’ isn’t perfectly competitive.

Is this related to all the talk about Middle Eastern AI deals I’ve been hearing about?

This Oxford academic was apparently told that the numbers are ‘calculated by the shrine using AI technology’. This suggests that Shia clerics in a mid-sized Iraqi city have been at the frontier of AI applications for over a decade?

And:

News reports on the Arba'in pilgrimage that bother to ask questions about infrastructure big up the voluntary provision of food by ‘charities, mosques, and devotional groups see to it that no traveller goes hungry’. I’m fucking sorry, but even armies can run into trouble sourcing and supplying enough food for twenty million people marching from one city to another. (Supply chain considerations are absolutely vital for military organisation for exactly this reason!) If you could show me evidence that a bunch of disconnected charities and mosques run by random religious people and do-gooders manage every single year without fail to (a) find enough food, (b) finance the purchase of it, and (c) supply it effectively to twenty million people who have suddenly arrived in a region noted for its instability where the biggest nearby city is ~700,000—well, I would renounce my Hayekianism instantly and move to Karbala, to throw myself at their feet and beg them to teach me how they have managed to solve the fundamental problems of human organisation better than any system ever seen before.

It’s quite striking that a few days’ research from a generalist has exposed the utter vacuity of the data reported about Arba’in from prestige outlets and the flimsy existing academic research. If I have any readers with access to drones in Iraq – wait, that came out wrong – so that we can dramatically improve these estimates using aerial footage, please email me.

A directory for going on side quests as an adult.

Alec sends another of my bangers into the stratosphere.

About five years ago, the differences-in-differences literature fell into crisis. Here is a helpful explainer of what has happened since then, from Beatriz Gietner’s helpful DiD Digest. Shout it from the rooftops!

There's this tweet that went viral once which reflects a common misconception that – especially in the era of Big Data – if your sample is large enough, you don’t need randomisation . . . But selection bias doesn’t vanish with more data, [you] just become more precisely wrong.

I was pleased to be gifted a paper copy of the first issue of Asterisk magazine. My favourite article was Is Wine Fake?, with a close second of Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich? For someone not familiar with the topic, the footnotes in the latter piece provide a good introductory reading list on growth theory.

Scientists have discovered a new shade of blue. David Hume, telephone!

The best technical blogs.

Something that will excite nobody but me: the archives of the 1926 Irish census have been digitised. Not many people know that Ireland had a small famine post-independence, in Connemara in the mid-1920s. The Great Famine is so dominant in the Irish imagination that it seems to crowd out memory and scholarship on the “lesser famines”, like the potato shortage of 1822. I haven’t had time to look through the data myself, so I’m not sure if the census sheds light on its mortality rate.

Every time Julian Gough tells me about one of his ancestors, the stories are so ridiculous that the relative sounds like a character from a Dickens novel. We’ve discovered that one of them literally is: John Sadleir was the inspiration for Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit.

The unbearable lightness of (Korean) cute:

There is a density of businesses in Seoul that's almost unmatched in the world. On any one block there can be thirty places to eat, and so I'm still discovering restaurants within a hundred yards of my apartment.

I hope that we can lower the fixed and administrative costs of business enough that cities like Dublin could be more like this. The fact that we don’t live like this is a policy choice:

I'm slow to explore these new places because I have a handful of regular modest restaurants I go to that I'm very happy with. They are the Korean equivalent to diners, relaxing and unpretentious, open long hours, and run by older women who are always in them and always fussing over each customer as if she is their mother.

The food in each of these is inexpensive, exceptional, and with more varieties of flavor in each dish than you get in most Japanese meals, yet with the same sense of freshness.

That was from Walking the World, which is one of the best Substacks out there.

30 essays to make you love biology.

Podcasts

I’ve begun the process of working through Roy Foster’s mammoth two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats. Here is a conversation he participated in about Yeats and Irish politics.

Ken Rogoff on their (his?) dollar, our (my?) problem. It is interesting to hear a first-hand account of the declining competence of top CCP officials under Xi. It reminded me of Henry Kissinger’s comment about how Zhou Enlai was the most impressive statesman he ever met.

Ezra Klein speaks with Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel, about the catastrophe of the war in Gaza.

More from the Institute for Progress on the basics of metascience. If you’re interested in this, you may also want to read Ben Jones’s work on the burden of knowledge. From this series, I also learned about the literature on the disruption index. The basic idea here is that if you publish a highly scientific paper that overturns existing knowledge, people will cite your paper instead of the original corpus. So, just using bibliometric data, we should be able to learn something about how often different fields are getting disrupted.

Self-recommending: Five hours of Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen talking about the history of AIDS treatments.

Question: What came after the Joseon period, but before Korea was a Japanese colony? Answer: The important but short-lived Empire of Korea.

Books

William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Although I enjoy his podcast, I’ve never actually read any of Dalrymple’s books. Here is a positive review of this one from John Keay. I’m not much of an audiobook person, but this one was narrated by the author, which was very enjoyable.

I would say Dalrymple’s biggest flaw as a writer is that he’s slightly breathless in claiming that certain knowledge is more obscure, or neglected in the school system, than it really is. Indeed, I worry that Willie D is beginning his descent down the slope of audience capture by poorly-read self-flagellating British people. There basically wasn’t a single point in Dalrymple’s basic narrative about the origins of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system – including the invention of zero, the role of Brahmagupta in developing it, and then Leonardo Pisano in bringing it to Europe – that I didn’t learn when I read the maths textbook in public school when I was 13. Was I the only one paying attention? Isn’t the more parsimonious explanation here that most people don’t know much about either mathematics or history in general?

I would say the book is at its strongest when it’s dispelling the myth that the “Silk Roads” were ever particularly economically important, or even a permanent set of trade routes. Just look at how many Roman coins have been found in India, and almost none in China!

A Tamil friend went to Southeast Asia for the first time recently, and she was shocked by the evident Indian cultural influence, e.g. the Thai royal family is deeply intertwined with the Ramayana, and the Pallava dynasty influenced Angkor Wat. What was that line from Tagore – “Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognise it”?

A few months ago, I was chatting with Anton Howes about how someone should take up the project of writing a book like The Golden Road about modern India, and its influence on 19th and 20th-century Britain in particular. One of the many things I’ve learned from Anton is that in the 19th century, among European nations, Britain was known for its particularly inhumane treatment of animals. But by the early 1900s, the situation had reversed, and Britain was basically the first place in the world to have “vegetarian” as a distinct cuisine. My sense is that any proper account of how this happened will involve groups like the Theosophical Society and desi soft power.

This conversation came up because I had just read George Bernard Shaw’s 1906 address to the London Vegetarian Association, in which he said that “I am beginning to be astonished at the difficulty I now have in finding anybody who eats meat.” Now, obviously there’s extreme selection bias there, but still, it’s striking!

Edward FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. I twice read FitzGerald’s 1859 translation, which is generally regarded as superior – in literary quality, at least – to the three later translations he produced. Omar Khayyám was then known primarily as an astronomer, and it wasn’t known until FitzGerald that he had a side gig writing some of the greatest quatrains in the history of Persian literature. The quatrains are standalone, although FitzGerald gave a loose structure to the 75 of them that made up his first translation.

My favourite stanza is LXXIII:

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits – and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire

Persian rubai’i have an AABA rhyming scheme, which FitzGerald replicated in his translation. How to translate different forms of poetry into one another has been on the mind recently, given that I’ve been working through Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad, which turns Greek dactylic hexameter into iambic pentameter.

FitzGerald is somewhat out of fashion now, partly because of the mania of orientalism he sparked, and partly because it seems that he just made up a lot of the poems. But the Rubáiyát was one of the most widely read pieces of poetry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You can’t understand the evolution of British attitudes toward the Near East without reading it.

A little-known fact is that the Rubáiyát was saved from oblivion by two exceptionally cultured men who stumbled across it in a used bookshop, recognised its literary merit, and were able to bring it to the attention of the critic Ruskin. Do I even need to tell you which nationality saved civilisation again?

In 1861 the remaining copies [of the Rubaiyat] were placed in the ‘penny box’ on the street . . . They were discovered in July of that year by two young Irishmen . . . Whitley Stokes . . . and John Ormsby . . . Stokes knew several members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle . . . By the following day, according to Swinburne’s famous account, the price had risen ‘to the sinfully extravagant sum of twopence’.

Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth… The Remedy. For thoughts, read my talk about Henry George. One piece of evidence for just how few people actually read this book is that I’ve never heard anyone ever mention the content of book X, which contains bizarre passages like the following, page 296 in my copy:

I remember once seeing, in a Brazilian seaport, a negro man dressed in what was an evident attempt at the height of fashion, but without shoes and stockings. One of the sailors with whom I was in company, and who had made some runs in the slave trade, had a theory that a negro was not a man, but a sort of monkey, and pointed to this as evidence in proof, contending that it was not natural for a negro to wear shoes, and that in his wild state he would wear no clothes at all. I afterward learned that it was not considered “the thing” there for slaves to wear shoes, just as in England it is not considered the thing for a faultlessly attired butler to wear jewelry, though for that matter I have since seen white men at lierty to dress as they pleased get themselves up as incongruously as the Brazilian slave. But a great many of the facts adduced as showing hereditary transmission have really no more bearing than this of our forecastle Darwinian.

I also think George is at least deserving of a footnote in a PhD thesis about beliefs about extinction events and eschatology in the 19th century. Here he is, writing in 1879:

We know that there have been geological conditions under which human life was impossible on this earth. We know that they must return again. Even now, as the earth circles on her appointed orbit, the northern ice cap slowly thickens, and the time gradually approaches, when its glaciers will flow again, and austaral seas, sweeping northward, bury the seats of present civilization under ocean wastes, as it may be they now bury what was once as high a civilization as our own. And beyond these periods, science discerns a dead earth, an exhausted sun – a time when, clashing together, the solar system shall resolve itself a gaseous form, again to begin immeasurable mutations.

Lars Doucet, Land is a Big Deal: Why Rent is Too High, Wages Too Low, and What We Can Do About It. This is a book version of Doucet’s winning entry in the Astral Codex Ten book review contest and subsequent Georgism explainers.

Larry Gonick, The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry. I enjoyed The Cartoon Guide to Statistics many years ago. And to my shame, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually read a book about chemistry from cover to cover. I’ve considered working through Linus Pauling’s General Chemistry, but I’ve been told it’s outdated. A chemist friend recommends The Art of Writing Reasonable Organic Reaction Mechanisms as one of the highlights of her discipline, but it also seems a lot more detailed than what I’m looking for right now. Is there a reason why chemistry has had so many fewer popularisers than physics or biology?

Papers

Note: Most of the papers I read this month were for an econometrics summer school, which will get its own post.

Paul Krugman, Ricardo’s Difficult Idea. This is mandatory reading! The term ‘comparative advantage’ is misused constantly. It has an extremely specific, subtle, and counterintuitive meaning. And if you haven’t grokked it, you simply cannot speak intelligently about trade. That has not stopped many from speaking unintelligently about trade.

Dani Rodrik, What Do Trade Agreements Really Do? By far the most rigorous discussion of trade agreements I’ve found. Economists tend to be highly supportive of free(r) trade, and political efforts leading to it, but that abstracts away from so many details about what is actually included in free trade deals. This is gold:

When I recently gave a talk arguing that economists underplay some of the adverse consequences of advanced globalization, an economist in the audience took me to task: Don’t you worry, he asked, that your arguments will be used (or abused) by populists and protectionists to further their own interests? It is a reaction that reminds me of a response from a distinguished economist more than two decades ago to my 1997 monograph Has Globalization Gone Too Far? All your arguments are fine, he told me, but they will give “ammunition to the barbarians.”

The objection is instructive insofar as it lays bare the implicit political economy understanding with which economists tend to approach public discussions of trade policy. In this perspective, the serious threats to sensible trade policy nearly always come from the import protectionists, and trade agreements mainly offset the influence of the protectionists. But as trade agreements have evolved and gone beyond import tariffs and quotas into regulatory rules and harmonization—intellectual property, health and safety rules, labor standards, investment measures, investor-state dispute settlement procedures, and others—they have become harder and harder to fit into received economic theory. Why do many economists presume that it is more dangerous to express skepticism in public about these rules than it is to cheerlead? In other words, why do they think that there are barbarians only on one side of the issue?

Morgan, T. Clifton, Constantinos Syropoulos, Yoto V. Yotov, Economic Sanctions: Evolution, Consequences, and Challenges. A great review of the empirical literature on sanctions. The headline figure here is that sanctions achieve their stated objective roughly a third of the time, which is high enough that it’s not to be scoffed at, but low enough that opponents of sanctions can point to innumerable failed examples. There is also a general trend of sanctions getting more effective over time, and more precisely targeted.

Sanctions are one of those areas where there seems to be a systematic pessimism bias, due to the fact that the most well-known conflicts are the longest-lasting and most intractable ones. Everybody wants to talk about how sanctions haven’t worked against North Korea, but nobody wants to talk about how they successfully resolved the Yugoslav-Albanian border crisis of 1921. This reminds me of one of the wiser pronouncements I’ve made on Twitter: Everything is something that the elites haven’t told you about when you don’t know anything.

Music

My favourite new albums discovered this month:

Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 10. Here is the accompanying Sticky Notes discussion. One of my friends, a Mahler enthusiast,⁵ predicted based on my interests that I would love Shostakovich. He was right, and this is great. If I find the time, I will be sure to read Julian Barnes’ novel about his life.

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 5. The fifth is one of the “easier” Mahler symphonies. I had an opportunity to hear Symphony No. 9 live again this month, which was welcome, because I didn’t get much out of the first time. Here is a four-part series to help you understand the 9th Symphony, and a two-part series on the 5th.

Quincy Jones, The Dude. Quincy Jones’s solo albums are high-variance, but the best songs are truly excellent. For some reason, I had never properly listened to this one. I heard an orchestra play a medley of his music this month, but unfortunately, they butchered it (sorry). It’s sad to hear such talented and hard-working musicians who have no feel for the music – I suppose I should be blaming the conductor? In any case, from this album, Razzamatazz is fun, but Ai No Corrida is probably my favourite track.

Grant Green, Visions. Perhaps my third favourite jazz guitarist after John McLaughlin and John Scofield. Listen to his interpretation of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40.

Weather Report, Sweetnighter. If you haven’t heard of them, Weather Report was an influential jazz fusion band in the 70s and 80s with Wayne Shorter on saxophone. Listen to how the groove ties everything together on 125th Street Congress. I liked the way Ben talked about it in a recent blog post:

After you’ve broken all the rules, what do you do? Well, some artists figured out that you want to add some back in again. Jazz fusion is one of these genres that emerged from this impulse. Miles Davis (and others like Tony Williams) basically said “we can do whatever we want melodically on top, but let’s have a real grooving rhythm section to tie it all together.” It’s tough and even the most advanced musicians can’t capture that perfect balance of structure and chaos consistently. I’ll listen to an album by, say, Weather Report, and be thinking “this is fine..” and then BAM they’ll nail the balance on a song like “125th Street Congress” . . . It’s the same experience of seeing free improvisers bumble through this stuff live, periods of searching, transcendence, and then more searching.

Films

Sergei Loznitsa, State Funeral. This is a documentary, with no narration, about Joseph Stalin’s funeral. The backstory is extraordinary: As soon as Stalin died, virtually every esteemed Soviet filmmaker was sent out to the provinces to film the reactions of workers to the news. It’s still disputed how much of their hysterical reactions were staged. The result was a film called The Great Farewell, a masterpiece of Soviet Realism. It was never released, and the footage was immediately censored, and wasn’t declassified until glasnost. It lay gathering dust in the Russian state film archives until a Ukrainian director in 2019 edited it into a finished film for the first time. Perhaps because of the pandemic, it received far too little attention.

I watched this on the curated streaming service Mubi. It was one of the most interesting films I’ve seen in years. Where else are you going to see pioneering cinematography depicting midcentury Kazakh nomads, or Azerbaijani oil rig workers? I only have one criticism: I would have liked more text flashed up on the screen to help identify who I was looking at. I know enough to have been able to identify Beria, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Svetlana, and Khrushchev, but many went over my head. If I’m not mistaken, Zhou Enlai also makes a cameo.

My conclusion here is that the film The Death of Stalin did a remarkably good job of capturing the real likeness of events, even down to the awkward shuffling of the Politburo while Stalin was lying in state. Many of the details that sound impossibly unrealistic did, in fact, occur.

Sergio Leone, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. A classic film I had never seen before – in fact, this is my first spaghetti Western. On the first viewing, I found the opening 30 minutes a bit slow, but the bridge battle and graveyard scenes are masterpieces. The soundtrack is, of course, absolutely iconic. Time to watch the South Korean parody?

From YouTube, I also enjoyed this video of Werner Herzog talking about how the only thing that could get him to speak French was a child soldier holding a Kalashnikov to his head in the Congo.

1. I’m sure this is not true anymore, since his post was posted over a decade ago. Still, it’s a great data exploration, and you should go read it.

2. I’m not a barbarian – I can’t handle complete silence. I bring a Kindle to listen to audiobooks, but it is difficult for it to overpower the gym’s music, and past a certain point of intensity, audiobooks about ancient India lose their motivational effect.

3. When I told him this story, SB replied immediately with characteristic wit: “The German historian sitting next to me on the train could only get a job as a postman. We are so doomed.”

4. If we define ‘largest’ as over the entire year, the Hajj is already beaten by the Umrah.

5. Unsurprisingly, this is the same guy as has the Frege PhD.